Monthly Archives: August 2018

It’s primary election day here in Minnesota, and the field is full of choices for both Republicans and Democrats.  One Republican choice for governor is unsurprisingly former governor Tim Pawlenty, who is running against the Republican Party endorsed candidate.

I recently received some campaign literature from the Pawlenty campaign.  In it, Pawlenty claims to have balanced the Minnesota budget as governor, after being handed a budget deficit.  Apparently Pawlenty thinks only kids who were not around then or old folks with poor memories will be reading his campaign literature, because the rest of us know the claim to be a complete lie.

Let me quote from a 2009 editorial^† from the Timberjay, a newspaper published in northern Minnesota:

The budget plan that the governor has proposed includes a deficit of approximately $1 billion, even after nearly $2 billion in federal stimulus funding is included. The governor proposes to address that deficit by issuing bonds, which will supposedly be repaid through future proceeds from the state’s tobacco settlement. With interest, the bonds will require payment of a total of $1.7 billion over 20 years.

…

There is, of course, a very simple reason behind the governor’s deficit spending. His reckless “no-new-taxes” pledge in conjunction with tax policy changes he backed as House Majority Leader, have left the state with an essentially permanent budget deficit.

…

Pawlenty now proposes to deal with the situation he helped create by longterm borrowing that will only exacerbate the problem for future state leaders by stealing future revenues to pay for operational spending today. What we have is a governor who claims the mantle of fiscal conservatism while proposing the most fiscally damaging solution to a state budget crisis since the founding of the state.

And he has the guts to call Washington irresponsible?

That’s pretty damning, in my book.  Even more so when one realizes the region in which the Timberjay is published is generally conservative, and not a Democrat stronghold.

The Timberjay editorial staff hasn’t gotten to like Pawlenty much more over the years.  On July 18 of this year, they wrote another scathing article, saying:

A former governor with an abysmal record seeks an encore. Voters should say, “No thanks.”

You can read it online here:  http://timberjay.com/stories/pawlenty-weve-had-plenty,14225?

There’s endless evidence that Pawlenty was a dishonest, double-talking and generally bad governor.  I may be motivated to dig up more of it, if he makes it past the primary.

^†The Timberjay site no longer has a copy of this editorial, but the quoted portions can be found on this blog post from 2009:  http://middlebrow_mn.blogspot.com/2009/04/who-supports-pawlenty-these-days.html

For non-Minnesota residents, today is Primary Day, the day in which the voters choose which candidate in each of the two major parties will be running in the general election for their desired elective position. It’s been a busier than normal season, what with Senator Franken resigning his seat and Governor Dayton choosing, quite reasonably, to have the special election to fill that seat on the same schedule as the regular mid-term election cycle, which means we have not one Senatorial seat, but two up for contention. The governor’s seat will also be contested, as will all the Congressional representative seats.

The big stir in the coffee had been the decision of Representative Keith Ellison (D), the only Muslim member of Congress, deciding to run for MN Attorney General, rather than his old seat. He made the decision at the last moment and it was quite dramatic.

But now that’s been eclipsed by the accusations of his former girlfriend, Karen Monahan, that he was abusive in their relationship.

This came two or three days ago. Yep, no time for Rep. Ellison to really rebut the accusations, or anyone to credibly investigate. He’s denied them, of course. But worse yet?

The accuser claims to have a videotape documenting the incident, but won’t release it.

This all stinks of a political hit-job. My wife (and Arts Editor) is enraged at the timing and the refusal to release the tape. The accuser’s excuse?

Karen Monahan says the video exists, but in an interview with the Minnesota public radio station MPR News, she said she doesn’t plan to release it.

“It’s humiliating, it’s traumatizing, for everyone’s family involved, and for me,” she told MPR on Monday. “It sets the expectation for survivors of all kinds of forms of abuse, whether it be abuse toward women, abuse from police officers, abuse from other people in power, to have to be the ones, like I’m doing right now, to show and prove their stories. It’s feeding into that.” [Vox]

You bet you’re supposed to prove it. Otherwise, this is what happens: a rumor of dubious credibility smears someone’s reputation. It’s just like the Salem Witch Trials.

Anyways, because of this I ended up voting in a primary for the first time ever. I voted for Ellison. Maybe the video exists. Maybe he is a domestic abuser. But, so far, the pattern of circumstantial evidence (see the Vox article for more information, such as the mutual restraining orders, which he received and she did not) doesn’t point that way, and this thing smells to high heaven like revenge for a problem in their personal relationship.

Force majeure:

Ultimately, everyone impacted by the tariffs is looking at the various legal avenues to find relief from tariff-related price increases. That includes several legal options that probably won’t work, such as force majeure clauses, Aiello said.

Force majeure is a legal clause excusing a supplier of its obligation to deliver parts upon the occurrence of an “act of god,” or an event beyond the party’s control. Suppliers are traditionally charged hundreds of thousands of dollars for every minute an automaker plant is shut down due to lack of parts supply. A force majeure can prevent them from that contractual penalty. 

From “Suppliers look for ways around tariffs,” Dustin Walsh, Crain’s.

Life has been hard for Venezuelans for the last few years. I’ve not followed it closely, but it appears they were caught in a squeeze play by the Saudi Arabians, who resented their presence in the energy markets, and leaders, democratically elected, who don’t know what they’re doing.

And that’s where I start getting uncomfortable. Look, the parallels between Venezuela and the United States are not particularly strong. In terms of population, we’re maybe a magnitude larger, far more natural resources, all that sort of thing.

But one thing we do have in common is the election of gross incompetents.

And now Venezuela, according to reports, are experiencing food shortages, inflation, and professionals are leaving in droves, while those who can’t leave are resorting to piracy.

In an age of technology, overpopulation, and manic national ambitions, I can’t help but think you want the best there are at the helm of your country – not some bankrupt businessman with a big mouth who knows how to con enough voters.

Since Mohammed bin Salman became Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, our big ally in the Middle East has been clumsily waging war on Yemen, war that has done little more than kill civilians and swallow up their budget. Additionally, Qatar has been the victim of aggression in the form of a blockade and a reported plan to depose the country’s emir. Bruce Riedel in AL Monitor, after noting that both Trump and Obama have “colluded” in this aggression, suggests that smart money is getting out of Saudi Arabia:

Indeed, the international business community has come to a very different conclusion [than President Trump] about the country’s policies, especially in the wake of Mohammed’s shakedown of his own people last fall to pay for his expensive adventures. Hundreds were detained without charge, and then forced to turn over their assets to the government. Foreign direct investment in the kingdom dropped 80% from over $7 billion in 2016 to $1.4 billion in 2017, according to the United Nations, and down from over $12 billion when King Abdullah was still on the throne. Jordan and Oman each attracted more foreign investment last year than Saudi Arabia. The number of companies also fell significantly. Concerns about the rule of law and arbitrary detention are also encouraging capital flight.

Foreign investment is crucial to Saudi Arabia’s ambition to diversify the economy and create new cities; Vision 2030 needs robust foreign investment. It was entirely predictable that the erratic policies of the royal palace would discourage investors who value stability and predictability — open-ended wars and feuds do not encourage confidence in decision-making.

Absolute monarchies can often be viewed as a collection of decisions driven by irrational motivations – monarchical whim, absolutist religious ideology, desire for personal enrichment, and/or a drive to leave one’s mark on the world. The result is war and suffering. The incompatability of liberal democracies, even one as currently damaged as the American version, and absolute monarchies will result in the former being dragged by the latter into undesirable situations, and underlines the importance of resolving situations which force democracies into such alliances.

Absolute monarchies may be momentary friends, but only momentary. There are no long term shared principles, for the variability and goals of monarchies differ too much from those of the democracy.

It seems to me that the entire “stand for the anthem” tempest-in-a-teacup might be summed up in the following way:

By requiring athletes to stand and honor the flag when the national anthem is played at sports events, and punishing them if they do not, those who wish to promulgate this rule have, in most basic fact, dishonored the flag. This country is all about freedom, and that’s the symbolism of the American flag. Such a rule restricting the freedom of the athletes to choose to honor, or not, the flag, to coerce those athletes into a possibly empty gesture, dishonors the flag and robs the athletes of a potent form of communication.

Those would-be rule makers, these would-be protectors of the United States’ flag, should stand-down and carefully think through the symbolism of their own planned actions, and then renounce them as destructive to the very nation they claim to love.

In the category of mailbag poison, this entry is almost not worth the time if we were to measure by wordage. However, it’s not the wordage, but the amount of illicit poison to the Union which is important, so let’s take a quick look.

You would think the national media would at least make a token effort to investigate this. Oh, I  forgot, she is a Democrat and they get a way with everything.

https://truedaily.news/2018/08/09/did-this-dem-candidate-marry-her-brother/

The “she,” in this instance, is Ilhan Omar, a Democrat who is a Representative to the Minnesota State House for District 20B in her first term, and who is a candidate to succeed Congressional Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) in the upcoming mid-term elections. It’s important to know that Omar is a refugee from Somalia, the child of a Somalian father and Yemeni mother. Evidently she moved here when young, as she attended (graduated?) Edison High School, and then went on to North Dakota State.

And the subject of the report at the link? Her alleged marriage to her own brother.

Is it true? MinnPost is a Minnesota-based investigative journalism site, so they took a look back in 2016, when she had won the primary race for the Minnesota House seat, into this alleged bit of incestuous relations, and what did they find?

Last week, Ilhan Omar made national headlines after her historic win over longtime Rep. Phyllis Kahn and fellow Somali-American Mohamud Noor in the DFL primary race for House District 60B. In the heavily Democratic district, the primary victory put the 33-year-old mother of three in position to become the first Somali-American elected to a state legislature anywhere in the United States.

A little more than week later, however, she found herself on the hot seat after conservative blog Power Line questioned whether Omar was married to two men: Ahmed Nur Said Elmi and Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her three children.

The Star Tribune then followed up, looking into Omar’s marital records, which revealed that Omar has been legally married to Elmi since 2009, and that she has never been legally married to Hirsi. Yet the paper also found that there was no evidence to support another of the charges raised in Power Line’s original report, that Elmi is Omar’s brother.

Note that the local StarTribune is referenced as also checking into these rumors. MinnPost also offers an FAQ for those who want more detail about her relationships, children, and marriage license situation as of that date.

Of course, it’s important to be aware of your sources, and while I know of MinnPost, I don’t use them, so I’m not sure as to the quality of their reporting. The StarTribune is better known for investigative reporting, but like many large city newspapers, they’ve suffered hits of late.

But there are other routes to judging the veracity of a report – when it’s been removed by the publisher. In this case, though, it’s not MinnPost doing the removing, but the news site that published the muckraking report in the first place – Fox 9. Another local newspaper, City Pages, has the report:

It was [Fox 9 reporter Tom] Lyden who pounced on a blog post that accused the 33-year-old Somali-American of bigamy and possible immigration fraud.

Since then he’s been attempting to pick away at the scab of what he’s reported as a “controversy.” The latest controversy to grow out of the Ilhan Omar coverage is one of Lyden’s own making.

“Feds looking into Ilhan Omar’s marriages,” read the headline  on a story appearing on KMSP-TV’s [aka Fox 9] web site Monday. …

According to Lyden’s story, Andrew Luger, the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, had “asked the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to look into Ilhan Omar’s marriages.”

But Lyden’s digging went from scoop to oops by the end of business Monday. Fox 9 has scrubbed the story from its site after serious doubts were raised about the report’s veracity. Those doubts came from Andy Luger himself.

On Monday, Luger emailed Omar’s attorney to put in writing what he’d apparently said earlier by phone. “[T]here is no truth to this report,” Luger wrote, “and my office is not investigating, nor have we requested an investigation into Ms. Omar.”

Yes, it’s a classic xenophobic smear job. In a sense, Omar finds herself treading the same honorable road as did the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, and many other ethnic groups that now make up the background noise of our State and Nation, but were once viewed with suspicion and outright hostility by the locals, whose main virtue was they got here first. The newcomers are accused of whatever happens to be handy for inspiring nausea and revulsion in the locals: witchcraft, eating their children, sleeping with their brothers, sleeping with the locals’ wives, they’ve all been used and all have worked with our ancestors.

But in today’s world, as fast as a lie can go around the world, the turtle of truth can at least get his scaly head out there to shout out the facts.

It’s also worth noting the lengths to which those who would distribute lies, who wish to manipulate the naive for their own ends, will go. First, the contemptible content of the mail, suggesting the media is ignoring controversies involving Democratic darlings, while victimizing the Republicans.

THIS IS HOW YOU SOW DIVISIVENESS. As my research shows, the local traditional and new media did investigate and found nothing substantive. But it’s important to the author of this poisonous little missive to keep his readers in the echo chamber of conservative media, so he seeks to cast anything he doesn’t approve of as being biased towards the non-conservative. It’s a classic divide-and-conquer strategy characteristic of those who would divide and destroy the greatest nation on Earth.

Second, if you follow that link, you’ll find yourself at a site called TrueDaily. Beyond a name that would suggest to the naive that it only deals in truth, a quick look at the menu shows that it’s married itself to the Trump tradition of destroying anything that may impair the Trumps from making money: a link to Fake News. I’m sure anything that might impair what TrueDaily’s editors see as the conservative narrative ends up labeled as Fake News. It’s an easy way to corral the naive reader onto the path the editors desire them to take, rather than subject themselves to possibly damaging comparisons by the discerning and independent reader.

A conservative reader may be raising their finger now, asking why MinnPost, or the StarTribune, has a grip on the truth not available to TrueDaily. Out of context, this is a fair question; but discarding context robs the careful, independent reader of important information.

MinnPost conducted an investigation, noting there was no evidence of an illicit sexual relationship, but also noting her personal relationships are a bit of a mess, with two divorces and one or more civil marriage licenses apparently not completed. They noted the StarTribune, who may have more resources, also found nothing. Their complete information advances their cause.

A careful reader may also note that this story, despite the lack of a date in the mail, comes from MinnPost in 2016. If it had any sort of truth to it, the author should have turned his evidence over to the relevant governmental authorities for prosecution, and by now Omar would have been discredited and no longer in the public eye, not heir-apparent to Ellison’s political seat. TrueDaily’s date on their “news”? 2018. Yeah, two years later.

But the capstone, as I’ve already noted, is Fox 9 removing the story. This has the following consequences:

1. It verifies MinnPost’s reporting;
2. Ditto StarTribune’s;
3. It confirms TrueDaily not as a dispenser of truth, but as a classic Fake News site, best ignored by the reader who thirsts for truth over ideology;
4. And, most importantly, it removes the mud thrown at state Rep Omar.

The lesson here? If you swallowed this story credulously whole, perhaps you should inquire as to whether your prejudices make you vulnerable to the manipulation routinely employed by fake news sites, such as TrueDaily.

Michael Scherer in WaPo, reporting on Rep. Collins suspension of his re-election campaign in the wake of his arrest by the FBI on insider trading charges and how the Republican Party might maneuver in order to take his name off the election ballot and replace it with someone else’s:

Under New York state law, candidates who have been nominated by a party are bound to appear on the ballot with a few specific exceptions, such as when the candidate moves outside the district or gets nominated for another position in the same election.

“What officials are likely to do is nominate him for a town clerkship, which will allow him to vacate the ballot legally,” said a Republican consultant involved in the race Saturday, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal party deliberations. It was not clear if Collins would actually serve as a town clerk if he is elected to that office.

WaPo’s Fact Checker column notes the Democrat’s newest rock star, “democratic-socialist” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the winner of the Democrat primary for Congressional seat NY-14, is not unlike everyone else in not having a firm grasp on the material of governing:

“Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.”
— interview on PBS’s “Firing Line,” July 13, 2018

This is an example of sweeping language — “everyone has two jobs” — that can get a rookie politician in trouble. She may personally know people who have two jobs, but the data is pretty clear that this statement is poppycock.

First of all, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that the percentage of people working two jobs has actually declined since the Great Recession — and been relatively steady at around 5 percent since 2010. The percentage bounced around a bit but it was as low as 4.7 percent in October 2017 and was 5.2 percent in the July jobs report, the most recent available. That hardly adds up to “everyone.”

“After reaching a peak of 6.2 percent during 1995-96, the multiple job-holding rate began to recede,” the BLS noted in a report. “By the mid-2000s, the rate had declined to 5.2 percent and remained close to that level from 2006 to 2009. In 2010, the multiple job-holding rate decreased to 4.9 percent and has remained at 4.9 percent or 5.0 percent from 2010 to 2017.”

The July data shows most of these people juggling two jobs — 58 percent — have a primary job and a part-time job. Only 6 percent have two full-time jobs, which calls into question her claim that people are working “60, 70, 80 hours a week.” Indeed, the average hours worked per week for private employees has remained steady at just under 35 hours for years.

It’s close to being a nonsensical statement to my mind. Unemployment should be higher if many people held more than one job. And the column has more examples, including an ICE claim that I think is somewhat inflammatory.

If Ocasio-Cortez wants to have a potent impact on the national scene, she must have a solid grip on the facts and a manner of communicating them that is both precise and effective. Unlike many Republican members of Congress these days, she doesn’t have the history of mendacity or delusion that would make me cynical and distrustful about her as I’m cynical and distrustful of them, but I’m not willing to grant her a pass just because she’s a not-Republican. A continued misstatement of the critical data, particularly if it’s tilted against her political opponents and targets, would soon sour me on her.

Not that I’m particularly sweet, I’ll hasten to add. Her youthful energy and new outlook on old problems, attributes which I value, are inevitably tempered with naivete and inexperience. But I look for detachment and an allegiance to reality, however distasteful it may be, in our elected representatives and other members of government, not a zealous attachment to ideologies incompatible with the facts on the ground. The latter is the cause of our current national disaster, even cognitive dissonance. Ocasio-Cortez’s current popularity should collapse if she proves in capable of mastering the difficult material of governance, and her ideology, whatever it may be, should not save her from herself.

Noted these on a sidewalk near my employer.

The ants themselves were actually quite tiny.

A while back I watched and reviewed Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), the Americanized version of the first installment of the Japanese Godzilla franchise. Now I’ve seen the true original, though edited for television, called Gojira (1954, aka Godzilla, akaゴジラ).

Compared to my scant memories of the Americanized version, this is a more coherent tale. It’s an allegory concerning a challenge unique to the Modern Era: what to do with society-threatening challenges such as adversaries willing and capable of total war, as symbolized by the appearance of the merciless and all-powerful (and, not coincidentally, radioactive) Godzilla, when the only viable defense are weapons that are themselves a threat to the survival of mankind if misused, in this case a weapon which destroys oxygen in water, rendering it a danger to all sea life, and therefore all humanity. You can consider weapons of biological, chemical, or nuclear origin to be the analogous element.

He drops them on the ground, then he steps on them. After we get to briefly see the terrorized passengers. Surprisingly effective.

From this view, the story makes sense. Godzilla’s appearance and presence are terrifying, if you’re capable of putting yourself in the place of the Japanese. He has a terribly misshapen head (much worse than those we see in the typical sequel), a rage against humanity, and his traditional bad breath weapon that cannot be stopped. Worse, though, is his behavior, and where this story is willing to go: the explicit and graphic death of men, women, and children. This is on two levels – the mass carnage of the threat to humanity, which a friend once observed makes for statistics, not tragedy; and the deeply personal deaths of people who are killed through Godzilla’s immediate actions, through fire, concussion, and general mayhem. While it’s true that undoubtedly fictional people are killed in the various and far-fetched sequels to this initial installment, it’s rare, if ever, that the deaths are so deeply personal and sobering. This happens because this story takes the few moments necessary to humanize the victims, such as those newsmen trapped in a radio tower, still doing their jobs as Godzilla approaches, tries to eat them, and then knocks the tower over, plunging them to their deaths. Or the young mother, holding her children on a sidewalk as Godzilla approaches, telling her children that soon they’ll be joining their father, presumably already dead. And, soon, they are dead.

Godzilla, in his first cinematic appearance, is vast evil incarnate, and the time spent on this in the story is important to drive home the point that the use of the frightening defense, dangerous as its very existence might be, is necessary, and by its necessity, it’s a warning that the path humanity is taking, with its rivalries and xenophobia, is presenting dangers out of proportion to history. The point is that changing our behaviors is necessary, or there won’t be any behaviors to change, eventually.

Technically speaking, this movie is a mixed bag. The story is coherent and necessary, but the major characters are not particularly compelling, at least not in comparison to Godzilla. The special effects range the spectrum from awful to the creepily effective. I’ve used images of Goya’s The Colossus in previous reviews of other Godzilla movies, and it remains an eerily effective analogy. Godzilla striding through Tokyo, clothed in shadow and the light of the flames of a city in its death throes, is quite moving, and the post-attack ruins are strongly, strongly reminiscent of the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after American nuclear bombs destroyed them in World War II. Godzilla’s bad breath weapon is not particularly well done, but, as the experienced Godzilla fan knows, his spinal ridges light up when he’s about to use the bad breath, and for some reason I thought that was, again, quite a creepy effect.

In the end, I don’t necessarily recommend Gojira, but if you have a chance and are in the mood to see it in light of the Japanese experience as victims of nuclear weapons, it’s worth your time.

And, yeah, I feel weird writing a positive review of the first Godzilla movie.

milquetoast:

Milquetoast is an insult popularised by H.T. Webster’s character, Caspar Milquetoast, which was a deliberate misspelling of the dish milk toast. It refers to a person who has a meek or timid disposition. [Wikipedia]

From “Why in the world is Saudi Arabia sanctioning Canada?” Daniel Drezner, WaPo:

If this is an example of what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meant when he said he wanted U.S. diplomats to get their swagger back, then he might be confusing “swagger” with “milquetoast.”

We’re coming up on two years of the Trump Administration, and it’s really been sort of amazing looking at him and his Cabinet & other high level picks. It’s a bit like looking at the Night Of The Living Dead. I mean, just to pick out a few:

• EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned in perhaps one of the most sycophantic displays^[1] this nation has ever seen. Of course, he may have been jonesing for a pardon, as he finally left after nearly 20 investigations had been opened into his behavior during his tenure. His basic goal during that time was to enrich his family neuter the agency to profit the industries he’d previously worked for, although he wasn’t above pushing and shoving for the Attorney General job, which turned out to be one of those grapes that wasn’t low-hanging.
• Sharing the neutering theme is Department of Education Secrectary DeVos, still in her position, whose various proposals have been horror shows of protecting the education industry (and, by that, I do not mean public universities, but for-profit institutes) at the expense of defrauded students. Her displays of ignorance – deliciously ironic – concerning her field have evoked waves of laughter which only fade when people realize the implications.
• Mick Mulvaney, holding duel titles of head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which he is reining in the belief that corporations that don’t actually bankrupt their customers through wrong-doing have done nothing wrong, and head of the Office of Management and Budget, outright admitted a few months ago that he only talked with those who donated sizable sums to his campaign when he was a Representative. That is, bribes will get you everywhere with this fellow.
• Ryan Zinke, head of the Department of the Interior, was seen as a prime competitor to Pruitt in terms of the number of open investigations into such things as his travel arrangements, familiar interactions with companies which are regulated by his agency, and he added in some personal oddness in that he has the DoI secretarial flag flown whenever he’s at DoI HQ. Doesn’t seem odd? No one in Washington can remember anyone ever doing this.
• Compared to the above, disgraced former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price seems like a fucking angel, and I’m not even jesting. I mean, he resigned over an uproar over spending a bit too much on travel expenses. In a normal Administration he would have been kicked out as well – but he’d have been considered the worst apple in the barrel. Right now I’m wondering why he left.
• And, of course, there’s President Trump himself. Setting aside tangible alleged corruption which may yet result in criminal charges or impeachment, the most important corruption for which the President is undeniably responsible is the corruption to the atmosphere of this country, stoking the divisions which have attempted to repair over generations, and chipping out new ones, such as the despicable fake news meme.

But someone whose name doesn’t come up often – yet – is Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. But that may be changing, given the content of this Forbes article. Let’s stop for a moment and consider the source. Forbes isn’t some lefty-rag trafficking in semi-fictional rumors. Forbes is the essence of capitalism, of enterprise and making money. So when Forbes publishes an article like this one, it’s worth sitting up and taking notice.

A multimillion-dollar lawsuit has been quietly making its way through the New York State court system over the last three years, pitting a private equity manager named David Storper against his former boss: Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. The pair worked side by side for more than a decade, eventually at the firm, WL Ross & Co.—where, Storper later alleged, Ross stole his interests in a private equity fund, transferred them to himself, then tried to cover it up with bogus paperwork. Two weeks ago, just before the start of a trial with $4 million on the line, Ross and Storper agreed to a confidential settlement, whose existence has never been reported and whose terms remain secret.

It is difficult to imagine the possibility that a man like Ross, who Forbes estimates is worth some $700 million, might steal a few million from one of his business partners. Unless you have heard enough stories about Ross. Two former WL Ross colleagues remember the commerce secretary taking handfuls of Sweet’N Low packets from a nearby restaurant, so he didn’t have to go out and buy some for himself. One says workers at his house in the Hamptons used to call the office, claiming Ross had not paid them for their work. Another two people said Ross once pledged $1 million to a charity, then never paid. A commerce official called the tales “petty nonsense,” and added that Ross does not put sweetener in his coffee.

There are bigger allegations. Over several months, in speaking with 21 people who know Ross, Forbes uncovered a pattern: Many of those who worked directly with him claim that Ross wrongly siphoned or outright stole a few million here and a few million there, huge amounts for most but not necessarily for the commerce secretary. At least if you consider them individually. But all told, these allegations—which sparked lawsuits, reimbursements and an SEC fine—come to more than $120 million. If even half of the accusations are legitimate, the current United States secretary of commerce could rank among the biggest grifters in American history.

It’s quite the article. It’s the story of the disgraceful grasping after money which seems to characterize so many of Trump’s associates, supporters (see Representative Collins), and picks for high positions in his Administration. It’s as if honor doesn’t exist for them. As if they don’t even understand that capitalism is not about making money any which way you can, but by providing valuable services to customers.

And perhaps Ross will become the next scandal that deflects attention from the master of the circus.

¹Not that I’d expect him to write a burn-the-bridges letter, but this one is a bit over the top. Here’s the opening paragraph:

It has been an honor to serve you in the Cabinet as Administrator of the EPA. Truly, your confidence in me has blessed me personally and enabled me to advance your agenda beyond what anyone anticipated at the beginning of your Administration. Your courage, steadfastness and resolute commitment to get results for the American people, both with regard to improved environmental outcomes as well as historical regulatory reform, is in fact occurring at an unprecedented pace and I thank you for the opportunity to serve you and the American people in helping achieve those ends.

If you’re wondering if the renewal of American sanctions on Iran is having an effect, apparently the answer is Yes. But is it what the Administration wants?  Mohsen Shariatinia has the story for AL Monitor:

An H30-Cross from an Iranian dealership site. Looks like a Western SUV, doesn’t it?

As Iran’s auto industry is grappling with a multifaceted crisis, there are signs that China’s nascent carmakers may step in to become part of the solution.

The US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the impending reimposition of sanctions have not only caused a currency crisis in Iran but also led French automakers such as Peugeot and Renault to leave the Iranian market, creating a shortage of parts. …

Iran Khodro, the country’s largest car manufacturer, recently issued a note to its representatives around the country, requesting that they introduce China’s H30 Cross as a substitute for the French Renault Tondar to customers. The measure was likely in response to Renault’s recent decision to halt all cooperation with Iranian automakers in the coming months. Similar withdrawals by Western automakers in the coming months could herald the beginning of engagement between Iranian automakers and their Chinese counterparts in a bid to reduce the impact of the ongoing crisis. Indeed, if the latter pans out, it has the potential of turning Chinese automakers into a key player in the Iranian market.

Allying the Chinese with the Iranians will make the job of containing the more pathological Iranians in the future a delicate task. This is true only if the Chinese are successful, though, as Shariatinia points out:

Chinese products are generally associated with items of poor quality. In the auto industry, too, Iranians generally refer to Chinese vehicles as “China Cars” in a derogatory manner, referring to them as fragile and subpar in quality.

I’ve gotta wonder if the Iranians have come up with a worse epithet for the Americans than The Great Satan.

Noted at the entrance to the building of my optometrist:

So far as I can make out, if you’re inside the building and within 20 feet of the entrace, then

NO SMOKING.

Kansas Secretary of State and gubernatorial aspirant Kurt Kobach appears – appears – to be off to a bad start in his moral test on the recount of his primary race in which he also has some influence, according to The Wichita Eagle:

[Governor Colyer spokesman Kendall] Marr added that “on top of the recusal, we’re also asking that the secretary of state stop giving incorrect information to the counties, particularly related to the mail-in ballots.”

[Current Governor and candidate for Governor] Colyer released a letter at 5 p.m. calling on Kobach to recuse himself from providing advice to local election officials. The letter comes after multiple counties reported that the election night totals on the secretary of state’s website were inaccurate, further clouding the results of a historically close election.

“It has come to my attention that your office is giving advice to county election officials — as recently as a conference call yesterday — and you are making public statements on national television which are inconsistent with Kansas law and may serve to suppress the vote in the ongoing primary election process,” Colyer said in a letter.

Marr explained in a phone call that the campaign has heard that Kobach’s office told county clerks to disregard ballots with a smudged postmark. Marr said that ballots received before a Friday deadline need to be counted.

Perhaps just a misunderstanding. More to the point:

Around the same time news broke that Colyer received 100 more votes in a western Kansas county than previously reported, the governor’s campaign announced the establishment of a voter integrity hotline. Hours later, additional counties reported that votes had been incorrectly reported on Tuesday.

“We’ve received countless reports that voters experienced issues when they voted on Tuesday. Many Colyer voters had difficulties finding his name on the ballot, were forced to vote on provisional ballots, or were turned away outright for unknown reasons,” Marr said in a news release.

Patrick Miller, a political scientist at the University of Kansas, said the hotline was a clear indication that Colyer’s campaign is preparing for a potential court case.

Looks like a classic case of low-level dirty tricks. Any one by its own could be excused as mistakes, but taken together, they appear to indicate someone who’ll do a lot of illicit things to win.

But we’ll see. Appearances from here could be deceiving. Maybe a court will be able to clarify matters.

Sorry, a bit overblown on the post title there. I’m just deeply amused by this NewScientist (28 July 2018, paywall) article on imminent cyber-disaster in Japan (apologies to any Japanese readers of this blog):

JAPAN has an impending millennium bug problem.

In the lead up to the turn of the millennium, few computers were able to properly represent the year 2000, leaving people worried about what would happen when midnight struck on New Year’s eve 1999. Now the same issues could arise in Japan when the current emperor abdicates in April next year.

The Japanese calendar is based on era names that coincide with the rule of its emperors. We have been in the Heisei or “peace everywhere” era since Japan’s current emperor, Akihito, took the throne in 1989. This period has covered the majority of modern computing, so most software has never needed to change to reflect a new era.

Almost every part of society, from payrolls to parking tickets, relies on recording dates accurately, so the change could break systems that rely on Japanese era naming conventions.

The cyber-era would be so much more efficient if humans weren’t part of the equation.

Preternatural:

Beyond what is normal or natural.
‘autumn had arrived with preternatural speed’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]

Noted in an article about a 14 year old running for governor of Vermont, “This 14-year-old is running for governor before he can even vote,” Kayla Epstein, WaPo:

Sonneborn thinks he can do it [be elected Governor of Vermont]. “My campaign transcends age,” he said. He possesses a preternatural self-assurance that’s not uncommon among politicians, but certainly is among teenagers who typically navigate the cutthroat politics of high school, not state government.

I ran across this pine tree (I presume) in Loring Park in Minneapolis, and I just happen to like how the picture turned out after my Arts Editor “adjusted” it.

The Rachel Maddow Show was gifted with a secret recording of a recent private fundraiser hosted by Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), chairman of the House Intel Committee, who, instead of taking his job seriously, has been a knight-defender of the President, extending himself to releasing memos that purported to clear the President of wrong-doing, while not paying a whit’s attention to his bailiwick.

Or so, at least, it seems to me.

TRMS has released transcripts of selected portions of the recording, which I found interesting.

Clip #1:

REP. NUNES (R-CA): “So therein lies, so it’s like your classic Catch-22 situation where we were at a – this puts us in such a tough spot. If Sessions won’t unrecuse and Mueller won’t clear the president, we’re the only ones. Which is really the danger. That’s why I keep, and thank you for saying it by the way, I mean we have to keep all these seats. We have to keep the majority. If we do not keep the majority, all of this goes away.”

Clip #2:

REP. NUNES (R-CA): “They know it’s ridiculous to go after the president for obstruction of justice. But if they tell a lie often enough and they put it out there and they say, ‘Oh, we’re looking at the tweets,’ cause you know you’ve got a mixed bag on the tweets, right? Like sometimes you love the president’s tweets, sometimes we cringe on the president’s tweets. But they’re trying to make a political, this is all political as to why that story ran in the New York Times on the tweets.”

So that confirms the impression. One might wonder if, as he asserts, this is really the Democrats engaging in a political lynching, and that might be reasonable if the situation were considered in isolation.

But once we consider the deceit and venality of Nunes, of Trump, of various Cabinet members, then it’s hard to consider Nunes’ contention to be reasonable.

So that’s our lesson for today. The Big Lie paradoxically works very well, and not well at all, in the Age of the Internet.

Readers comment on the latest special election results and my conclusions:

I was Republican for roughly the first half of my life, until the party was grabbed by the venal, the hypocrites and the plunderers. I’ve drifted left in some of my thinking as I’ve gained wisdom, no doubt. But the whole political spectrum has gone so far right — in so many words, because the corruption and amorality is less a political left/right thing than it is a tribal thing.

I have a few friends who used to be Republicans and are now independents or even progressive Democrats. The right side of the spectrum, for all that it wears the clothing of religion, is the more materialistic end of the spectrum, and I believe we see that in the behaviors of the current Administration and its allies in Congress and across the Nation. I’ve speculated in the past that there is effectively two factions on the conservative side of the spectrum, the truly religious and the less authentically religious, and that the latter preys on the former’s credulity, which is greater than on the left side of the spectrum (which has its own set of problems) because of a pre-disposition to credulity brought on by that religiosity which defines them.G

Another:

It’s not enough that many incumbent Rs should lose. Equally important is that challenger Ds should win. Convincingly and for good reasons, not simply the lesser of two evils.

I completely agree. The Democrats must field competent and ethical candidates who can communicate with their constituents. But what’s to be done with those still addicted to Fox News and other media which fails to serve up the information available? That’s a hard question.

I’ve mentioned Kansas Secretary of State Kurt Kobach a few times over the years. He was on the President’s defunct commission concerning fraudulent voting (despite his vociferous insistence that it was endemic, they found no evidence of same), he was on the answering end of a lawsuit requesting raw electoral data from voting machines by Professor Clarkson (he won).  More recently, well, there’s been some unsavory stories which I shan’t repeat. His most recent venture? The Kansas governorship, the Republican primary for which was last Tuesday. We’ll pick this up from Steve Benen, for one very good reason:

One of the most closely watched Republican primaries of the year was held in Kansas this week, where incumbent Gov. Jeff Colyer faced off against Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Everyone expected it to be a close contest, and the results didn’t disappoint: Kobach currently leads by 191 votes out of over 311,000 cast.

It’s not over just yet, though, and in the coming days, officials will still have to count provisional and mail-in ballots. The prospect of a recount is very real.

And that’s where this is likely to get tricky.

As Secretary of State for Kansas, Kobach and his team have supervisory responsibility for his own recount. He’s refused to recuse himself (although Steve later notes he’s hedged that position), which Steve thinks is outrageous:

The Kansas City Star reported yesterday, “No law requires Kobach to recuse himself, but legal and political experts said that he should do so to maintain trust in the election.”

And yet, as of yesterday, Kobach – the state’s top elections official – said he has no plans to recuse himself from the process, despite the apparent conflict of interest. The far-right Republican said his office “serves as a coordinating entity overseeing it all,” but since his team wouldn’t literally count ballots, Kobach is satisfied that he’s detached enough.

To my mind, this is not scandal – it’s a test. Kobach fails the first part of the test, that of recognizing when it’s necessary to take action in order to preserve trust in public institutions. However, he has not yet had a chance to test whether or not he’ll actually try to interfere with the recount for his benefit. If he does, and he’s caught, the citizens Kansas will know they have a real scumbag on their hands.

And they can kick him right out of public service as someone who doesn’t understand how government service should be conducted.

Sometimes, ya gotta give folks a bit of rope just to see if they hang themselves with it.

In NewScientist (28 July 2018, paywall) Clare Wilson reports on a the theory that obesity might be caused by a virus:

In humans, adenoviruses usually cause colds, diarrhoea or eye infections. For ethical reasons, we can’t just inject adenovirus-36 into people and see if they put on weight. Instead, Dhurandhar and other groups looked to see whether people who are overweight are more likely to have antibodies to this virus – a sign that their immune systems have encountered it. They found that they did: one US study, for instance, reported that 30 per cent of obese people had these antibodies, compared with 5 per cent of those who were a healthy weight.

Now Wilmore Webley at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has searched for the virus itself in people, rather than antibodies. His team looked at 80 biopsies taken from women with breast cancer. Analysing healthy breast tissue from them, the team found that 81 per cent of the samples from overweight women contained the virus, while just 19 per cent of samples from healthy-weight women did. “That is a big difference,” says Webley. The findings were presented at a conference of the American Society for Microbiology in Atlanta, Georgia.

It’s interesting that the focus is on the virus. Is it not possible that the cause of the obesity is the antibodies themselves?

Source; Wikipedia

A couple of days ago I mentioned the special election for House seat Ohio-12 between Balderson (R) and O’Connor (D). As of just now, Balderson leads by less than a percentage – and absentee votes amounting to far more than the margin are still to be counted in 10 or 11 days. O’Connor is not conceding, despite Republican crowing.

As I mentioned in the prior post, the Republican claims of victory, accurate or not, are really hollow. The fact that this is close is shocking, because this seat leans heavily Republican, and went for Trump in the Presidential election. But a facet I have neglected in all the special elections is this: Republican and leaning voters are, to some extent, going to be aware of the history of this seat, and the overwhelming margins by which it has been won by the GOP.

It has to be going through their minds: What The Fuck?

And, for those not irrevocably wedded to Trump or extremist ideology, that must eventually lead to the question: What does everyone who used to vote Republican but didn’t this time know that I don’t?

It’s gotta be eating away at them. The high profile resignations, accompanied by epitaphs for the Republicans. There’s been a lot of them, and for the extreme wing of the Republicans, it can’t happen fast enough. But for the moderates, the enablers of the extremists, those are signals that something is going seriously wrong.

Will we see a migration of moderate Republicans to the independent ranks as their consciences are struck by the venial nature of so many of their candidates? I don’t know for Balderson, and I have no intent to tar him with allegations and innuendo. But if he’s a moderate, then he’s become an object lesson to the balance of the Republicans, even if he wins, because he should have won in a landslide.

And, instead, he’s crawling underneath the barbed wire in hopes of winning.

Like Bartlett, I think first the GOP has to be dismantled, and then rebuilding a sane party can begin.

Know hope.