I titled this screenshot "jeb wtf.png"

Putting this here because in November, 2016, we won't believe that a candidate for the Presidency actually said this and then thought it was a wise move to memorialize it the next day on social media.

One of the better reply Tweets notes that he's literally
standing on a pile of American corpses.

The other thing we won't believe Jeb Bush said was that he thought Margaret Thatcher should be on the American ten-dollar bill.

GOP candidates treating Donald Trump as if he's a real candidate

Well, someone has to.

The best thing about the Donald Trump presidential candidacy is that all the other GOP candidates -- for lack of a better word, let's call them "serious" or "realistic" -- I say, all the other GOP candidates are actually responding to him, in public. Seen on CNN, just this morning:

Reince Priebus has phoned him personally.

George Pataki has invited him to a one-on-one debate on immigration.

Lindsey Graham spent time in comments to an international affairs think tank criticizing Trump and Hillary Clinton, as if they're both of the same caliber of candidate or as if Trump actually had some grown-up understanding of foreign policy.

Following a bouncing link, I see that Ted Cruz actually called Trump "terrific" the other day. I'm not sure if he meant that in sort of a modern, everyday way, like "really neat" or "the bee's knees" or "awesome," or if he was going for a more originalist meaning, like "inducing terror." But whichever meaning he intended to get across doesn't matter so much as why on god's green earth is he bothering to answer any question about Trump?

Another bouncing link shows me that Marco Rubio says that Trump's anti-Mexican comments are "offensive" and that Trump himself is "divisive." Whoa, Marco! Them's fightin' words! Let's cool it with the harsh language and try to be a little more polite next time, eh?

Every action they're taking to delegitimatize Trump only increases how seriously the media is taking him. "Amateur hour" is one term for it. The GOP clown car could not be more literally full of clowns, though at least one outlet is being realistic about the situation.

Lynne Abraham's favorite speech-muzzling law tossed

GWB appointee throws out the anti-Mumia "Silencing Act" on First Amendment grounds, because of course:

The Revictimization Relief Act, as it was called, "is the embodiment of content-based regulation of speech," [Judge Christopher] Conner wrote. "Its terms single out a distinct group and disincentivize its members from speaking."

[Also 5th Amendment grounds, particularly because the law didn't define "offender."]

"As a result, many plaintiffs -— prisoners and non-prisoners alike -— instantly modified their conduct for fear of falling within the ambit of the act," the judge said.

He said the law hinged on the emotional response of victims.

"Short of clairvoyance, plaintiffs cannot determine in advance whether and to what extent a particular expression will impact a victim's sensibilities," Conner wrote.

Minus one point for using the "word" disincentivize, but plus one for explaining that the law is no good because, as drafted (PDF), it required the speaker to be a mind-reader.

In January I noted how happy Lynne Abraham was to be present with Governor Corbett at the bill's signing into law. Would love to see someone ask her about the law now that a federal judge has ruled so predictably on it.

Hillary Clinton won't announce for months

You people who think that Hillary Clinton will announce her campaign for the presidency any time before, like, late July are so funny. Why on god's green earth would she not maximize the amount of time permitting the various dumbass GOP candidates to say and do the most incredible things?

What would Chris Christie have said about vaccinations if Clinton were in the race already?

Would Mitt Romney have dropped out?

Would Sarah Palin have hired a speechwriter (or "teleprompter repairperson")?

Let's stay hunkered down during these winter cold snaps, wait for spring to come and go, and tune back in after the 4th of July -- and let Clinton hang with her granddaughter. The longer she stays out of the race, the more hilarious stories she can tell her about these GOP knuckleheads.

News from confirmed bachelor Lindsey Graham

Confirmed bachelor Lindsey Graham has a hat, and he's not afraid to throw it into the ring:

Graham formed a committee called "Security Through Strength," which allows him to raise money to fund travel around the country to gauge support for a candidacy.

[ . . . ]

Graham's organization is headed by David Wilkins, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada under President George W. Bush and a former speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives.

Now, far be it from me to tell anyone that they should get married -- it'll take me some convincing to ever go down that road again, myself, that's for sure -- and it's absolutely none of my goddamned business what Graham does when he's not on the job. The point, of course, is that it shouldn't matter. But because it does, and because he's a war hawk who was never a combat veteran, and because he voted for Clinton's DOMA, and because he thinks Justice Alito is a "decent" man, it does.

Lynne Abraham hates the First Amendment

I'm so old, I remember when Lynne Abraham, who was definitely not yet running for mayor at the time, came out to support Governor Corbett's signing of the Revictimization Relief Act back in October. Here's a screengrab from a video embedded in the article:

Video is via ScrappleTV.

This is a terrible law that violates the First Amendment on its face. It won't survive the court challenges, whether the first one filed by baby lawyers in November or the one filed by ACLU today (PDF). Governor Corbett's last-ditch attempt at winning re-election got him nothing but a few points from the people who are still insane about Mumia Abu-Jamal -- a broken man who will die in prison, probably within just a few more years -- and maybe some glee at sticking the incoming Wolf administration with paying to defend the lawsuits.

McCain's decision: D-Day 2015, or turn the Champs Elysees into a glass parking lot?

. . . and John McCain's response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre is, essentially, "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb-bomb Par-ee":

"We knew for a long time about the areas outside Paris that police don't go into at night," said Arizona Senator John McCain. "We know there's a strong Islamic influence there, radical Islam. We know there are many French who are fighting in Syria."

H/T Zaid Jilani on Twitter (@ZaidJilani).

Meet our next mayor: MOVE arrest warrant Judge Lynne Abraham

. . . and here's Lynne Abraham ducking softball questions, and apparently still believing that marijuana is a gateway drug, on her road to the Mayor's office.

I mean, we're all aware she'll be our next mayor, right? Nobody else's name on the ballot is recognizable, and nobody actually votes in the primary, where Philadelphia actually elects its mayor since the Democratic candidate tipped in May will trounce the Republican in November.

In related news, Jason Osder's 2013 documentary film about the MOVE bombing, Let the Fire Burn, is on Netflix. You should see it; it's all archive footage, no re-enactments, no narration, just layin' it out there for the audience to draw its own conclusions from the materials presented.

Why is this related news?

I should verify with the archive over at Temple University, but word on the street is that it was Judge Lynne Abraham who signed D.A. Ed Rendell's arrest warrants, which the police took to the MOVE house on 13 May 1985 in order to serve -- leading to the 14 May bombing and subsequent fire that killed 11 people (half of them kids) and burned five dozen homes to the ground.

Some years ago, the local anarchist bookstore briefly had a few t-shirts for sale with a poster-ized treatment of this image on it. The title of the image was "Welcome to Philadelphia." I think I prefer "This was Plan B."

The mayoral primary will take place on 19 May 2015, which is 30 years plus five days after the MOVE bombing. Philadelphia memories aren't short, so I do wonder if anyone will be brave enough to ask Lynne Abraham her thoughts on having signed those warrants. She states in the Philadelphia Magazine interview up there, "I don't know why the police were not indicted in the [Staten] Island matter." Maybe she could be asked if she understands why the police were not indicted in the MOVE matter, either.

Or maybe all journalists are Chuck Todd.

Private ambulance service closes, giving you what you ideologically pay for

When a business owner can't make a profit, they close up shop. And in a libertarian paradise where government services are outsourced to private, for-profit third parties, that means ambulance companies may close up shop, too:

A private ambulance service that transported more than a half-million patients a year in six states abruptly shut down without explanation, leaving dozens of cities and towns scrambling for medical transportation options Monday without a word of warning.

First Med EMS, based in Wilmington, N.C., served hospitals and other medical facilities in more than 70 municipalities in Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. It operated under the names TransMed, Life Ambulance and MedCorp[.]

It's not clear whether the outsourcing deals required First Med EMS to give anyone notice that they were leaving the medical transportation biz. After all, there's no law saying that any ordinary for-profit concern has to tell their customers that they're not going to open their doors from one day to the next. Sure, you have to officially wind down the business and pay your last rounds of taxes and settle up outstanding accounts and bills. But you can take a long time doing it, if you like, or even declare bankruptcy and drag the process on for years. And it's not as if you have to alert the media or call the county to put the government on notice, because mostly, it's nobody's business.

Medical facilities said the shutdown took them by surprise, too, and at least one county -- Bertie County, N.C. -- declared a state of emergency at noon Monday. The county board of commissioners said in a statement that it would pursue legal claims against First Med.

Oops. But I do wonder what kind of contract was in place. And I wonder what rhetoric was used to convince the county that outsourcing its ambulance services was a good idea. Operating a medical transport service isn't the same as running a taxi company. And libertarian paradises are all fun and games until people can't get to their dialysis appointments because somebody decided an ambulance is nothing more than a taxi with flashing lights.

Voter ID, the death of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the 19th Amendment

The Pennsylvania voter ID trial begins today. I still think voter ID laws are a 19th Amendment issue.

Who changes their names after marriages and divorces? Women.

Who has to run the paperwork gantlet to get a new driver license or passport, digging up marriage certificates, divorce decrees, and birth certificates or sending away to out-of-state agencies for proof that they're who they say they are, only to risk being turned down by a DMV functionary who orders them to transfer the title of their home into their maiden name (PDF)? Women.

Who are disproportionately represented in the Pennsylvania anti-voter ID case? Women (PDF).

And I'll go there. You think the prisoners fasting for Ramadan in Gitmo, or the 29,000 prisoners in California, are the first to go on hunger strikes for their cause? They're only the latest. Who was force-fed during their struggle for the right to vote? Women.



A hundred years ago, Emily Davison was about my age when she was killed attempting a theatrical gesture for women's suffrage. A 7-minute doc includes a film clip and calls her "a radicalized woman with nothing to lose" (4:10). Though she probably wasn't a suicide and never intended to be a martyr, she had a hero's funeral.

You can roll back the business end of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and implement anti-voting measures right away, but it can't end well. The little old ladies with no driver licenses will die off. Those of us born before all the birth records were digitized or originated on the computer will get our acts together and get the right ID. And people my daughter's age, who were in the computer from the get-go, won't have a problem getting their voter ID. Requiring state-issued ID and then making it hard to obtain is not a sustainable strategy. And it won't be too long now before that daughter of mine is voting.

Since, after all, your grandfathers and great-grandfathers were so gracious to vote for the 19th Amendment.

Of course Gingrich's daughters are defending him

The CNN blog headline reads, "Gingrich's daughters defend him ahead of ABC interview with ex-wife." I was going to make a comment along the lines of, well, of course they're defending him. It's perfectly reasonable for a man's children to stick up for him. Parents generally treat their offspring very different from the way they treat a spouse, and no child shares the perspective, knowledge, and experience of a spouse when a marital relationship goes kablooey. So I was going to say, you know, I imagine my daughter would defend her dad ahead of a television interview with me, just as Gingrich's daughters are defending him as against one of his ex-wives; but that statement would seem to equate my ex-husband with Newt Gingrich. And no matter how smelly the dirty laundry is between me and my ex-husband, I would never dream of equating or even comparing him to Newt Gingrich. After all, my ex-husband never asked me to open up our marriage, or cheated on me with someone 23 years younger than he is (as far as I know), or discussed divorce proceedings with me while I was in the hospital, or brought legislation destroying the welfare state to the sitting Democratic President for his signature.

Regulatory uncertainty versus food insecurity

The trope is that big businesses aren't creating jobs because of "uncertainty." Would someone please explain to me the nature of this uncertainty? GE paid no federal taxes in 2010 and its profits have regularly exceeded $1 billion per quarter. Private equity wizards, Tea Party financiers, and terror profiteers Charles and David Koch are (each or both, but at this level it hardly makes a difference) worth $25 billion -- which sounds like a number you'd make up to exaggerate for comedic effect, you know?

What is the uncertainty here? You hire someone and pay them $28,000 a year, or $120,000 a year? That will have an almost literally negligible effect on GE's profits. What am I missing in the math? GE makes over $1 billion extra every quarter; they'd pay the hypothetical new hire some $7,000 or $30,000 out of that. The Kochs add some new, highly capitalized business or a family of brands to their equity portfolio, and they've spent, what, a few hundred million dollars out of their $25 billion.

I guess "regulatory uncertainty" is the phrase spoken trippingly on the tongue as well. But really? The argument is that businesses won't hire now because they don't know if the rules will change in the future, making their permanent employees more expensive. But OSHA is notoriously understaffed and underfunded and has been for years and multiple administrations. It's not as if some new rules or increased enforcement will happen any time soon to wreck your factory's productivity. As for the energy sector (oil drilling, fracking, and so on), how many actual jobs are we talking here, versus, for example, Exxon's $10 billion in quarterly profits?

Why do people repeat the "uncertainty" line without making the people who claim uncertainty explain it?

I'll tell you what uncertainty is. It's not knowing whether you can pay the rent or put food on the table next month. And states are cutting TANF left and right. TANF -- thank you, President Clinton -- is difficult to get in the first place, offers no childcare to moms while requiring them to go to work, and discriminates against non-married, non-nuclear families.

I said it yesterday and I'll say it again. It's no wonder that there's a tent city at City Hall, and I don't see why anybody there would hurry up to leave. There's nothing left to lose, and the critics are free to hire them so that they move into a higher tax bracket.

Bloomberg Businessweek: Small businesses are killing America

This week's Bloomberg Businessweek, page 10-11:

[T]he notion that small business is the force behind prosperity is not true. [...] So let's revisit the home-office tax deduction, which costs the IRS $9 billion in [annual] revenue.

And on 66-67:

U.S. multinationals like Pfizer, Cisco, and Apple have parked more than $1.3 trillion in profit overseas, avoiding federal income taxes.

You can't have it both ways, Bloomberg. Either small businesses are killing America, or transnational megacorps evading taxes by offshoring all their capital are starving the Treasury. I think I know which scenario is more plausible.

"Helicopter hovering over Abbottabad at 1 AM (is a rare event)"

The New Yorker has just published a blow-by-blow account of the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden. You know what still strikes me about the entire thing? Never mind how well the President has handled the debt-ceiling business over the past several weeks; dig the timeline around the raid:

The next morning [that is, the morning of Friday 29 April], the President met in the Map Room with Tom Donilon, his national-security adviser, Denis McDonough, a deputy adviser, and [counterterrorism adviser John] Brennan. Obama had decided to go with a DEVGRU [Naval Special Warfare Development Group] assault, with [Vice-Admiral and Navy SEAL Bill] McRaven choosing the night. It was too late for a Friday attack, and on Saturday there was excessive cloud cover. On Saturday afternoon, McRaven and Obama spoke on the phone, and McRaven said that the raid would occur on Sunday night. "Godspeed to you and your forces," Obama told him. "Please pass on to them my personal thanks for their service and the message that I personally will be following this mission very closely."

On the morning of Sunday, May 1st, White House officials cancelled scheduled visits, ordered sandwich platters from Costco, and transformed the Situation Room into a war room. At eleven o’clock, Obama’s top advisers began gathering around a large conference table.

See that paragraph break there? It's like a literal depiction that the article omits any mention of what the President was doing between that Saturday afternoon phone call and the Sunday evening (East Coast time) raid. But recall what was actually happening during that paragraph break. The SEALs were finalizing their preparations for the raid and spending the night in Jalabad, while the President was doing this:



And the next morning he put in a half-round of golf before heading to the Situation Room to watch the video feed, likely to blow off steam, and maybe also to keep up the appearance of it being any ordinary weekend morning. President Obama is one cool cat, and it's this kind of thing that makes me more sure than I otherwise would be that the GOP won't be able to pull of the presidential election in 2012.

On a different note, the New Yorker article mentions a participant speaking "chaste Pashto." I'd be interested to learn what that is; googling isn't much help, other than showing me a bunch of duplicates of a comment to the article itself asking what "chaste Pashto" is. Maybe some kind of schoolmarm Pashto? A "High Pashto"? A "received pronunciation" Standard Pashto?

Attack of the summer canvassers

Way too many progressive-cause canvassers on Walnut Street in Center City lately. I encountered no fewer than 3 pairs between work and home yesterday. Bless their hearts, they can't possibly be meeting their quotas and I know they're not paid much. But though I hate to say it I sure do wish they'd move to another street.

BBC asks "why get married?" but omits pretty obvious answer

BBC Magazine article discusses the question of why a couple would get married after having kids, without suggesting the most obvious answer: for health insurance or legal or tax purposes. (Granted, marrying for the health insurance is perhaps not so obvious in a nation with socialized medicine.) But my point is that government- or authority-recognized marriage has only ever been an economic contract. The religious trappings and moral imperatives were added for solemnity -- to make the couple take the marriage more seriously, put them in mortal fear of their souls if they change their minds afterward, and provide some predictability in estate planning.

Anecdotally, I know an American couple who got married only for the health insurance. They've kept their marriage open, have had two kids, and are still together some dozen years later. From what I understand of their decision to get married, they flatly wouldn't have done it if one of them hadn't needed healthcare. Another acquaintance of mine has been married twice, and both times it was solely for health insurance because of a chronic condition. The first marriage was kind of predictably a disaster, but the second seems to be going well.

And in the end, that person moved to England for, as they put it, simply to stay alive. No American health insurance company, even the Cadillac insurance they got through the second spouse who worked for a Fortune 500 company, would pay for their preventive and ongoing care in a timely and reasonable manner, so they moved to a country where you just go to a clinic, get treatment, and go home.

As for marrying for legal and tax purposes, for crying out loud, what do you think the fight about gay marriage is all about? It's about hospital visitation rights, intestate inheritance issues, and mortgage interest tax deductions.

Most of the time, follow the money. Marriage qua marriage is an economic and legal question, and that's all it will ever be. Consider how easy it is to get married, compared to how complicated it is to get divorced. And have you noticed that, once you are divorced, you tend to have to identify yourself as "divorced," not "single" again? A marriage that ended years or decades ago follows you forever!

Schumer's "no ride list" for trains is stupid

Sen. Chuck Schumer's (D.-N.Y.) "no ride list" for Amtrak (Reuters) is stupid.

His reasoning is that bin Laden had been planning to blow up some train tracks on or around the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. So there are at least two reasons why Schumer's proposal is stupid:

One, it's closing the barn door after the horses have run out. Bin Laden is now dead, his plans discovered and publicized. I for one doubt that his organization is so well organized that it will just pick up and implement these plans -- which were so inexact or incomplete that they didn't include a precise date or location for the event -- without their leader. And even if they could, why would they keep on with a plan that the government is now aware of?

While it would be dead simple to bring the Northeast Corridor to its knees by strategically blowing up a single bomb somewhere between D.C. and Boston, it's apparently difficult to arrange. I'm actually flabbergasted that it hasn't been done yet. It's like 450 miles of very vulnerable and largely unsecured track. Are terrorists stupid? Incompetent? Badly organized? I don't know. But it seems to be it would be a hell of a lot easier to carry out than the 9/11 operation.

Two, and really I think this is the more important point, how will preventing a suspect from entering onto a train prevent him from planting a bomb on the tracks on which the train runs?

I mean, really.

Working through the government shutdown

I got nothin'.

I've been putting out little work fires all week, nagging colleagues who have blown deadlines, and going so far over my minutes on my cell phone plan that they even sent me e-mail about it.

I would say, "I can't believe they're shutting down the federal government over women's cancer-preventive healthcare," but I would be lying.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at José Pistola's upstairs bar, where there are drink specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. And the more we tip the bartender, the more frequently he hands out free dishes of chips and dips. I hope to see you there!

José Pistola's is at 263 South 15th Street (15th and Spruce) in Center City, near the Kimmel Center and the Academy of Music. There's a parking garage across the street, but as filthy liberal hippies naturally we suggest public transit; both SEPTA and PATCO will get you there in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

This week's topic: A Q & A with Democratic City Council (2nd District) candidate Richard C. DeMarco, Esq. He'll be speaking and then taking questions from about 7:00. We aren't endorsing Mr. DeMarco -- we don't endorse anybody, and we're not sure that a candidate would welcome our endorsement anyway -- but we do welcome non-recruiting visits, like this one, from candidates.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

GOP to West Coast: Drop Dead

It's like shooting fish in a barrel, it really is.

Remember when Gov. Bobby Jindal (R.-La.) gave the Republican response to the 2009 State of the Union speech, and he mocked funding for monitoring volcanoes, and then the Mt. Redoubt volcano in Alaska erupted a couple of months later?

The GOP's federal budget proposal cuts tsunami preparedness and relief, and today -- basically as I type this -- tsunami waves (albeit small ones) are hitting the West Coast of the United States, Hawai'i is assessing its damage, and American holdings in the South Pacific may have been washed over completely after yesterday's earthquake in Japan, which registered mind-boggling 8.9 on the Richter scale.

Tens of millions of Americans live in tsunami danger zones. Tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions don't quit just because of a budget crisis and a global economic recession. But the GOP would rather have the West Coast drown than end the Bush tax cuts for billionaires.