The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Almost too close to home

Sometimes The Onion has a satirical piece that's, well, almost completely true:

Visa Exposed As Massive Credit Card Scam

SAN FRANCISCO—In coordinated raids Monday at locations in Delaware, South Dakota, and California, federal agents apprehended dozens of executives at Visa Inc., a sham corporation accused of perpetrating the largest credit card scam in U.S. history.

According to indictments filed in U.S. District Court, Visa posed as a reputable lender, working through banks to peddle a variety of convincing-looking credit cards carefully designed to dupe consumers into spending far more money than they had. The criminal group would then impose a succession of escalating fees on unpaid balances, allegedly bilking some $300 billion from victims in the past year alone.

The article goes on to enumerate Visa's alleged wrongs. Only, most of them are true.

Chuckle, or nervous laughter?

Shot across the bow

Democrats in Wisconsin picked up two state senate seats in an unprecedented recall election:

Democrats defeated Republican state Sen. Dan Kapanke, who represented the most Dem-leaning seat of any Republican in the chamber, by a 55%-45% margin. They also won a 51%-49% victory over state Sen. Randy Hopper, whose campaign was also damaged by a messy divorce, and allegations by his estranged wife that he "now lives mostly in Madison" after having an affair.

This would get Democrats from their previous 19-14 minority, following the 2010 Republican wave, to a 17-16 margin. In two more safe Republican districts, incumbents Robert Cowles and Sheila Harsdorf won by margins of 60%-40% and 58%-42%, respectively

At the very least, this might signal to the Wisconsin GOP that a good chunk of the electorate believes they lurched too far right since being elected:

All six of these districts were, on paper, serious uphill climbs for Democrats. The incumbents were last elected in 2008, winning their districts even in the middle of the huge Democratic wave that year.

After this near-miss, the next question becomes: How will this result impact the Democrats' declared intentions to recall Gov. Scott Walker some time next year? Will the Dems' grassroots energy flatten out -- or can it keep going, towards the lofty goal of collecting over half a million signatures, plus a buffer, to trigger a recall election?

It also means, for the next 15 months or so, Wisconsin politics might be the most divisive and vicious in the country. Thanks for all your help, Koch brothers!

Krugman says it succinctly

From today:

It’s not the whole story, but something like this threatens to develop:

1. US debt is downgraded, sparking demands for more ill-advised fiscal austerity

2. Fears that this austerity will depress the economy send stocks down

3. Politicians and pundits declare that worries about US solvency are the culprit, even though interest rates have actually plunged

4. This leads to calls for even more ill-advised austerity, which sends us back to #2

Behold the power of a stupid narrative, which seems impervious to evidence.

Sounds about right.

Two out of three is a career in baseball

Like most American citizens, I have three representatives in Congress: one in the House, and two in the Senate. My representative is Mike Quigley; the Senate Majority Leader, Dick Durbin; and the other guy, Mark Kirk. I've given money to everyone who's run against Kirk in the last six years, and voted for one of them[1], and I've given money to and voted for my other Senator and my Congressman every time I've been able. Thus, I'm batting .667, which isn't bad.

And why do I want Kirk to retire? Why do I think he completely fails to represent the interests of the State of Illinois, and more specifically, my interests? In part because he says dumb crap like this:

In a potential missile combat scenario between NATO and Iran, Russia is thoroughly irrelevant. So Russian concerns about what we do and not do about the Iranian threat are interesting but largely irrelevant.

O RLY? Does Senator Kirk know that Iran borders Russia, that Russia considers Iran within its sphere of influence, that Russia has sold weapons to Iran, and all that aside, that Russia has just as many missiles as NATO?

Kirk's latest polysyllabic fart, by the way, came in response to a remark the Russian Ambassador's made about him yesterday:

Today in the Senate, I met with Senators Jon Kyl and Mark Kirk. The meeting is very useful because it shows that the alternative to Barack Obama is a collapse of all the programs of cooperation with Russia. Today, I had the impression that I was transported in a time machine back several decades, and in front of me sat two monsters of the Cold War, who looked at me not through pupils, but targeting sights.

Hyperbole aside, I think Ambassador Rogozin is correct: Kirk's politics are an unholy blend of 1963 and 1850, not what either Illinois or the country needs right now.

[1] Kirk represented the 10th District for 9 years, and I supported his opponent Dan Seals twice. However, I live in the 5th District, so I couldn't vote for Seals. Pity; both elections were close.

(Corrected typo, and length of Kirk's time in the House.)

A decision has been decided

Tokyo.

Two things about this of interest to travelers: First, because it's a frequent-flyer miles purchase, I can hold the reservation without fully committing for a week. So, if something changes before the 3rd, I'm not out anything. Second: as much as the Congressional Republicans boggle my mind, and as much as I wish they'd shut up for ten seconds and reauthorize the FAA, their idiocy is my gain. Instead of the usual expensive tax I'd have to pay to the US for a premium frequent-flyer ticket, I only have to pay Japanese taxes of about $50.

Arigato gozaimas, Congress.

I want to live in Ame-ri-ca!

Because only in the United States do we have, enshrined in our basic law, the right to establish a city populated exclusively by religious nutters:

Kiryas Joel is an enclave of ultra-orthodox Jews who belong to the Satmar Hasidic sect. Members of this group believe in separating themselves from others – they’d rather not be around non-sect members. Thirty-four years ago, they won the right to create their own village from the surrounding community of Monroe.

The village’s founders might have envisioned an idyllic community where people of a shared faith lived in harmony. It hasn’t worked out that way. As often happens when people live in insular communities, factions emerge. Dissidents in Kiryas Joel don’t like the way the town of about 20,000 is being run. The dissidents, who by some accounts now make up 40 percent of the community, say religious discrimination is rampant. They say if you don’t belong to the right synagogue, you’re a second-class citizen.

Money quote:

A sign at the village entrance admonishes visitors to dress modestly. Cleavage-revealing tops for women are verboten, and both sexes are told to cover arms and legs. Couples are advised to "maintain gender separation in public places." ... Imagine the reaction from the Religious Right if this were a town of fundamentalist Muslims and they erected a sign reading, "Women are welcome to visit if accompanied by a male relative. Please respect our values by wearing a burqa."

Of course, the same constitutional language giving people freedom of religion also takes a little bit back. In fact, the establishment clause comes before the free exercise clause. We adopted the first amendment to prevent having the head of state also be the head of the official church, as it was (and still is) in England. What does this mean for Kiryas Joel? Well, you see, if the village government and the biggest synagogue are the same people...yeah. Thus, the lawsuit.

I'll keep my eye on this.

Destructive passivity

The indefatigable Paul Krugman smacks down the excuses for why the government has failed to get the economy going:

[A] destructive passivity has overtaken our discourse. Turn on your TV and you’ll see some self-satisfied pundit declaring that nothing much can be done about the economy’s short-run problems (reminder: this “short run” is now in its fourth year), that we should focus on the long run instead.

This gets things exactly wrong. The truth is that creating jobs in a depressed economy is something government could and should be doing. Yes, there are huge political obstacles to action — notably, the fact that the House is controlled by a party that benefits from the economy’s weakness. But political gridlock should not be conflated with economic reality.

This is the frustration: the GOP does not want the economy to improve. I hope Americans understand this by next November.

As TPM's David Kurtz puts it:

Republicans are taking the country to the brink of default demanding spending cuts that will signify their commitment to fiscal responsibility, smaller government and austerity—but for reasons that are political in the macro- and micro- sense, they can't come up with a list of cuts that actually gets the job done. It's not that they can't do the math.

One begins to feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis...

Warming? What warming?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released the 1981-2010 temperature normals this week, and guess what? They're warmer:

Normals serve as a 30 year baseline average of important climate variables that are used to understand average climate conditions at any location and serve as a consistent point of reference. The new normals update the 30-year averages of climatological variables, including average temperature and precipitation for more than 7,500 locations across the United States. This once-a-decade update will replace the current 1971–2000 normals.

In the continental United States, every state’s annual maximum and minimum temperature increased on average. “The climate of the 2000s is about 1.5 degree F warmer than the 1970s, so we would expect the updated 30-year normals to be warmer,” said Thomas R. Karl, L.H.D., NCDC director.

Like the myth of heliocentrism before it, the myth of anthropogenic climate change will stand forever disproven!

(Yet, it moves...)