Chuck Schumer is now officially the Senator from Israel. He is no longer a member of the Democratic Party that I belong to, and his primary constituency is the small number of well-moneyed AIPAC contributors who have bought up all his stock.
Now he is trying to cover his tracks with a story that he didn’t really mean to oppose the President. That’s why he waited until the middle of the GOOP debate to announce, and caught the very slow Friday news cycle. So no one will notice. Well I noticed.
And he is trying to sound moderate. We just need a better plan he says. We can go back to the table and get a better deal, he says. Bullshit. Let me count the ways. First, there is no better deal. You don’t have to take that from me. Listen to the guy who used to make his living opposing ANY nuclear deal with Iran, Gary Samore, until recently president of United Against Nuclear Iran, a job he resigned because UANI is still opposed to the deal. (He has been replaced by none other than Joe LIEberman, which will tell you which direction UANI is headed.) Samore, a Harvard professor and authority on Iran and nuclear disarmament, had this to say: “I’m skeptical that we can reject this agreement and negotiate a substantially better deal within any kind of reasonable time frame.”
Second, the fact is everyone wants to get this done, Iran has gone as far as it will go (which Samore says it’s much further than he ever thought possible), and our negotiating partners are as tired of the trade embargo as are the Iranians. So Sen. Schumer is rejecting a common sense approach to one of the most delicate diplomatic challenges of this century… exercising the galling presumption that he somehow knows a lot more about this deal than does the President, or Secretary of State, both of which have staked their legacy on its outcome.
Third, common sense tells you it is not a bad deal. It substantially reduces the ability of Iran to make weapons. It provides for and establishes a significant and unprecedented inspections program that can easily inform the participating nations in the event of any breach or attempted breach by the Iranians. AND any breach of the agreement by Iran will lead to re-imposition of sanctions… an action that is binding on all signers of the pact. That is important. Russia and China are also signers to the pact. Without a pact they are likely as not to abandon the process and never return. With it they have an obligation to support the others if there is a breach.
The Iranians will get something for their participation, most importantly, they get relief from stringent economic sanctions and they get access to billions in Iranian assets that have been frozen in the US since 1980.
Fourth, the agreement will have positive repercussions worldwide. For the USA, for better or ill, lifting the sanctions will open the market to Iranian oil and lower the cost of fuel. Gasoline is expected to drop below $2 in the USA for the first time in years. In the Iranian economy, stifled by sanctions for decades, access to world markets is expected to be dramatic.
Fifth, political implications are significant. Iranian oil is another assault on the Saudi oil monopoly which has already been challenged by Iraq, Koch brothers’ Bracken Crude from Canada (which we hope is also challenged by Iranian oil) and natural gas from world-wide fracking. Thus it will further diminish the influence of Saudi Arabia in the Middle East and beyond. We should remember that Saudi money is still fueling ISIS, still funds hundreds of madrassas throughout the region, all of which are no more than recruiting centers for terrorists and suicide bombers. In Iran, the hard line Mullahs are as opposed to the deal as are Israel’s hard liners, and for similar reasons. The pact gives more credibility to moderate forces and creates opportunities for further cooperation between Iran and the rest of the world. Hard liners, who use fear as a tool of control, hate moderation.
Sen. Schumer has yet to offer an alternative that will improve on the already substantial world-peace potential of this agreement. All he has are threats and fears. The tools of despots. He says we can’t trust Iran, what happens if Iran backs out? The answer to that is written in the terms of the agreement. We are back to sanctions and a continued effort at economic isolation, and every signer of the agreement is obliged to re-impose sanctions.
Sixth, Sen. Schumer has forgotten one important element in the game. The USA is not the principal player in on the field. Also playing are the four permanent members of the United National Security Council (China, France, Russia, The United Kingdom), Germany and the European Union. Other affected nations that have been more or less honoring the sanctions include India and Pakistan and Japan. Some of these nations, China and Russia in particular, are unlikely to agree that more talk is useful or necessary. With or without an agreement, they may reopen trade with Iran. Once they open trade, the rest of the world is likely to follow. In short, whether or not the USA agrees to the deal, the other parties will likely go ahead without us.
Senator Schumer’s claim that we need a better deal offers no deal that we can get. Especially appalling, nothing in his statements have improved on the talking points offered by the Republican Party, all of which were originally offered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he came the USA with the specific intent to embarrass President Obama in an address to a Republican Congress particularly hostile to the President.
Chuck Schumer is no Democrat. He has no party loyalty, he is a traitor to his President.

I am not sure I know any actual facts about what the TPP will do. We are told it is a wonderful thing for us and its terms are completely top secret, so should we be suspicious?
Indeed the first and maybe most controversial aspect of the TPP is that it is so secret. Congresspersons are allowed to read it only in a locked and guarded sound proof room in the Capitol Building and are forbidden to take notes out of the room. It may provide some comfort that trade negotiations are always surrounded by secrecy… allegedly because the information is very valuable to investors and because trading partners are very goosy about letting their public know what is happening.
The basic facts about the TPP are simple enough. It will remove trade barriers between the majority of nations on the Pacific Rim. The parties to the TPP are the USA and Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Trade barriers are not just tariffs. These include laws and regulations specifically intended to be trade barriers, intellectual property laws (copyrights and patents), labor laws and other matters having to do with commerce.
Because the agreement is so secret (not to mention massive, Congresspersons are said to have access to thousands of pages including the current draft and annotated position statements of trading partners) most of what we think we know about the TPP comes from leaks and more significantly, what is reported about what has been leaked. We also have a Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report that provides a basic analysis. Surveying the two, I cannot say that we have a clear picture.   For example, the leaks focus on a section intended to protect imports from fake trade barriers, such as  Japan’s claims years ago that American electronics (Motorola pagers) were inferior to Japanese products.  Current trade agreements allow corporations to sue to remove such artificial barriers, but this provision has been abused and misunderstood. Recently, tobacco companies sued Brazil under this provision because of local rules that prohibited the use of company logos on cigarettes in order to discourage cigarette sales. The reporting on this in many cases has been about the ability of corporations to use this provision to circumvent local laws. The CRS report points out that the US sees this example as an abuse of the rules and is looking for language that will clarify this.
Also reported widely is the complaint that the TPP does not demand stringent protections for labor and the environment, and has no mechanisms for enforcing the limited standards that are included. If the CRS description of the standards and enforcement mechanisms are correct, this criticism is accurate, and indicative of the abuse of power our government so frequently allows its corporate masters.
While rich and powerful corporations and investors have a seat at the negotiating table and participate fully in the process of drafting this top secret treaty, working Americans, labor unions and consumers are not even allowed to read it. Among the certain results of this imbalance are weak labor laws, poor consumer protections and limited environmental expectations.

American labor has lost out in prior trade agreements because it is competing with countries where employees work 16-hour days, seven days a week for three dollars a day. They have no health or safety standards and take no special pains to protect the environment. These conditions are perfect for rich corporations and investors, not so good for the rest of us, and disaster for the lowest end of the US labor market. Economic studies show that NAFTA has been particularly damaging to people on the lowest end of the economic spectrum… low-skilled workers with limited education are now essentially competing with the lowest skilled Mexican labor market.

Congress has approved the President’s authority to fast-track the TPP negotiations but it has one more opportunity to influence the process. I have three suggestions that will ensure that the TPP will work to the benefit of all Americans.
1. The Environment: Participating countries should all be required to adhere to the terms of the Kyoto Protocol (and its subsequent agreements). This provision provides a particular problem for the USA because most of the signers of the TPP are also signers of Kyoto, but the USA is not. While the President supports international  environmental agreements, the Congress, which is owned by the oil industry, does not.
2. Labor: The TPP should include minimum health and safety standards, a guaranteed work week of no more than 40 hours, annual leave and a minimum wage based on local “living wage” measurements. These standards should be specific and mandatory for each participating nation. There should be enforcement mechanisms in place… i.e. companies that do not follow the rules should be banned from international trade. Unions organizing should be legal and widely encouraged in every participating country.
3. Corporate Taxes: The ability of corporations to avoid paying taxes by forum shopping should be addressed through trade agreements. Corporations should be required to pay some stated tax in each jurisdiction where they store money, and that tax should be shared in some negotiated proportion with the country of manufacture which bears the cost of supporting infrastructure, the country of origin, which initiated the company’s success and continues to provide legal protections, and all markets where goods are sold.

So USA Toady calls Pan Geller a “fiery activist” who is “known for taking on Islam.”

True maybe. She is also an idiot and a bigot best known for her campaign against the “Ground Zero Mosque,” which is not a mosque and not located at ground zero. Geller and her partner Robert Spencer have been said to be “the primary sources for the anti-Muslim propaganda that had helped give voice” to the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass-murderer.

Now, Geller and her American Freedom Defense Initiative, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a hate group, is sponsor of what she calls a “free speech event” that gives prizes for drawing the best comic representing Mohammed the Prophet.

This weekend a security guard at the event, held in Garland, TX, near Dallas, was shot down by two yahoos out to defend the honor of Islam and wage jihad against infidels. The Yahoos, as could be predicted, were gunned down by Texas police. Here there is a buttload of what the popular media calls “controversy” that is “swirling.” This is the kind of “controversy” that has one primary aim… make MS. Geller rich and famous and promote the interests of her obvious patron, Bebe Netanyahoo. Some points are worth making.

1. If you want to paint a target on yourself and attract a carload of Moslem terrorists, you should hold an event that offers a big prize for the best comic depiction of The Prophet.

2. Is this a free speech event? Yes it is, not a noble one, but it is a highly important constitutional principle that free people have a right to say whatever they please about anything, even religion. You cannot take the “free” out of free speech and leave it functional. Having said that, we should note that the sponsors of this event have an obligation to support all free speech… just like the ACLU supports nazis and liberals and gays and christians. So the christians, and Jews (and Ms. Geller’s Israeli patron) who supported this event should be equally supportive of events that promote Jesus and Mary jokes or Wailing Wall jokes (Jesus and Mary walk into the Wailing Wall Bar and Grill and sit at the bar next to a pig)… or the truth about how many Palestinians Bebe has killed today.

2. I saw the winning cartoon. It proves once again that conservatives have no sense of humor. An average disaffected sophomore could have done a better job.

3. Most important, why is it that the good guy who got shot was a renta cop? In fact, a moonlighting school security guard. While trying to pick up a couple of extra bucks to make the car payment, he takes the hit for… Pam Geller and the half dozen or so hot shots who put this dangerous event on the ground and stand to make money and fame from it. As in all wars, the people who suffer most are not the people who benefit from it.

The latest theme of the right wing propaganda machine is how abused the rich people are because they pay so much in taxes. The issue is so important to the mega money political handlers that even Willard Romney, who refused to reveal his tax history when he ran for President, has opened his books.

According to the NY Post, last year Willard paid $1.9 million in taxes on an income of $14 million — and gave $4 million to charity. AND, the year before, he made $21.6 million, paid $3 million in taxes and gave $3 million to charity. Poor Willard, after paying all those taxes he will have a hard time feeding his wife’s $800,000 horse.

So here are a few things they are not telling you about Willard’s income. First of all Willard has made a big deal about how he tithes to his church and relies on the church to engage in appropriate charitable activities. In other words, if he made $4 million in contributions to his church, his gross income is $40 million. (In 2013, he made only $30 million and had fewer deductions, so he is  showing a higher income.  He is getting a lot of tax breaks to get his $40 million net gross income down to $14 million. Those breaks include the care and feeding and transportation of the horse and depreciation on the barn and so on.

Moreover, if he is paying 1.9 million on his $14 million income, he is paying an effective rate someplace under 15 percent. A family with an adjusted gross income of $50,000 pays an effective rate of over 16%. In real numbers when Willard paid a tax of $1.9 million, he had $12.1 million left to live on. The family with an AGI of $50,000, on the other hand, has $41,700 left to spend. In short, Willard is not missing any meals after having paid his taxes, neither is his horse. The other folks may also not be starving, but they do have to worry about how to send the kids to college, getting the car fixed, paying medical insurance… on and on.

Ask yourself what is more productive, putting more money in the hands of people like Willard, who are not likely to spend it, or people who need it to meet immediate needs. And do not try to feed me that bullshit about how rich people are “job creators.” In the average case, most jobs come from small businesses that do not pay anything near the taxes Willard pays (or should be paying). Willard’s specific history reveals he has killed more jobs than he has produced and many of the jobs he “created” were over seas.

Since the Busch tax cuts, most tax breaks have favored the rich at the expense of everyone else. The fact that millionaires have to actually pay taxes should be no surprise. The surprise is how little they pay in relation to the rest of us.

Now the big Conservative Bugaboo is whether transgendered children can choose their place to pee. A school in Oklahoma had decided that a “boy” who identifies as a girl may not pee in the girl’s “bathroom” because… maybe he is a regular boy who is pretending that he is a girl so he can watch girls pee? Whatever…

All this while I am still processing all the marvels I beheld on my first trip to Europe last fall… including the rules for where you pee. Among the excellent local customs are these:
• When you are in a bar and want to pee you ask the waitperson for the toilet (OK “la toilette” which you ask with your best French accent which you have studied for minutes using the translator on your phone… so he/she will not think you are some dunderhead American). None of this bathroom stuff, or restroom nonsense. When was the last time you took a bath in your local bar? Or bothered to pause to rest in the toilet?
• There are no annoying cute designators on the doors… no “Does and Bucks” no “Sitters and Standers.” In fact there is usually only one toilette and if it’s big enough there could be girls in there peeing.
• Many towns have public toilets, usually on the town square, which cost about 20 cents. The better ones include showers in case you are biking and camping. When you are finished and close the door, the place locks up and is automatically sprayed down to make it nice and clean for the next person.
• The best town toilet was in Soissons (where an ancient local cathedral once boasted of having the Blessed Virgin’s shoe). There is a trough along the back wall so that guys who don’t want to spend the 20 cents can just pee in public.
• At a highway rest stop in Belgium there were long lines for the toilettes, which were operated by a British company and thus called “loos.” (Oddly enough the Europeans have commoditized pissing.) They had segregated pissers. Travelers who preferred not to pay were perfectly comfortable pissing on the lawn… backs discretely turned to the parking lot. I did not see any women watering the lawn and presume they chose to pay.

When I was in about the 6th grade there was a peep hole carved between the bathrooms at St. Rose School (which I was, in fact, too timid to use) so I recognize our long standing … concern regarding separate facilities… confusion regarding sex and peeing? I suspect they don’t have that problem in France. And ask yourself, if you desegregated toilets in the USA would people begin to hook up in the “restroom”?

The Supremes spent some time this week hearing arguments about whether it could be a crime to claim falsely to be a war hero. Or, is there a first amendment right to lie? The genesis of this burble is a law that was passed back in 2005 that responded to a small scandal wherein a bunch of Pentagon back benchers got caught claiming battle medals they had never earned.

Congress, in the normal course of business, had to prove to the world that it was completely aware of what a horrible thing it is to claim falsely to have fought some battle, and so made it illegal to do so. They called it the “Stolen Valor Act.” Now comes the defendant Xavier Alvarez, an admitted professional liar, more or less, who claimed once at a public meeting that he was a Congressional Medal of Honor winner.

Of course there are hundreds of people who have claimed to have won the Congressional Medal who never got close to a battlefield. In fact if anyone tells you they have anything higher than a purple heart, doubt it. Most guys who get those things want to forget about it. I think that is perfectly all right. My sense of irony is satisfied that guys who get the Medal do so just so that fools like Alvarez can claim to have done so.

There is another piece of this, though, that I want to look at. (In the interest of full disclosure this notion was floated to me by Pat the Hat, who is usually right.) Congress was so happy to defend the medal itself against claims of lying scumbags, how is it that they have failed to defend the honor of real war heroes? I refer of course to the trashing that John Kerry took at the hands of a well funded scumbag operation called Swift Boat Veterans. Of worse, how about the hatchet job they did on Max Cleland, who gave up two legs and an arm to win his Bronze Star and Silver Medal, or in the 2000 South Carolina primary, the rumor that John McCain was a POW punch.

Me and Pat the Hat are not suggesting that Congress make it illegal to say bad things about war heroes. But I think a sense of Congress resolution defending genuine war heroes whose record in service of their nation was being challenged by a bunch of cheap shot artists who never really served, would have been in order.

The Congress of the United States has long since been consigned to the level of those creatures that slither on their bellies just to get their morning coffee. It would be nice once in a while to see it actually stand up for something that is right and fair and true. Do not hold your breath.

Roger M. Boisjoly died recently. He is remembered as the rocket scientist for Morton Thiokol who tried to get NASA to call off the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. That’s the shuttle that blew up and killed the entire crew and the school teacher and all, on January 28, 1986.

Boisjoly and a handful of engineers who were paid to know these things knew that if the shuttle were launched in cold weather, the “O” rings would not expand and there would be a fuel leakage and the thing would blow. He and his fellow engineers tried to get NASA not to launch because the weather was too cold, and NASA called bullshit on that.

The Challenger carried the first “teacher in space,” Christa McAuliffe, and was part of a major publicity stunt by the Raygun Administration that was certain to get Ronnie the Raygunner’s picture in the paper with flags and space shuttles and such. That made it a very important matter for NASA, which was not about to risk its funding by pissing off the Raygunner and missing his photo op.

Ms. McAuliffe and the entire crew perished, and Roger Boisjoly spent a year or two in a deep depression and the remainder of his life teaching ethics to engineers. Throughout his life, he continued to ask the question, why didn’t they listen to me. Why did they insist of launching the shuttle.

I have the feeling that Roger M. Boisjoly was not cynical enough to come up with the correct answer. They launched so that tinhorn dipshit Ronnie Raygun could not miss a photo op.

In passing, Roger may now have an opportunity to get an answer. I suggest he leave the comfort of that part of eternity they reserve for honest men and travel to the special place in hell where they keep politicians and scumbags and traitors like Ronnie the Raygunner. Ask him. They say not even the Raygunner can lie in hell.

They say if you put a million monkeys to a million typewriters they will eventually produce a novel. Just so Newt Gingrich, who spews an idea a minute, is bound to have a good idea once in a while. I have to say I am disappointed that liberals from Rachel Maddow to Bill Maher have been pooping all over it.

I speak of course of Newt’s promise to build a moon colony. An excellent idea for many reasons, the first several of which is jobs. Nothing creates jobs like a massive infrastructure project, and nothing creates the kind of jobs that challenge our technical work force and put our engineers back to work like big ticket space projects. (Provided NASA can resist the private sector impulse to prefer cheap foreign trained engineers to Americans.) It will also make jobs for mechanics and laborers and lesser classes of workers, not to mention support industries.

A space race will also generate new technologies, which can be spun into new industries and more jobs. Bucky Fuller suggested the best way to fuel economic growth was to design an impossible task and try to complete it. A moon station is not impossible… in fact it is clearly within the reach of our current knowledge… but it will demand that we create new technologies, and significantly expand our development horizons. That means new products and new processes and a significant enhancement of our mastery of technology.

And then there is the future factor. I remember well staying up all night and watching the countdown for the earliest space flights with my geek friends. These were exciting times, we all believed the USA could do anything. No one believed in 1964 that the race to space would stop. We saw it as a continuum that led to the stars, to the adventures of Starship Enterprise. In the last 30 years we have lost that sense of purpose. This is because we have focused our energy and money on meaningless wars and thus depleted our national wealth. And it’s partly because we have not had leaders with the confidence to stand up and demand that we seek bold horizons. Only Newt. A sad commentary.

Finally, we need to move forward with a moon base because if we don’t do it, the Chinese will. At the risk of sounding like a right wing cukoo. No one wants to see the moon painted red.

Today’s news tells me that Walmart has decided to no longer have greeters in stores on the graveyard shift. Greeters, as we all know, are those retired geezers that meet you at the door, help with getting a basket and tell you where you can find stuff.   It’s not a great, important position, but most of these geezers are just trying to supplement their puny retirements … and maybe gain a little end of life dignity… moonlighting for America’s favorite retailer. Who needs them anyway?

And what a big money saver it is. WalMart has 3,000 superstores in the USA, each employing one geezer on the graveyard shift. Figuring they earn $8 per hour and another $2 in benefits, the cost to Walmart for all those geezers is about $10 million a year. A LOT OF MONEY.

Walmart reported net income of $6.6 billion last quarter… yes, I said last quarter. Last year’s total income was in excess of $25.5 billion. So you can see getting rid of those old people is very important to ensure that Walmart exceeds its income levels next year. $10 million here, $10 million there. Eventually it all adds up.

I have long noted that the GOOP is the dirtiest, scumbaggiest, low-down maggot infested unscrupulous bag of crap that ever played the dirtiest game… politics. The GOOP has no scruples about truth or justice or the American Way when it comes to using the levers of fear, ignorance and hatred to get what it wants.

Willard Romney is about to go into the South Carolina primary and face up to the lowest end of the lowest pit of GOOP skullduggery. There are no rules in South Carolina. They once beat John McCain by intimating that he was both a queer and a nigra lover.

I would not wish the worst that South Carolina can invent about anyone on anyone… even Willard, and I have no love for Willard.

But just by way of prediction, since I always want you to hear it here first: by the time the primary is over, every dumb-assed cracker in the Palmetto State will believe that Dain Capital was written by Karl Marx, Mormons worship Satan, One of  Willard’s other wives is black and one is foreign; and Willard uses secret church services to bugger young boys.