Conrad Theodore Seitz

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley Didn’t Know There is no Such Country as Binomo

2017-12-28

OK, so maybe you didn’t know either. But I knew… and Nikki Haley should have known. She is, after all, the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations. The report, if it is to be believed, is that two Russian pranksters managed to connect with Nikki Haley on the phone and talked with her for twenty minutes without her realizing that they were playing a practical joke on her. The highlight, or lowlight, of the conversation was when the pranksters, pretending to be the Polish Premier, brought up the the fictional country Binomo. They asserted that Binomo, “near Vietnam”, had declared its independence and had elections, in which the Russians had interfered. Nikki claimed to know this made-up country and agreed with the assessment that Russia had interfered.

In looking up this absurd story, I found that it was carried on RT (formerly Russia Today) and a number of off-center web sites, and was backed up by a YouTube video from the imposters themselves. Among the sites that carried the story: Raw Story, Newswire, Sputnik, and Pravda (I didn’t know that Pravda still existed.) Conspicuously absent: CNN, ABC, CBS, etc., etc. No major US sites have picked up this story over the last several days, despite the audio recording of her voice assenting to the existence of Binomo.

Comment of the Day: Long-Term Treasury Bonds Not Yielding Well

2017-12-25

David

California 9 minutes ago

Long term bond yields on Treasuries are around 2.5%.
That doesn’t seem consistent with the prospect of long term
real growth of 4%.
If we are going to grow at a 4% rate, somebody needs to inform the bond market.
either that 4% growth rate number is bogus or long bonds are way overpriced.

Long-term Treasury bonds are sold at rates that “float”, meaning yields represent savvy investors’ estimates of what real growth will be over the next 5-10 years… i.e. no better than growth over the last ten years.

Quote of the Day: Don the Con Hates Immigrants

2017-12-23

This quote is from a New York Times article about Don the Con’s attempts to prevent anyone from another country (darker than him) even visiting the United States:

Those who know Mr. Trump say that his attitude toward immigrants long predates his entry into politics.

“He’s always been fearful where other cultures are concerned and always had anxiety about food and safety when he travels,” said Michael D’Antonio, who interviewed him for the biography “The Truth About Trump.” “His objectification and demonization of people who are different has festered for decades.”

…

In 2014, well before becoming a candidate, he tweeted: “Our government now imports illegal immigrants and deadly diseases. Our leaders are inept.”

His comments were not so much an expression of hatred of immigrants as of hatred of people of color: Mexicans, Haitians, Africans, Afro-Americans, even Native Americans, the ultimate natives. The only people he likes are white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants… but he’s happy to import people of any color to work service jobs for him, as long as they go home when they’re done.

This comment, from someone who usually leaves right-wing comments, struck me as interesting and actually quite accurate:

Richard Luettgen

New Jersey 5 hours ago

If Trump has six people close enough to hear or be briefed on confidential and sensitive conversations who are willing to spill them to the Times anonymously, then he has a bigger problem than uncontrolled immigration. Unless they’re using burner phones or public phones (if you can still find any), then an FBI he also doesn’t trust should be dumping phones and finding these people. Oh, and I believe the Times that six people came forward, and not Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

This guy still hasn’t learned that he’s not working out of his Trump Tower offices, and that his is one of the most politicized jobs in the world. I might disagree with his extreme position on immigration and be personally offended by the “AIDS” and “huts” comments, but I’m far more concerned by what appears to be monumental naiveté in a U.S. president. And by his apparent inability to inspire enough loyalty among his advisors and staff that SIX (!) people ratted him out.

If he has a policy that the bureaucracy must obey and that policy lies within his powers to impose, then he has a problem managing the bureaucracy. That suggests that he needs to dedicate more attention to the management aspects of his job, and that he should get more of the open positions in his administration filled to help him out. And that he’s surprised at numbers he should already know intimately is astonishing.

Wise the hell up, Mr. President. You’re 71, not 7.

Quote of the Day: Congresspeople Benefit, Bigly, From Tax Bill

2017-12-22

This is quoted from a piece in CNBC, which was also quoted by Paul Krugman, who naturally hates the tax bill just passed:

Dozens of lawmakers stand to reap a tax windfall thanks to a loophole inserted in the sweeping GOP tax overhaul bill, according to a review of federal financial disclosures.

The provision, which gives favorable tax treatment to a common form of real estate income, would also create generous tax saving for President Donald Trump, who derives much of his personal fortune from real estate.

The measure — added late Friday to the $1.5 trillion package of tax cuts — reduces the tax rate on “pass-through” income derived from real estate. Owners of such businesses are allowed to “pass through” the profits from these enterprises to their individual tax returns, which lowers the amount of tax they owe.

Those benefits will now go to roughly four dozen Republican House and Senate members who voted for the bill, according to an analysis of personal financial disclosures for CNBC by the Center for Responsive Politics. They include Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Bob Corker of Tennessee and James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Reps. Diane Black of Tennessee and Vern Buchanan of Florida.

Under federal financial disclosure rules, members of Congress are only required to report their assets in a range of dollar amounts, so a full accounting of lawmakers’ holdings isn’t available. But GOP lawmakers who voted for the bill had combined real estate assets eligible for pass-through treatment of as much as $390 million in 2015, according to the center’s analysis.

Quote of the Day: Republicans Pass Big Cash Bonus For Don the Con

2017-12-21

Here’s a quote from New York magazine, the last two paragraphs from an article about the tax cut passed by Congress a couple of days ago:

The Republican Party has decided as a whole to enable President Trump to conceal his tax returns, and further decided to pass a tax cut that rewards him personally. They have likewise formed a protective shield against the Russia probe, which is investigating Trump’s opaque ties to the Russian regime and criminal underworld.

The regular Republican Party of tax cuts for the rich and deregulation of polluters and the financial industry once seemed to be set apart from its clownish demagogue presidential candidate. In rapid order, the strands have merged together into a party disdainful of transparency and united in self-enrichment.

Naturally, the Con and his press secretary have claimed, without evidence, that the bill would hurt Don financially. That assertion is, of course, absurd, given the nature of Don’s business and the size of the estate that he will soon pass on to Don Jr. and Ivanka. The merger of the victorious Republican Party’s image with that of Don the Con will only hurt them at the ballot box if the Democrats are able to cut through the propaganda being spread by organizations like Fox News with better propaganda.

The best propaganda is the truth and the truth is that the Republicans are deliberately trying to aggravate the disruptive wealth inequality that has developed since the end of World War II and worsened since Nixon was elected in 1968. What’s more, using the excuse of moral propriety, lies about in-person voter fraud, spurious ethical claims, and asserting religious freedoms that amount to discrimination, the Republicans are trying to enforce inequality in voting (creating an equivalent to the poll tax by enacting an ID requirement that poor people would have difficulty satisfying), prevent women from exercising their choice not to reproduce (by making birth control expensive and not covered by insurance, and restricting women’s access to abortion clinics), prevent people from poor families from going to college (by restricting college’s ability to attract able students without funds), allow segregation and discrimination in housing by private parties, make it impossible to form unions to represent workers and equalize the power relationships in the workplace, and so on and on– an ultimate libertarian wet dream for the wealthy and a nightmare for the rest.

Don the Con has successfully fooled 60 million voters with his warm, friendly voice and his ability to lie without compunction to satisfy his current audience. His real goals, other than enriching himself, are vague and malleable. He has no over-arching philosophy of the ideal state nor any understanding of economics or science. He is happy to hand over administration of most branches of government to those who have paid him the largest campaign contributions– people like Betsy DeVos, a vastly wealthy woman with no knowledge of the science of education but a fixed desire to promote home-schooling for religious reasons. Don has no understanding of the intricacies of foreign relations and takes the campaign donations of Sheldon Adelson as instructions to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem– a move that virtually every other country in the world opposed in the United Nations.

Republicans with more political experience understand that they can’t blatantly expose their ultimate aims without incurring the displeasure of the average voter. So they introduce the changes they want incrementally, on slippery slopes. Just like Adolf Hitler in the 1920’s, they depend on the failure of their enthusiasts to actually read their “Mein Kampf” manifestos; their supporters merely watch and listen to their speeches and believe their lies, which change from day to day. Like the Communists (and the post-Communist Vladimir Putin), they make use of democratic means to destroy democracy from within; once they attain ultimate power, they rig the voting process so that they can control the outcome.

Quote of the Day: Senator Bob Corker Accepts Bribe to Support Trump Tax Bill

2017-12-18

This quote is the last two paragraphs of a New Yorker story which describes the tax bill, over a thousand pages long and produced without any public hearings as a “corrupt, budget-busting, cruel hairball”:

Another provision, which wasn’t in the House or Senate bills, allows real-estate developers who own buildings through L.L.C.s, as Trump does, to deduct twenty per cent of the income that these properties generate. To qualify for the break, the properties have to be newish ones that haven’t been fully depreciated. “This helps people who have held property for a while, like Donald Trump,” David Kamin, a law professor at New York University, told David Sirota and Josh Keefe, of the International Business Times.
Another beneficiary of this provision may well be Senator Bob Corker, of Tennessee, who is also a real-estate investor. Corker had been the only Republican to vote against the Senate version of the tax bill, but on Friday he announced that he’d changed his mind, and that “after great thought and consideration, I believe this once-in-a-generation opportunity to make U.S. businesses domestically more productive and internationally more competitive is one we should not miss.” Corker didn’t mention his personal interests, but Sirota and Keefe did. “Federal records reviewed by IBT show that Corker has millions of dollars of ownership stakes in real-estate-related LLCs that could also benefit” from the final bill, they reported.
In other words, Senator Corker’s support was bought with a provision that would dramatically lower his personal tax bill. A bribe by any other name would taste as bitter. The story can be found here but it may be behind a paywall– or you may get a discount offer for a dollar week– well worth it for the mass of online news, reviews, fiction, and other content online as well as those priceless cover illustrations, the latest of which portrays Don the Con as the infamous Scrooge by Charles Dickens.

A Side Note On Net Neutrality From NPR: Your Comments Were Ignored

2017-12-18

Europe does not have “Net Neutrality” laws– but there is intense competition for the business of the consumer over that “last mile” of connectivity. Most European internet subscribers have a choice of several– at least four or five — different Internet Service Providers, whereas Americans overwhelmingly have either one (78%) or two possibilities for different companies to provide fast service. So American companies usually have monopolies or near-monopolies and must be regulated much more firmly to prevent them from abusing their customers and getting away with it.

A side note: a huge number of the comments submitted to the FCC turned out to be bogus, generated by dishonest means– several millions of the 22 million total comments submitted. 94% of comments were submitted multiple times, some of them hundreds of thousands of times. New York Attorney General concluded that some 2 million comments were fake and half a million came from Russian addresses. Democratic FCC Commission Josephine Rosenworcel said forging ahead without considering this situation shows the FCC’s “sheer contempt” for public input.

The NPR story on this can be found here.

Quote of the Day: Don Was Definitely Told That Vlad Personally Ordered an Operation To Help Him Win the Election

2017-12-17

Those who have been following the Russia-Trump story closely know that Don the Con and Moral Mike (Pence) were briefed by the heads of our intelligence agencies before the two were inaugurated about the information collected showing Russia had covertly interfered with the election… what we didn’t know was, apparently, still classified: that the agencies possessed a source of intelligence which had captured the actual instructions Vlad “the Impaler” Putin had given for that interference operation. Apparently, that source is gone, because the information it gave was recently leaked to the public. That is, the fact that Vlad’s specific instructions had been intercepted was recently revealed to the general public and is no longer a secret. Until very recently, the fact that this secret information had been orally transmitted to the incoming President and Vice-President by the heads of our secret services was not publicly known. Now it is.

What could have happened, speculatively, was that an American agent operating under deep cover was able to penetrate to Vlad’s innermost circle and overhear the oral instructions that he gave for a typical Russian active espionage program implemented by semi-official agents involving disinformation, lies planted in social media, the use of social media to propagate the false impression that there were numerous actual Americans who believed false stories and supported (or worked against) specific candidates for office in American elections, the co-opting of various American persons sources of information (“useful idiots”) and influence, and so on. It is also possible that a technological source could have recorded Vlad’s voice so that American agents fluent in Russian could have made transcripts. The compromise and deaths of two from Vlad’s inner circle who may have been double agents suggests that human intelligence by one or two specific people could have played a part.

What this means is that Don the Con was told that we KNEW that Vlad personally wanted to prevent Hillary from winning the presidency and had given specific instructions on what was to be done in an effort to throw the election the other way. So all this time, Don has been lying about Russian “non-interference” and has been trying to prevent the American public from learning that his campaign team cooperated (or even “colluded”) with the Russians in their efforts. This is a quote from The Daily Beast about the briefing:

…[W]hich covered the most highly classified information U.S. spy agencies had assembled, including an extraordinary CIA stream of intelligence that had captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation.

Ironically, Vlad may not have gained any positive advantage with his cold war tactics; sanctions against Russian economic interests and persons that hurt him have not been lifted because any such activity by the Trump administration would look very suspicious. He has, however, succeeded in damaging the American government and worsening unrest in the United States, in part by encouraging race hatred, Islamophobia, and xenophobia.

More Bad News: White Women Are Highly Susceptible to Republican Propaganda

2017-12-15

This is a quote from a New Yorker piece (which may be behind a paywall, so I won’t link to it… a hundred dollars a year for the privilege of reading the facts about the latest election):

Ninety-eight per cent of black women (and ninety-six per cent of black voters over all) chose Jones over his rival, Roy Moore, who had been credibly accused of child molestation and sexual assault. Meanwhile, sixty-three per cent of white women supported Moore; among evangelical white women, the figure rose to seventy-six per cent.

This has over-stimulated my outrage glands, which are particularly well developed. At least I have the sense to keep most of it private. Sorry folks, you’ll have to supply your own outrage from here on…

Comments of the Day: the Attempted Repeal of Net Neutrality by Ajit Pai

2017-12-15

This comment was attached to a New York Times article about the repeal of “Net Neutrality”– the repeal, pushed through on party lines despite massive public opposition, is another of the new administration’s many moves to dismantle regulations intended to protect consumers from unfair actions by businesses, most of them put in place by the Obama administration.

DJA

Houston 1 day ago

How is this in any way “making America great again?!” With each decision by this current administration, we are taking many steps backwards to the way things were done years ago. When your entire agenda is to dismantle really good things put in place by a previous administration, simply for the reason you did not like the previous administration, you really are not running the country but carrying out your own personal and vengeful agenda.