Carly Fiorina Auditions for Cabinet Apprentice

I don't really think that Donald Trump is seriously considering Carly Fiorina for DNI. Just a feeling-based on watching the past election season pretty closely. She once pointed out that Trump, the outsider, didn't bone up on foreign policy. And although she did endorse him (after running out of Republican options) she rescinded her endorsement.

Do I think Trump is seriously considering her?  Well, we can take a look at her audition reel. 

"(We) spent a fair amount of time talking about China as probably our most important adversary and a rising adversary. We talked about hacking, whether it's Chinese hacking or purported Russian hacking. We talked about the opportunity that the President-elect has to literally reset things, to reset the trajectory of this economy, to reset the role of government, to reset America's role in the world and how we're perceived in the world," she said.

They talked about whether it was "purported" Russian hacking or "gyna!" I feel like she learned how to say the things he wants her to say which is both adorable and disqualifying. (She failed to do the Carter Page/John Bolton maybe US false flag hack thing, tho') And I also think she already pissed him off enough previously for her current suck-up audition to basically be his get-back--her audition will be rejected. The way he might have been playing pore ole Mitt Romney.

Although, for pols thinking of signing on to Team Trump who ever once opposed him--this is a guy who has openly talked about being about the vendetta. So if you're entertaining being on his cabinet--do you want to eat a buttload of shit all at once (he doesn't pick you after you cozied up hard) or eat a little bit of shit everyday (he hires you). Because I assure you, I do not think the shit is optional. I think the shit is the point.

Or he'll make her DNI because she loves the same generals and flattered Trump's screw-loose ass. But I just mostly doubt it. This is reality show 101--build suspense. It's also not normal and weird for an actual presidential cabinet.

A Tale of Two Speeches

It makes a kind of sense that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton gave speeches to two very different groups this Friday--they are two very different candidates and they do not substantially share a worldview. Donald Trump spoke in front of the Faith and Freedom Conference, where he was protested (because I think he might actually being paying protesters at this point to attract cameras and further the idea that he is an exciting and dangeous candidate, if you want to know what sort of things I think about this weird Potemkin campaign)  Hillary Clinton spoke in front of Planned Parenthood, the embattled reproductive health provider that has faced actual existential threats from the very sort of people who attend the Faith and Freedom Conference.

That right there strikes me as very different! For what it's worth, the Faith and Freedom shindy is an event at which a sitting US Senator who isn't even especially known as a firebrand suggested that it was funny to pray for President Obama's death--a joke which isn't even especially new. It's also a nice place for small-child hijacker and fetal snuff porn aficionado Carly Fiorina to assert that she is a feminist--in what way I guess we just have to imagine--who does not support Hillary Clinton. Well slap my ass and call me cynical! I could have called that one, Carly Obvious. (She can go sit next to Jill Stein and they can chat about how Hillary is a bad mother.)  Trump made people wait for his insubstantial Telepromptered speech, where he mostly avowed how he would support Christian Americans and appoint pro-life judges.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton gave a speech in front of Planned Parenthood, and talked about how reproductive justice is a part of human rights. She understood the economic, social, and government policy implications of women taking charge of our bodies and reproductive rights. That means a lot to me. She understands that the personal is political. She represents a part of that movement where we as women came of age knowing that our very bodies were not assumed to be our own, but the possessions of men, or government, or churches. And where women were raised to accept that decisions should be made on our behalf for us, because our lady-brains shouldn't be trusted with making the choices that as adult women, we needed to make for our very own survival and for the success of our own children.  The ideas, after all, that were expressed by folks at the event Trump spoke at. She is keeping score of how our rights as women and our ability to access reproductive justice is regularly clipped by religious right haters.

She gets it--Trump never would. He gives his lip service to the religious right as an obligation to his party--but I think Clinton opposes it as I do--because it is specifically harmful to me and the people I love. This matters. It matters an awful lot.

Hoping to Catch a Draft from an Upward-Failer?

I think the leak that Carly Fiorina was going to be Ted Cruz's Very Big Serious Announcement was not all that surprising--merely kind of weird. After all, Fiorina's endorsement of Cruz was treated as a pretty big "get" and they seemed pretty tight since, even though at one time, Fiorina basically admitted that Ted Cruz would say anything to win. Our mistake was in thinking she meant that as a criticism.

What can one say? Ted Cruz is not likely to be the GOP nominee, which makes this pretense something along the lines of staging a children's tea party with empty cups and teddy bears in some of the seats. (Unless of course, the Trump University trial sinks Donald Trump's candidacy, although this is not Donald Trump's first rodeo, and what the fuck am I talking about--I sort of think his gobs of hubris are preventing him from realizing what his general business shenanigans translate to in terms of how political personae are construed--Caesar's wife, or even Big Dog Bill's, he ain't. Remotely.)

Is it possible that Cruz is allying himself to Fiorina in the hopes of presenting himself as a more woman-friendly candidate than Trump? Is he just pandering to the many California voters in hopes of receiving many California delegates in the last place he can hope to pick up anything like a "many"? Has he lost his shpadoinkle?

I'd Say It's all Over But the Being Over

It's at the point where I can't pretend that my job's busy season is really keeping me from blogging anymore and get down to admitting that these Democratic presidential primaries seem to give me roughly the same sense of intense lassitude that debt ceiling arguments do. So I'm going to take the results of last night's primaries (including the one in my home state)--a sweep by Donald Trump and a 4 out of 5 win by Hillary Clinton, as a hopeful sign of the Beginning of the End. At least, I think Trump and Clinton seem in agreement that this is the beginning of the end, even if their intraparty opponents don't!

Senator Sanders still maintains that there is a path to the nomination (and some of his principal advisers seem eager to keep things going until the convention, regardless) even though the chances of a contested convention are pretty darn remote. (I am going to discount the probability suggested at Salon that an FBI investigation is going to sink her campaign on the grounds of this ain't her first rodeo, and I'm sure her legal self-vetting regarding her conduct as Secretary of State was exceptionally thorough--all political candidates seem to have gobs of hubris, but she has experience of how people get burned.) This is despite signs that his campaign is beginning to cut back.

I really do want Sanders and his supporters to have a voice regarding party platform at the convention, because I've been a fan of much of what he has been talking about, but my issue has mainly always been procedural--how do progressives get things done? And as a watcher of how campaigns fund and spend, it's only my dearth of blogging in general that has kept me from writing a "Bern rate" post--big rallies generate their own advertising, but their cost hasn't necessarily been balanced out by returns at the ballot box.

As for Donald Trump, he has two challengers who are bolstered by the #Nevertrump notion into hanging on, that are almost shamefully inept. Senator Ted Cruz, in a Bizarro World Hail Mary move (about which more in a later post), has announced a running mate a day after being basically mathematically eliminated from serious contention. Ohio Governor John Kasich still has less delegates than Senator Marco Rubio, who dropped out in early March.

Although I will write about future primaries--my heart isn't in it anymore. I want to write about Trump's obnoxious style versus Clinton's substance. I want to write about the bullshit misogyny of deriding "the woman card" versus the real need for leaders who do understand and represent the concerns of, it turns out, the slight majority of US voters by gender.

So despite some of the enervating aspects of the 2016 election year to date, bring on Trump vs. Clinton! If I had any questions about how strongly I supported Hillary Clinton before Trump decided to adopt the "unqualified except for being a woman" meme--well now it's entirely on.

Carly Fiorina and the Class Trip

There was a time when I thought that maybe, with a little spit and polish and some donor-money, Carly Fiorina might be just the kind of pathological type who could clean up into a nice Establishment sort of candidate.  She would still be kind of awful, but it would be a livable kind of awful where her business reputation and previous political failures could be airbrushed out so long as she presented herself as a serious Chamber of Commerce business-friendly Republican with solid values.

Welp. Being that kind of candidate probably wouldn't have helped her this election cycle anyway, but her pro-life thing just got weirder because it seems that she hijacked a class trip to a botanical garden for an anti-abortion rally. 

Who does that? She basically saw small innocent people, something in her grasping little skull said "Oh good, props!" and she set about acquiring them for her own political purposes--without the consent of these kids' parents. (And of course, they are little kids, they don't even grasp what exactly is going on to consent for themselves.) What astonishes me is that the adult supervision for those minor children let them be put in that position and never considered that it might be a bad idea.

News flash--other people's young children are not props. They have families who might not think their kids should be used for a photo op. Even if Fiorina realized that just standing by herself in front of a honking huge fetus picture was awkward, it really didn't give her any right to fill out her little stage with a passel of post-borns.

I don't know if it looks desperate or just weird. Either way, I was wrong about taking her seriously.

Carly the Incoherent

Given the general tone that 2016 presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has taken with respects to Hillary Clinton, her cheap shot that she, Fiorina, unlike Clinton, likes to spend time with her husband is not really shocking, just tacky and personal. But when interviewed on it by Chris Matthews, she went from tacky to just plain incoherent:



Now, this doesn't make sense:

“There are so many other things we could talk about like the fact that Mrs. Clinton wants to go to the White House — she’s qualified for the big house,” Fiorina said as she dropped all pretense of fake smiling for the camera.”She should be prosecuted. She has not been prosecuted for things that took a great warrior out of office, David Petraeus.”

Huh? So Hillary Clinton doesn't like being with her husband, because she stayed with him despite his affairs, but she is responsible for David Petreaus not being CIA Director....because he had an affair.

Fiorina should probably leave Hillary Clinton's personal life alone, and maybe give up her falsehoods about her various good general friends.

Maybe she should go spend more time with her spouse?

Stick with Demon Sheep

Carly Fiorina makes a joke about Obama eating dog meat and then chews on a Milkbone. From the kind of political instincts that approved of an ad that has gone down in political advertising history for its sheer bizarreness, comes a spot that should make her seem more loose and likeable.

It doesn't. Maybe it would take an awful lot of work to change the established impression we already have of her.

Carly Fiorina's Ridiculous Rhetoric

Believe it or not, I really am not going to go into whether Fiorina wants to dig deeper into defending the CMP videos in the aftermath of the Colorado Springs shooting--it's really her characterization of President Obama as "delusional" over connecting climate change with terror that I find astonishingly short-sighted and wanted to address.

Actually, to be honest, she didn't just characterize President Obama as delusional. She mentioned Obama, Hillary Clinton, and "anybody else" who wanted to make the assertion. Apparently, she isn't very familiar with the entire brace of people who have made that very assertion. This opinion is backed up by the Pentagon, the Navy, by other world powers. Quite reasonable people have set forth the chronology whereby drought in Syria lead to the economic and population stressors that led to the Syrian Civil War. Military experts and scientists alike understand that climate change benefits terror groups, while also understanding that these groups have very specific reasons for wanting nothing to be achieved by climate confabs like COP21.

Who, exactly, is delusional, when we have this many people capable of putting the dots in order, while poor Carly is still figuring out which crayon to use?

The problem isn't entirely that Fiorina is an utter neophyte to world affairs having little background in politics, nor that her tech experience didn't actually rely on scientific know-how. I think the real reason is that she isn't really a "big picture" person. She manages details, but sucks at taking in sweeping trends. Take this interesting view of her weaknesses.

For the many who are unfamiliar with her record, it is not a strong one. The primary mark on her CV is negative, having run Hewlett-Packard into the ground as CEO. “Call her the anti-Steve Jobs,” wrote Infoworld, who put her on a list of tech’s all-time top 25 fiascoes. During her tenure, the company’s stock lost nearly 50% of its value, thousands of employees lost their jobs to layoffs, and Ms. Fiorina was forced to resign (read: “fired”) by HP’s board. In USA Today, CBS Moneywatch, and Portfolio.com, she was ranked among the “worst CEOs in America.” On the day her departure was announced, HP’s stock went up—and she received a $21 million severance package.
 

The "anti-Steve Jobs" slight is especially telling. Jobs had a reasonably good eye for what customers would want. He had vision--a big picture. He succeeded in selling people--lots of them--stuff that was useful and catchy and became indispensable. He understood the broad spectrum of how people used tech.  This was her job-the thing she made money at, and she wasn't good at it. Why does anyone think she knows what she's talking about now? She doesn't understand the broad spectrum of how science relates to social change. How dim can one be? Because to be honest--that's astonishingly dim.

 

"No More Baby Parts."

If the "mainstream media" is to be believed, Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooter, Robert Dear, said "No more baby parts," when he was finally taken into custody after his violent rampage.  But, why, whatever could he have meant by that, do you suppose? Maybe he was just down to the clinic to borrow a cup of baby parts and found they were all out?  Maybe he was building a Frankenstein-esque creature and got peeved at the glut of juvenile bits on the market? Maybe he was misheard and was unhappy with "A. B. parts."

As Sherlock Holmes might have said, if he were prone to using my vernacular, if every other possibility is so fucking stupid and fanciful that you'd have to be a lying bastard to propose them, you should consider the evidence staring you in the face.

And it might just sound a little self-serving if one admits that Dear was a domestic terrorist, as Gov. Mike Huckabee has, but then plays victim by saying it especially harms the pro-life folks. Does this make the anti-abortion people really look bad? Do they need much help, there? And the knee-slapper is, this is the guy who was going to use the US military to forcibly close health clinics. It's "domestic terrorism" if you are a DIY-type. If you're president, you do what you want!

Failed tech-CEO Carly Fiorina takes a slightly different tack--it's just "typical left-wing tactics" to blame anti-abortion rhetoric for violent actions.  How dare we connect those dots in chronological order! This was the candidate, mind you, who imagined a scenario that wasn't even in the highly-edited videos who had to go on to produce one yet more lurid. Which we are not supposed to find incendiary or deceitful in the least, mind you.

Now, a handful of people are just looking at this guy's criminal records and immediately dismissing him as a lunatic. Mental illness is a spectrum, charges against this miscreant were regularly dismissed, and the things he was accused of weren't necessarily out of bounds for people who are considered perfectly sane. Being antisocial or even sociopathic doesn't exclude this person from having political views. People have made note of the fact that Colorado Springs is the headquarters for Focus on the Family. The founding member, Dr. James Dobson, justified both wife-beating and animal abuse.  (Not that I'm saying Dear was influenced by Focus on the Family, at all, at all--after all, he wasn't originally from Colorado Springs. He was from North Carolina. Where Eric Rudolph was found holed up. And there's some folks to this day who consider Rudolph a folk hero. )

The Wages are Too Damn High

I couldn't blog last night about the debates because they literally took a melon-baller to my cranium. Two GOP debates is a kind of brutality. Things like listening to Chris Christie's baseless assertion that Hillary Clinton was coming for anyone's wallet or just pretending that Ben Carson can make any statement regarding foreign policy that actually makes sense in any world whatsoever are patience-exhausting.

But check the tone right from the top of the main card debate--Trump on the minimum wage. Wages are too high. He would not raise the minimum wage. Just last debate, Carly Fiorina said that she believed that a minimum wage was actually unconstitutional. Donald Trump reiterated his position earlier today regarding wages being too high.

This is bullshit. This is the ugliest and dumbest level of bullshit and anyone who thinks America can be great when we are actually bidding to lower the standard of living for American workers is foolish. We want to compete with third-world nations in providing low-income workers?

Let me restate that--we want our elites to sell our labor to corporations for bottom-dollar prices?

Hey rubes! The Donald wants to lower your salary to make the rich people in America great again, get it?

There was a Presidential Debate Tonight!

A presidential debate--yayayayayayay!

A GOP debate. Oh. Well....

So, I could seriously analyze it--but let me start off by saying the format where there's an undercard "kid's table" debate is starting to seem really insulting and like a rotten waste of time. So why aren't these people dropping out of the race so they can stop wasting our time? It's not that they have no right to run--they just have no reasonable expectation to win anything. But even the main event debates seem like maybe they are a little too populous. I don't think Mike Huckabee is really looking to be president. I'm kind of wondering what Chris Christie really thinks his odds are. And again, the outsiders, Carson and Trump, say really odd things that make it questionable whether they have the firmest grasp on policy.

The winner and loser of the debate seem to be above. Rubio was capable of dealing with questions with reasonable political instincts and impressed people watching the debate. Bush didn't do a lot of talking, and frankly wasn't about being there.

General impressions:

Rubio: Polished like a finger nail, and about as deep. But his debate coaching must be immaculate. But gosh he seems young. You know how sometimes a parent is asked if maybe their kid should have another year of kindergarten? Sort of like that. But sheesh--he's so tired of the Senate kindergarten.

Fiorina: She has no regard whatsoever for the facts, and says things that are completely wrong with utter confidence. How has FOX News not picked up on her yet? Also she will simplify the tax code to three pages--and that was when I realized she was about that grift, ladies and gents. She also said all of Obama's policies and all of Clinton's policies are just the worst. FOX News, are you listening?

Carly Fiorina Could Be the New Mitt Romney

When considering the news that the Koch brothers and other donors were developing an interest in Carly Fiorina, an outsider candidate, I started considering what her appeal was, and then it hit me--she's credibly a little like Mitt Romney, no? He was a businessman with a thin political resume but a remarkable talent for lying, and she's a former business woman with a nearly nonexistent political resume but with a remarkable talent for lying. What the hell? Jeb Bush is like a dead frog with donors trying desperately to run a current though his ass every once in a while to see if he jumps. Fiorina, to give her her due, jumps all by herself. She's not as conspiracy theory-driven as Carson, as clowny as Trump, as nekkidly grifting and holy-rolling as Huckabee and Santorum, and unlike Ted Cruz, people don't want to sock her in the jibs.

She could be going places.

There's the rub--once you start getting taken seriously, why, people might start taking you seriously! I mean, take her business record. Not so great, actually. I think her story goes like this:

Don't cry for me Hewlett Packard,
The truth is I never left you,
although you shoved me
I think you still loved me,
I made increased revenue
if not shareholder value.

And as for my fortune
and as to blame
I never invited them in
even though it might seem
by an objective record of fact
I got paid for crashing
the stock.

But that's illusions,
you should listen to me,
I think I've been more than that,
I'm all I expected I'd be.

There may be reasons why people who worked for her then, or were laid off by her, aren't really in favor of her candidacy.
 

Carly Fiorina and the Very Big Lies

Let's get one thing very straight, here--I don't like Carly Fiorina. I might smile when she takes pot-shots at Donald Trump like a natural-born politician running against him should feel obliged to do, and I might like it that a woman is shaking things up in the GOP primary--but that does not mean I think Carly Fiorina is a great candidate or even an adequate person. Truth is, she bothers the shit out of me, and not just because she trash-talks Hillary Clinton with that "accomplishment" foolishness.

Gurrl, I've followed Hillary Clinton for over twenty years, and you, ma'am, are no Hillary Clinton!

But her recent disgraceful lying about Planned Parenthood takes the cake. She imagined a disgusting scene  that did not occur in the actual CMP videos, and, to cover up her fabrication, produced her own really specious and janky video. Since the images don't have much to do with Planned Parenthood in the real world where people live, I guess her little video stands as a testimony to...her love of fetal snuff porn? Because honestly, her concentration on the mechanics of ending pregnancies while ignoring the reality of women who seek abortions to end their pregnancies basically makes me believe she considers 1 out of 3 women baby killers. And her visit to a pregnancy crisis center should actually remind us that these centers are mostly frauds.

As is Carly Fiorina. After all, her much-vaunted business success is built on self-promotion and a meticulous cover-up of her failures. She 's anything but a job creator.

Basically, she's always lying.  She's a compulsive liar. But when she lies about women's health care in a way that makes it harder for women to obtain care for their bodies or their prospective children's bodies, she goes too damn far for me. I do not like Carly Fiorina, and I do not have room to forgive her very big lies. She has no business chipping away at other women's bodily autonomy and reproductive choice. I stand with Planned Parenthood against her fabricated snuff porn and I support not treating this liar with kid gloves because she's allegedly a lady. She's a politician and not a good one. All systems go.

Balls to You, Big Daddy

There's something kind of Freudian going on there, isn't there? A little bit of projected castration anxiety, perhaps? Because even if Carly Fiorina roughed Trump up in the debate a little bit (and for that matter, seems more willing to take direct shots at him than some of the other candidates), it's GOP establishment types who are a little, um, impotent, when it comes to doing something about Trump. I take note that this exchange took place on FOX News, the unofficial propaganda arm of the Republican party--which has had an on-again/off-again feud with The Donald over how they "treat" him. I think they'd prefer this unmanageable upstart stop complicating things, but he persists.

It's also fascinating to me that the castrator in this case is Carly Fiorina--aggressive women are depicted as "ball-breakers" (as in this charming Hillary Clinton novelty nutcracker). There have been historical fears of regarding powerful people taking "manhood" away. There's a kind of sexist subtext, there.

But I think it's a mistake to believe that a "symbolic castration" so to speak is going to shame Trump, any. The guy has been very rich and powerful for a very long time. He's had so much smoke blown up his ass by yes-men over his career, he might as well wake up thinking he's been selected as the new Pope each morning. Take this interesting way he responds to a question about how he sees God: he starts with his own accomplishments. The guy can't be bothered with what lesser mortals do with his metaphorical balls. They grow back, like Prometheus' liver. Gold-plated. Luxurious. Yuge.

Climate Sunday: Donald Trump Edition

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

Keeping with the traditions I make up here on the fly, I have named this week's climate change and environment round-up after Donald Trump, who alleged, as the Tweet above shows, that climate change is a hoax started by the Chinese. (There is so much more raving silliness where that came from it's almost not funny. Almost. But mockingly plow on, I must.) But really--he doesn't know the Swedes started it? I'll give a buffalo nickel to anyone with the stones to ask him for the name of one Chinese climatologist.

Trump is still nattering on about climate change with apparently no more sense than he has about things appearing in the Bible, foreign policy, and how not to look racist in public. As a benchmark, I'd have to say my favorite "kooky uncle-you-ignore-on-Facebook" moment is when he quixotically actually made a crusade of tilting at windmills. When Carly Fiorina drops nonsense about stuff like windmills killing birds, you kind of just want to laugh it off and wonder what she's fixing to do about the damn cats. When The Donald calls windmills an eyesore and claims they don't look classy, you're in meta-territory. They don't look right. Shoot. The Dutch were cool with windmills, back in the day. Maybe Trump just has a problem with strong winds in general.

Anyway, he's not much worse than the rest of the "not-a-scientist" pack at the recent primary debate. Most either ignore climate change entirely or consider it a hoax, and where they don't, they use vague economic excuses about why they don't think anything should be done about it. Sen. Marco Rubio's "America is not a planet" line sticks out for it's half-rightness. Of course, The US is just one country that happens to exist on this particular globe--but exist on it we do. So climate change actually affects us and our responsibility doesn't change because of "Well, what are the other countries doing?" And for that matter, China is often used as the scapegoat--what are they doing anyway? Well, turns out they are doing a thing or two or a bunch. They are losing many citizens to environmentally-related diseases. They can't not realize that not addressing climate change is just as much a losing proposition for them in the long run. And keep in mind that globally, it's always the poor who are most screwed over by the results of climate change. Pretending we'll do nothing because it benefits them is a disgraceful lie.

Failing to understand how climate change affects populations in vulnerable areas as a national security and foreign policy issue is part of what's driving things like the Syrian refugee crisis. People willfully closing their eyes to the reality of climate change because they think it's about dollars and cents, are completely unprepared to recognize that this is not just a humanitarian issue abroad, but at home, when you consider that the western wildfire season has become nearly year-round and is costing our economy astronomical sums. Our coastal regions (where many countries have put their big cities because of the convenience for shipping trade) will also suffer from sea level rise--which is measurably occurring.  We experience significant short-term evidence of a warming planet, but also, some of the oases of supposedly contradictory evidence, like the polar ice caps, are melting away. The so-called hiatus when things weren't heating up--doesn't seem to have actually happened.

Donald Trump is way wrong on environmental issues and basically a conspiracy theorist, just like he is regarding Ebola, vaccines, or whether President Obama was born in America. The idea that this kind of gob-stopping ignorance is thisclose to the Presidency is really scary.

There was Another GOP Debate

I did not watch it, although according to Twitter, it definitely happened. Apparently, Carly Fiorina believes in the Planned Parenthood hoax videos and thinks this:

 

 

was an actual thing she saw instead of the stolen image of a stillborn baby that even the makers of the highly-edited hoax videos had to admit to. She dares pro-choice people to watch that nonsense. A lot of us have. I don't think she has, or if she has, she is too gullible and weak-witted to realize how deceptive it is. Aaaaand, she's pretty much one of the winners of the too-many person free-for-all that was. Because even if a lot of what she said was internally contradictory and obviously nonsense (she won't negotiate with tyrants but she's calling Khameini on Day one?) she believes in her bullshit. She even went in again on the "name one accomplishment of Hillary Clinton thing". I hope her rude awakening is bloody humiliating. It ought to be. But long story short--she's an awful person.

 

You know who else is?  Jeb Bush. He made some noises about how his brother kept America safe. From 9/11, the Beltway snipers, anthrax, Hurricane Katrina, a dumbass protracted war in Iraq and Afghanistan and assorted terrorist attacks on different embassies and such? Well--no. Also, he thinks the stupid SOFA with Iraq that ended US engagement there was dumb. I guess he doesn't know whose administration that happened under, either. I'm not sure a person who was in a coma the last 15 years would make any kind of good president. Also he said Margaret Thatcher, a foreigner, should be on the $10. That's just stupid, I don't care who you are, son.

 

Shade Balls!

"Shade balls" kind of sounds like the slang the kids would use these days, as in "When that girl talked shit about my outfit, I was casting shade balls at her at night."

But, no! This is a thing where plastic balls absorb the sunlight instead of the water in a reservoir which should reduce evaporation. It also should cut down on bacteria growth in the water (some aquaculturists working in gardens with koi ponds add a kind of ink to reduce algae blooms, so I get that principle) and nothing from the plastic itself should leak into the water. At first I wasn't 100% on how this would work because it seemed to me that if dark-colored balls absorbed solar heat, that heat would redistribute along the surface area of each ball transferring it to the water causing more of an evaporation effect. But smarter people than me apparently worked out that the surface absorbs the heat, but the water-side is protected. If this works how the smart folks say, call me impressed!

I'm not terribly impressed by some arguments of some people, which seem to hinge on the idea that California should have built more reservoirs to catch the water that the state is currently not getting.  I prefer to believe that if people accept that climate change is real, they can deal with it using real solutions, instead of bitching about what might have been without actually presenting any solutions at all. I really don't see professional blame-redistributors as innovative in that necessary sense.

Lindsey Graham and Carly Fiorina Are Being Ugly Americans

The specter of "the ugly American" as a kind of diplomatic naïf uncomfortable with foreign languages and geography, and  showing an insensitivity to culture is going poltergeist right now as Sen. Lindsey Graham and former HP CEO Carly Fiorina try to show how much they understand about the broader world by slinging broad-brush generalizations at entire nationalities.

Because nothing says you're to be taken seriously like a willingness to be a public clod.

First up is Senator Graham, who explained that his time working in a pool hall taught him about liars, and that is how he knows that Iranians are liars. No,  really.

In a video address to this weekend's Southern Republican Leadership Conference during which he made his case as a potential presidential candidate, Graham asserted that his experiences dealing with the clientele of his parents' business taught him that "the Iranians are lying" when it comes to the ongoing nuclear negotiations with the Obama administration.

"My family owned a restaurant, a pool room, and a liquor store, and everything I know about the Iranians I learned in the pool room," Graham said in the video. "I ran the pool room when I was a kid and I met a lot of liars, and I know the Iranians are lying."

He also called them "cheats" and compared them to Nazis.

GOP Primary 2016: The Outsiders

It seems like discussions of the presidential "horse race" tend to drift back to whether one favors the chances of a governor (for executive experience) or a senator (for all-around policy experience, including some foreign policy cred). I think for me, the answer has really tended to have more to do with the individual running and what that person is saying than the public service positions that person has held.

Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson have exactly zero public service experience, and both joined the 2016 GOP presidential primary today. I know some people like the idea of an outsider who has never held public office jumping in and shaking things up (like a Ross Perot or a Ralph Nader). I have to admit--I've never been that keen on the idea that an outsider is necessarily better. I think that being grounded in taking policy positions and defending them through the process of previous elections and making votes as a legislator or policy in state government is a kind of necessary preparation for the job, and that even excellent achievements outside of public office are, in many ways, irrelevant experience. A boardroom is not democratic in the way public office is. A surgery is altogether removed.