Headline of the Day

The DNC Picked a Bunch of Sleazy Lobbyists as Superdelegates, Can't Figure out Why No One Is Donating.

It's an on-point analysis of a rather anodyne story at Politico on DNC fund raising panic, but there is a few gems of unvarnished truth out there:

Party officials involved in fundraising say donors repeatedly turn them away with a "try again next year," especially since it became clear there won't be an official party autopsy from 2016. Democrat Jon Ossoff's loss in his much-hyped special congressional election in Atlanta's suburbs in June has also depressed donor enthusiasm.

………

DNC members themselves have now been asked to give or raise $1,000 each, some said — a request people who've been around the committee for decades say they can't remember being made before.

Not only the party base, but the big donors are demanding reforms.

I don't think that the moneybags wing of the Party are looking to implement a socialist agenda, but I do think that they realize that they spent a huge amount of money on a hapless candidate and a hapless party establishment, and they want to see changes.

I do not expect to see meaningful changes until dissatisfaction reaches a crescendo, because there are simply too many people who earn a living by mismanaging Democratic party operations.

This is Why Obama's Knifing Ellison in the DNC Race Makes a Difference

DNC Chairman Tom Perez has appointed a fierce opponent of the minimum wage to its finance committee, because ……… Hell because the New Dem wing of the Democratic Party needs to accommodate abusive employers, slumlords, Wall Street, and evil people in general, because they want their money to pay for overpriced incompetent consultants:

Various sources have reported that Tom Perez, the Chair of the Democratic National Committee, has appointed Atlanta native Dan Halpern to the finance committee of the party.

Tom Perez just appointed a lobbyist for an anti-minimum wage group in the South as a DNC Finance Chair. I'm not joking.

— spooky neesins🌹 (@LaDemSoc) October 12, 2017

Specifically, he will be part of a squad of deputy national finance chairs. As the Atlanta Business Chronicle reports:

Halpern chaired Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s mayoral campaign in 2009 and served as a trustee for then-President-elect Barack Obama’s 2008 inaugural committee. Halpern also is immediate past chairman of the Atlanta Housing Authority Board of Directors and a past chairman of the Georgia Restaurant Association.

In a party that says it’s trying to be progressive, Halpern is a strange direction. As the head of Jackmont Hospitality and the GRA, Halpern has reliably opposed the minimum wage. His record thus far suggests a hostility towards the kind of worker-friendly policies that the Bernie-era Dems are supposedly pursuing. It suggests Perez, and Perez’s backers and friends, have not gotten the memo about economic justice.

In Halpern’s home state of Georgia, according to Politifact “Senate Bill 314 called for raising Georgia’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, but it didn’t get so much as a hearing.”

Why? Halpern’s people—the Georgia Restaurant Association—claimed that there would be a potential loss of 21,000 jobs, ignoring the increased possibility for consumer spending, for new jobs, for giving hungry people a hand up. Everything must benefit the boardroom, you see, or it’s not worth doing. As Politifact helpfully reminds us, “Georgia’s minimum wage is technically $5.15 an hour (Georgia Code 34-4-3) and has been since 2001. But the vast majority of Georgia employers (some say more than 99 percent) must comply with the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which means they have to pay their employees the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.” If given god-like sway over the business, Halpern and his GRA would probably prefer to keep this amount even lower.

Hardly surprising. When a guy is described by the Atlanta Journal Constitution as a “Georgia Democratic moneyman,” it’s safe bet he couldn’t give two hoots in hell for a single mother making minimum wage at McDonald’s.

Is it any wonder that the Democratic Party brand is in the sewer?

This sort of crap is toxic.

Once Again, Let Me Say, "Do Not Give to the American Red Cross"

This time, it's the Red Cross screwing the pooch after hurricane Harvey hit Texas:

The Red Cross’ anemic response to Hurricane Harvey left officials in several Texas counties seething, emails obtained by ProPublica show. In some cases, the Red Cross simply failed to show up as it promised it would.

In DeWitt, a county of 20,000 where Harvey ripped apart the roof of a hotel, Emergency Management Coordinator Cyndi Smith upbraided a Red Cross official in a Sept. 9 email:

“Red Cross was not there as they were suppose[d] to be with the shelter and again no communication to what this is actually about and that you have been in DeWitt County doing anything.”

With fewer than 24 hours’ notice, Micah Dyer, a school superintendent in DeWitt County, was forced to run a shelter on his own in an unused district building that would eventually house 400 people. For the first three days the shelter was opened, only two Red Cross volunteers were there — neither had any experience running a shelter, Dyer said in an interview.

“Every hot meal came from us,” Dyer said. “[School district employees] had to go to our pantries and walk-in coolers and get whatever we could get so people would have food.” Dyer says the Red Cross didn’t appear with supplies until the fourth day of the storm, and didn’t bring enough cots or food for those housed in the shelter, he said. A significant portion of the Meals-Ready-to-Eat the charity did bring had gone bad, he said.

The charity contested his account, saying in a statement that it maintained two shelters in DeWitt County — including the one Dyer ran — “and recorded a total of 1,599 overnight stays.”

We have only a partial picture of the Red Cross’ response to the massive storm. ProPublica received emails through public records requests from several counties, large and small. But they don’t cover the full swath of the state affected by the storm.

Still, the frustration many authorities felt with the Red Cross was striking. Officials in Jefferson County, which contains Beaumont, were so fed up with the Red Cross that they kicked out a charity employee assigned to work with government officials from the headquarters for the storm response.
………

Many others singled out the Red Cross for criticism. At a public meeting earlier this month, Houston City Councilman Dave Martin let loose on the charity for being the “most inept, unorganized organization I've ever experienced.”

………

In an interview with ProPublica, Martin said he ran into Gail McGovern, the charity’s CEO, in a parking lot several days after Harvey hit. When he raised his concerns to her, Martin said she responded: “Do you know how much we raised with Katrina? $2 billion. We won’t even raise hundreds of millions here.’ I just thought, ‘Really, Gail? That’s your response to me?’”

It's clear that Ms. McGovern, a former senior executive at AT&T and Fidelity, wants to run the charity like a business.

She wants to burn it down for the insurance money.

This is the Most Disasterous Performance in Tory Politics Since………*

Highlights (Lowlights?) of the speech

At the 2017 Conservative Party conference in the UK, Prime Minister Theresa May delivered an absolute train wreck.

First, was a comedian pranking by delivering a "P-45" form (pink slip to Yanks) from Boris Johnson, then she spent something like 15 minutes largely unsuccessfully battling a cough and a frog in her throat, and finally, the theme logo for the conference began to drop letters off the backdrop.

It’s hard to imagine a more excruciating hour. One that was meant to re-establish the prime minister’s authority over her party ended in pity from an audience who could scarcely bring themselves to look her in the eye. Open ridicule would almost have been a kinder reaction.

Theresa May had always intended her speech to be personal; she just had no idea it was going to get this personal. She began by trying to rid herself of her Maybot image. Her election campaign had been too presidential. Too scripted. She said, reading awkwardly from a script. Even when she is trying to be engaging, sentences don’t come naturally to her.

“The British. Dream. That. Is what I am. In politics. For,” she repeated leadenly time and again as she tried to reinvent herself as a three-dimensional entity. But each time she said it, she only sounded more automated. Emotional intelligence is even harder to master than artificial intelligence.

Then the British Dream turned into a nightmare. First the comedian Simon Brodkin, dressed as a conference delegate, wandered up to the stage. “Boris asked me to give this to you,” he said, handing her a P45. Which Theresa gratefully accepted. Because in her heart of hearts, this was what she had always really wanted. Being PM just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was too stressful. No fun.

………

It rapidly got worse. Once Brodkin was escorted out the hall, it was the turn of Theresa’s voice to make its own protest. By going awol. This time she knew what words she wanted to say, she just couldn’t get them out as her voice had its own psychosomatic, narcissistic, breakdown. She tried to clear her throat. She drank water. Still nothing came out. Eventually the chancellor handed her a cough sweet which temporarily did the trick.

“The British. Dream. That is. What I. Am in Poli. Tics for,” she croaked in a barely audible whisper. By now almost everyone in the audience was feeling almost as uncomfortable as her. People started muttering and staring at the floor. Opera heroines have died a less public, less agonising death.

………

As she reached her final appeal for the party to stop squabbling – a bit rich after she had spent the previous three days saying how united the cabinet was – the frog got the upper hand again. This time it didn’t limit itself to obstructing her throat, it also hopped across the stage and started knocking letters off the slogan, Building a country that works for everyone, on the screen behind her. First the f of for disappeared. Then the last e of everyone fell to the ground. Theresa’s world was literally falling apart around her. 

Seriously, this absurdity would have deemed a step too far by Monty Python in the day.

She could have bitten off the head of a kitten during the speech and done better.

^*Since all but about 8 years of Winston Churchill's political career.^†
†Seriously. Aside from 1939-45, this guy was a f%$#ing horror show.

Quote of the Day

That said, if all it takes to neutralize a billion plus in Clinton campaign contributions is $100K in Russian Facebook ads and some Twitterbots, then then political class has a lot to answer for in terms of its ROI.

—Lambert Strether

For the non-financial types, ROI=Return On Investment.

The Democratic Party consult class really is hopelessly incompetent.

Business as Usual

Yesterday, I wrote about how to check if your records were a part of the Equifax breach.

Today I observe that in the interval between when the credit reporting firm discovered the breach and when the news became public, senior executives dumped stocks in what appears to be an attempt to to trade on insider information:

The sale of nearly $2 million in corporate stock by high-level Equifax executives shortly after the company learned of a major data breach has sparked public outrage that could turn into another hurdle for the credit rating agency.

The sales all occurred before the company publicly reported the breach, a disclosure that quickly sent its stock tumbling. The timing of the sales could attract federal scrutiny, legal experts say, though proving insider trading would be difficult. A company spokeswoman said the executives did not know about the breach when they sold their shares.

………

Equifax, a major consumer credit reporting agency, disclosed Thursday that hackers had obtained sensitive information, including Social Security numbers and dates of birth, for 143 million people. The breach began in May and was discovered by the company on July 29. Shortly afterward, three company executives — Chief Financial Officer John W. Gamble; Joseph M. Loughran III, the president of U.S. information solutions; and Rodolfo O. Ploder, the president of workforce solutions — sold large amounts of their shares of Equifax stock.

Yeah, sure, "The executives did not know about the breach when they sold their shares."

I believe that.

You Ever Notice What Happens When the Silicon Valley Mindset Meets the Real World?

First Theranos, and now Juicero.

In all fairness, Theranos has a harder job, they were actually in the healthcare business, which involved deceiving regulators, which is hard, while Juicero was just a f%$#ing juice machine:

It sounds like America’s favorite $400 juice machine will be no longer.

“After selling over a million Produce Packs, we must let you know that we are suspending the sale of the Juicero Press and Produce Packs immediately,” reads the company blog post.

Juicero will also be giving people money back. “For the next 90 days, we are offering refunds for your purchase of the Juicero Press,” according to the note.

Founded by Doug Evans, San Francisco-based Juicero had raised more than $118 million in funding from prominent VCs like Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Carmelo Anthony also invested through his Melo7 Tech venture fund. Even The Campbell Soup Company threw money at it. Juicero started raising funding in 2013 and launched 16 months ago.

The company was subject to mockery, particularly after a Bloomberg piece showed that the juice packets could be squeezed by hand and did not require a fancy machine.

The emperor has no clothes.

If regulators and prosecutors did a deep dive on Silicon Valley, those that weren't in prison would be asking, "Do you want fries with that?"

You Cannot Blame the Deplorables or the Russians for This

The Pew Research Center just did a study, and it showed that black voter's turnout fell in 2016.

A record 137.5 million Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Overall voter turnout – defined as the share of adult U.S. citizens who cast ballots – was 61.4% in 2016, a share similar to 2012 but below the 63.6% who say they voted in 2008.

This wasn't Russian hacking. This wasn't, as Lamberth Strether sarcastically noted, "Black voters are racist, sexist bros," this was an incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring candidate with a history of winking and nodding to racism. ("They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.")

This was a candidate who promulgated a Lord of the Flies management style in her campaign which created an incompetent, arrogant, and uninspiring campaign.

And the Democratic party establishment, the incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring DNC, and the legions of incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring consultants pulled out all the stops to fix the primary process for her.

Running against the most racist major Presidential candidate since Woodrow Wilson, somehow, she, and the entire Democratic Party establishment, could not get black voters to turn out.

These are not the people who should be running the Democratic Party. 

These are not consultants who candidates should pay to run their campaigns. 

These are not people who should hold elective office.

They need to go away.

Snark of the Day

Pelosi And The DCCC Prepare To Lose Again-- Their Specialty And Only Competence

—DownWithTyranny!

It might sound unfair, but it's, well, you know, true.

Zuckerberg hires former Clinton pollster Joel Benenson - POLITICO

My first though upon hearing that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired former Clinton pollster and political advisor Joel Benenson, oh my God, this dirt-bag is going to run for President.

My second thought was that I didn't have to worry, because if he is going to be relying on the incompetents who managed to lose an election to an inverted traffic cone, then he has a snowball's chance in hell of actually winning anything:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have hired Democratic pollster Joel Benenson, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, as a consultant, according to a person familiar with the hire.

Benenson’s company, Benenson Strategy Group, will be conducting research for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s philanthropy. The organization — whose mission statement, according to its website, is “advancing human potential and promoting equality” — is endowed with the couple’s Facebook fortune.

Zuckerberg and Chan have vowed to give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares, worth an estimated $45 billion, to charity. Bringing on Benenson is the latest sign that they’re pushing their philanthropic work more heavily into the political and policy world.

In January, the couple hired David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 presidential run, as president of policy and advocacy. Plouffe had previously worked at Uber. Ken Mehlman, who ran President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, also sits on the board.

Yes, Mark Zuckerberg is seriously considering a Presidential run, and he is availing himself of the most incompetent people available, so it's going to be a clown show.

There is nothing to worry about.

Then again, that's what they said about Donald Trump.

United Strikes Again

United notified passengers that they could not check check comic books in as luggage if they were flying to Comic Con in San Diego, because ……… Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

The TSA released a statement that United Airlines had f%$#ed up: (Also here)

Don’t worry Comic-Con fans, you don’t have to remove your comic books from your checked luggage, despite what a Sunday photo circulated on Twitter suggests.

The dust-up began after a person named Adi Chappo tweeted the above, tagging United Airlines, which responded on Twitter:

If you are at #SDCC #SDCC2017 and are flying out on @united - please take note of this and share!!! pic.twitter.com/s1sV269DuQ

— Adi Chappo (@adichappo) July 23, 2017

The restriction on checking comic books applies to all airlines operating out of San Diego this weekend and is set by the TSA. ^MD

— United (@united) July 23, 2017

But by Monday, the Transportation Security Administration was saying that no such restriction existed.

Good afternoon. Pls note there are no TSA restrictions on checking comic books or any other types of books. https://t.co/Nu00IvcZSc

— TSA (@TSA) July 24, 2017

Lorie Dankers, a TSA spokeswoman, told Ars on Monday morning that she was mystified as to how United could get this policy wrong. “I don’t know how United went ahead and stated a TSA policy incorrectly,” she said. “I can say that TSA has advised in the past that if people bring several of the same type of item, it can alarm the checked baggage screening, but there is no prohibition on bringing things that are not a security threat. In this case, comic books are not a security threat and we encourage travelers to bring them if they so choose.”

Seriously, they make big bank on checked bags, so it takes a special type of incompetence to do this.

They are both inconveniencing the customer and losing money on the deal.

Mindbogglingly Incompetent

We have a reveal of the Democratic Party motto for 2018:

I shouldve corrected this immediately; I've deleted original tweet. Full slogan is "A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages"

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_Vox) July 20, 2017

This is monumentally incompetent.

My take:

Jeebus. The unofficial Motto of Reed College would be better, "Atheism, Communism, Free Love."

— Matthew Saroff (@40_Years) July 20, 2017

Cuomo, the NYC Subway, and Drip, Drip, Drip

When Cuomo declared an emergency in the New York City subway, and I noted that the emergency was largely precipitated by Cuomo's hostility to and neglect of mass transit in New York City.

Well, now some of the specifics are coming out, and now we know that just a year ago, Andrew Cuomo ordered the MTA to cut a $5 million dollar check to ski slopes in upstate New York:

What’s come to be known as “the winter that wasn’t” in 2015-16 was so bad for business at state-owned ski centers such as Whiteface Mountain that Gov. Andrew Cuomo swooped in late last winter and directed a major downstate authority, cash-strapped in its own right, to expedite funds to this region’s state Olympic Regional Development Authority.

In March 2016, Cuomo’s administration directed the downstate-based Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the largest public transit authority in the U.S., to write a $4.9 million check to ORDA after its ski centers ailed from a lack of business amid 2015-16’s mild weather. ORDA owns and operates Whiteface Mountain Ski Center in Wilmington, Gore Mountain Ski Center in North Creek and Belleayre Ski Center in the Catskills.

The inter-authority transfer of funds was atypical, as Cuomo’s administration told the MTA to send the money directly to ORDA rather than to the state’s Division of Budget, which could then reallocate funds to ORDA.

………

Cuomo also has pledged $20 million worth of upgrades to its winter sports facilities at Whiteface and Gore mountains and at Mount Van Hoevenberg in Lake Placid, with a specific focus of emphasizing year-round attractions. At Mount Van Hoevenberg — currently home of the state’s bobsled-luge-skeleton track, cross-country skiing and biathlon venues — the state wants to finance the construction of the longest “mountain coaster” in the United States. At Whiteface, the state plans to build one of the longest zip lines in North America. Cuomo said in January that Whiteface and Gore aren’t good enough to compete globally without upscale amenities and conveniences and year-round attractions.

What a complete sh%$heel, which probably means the DNC is probably grooming him to be the 2020 Democratic nominee for President.

These Are the Most Overpaid People in the World

Not exactly the most inspiring political slogan, @dccc: pic.twitter.com/oIE9bTBHa0

— Derek Willis (@derekwillis) July 5, 2017

Yes, this is real.

"Arby's: Cause, you know, Jared"

— Richard T. (@Miceelf88) July 6, 2017

The best tweet in response

I am, of course, referring to the political consultants for the Democratic Party.

Case in point, the geniuses at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), who have a proposed, "Have You Seen the Other Guys?"

No, this is not satire.

The campaign arm for House Democrats on Wednesday tried out a new slogan: “I mean, have you seen the other guys?”

The sticker slogan, one of several floated as part of a fundraising effort by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), caused a stir on social media, where many wondered why the party would try out such a self-deprecating campaign line.

Why would they do this?

Because they are incompetents who are unqualified to work at a fast food joint?

Seriously donors, this is what your money is paying for.

If you don't start demanding accountability, by which I mean firing their hapless flabby asses.

Also, keeping the DCCC, DSCC, and DNC from fobbing off their incompetent brothers-in-law on state and local campaigns and party committees would be a good thing too.

H/t Lawyers, Guns & Money.

It's Official" The "Resistance" Is the Effort to Protect Incompetent Democrats

It turns out that the usual bunch of incompetent looters in the national Democratic Party are running the resistance:

The Democratic Party’s top officials will meet with some of their wealthiest donors in Washington, D.C., this week to plot the Trump resistance, according to documents obtained by The Daily Beast.

The chairs of the Democratic National Committee and the party’s House and Senate campaign arms will huddle with activists, operatives, and deep-pocketed Democratic financiers at a biannual conference hosted by the Democracy Alliance, a leading left-wing donor collaborative at Washington’s ritzy Mandarin Oriental hotel.

They will discuss strategy for immediate opposition to President Donald Trump’s policies, begin laying the groundwork for Democratic campaigns in next year’s midterm elections, strategize future efforts for congressional redistricting, and promote an agenda focused on the state level, where Democrats still retain some power and hope to build a model for national progressive victories. And perhaps most importantly, map out how to fully fund their opposition to all things Trump.

These are the the same ratf%$#s who continue to ignore the party base, corrupted the party to force the worst possible candidate down our throats, and then ran the worst Presidential campaign since the founding of the Republic.

You guys want to run "The Resistance"  ……… Seriously?

You do not have my support, and your wealthy contributors need to understand the problem of throwing good money after bad.

I'd sooner have a surgeon with end stage Parkinson's perform a vasectomy on me ……… With a spoon, than be a part of a political movement that you morons run.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Amid all the claims of who hacked the DNC and why, we now discover that the FBI NEVER requested access to the DNC servers:

The FBI did not examine the servers of the Democratic National Committee before issuing a report attributing the sweeping cyberintrusion to Russia-backed hackers, BuzzFeed News has learned.

Six months after the FBI first said it was investigating the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, the bureau has still not requested access to the hacked servers, a DNC spokesman said. No US government entity has run an independent forensic analysis on the system, one US intelligence official told BuzzFeed News.

“The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI’s Cyber Division and its Washington (DC) Field Office, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, and U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers,” Eric Walker, the DNC’s deputy communications director, told BuzzFeed News in an email.

The FBI has instead relied on computer forensics from a third-party tech security company, CrowdStrike, which first determined in March of last year that the DNC’s servers had been infiltrated by Russia-linked hackers, the U.S. intelligence official told BuzzFeed News.

“CrowdStrike is pretty good. There’s no reason to believe that anything that they have concluded is not accurate,” the intelligence official said, adding they were confident Russia was behind the widespread hacks.

(emphasis original)

Crowdstrike was hired by the DNC.

If it was the Rooshans, then it isn't their fault, and CrowdStrike was hired by the Democratic Party Nomenklatura whose heads were on the chopping block in the event of any sort of (very) well deserved house cleaning for the utter incompetence o n display.

You know that the Russian angle was pushed by the DNC in discussions with CrowdStrike, and as the Golden Rule says, at least according to Johnny Hart, is, "Whoever has the gold, makes the rules."

A Lot is Going on in Syria

First, as I am sure most of you are aware, the evacuation of Aleppo is complete, and the Assad Regime has full control of the city:

The evacuation of civilians and fighters from the last rebel-held part of Aleppo concluded on Thursday after long delays because of frigid weather, putting all of Syria’s industrial capital back in the hands of President Bashar al-Assad’s forces for the first time since 2012.

The last buses carrying residents from eastern Aleppo left the city late Thursday night, according to the Syrian state news agency.

Tens of thousands of people have been removed from eastern Aleppo since Dec. 15. Before the last buses left on Thursday, the Red Cross said that 34,000 people had left the city, including 4,000 fighters who had left in their own vehicles the previous night.

A separate convoy was waiting to carry residents out of two pro-government villages in neighboring Idlib Province that have been surrounded by rebels for years. It was unclear late Thursday whether the convoy had completed its trip.

The seizure of all of Aleppo by Mr. Assad and his allies signals a turning point in the nearly six-year conflict.

Rather unsurprisingly, despite representation in western media, upon entering East Aleppo, evidence of mass torture and mass executions were found:

Russian military forces have discovered mass graves in eastern parts of the Syrian city of Aleppo, with many of the bodies reportedly showing signs of torture.

Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a spokesperson for the Russian defense ministry, announced the horrifying discovery on Monday. “Many of the corpses were found with missing body parts, and most had gunshot wounds to the head,” he said, according to RT, a Russian state-owned news network.

Until recently, the eastern portion of Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city and industrial and financial center, was under the control of so-called “moderate” rebels, many of whom have received both intelligence and material support from the United States and its allies in the Middle East.

Last week, Russian and Syrian military forces oversaw the evacuation of civilians from eastern Aleppo. Prior to that, the rebel-held portion of the city had been controlled by two main factions, Jabhat al-Nusra, a terrorist group with ties to al-Qaida also known as the Nusra Front, and Ahrar al-Sham, another extremist group that receives U.S. support despite being designated a terrorist organization.

………

Russian forces also found massive stockpiles of weaponry abandoned by fleeing rebel groups. “In one small area, three tanks, two cannons, two multiple rocket launchers and numerous homemade mortars were found,” reported RT.

In related news, a Syrian refugee was charged with war crimes in Sweden for his role in executing captured Syrian government soldiers:

A former Syrian opposition fighter has been charged with breaching international law over the execution in 2012 of seven soldiers loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, the Swedish prosecutor's office said on Thursday.

The 46-year-old man, who was arrested in March, appears in a video showing the killings, the prosecutor's office said.

The man, who was not named, denies any crime.

"The soldiers were captured and defenseless when this happened," prosecutor Kristina Lindhoff Carleson said in a statement.

While this was going on, Russia, Iran and Turkey met for cease fire negotiations.  Notably, the US, NATO, and the UN were not included, which is rather unsurprising, considering that those three entities have remained committed to replacing Assad.

What's more, it appears that these negotiations have born fruit, with cease fire coming into effect across Syria, though it it's success is still not certain:

A cease-fire announced by the Syrian government went into ­effect across the country early Friday as part of a broader deal that includes a return to peace talks to end more than five years of war.

Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reestablished control over the northern city of Aleppo earlier this month, forcing rebels to flee what was once their largest stronghold and handing the government a victory that appeared to bring the war’s endgame into view.

The Assad government, backed by Russia and Iran, is now in its strongest position since the start of the war, while rebel groups are mostly boxed into the northwestern province of Idlib and hold no strategically significant urban areas.

The Syrian military declared in a statement issued Thursday that the “comprehensive” cessation of hostilities follows “victories and advances” by the armed forces.

Russia and Turkey, which brokered the deal, said they could guarantee compliance from the government and its armed opposition, respectively, after weeks of negotiations.

………

The Syrian army said the cease-fire excluded “terrorist organizations,” notably the Islamic State but also the country’s al-Qaeda affiliate, an influential component of what remains of Syria’s armed opposition. The caveat suggested that the fighting could continue in Idlib, now the rebels’ final bastion.

ISIS and al Qaeda (al Nusra/al-Sham) aren't just an "influential component" of Syrian opposition. They are the bulk of viable rebel military forces.

As I have stated before, there is no moderate opposition. They are all salafist Sunni extremists, sponsored by Turkey, the House of Saud, and the Persian Gulf Potentiates.

Turkish President Erdogan is claiming that he has evidence to prove that the US is supporting terrorist organizations, including al Nusra, Daesh, and the YPG:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said "it's very clear" that the US-led coalition is supporting terrorist groups in Syria, Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS/ISIL) among them.

"They give support to terrorist groups including Daesh (Arabic for IS)," Erdogan said.

Saying that the US have accused Turkey of supporting IS, speaking at a press conference on Tuesday the Turkish leader blamed the US-led coalition for assisting terrorists themselves.

Apart from IS, he also mentioned Kurdish People's Protection Units in northern Syria (YPG) and Democratic Union Party (PYD) as groups supported by the coalition.

"We have confirmed evidence, with pictures, photos and videos," he added.

Best evidence is that he is right on two of those three counts, our military haxs supported Kurdish fighters, and the CIA has been supporting (at least indirectly through its completely incompent grooming of "moderates") al Nusra.

Our policy, which largely consists of incompetent CIA operations running at cross purposes to military and diplomatic efforts that are in large part intended to slavishly follow the dictates of the House of Saud.

This is the Stupidest Thing Written on US Politics This Year

Yes, I am aware that this is a very high bar to clear, but there is no competition here, Carol Felsenthal, writing for Chicago magazine, has made the most mind bogglingly moronic political analysis of this political season.

Baldrick would say that, "It's so cunning that you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel."

Blackadder would say, "Your brain for example- is brain's so minute ……… that if a hungry cannibal cracked your head open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit."

Ms Felsenthal says that Rahm Emanuel should be made head of the DNC:

Not that he asked me, but here’s some advice for Rahm Emanuel: Run for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee.

The new DNC chairman will be elected when all 447 members meet on February 24, but the auditions are on right now.

Get in the mix. Get out of Dodge. Leave behind the burden of running a city tortured by homicides that this year top 700 with a month to go. Leave behind the stubborn unpopularity with African Americans who make up one third of the city’s population. (Even before Laquan McDonald became a household name in Chicago, Rahm’s support among African Americans was eight percent.)

When I first read this, I thought that it was a joke.

I could not believe that anyone was that profoundly and deeply stupid.

If you read the comments, this opinion is nearly universally shared, with such comments as, "Why not Zoidberg?"

The article is garbage, but the comments are amusing.

More Professional Class Arrogance

It turns out that Hillary Clinton's vaunted ground game was complete garbage obscured under mounds of big-data jargon driven bullsh%$:

It is now becoming clear that Clinton’s ground game — the watchword for defenders of her alleged competence — was actually under-resourced and poorly executed. Like so much else in this election, her field strategy was hostage to the colossal arrogance and consequent incompetence of the liberal establishment.

At the heart of the failure was the notion of the “new emerging majority.” According to this argument — pushed by, among others, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira — women, Latinos, blacks, and skilled professionals who support the Democrats were becoming the demographic majority. Thus the traditional white working-class base of the Democratic Party could be sidelined.

Back in July Chuck Schumer summed it up: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

From this theory and strategy flowed a deeply flawed set of tactics, and a badly fumbled get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort.

A labor organizer in Ohio, who wished to remain anonymous, reports that Clinton’s early GOTV effort there focused on Republicans in the mistaken belief a significant number of them could be peeled away. This play largely failed. And it also involved serious opportunity costs: traditional Democratic constituencies like African Americans and the white working class were neglected, and Clinton ended up badly under-performing Obama among both groups, especially in the Rust Belt.

Only in the last two weeks, according to this labor source, did the Democratic Party outreach effort really switch back to traditional Democratic voters. By then, it was too late. Due to lack of preparation, the voter lists guiding the effort had not been updated. Because poorer voters tend to relocate more frequently than home-owning suburbanites, many addresses were wrong. And for lack of more frequent contact the campaign was often unsure about the voters’ current political attitudes.

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The Clinton campaign’s assumption seems to have been that actual people living on the ground in actual places knew less about the population around them than did the data-savvy professionals at campaign headquarters in Brooklyn.

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The computer-obsessed Clinton campaign — having lost touch with people but not big data — seems to have inadvertently turned out Trump voters!

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A point for the Left in all this: the DNC’s ideas are not only bad because they don’t advocate the social-democratic redistribution we would like to see — they are also bad because they don’t work at a purely technical level.

Their arrogance and contempt for the working class produced a flawed political theory, which in turn produced a bad strategy, which in turn produced a tactically inept ground game.

Too busy congratulating themselves and concurring with each other, the Clintonites couldn’t even get the rudiments of the campaign correct.

The larger point here is that smug self-satisfied professionals are neither the basis for governing electorate nor are they a basis for a campaign.

This was shown by the debacles in 1994, 2004, 2010, 2104, and 2016.

It is only when the Republicans step on their own dicks (impeachment, Iraq, financial crisis, Mitt Rmoney) that this strategy, and this class, manages to win elections.

Grownups in the Room, My Ass!

In Syria, at least, it appears that the United States only takes action in its own interest or in that of the Syrian people when they are shamed into doing so.

It appears that our state security apparatus has been thoroughly captured by the House of Saud:

Russia has now managed twice to shame the U.S. into action against Jihadis by publicly demonstrating that the U.S. is not really committed to its promises.

During 2014 and 2015 the U.S. did very little to attack the Islamic State. U.S. strikes hit irrelevant targets like an "ISIS excavator" or some lone truck. Meanwhile ISIS was making millions per day from pumping oil out of the Syrian desert and selling it to Turkish contacts. Hundreds of Turkish tanker trucks assembled near the oil wells in south-east Syria waiting to load. No airstrike would hit them.

The Russians saw this and were appalled. The loudmouth U.S. spoke about its big coalition and attacking ISIS but did essentially nothing. The Russian President Putin then decided to shame the U.S. and Obama personally. On November 15 2015 at the G20 meeting in Turkey he walked around the table and showed satellite pictures to his international colleagues. Hundreds of trucks waiting in the Syrian desert for loading without fear that anyone would harm them:

"I've demonstrated the pictures from space to our colleagues, which clearly show the true size of the illegal trade of oil and petroleum products market. Car convoys stretching for dozens of kilometers, going beyond the horizon when seen from a height of four-five thousand meters," Putin told reporters after the G20 summit.

The very next day on November 16 U.S. airplanes, for the first time, hit truck assemblies near ISIS oil wells in south-east Syria:

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Something similar happened Friday and today. First the Russian Foreign Minister accused the U.S. of complicity with al-Qaeda:

The Russian foreign minister said Russia has "more and more reasons to believe that from the very beginning the plan was to spare Al-Nusra and to keep it just in case for Plan B or stage two, when it would be time to change the regime."

At the daily State Department press briefing on Friday, State spokesman Toner was grilled by multiple reporters over Lavrov's accusations and the lack of U.S. attacks on al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al-Nusra aka Jabhat Fateh al-Sham):

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State spoks Mark Toner admits that no U.S. strike had hit Nusra since March this year. His excuses are paltry and in the end he punts to the Pentagon. He really got his balls squeezed.

But that pressure, initiated by the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, created results. The U.S. was shamed into action and today killed some Nusra number 2: Pentagon: US targets 'core al-Qaida' member in Syria strike.

Al-Qaeda confirmed the strike:

Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, former Nusra Front, says Egyptian alQaeda cleric Abu al-Faraj al-Masri killed in #US led coalition strike in #Idlib

— LBCI News English (@LBCI_News_EN) October 3, 2016

This is the very first strike on al-Qaeda in Syria, a UN designated terrorist organization which the U.S. vowed to fight, since March 2016. It comes a weekend after Lavrov accused the U.S. of not striking Nusra and a grilling at the State Department briefing.

The Russian shaming has again worked.

And in the context of all this, now there are reports  that U.S. has abandoned even the pretense of working with the Russians to fix the situation:

U.S.-Russia relations fell to a new post-Cold War low Monday as the Obama administration abandoned efforts to cooperate with Russia on ending the Syrian civil war and forming a common front against terrorists there, and Moscow suspended a landmark nuclear agreement.

The latter move, scuttling a deal the two countries signed in 2000 to dispose of their stocks of weapons-grade plutonium, was largely symbolic. But it provided the Kremlin with an opportunity to cite a series of what it called “unfriendly actions” toward Russia — from Ukraine-related and human rights sanctions to the deployment of NATO forces in the Baltics.

The United States, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement, has “done all it could to destroy the atmosphere encouraging cooperation.”

Of far more immediate concern, the end of the Syria deal left the administration with no apparent diplomatic options remaining to stop the carnage in Aleppo and beyond after the collapse of a short-lived cease-fire deal negotiated last month.

The State Department announced that it was withdrawing U.S. personnel who have been meeting in Geneva over the past several weeks with Russian counterparts to plan coordinated airstrikes against al-Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists in Syria. The coordination was to start as soon as a cease-fire, begun Sept. 12, took hold and humanitarian aid began to flow to besieged communities where civilians have borne the brunt of Russian-backed President Bashar al-Assad’s response to a five-year effort to oust him.

The House of Saud wants Assad gone, so the US wants Assad gone, even though it it's clear that this would be a complete disaster for the US, NATO, and the Syrian people.

You know that a situation has been well and truly f%$#ed when Bashar al-Assad is the best alternative available.

At every single stage of this catastrophe,  the Obama administration has made the worst possible choices.

This is why there is no good alternative.