Odds and Ends

McCutcheon

Personally, I couldn't care less how many $5200 contributions fat cats pass around to Congressional candidates.  $5200 is chump change, and I'd rather see it publicly donated than filtered anonymously through a  501(c)(4).

Affirmative Action

Also, I couldn't care less whether or not the Obama children or the grandchildren of Stanley O'Neal get preference for college admission.  Let the top schools tap their endowments and bring in students, of whatever race, who never could afford to attend a top school otherwise.  The poor will be overrepresented by blacks and Latinos, but if the Ivy League can pull in some unemployed West Virginia miner's kids, that's great.

Iraq and Afghanistan

Elections do not mean a country is democratic.  In classically corrupt Iraq and Afghanistan, it's pretty obvious.  In the United States, it's less obvious, but just as true.

More Short Subjects

 Ukraine

Russian troops at the border!  NATO jets patrolling the Baltic states!  The Donetsk People's Republic!  Be afraid!  Well, don't be that afraid unless you're an Ukrainian who soon will be living with IMF imposed austerity measures while paying more for Russian natural gas.

All I see is a lot of posturing.  There is no way in hell Russia and NATO will slug it out physically over some antiquated manufacturing plants and wheat fields.

India

It looks like Narendra Modi's BJP party will be pushing the Gandhi family's Congress party aside in the current election cycle, despite Modi's previously undisclosed wife and that little matter of the slaughter of Muslims up in Gujarat back in 2002.  Will Modi govern as the consummate capitalist, the Hindu nationalist, or some combination of the two?  We'll wait and see.

Speaking of Gujarat, I like to point out to people that Muslims often are victims as well as perps (and not only to each other.)  In the Central African Republic, the Christians seem to be the real crazies, for example.  Then there's Cambodia, where the Buddhists are the bad guys.  Then again, there's Palestine.  'Nuff said.

Flight 370

I've read that the missing Malaysian airliner has done more for CNN's ratings than anything since Bush bombed Baghdad.  I will admit I'm curious to know what actually happened (my personal crazy hypothesis involves hacking the airliner's software), but sometimes it happens that you just don't get to know what you want to know.

Short Subjects

The Ryan Budget

Evil.  What else is there to say?

Okay, there's a little more to say.  Ryan claims that eviscerating SNAP and turning Medicare and Medicaid into block grants to the states will generate enormous economic growth.  Needless to say, even he knows he's wrong.  He's not stupid.  He's just evil.

The Supremes

The most recent decision in favor of plutocracy (McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission) really does not do too much more to empower the oligarchs, because they already had all the power.  On the other hand, it makes the very richest of our plutocrats a bit more powerful than the others — and to that I say, "So what?"

If Clarence Thomas (like so many black men of his age) dropped dead tomorrow, it probably wouldn't matter.  Obama would feel obliged to nominate a "moderate," and what the hell good is that?  (Even the ACLU seems to believe that money equals speech.)

Andrew Cuomo

If I had Mario Cuomo's personal email address, I would advise him to slap his boy around a bit.  Here in New York, it's pretty obvious that Andrew is pursuing the Clinton (Bill, mostly) route to the White House (which mostly involves right turns.)

Andy-Boy has been fucking over Bill DeBlasio (that shameless liberal) while sucking up to Wall Street and the hedge fund managers who no longer have any real limits on how much they can funnel to his eventual campaign.  I wouldn't vote for him if he were running against Rush Limbaugh.  (No, I wouldn't vote for Rush.  I guess I'd go Green again, for all the good that does.)

Wrapping up March

It's been a pretty depressing month.  That mudslide out in Oso, Washington, is heartbreaking, and every developer who built a house in that known danger area should be financially wiped out.  It won't happen, of course.

Then, there was the Malaysian Airlines flight.  I can't pretend to have any clue as to what happened, albeit I suspect depressurization had some role — but, then, what do I know?  In both Washington and Peking, there are hundreds of people suffering, wondering what became of their loved ones.

As usual, though, there was more crap.

Crimea

It's part of Russia again, and won't be undone.  In the meanwhile, Ukraine is a mess, economically, and probably about to get worse, thanks to the IMF.  Look forward to shitloads of austerity, Ukrainians.  It's been six years of hell for Greece, and it will be worse for you.  Maybe you can overcharge the Crimeans for water, and make the Russians absorb some of the pain.

Israel and Palestine

Abbas will not agree that Israel is a "Jewish State," because that will accept the second-class status of Arab-Israeli citizens.  I no longer believe in the "two-state solution," if I ever did.  It's time for Israel, the settlements, and the rest of the West Bank to become a single state, with equal rights for all.  The Hassidim and the Arabs can compete to see who will reproduce more like the proverbial rabbits to see who stays in control.  Too bad for the secularists, but that's how the sperm splatters.

Barack and Francis

Okay, they've met, and sort of seem to agree that some degree of income redistribution is needed.  The big difference (apart from differences regarding abortion and birth control) is that Obama's perspective is political and the pope's interest is moral.  (My interest, by the way, is sociological.)

Greece

Supposedly, Greece now has a balanced budget.  Unfortunately, it still has a 25% unemployment rate.  If it experiences any GDP "growth," ordinary Greeks won't see any of it.

More depressing crap.

The Senator and the CIA

Dianne Feinstein is profoundly pissed.  As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she has loyally defended the interests and reputations of the CIA and NSA for years.  No more.

The Committee's investigation into the abuses of the Bush-Cheney years has produced a report that probably would never have been made public.  On the off chance that it might have been made public, CIA operatives hacked into the computers used by Senate staffers and removed some documents the CIA stupidly provided in the first place — most notably, an in-house report on rendition and torture asserting that nothing useful ever came out of such practices.

Now that Feinstein has gone public, however, there is a slight chance that the Senate report — or at least an executive summary — may be released.  Personally, I'd rather see the CIA's in-house report, but you take what you can get these days.  (Well, maybe somebody will send it to Wikileaks.)

Edward Snowden is a hero.  Chelsea (nee Bradley) Manning is a hero.  Certainly, some CIA staff and Bush-Cheney personnel (including, perhaps, Bush and Cheney) belong in jail.  Just don't expect too much of "Professor of Constitutional Law" Barack Obama.

More Ukraine (groan!)

Ukraine, with or without Crimea, is screwed.  Its tiny economy is pretty much on a par with that of Greece, and the IMF can't wait to get in there and impose austerity.  Except for the usual plutocrats, Ukrainians are going to suffer.

So, think about it: if you lived in Crimea, would you be more likely to go for a Russian bailout with continued cheap natural gas, or a whole lot of pain?  Personally, I think I might go with the dreadful Mr. Putin over the parsimonious Ms. Merkel.

Do the "nationalists" in Kiev understand how hooking up with the EU will make Ukrainian poverty so much more obvious to the Ukrainian people?  Yes, much of the blame can be cast on Yanukovych, but it's unlikely that replacing one group of corrupt assholes with another will do much good.

In the meanwhile, the media are not paying enough attention to Syria, Turkey, Venezuela, the CAR, or other places where people are in a hell of a lot more trouble than Crimea.  Pretty clearly, the Russians are going to keep Crimea this time around, the (very) Light Brigade of the USofA and Europe notwithstanding.

After the putsch

I wish I could get away from Ukraine, but that seems unlikely at the moment.  Granted, Yanukovych was a moron, a kleptocrat, and an ineptocrat (I just made that up) as well.  Just the same, it seems pretty obvious that the ouster of Yanukovych was not especially constitutional.

I'm calling the uprising a putsch because "coup d'etat" seems a little too Latinized to me.  I do not think all the "nationalists" are, as Putin would have it, fascists, but I can't be sure of the actual proportion.  Europe is full of fascists these days, so who knows?

The West supports the new government in Ukraine because the friend of my (kind of) friend is (kind of) my friend — and the alternative is (Cold Warriors may gasp now) Russia.  Whatever.  If the Crimeans are dumb enough to want to return to Russian control, I'm inclined to let them have self-determination.  Would they do better as a somewhat more autonomous region of Ukraine?  Given the crappy economic situation Ukraine is in these days, Russia might be the better choice.  Ukraine's current "leaders" already are discussing the kinds of austerity measures they'll be taking to satisfy the IMF.  (Think Greece.)

Clearly, Obama doesn't want to look any more like a wimp than he already does, and the more traditional Republicans want to cast him in that light and find ways to puff out their chests like robins in the springtime — but for all concerned, the best bet is just to let Russia re-absorb Crimea.  Russia already controls Crimea with their military/naval bases, so what's the big difference?

There is no way to know if a new Ukrainian government will be any less inept nor any less corrupt than the Yanukovych regime — nor any less inept nor any less corrupt than the Putin regime — but I think it's for Crimeans to decide which is the lesser of two evils.