Betcha didn’t know the “a” in “Rand” is long:
Is Rand Paul from Scandinavia?
SYNDICATED COLUMN: John Kasich’s Ohio Fantasy
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There’s denial.
There’s self-delusion.
There’s hallucination.
Then there’s John Kasich.
It’s just another political horse-race story about another white guy running for president, but “Kasich Looks to Republican Primaries, ‘Ohio Story’ in Hand” in the March 19th New York Times would have made me fall out of my seat had I not been confined by a seatbelt and squished in by a pair of chubby fellow airplane passengers.
John Kasich is the other Scott Walker, another Republican governor of a Midwestern state contemplating a run for president next year.
Kasich runs Ohio. Ohio is my home state.
Says the Times, Kasich is touting his “Ohio story” to make his case for moving into the Oval Office: “On his watch, Ohio’s $8 billion budget shortfall has turned into a $1.5 billion surplus. He has increased funding for mental health services and takes credit for 352,000 new private sector jobs.”
(Note the qualifier “takes credit for.”)
To be fair, the paper quotes Ohio State Senator Joe Schiavoni, who notes that “nearly half of Ohio households are getting by paycheck to paycheck, and 43% of students in public schools are on free or reduced lunch.”
When obscure governors run for president — Carter in 1976, Clinton in 1992, Bush in 2000 — their case to the nation is: Look what I did for my state! Elect me, and I’ll do the same for the country. The fact that Kasich is bragging about what he did to Ohio indicates that he’s (a) politically suicidal and/or (b) has absolutely no idea what’s going on there, especially in the state’s urban centers.
When I looked it up, I was surprised to learn that Kasich has actually visited Dayton, the southwestern Rust Belt city where I grew up. It’s a mess.
To be fair, this disaster predates Kasich by decades. Like many of my friends, I left after we graduated high school in the early 1980s because there were no jobs. Dayton Press, where they printed magazines like Time and Newsweek, closed. Mead Paper moved away. Department stores were boarded up, abandoned and demolished; factories rusted and rotted and were carted away. It got so you could take a nap in the middle of Main Street without being disturbed by traffic.
But things have only gotten worse under Kasich. Dayton’s population has plunged by 40% since I left. The local economy has been devastated since GM’s huge Moraine Assembly plant closed in 2008, throwing 5,000 people out of work.
Forbes listed Dayton as one of the ten fastest-dying cities in America. Four out of 10 were in Ohio. (The others were Youngstown, Canton and Cleveland.)
Forbes tried to put a bright face on Dayton’s problems: “Cash register and ATM manufacturer NCR is based in Dayton, and one of the region’s major employers, the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, is not going anywhere.”
NCR moved to Atlanta two years later.
Every day I check the Dayton Daily News app on my phone to follow the latest mayhem. Grim accounts of grinding poverty, drug epidemics and random violence are routine. The national story about the boy who found his neighbor’s mummified body while exploring an abandoned house somehow spoke volumes about the collapse of the city of Dayton. Facing foreclosure, the dude had hung himself five years ago. Bank officials never bothered to look inside.
Even the national economy recovered, Dayton’s contracted last year.
Kasich’s “Ohio Story” is a nightmare.
Cleveland, Dayton, Canton and Youngstown aren’t the Buckeye State’s only urban disasters — though they are some of the state’s biggest cities.
Toledo is so broke that its mayor asked residents to cut the grass in public parks. So many Cincinnatians are dying of heroin overdoses that the morgue is facing a budget crisis. The infant mortality rate is soaring in the capital city of Columbus.
Under John Kasich, Ohio is in danger of becoming a failed state.
Just what America needs!
The Ohio political blog Underbund has the goods on Kasich.
“The so-called ‘Ohio Story’ Gov. Kasich is out shilling to ruby red western and southern states will never include the kind of statistics reveled Friday in a report by the Pew Charitable Trust, which painted a different portrait of the state,” writes John Michael Spinelli.
Spinelli quotes the Pew report:
- “In John Kasich’s Ohio, the share of households that are middle class has fallen from 50.9% in 2000 to 45.7% in 2013.
- “Meanwhile, median income has also taken a dive under Gov. Kasich, from an inflation-adjusted amount of $56,437 in 2000 to $48,081 in 2013, a dip of nearly 15%.
- “And the share of households spending at least 30% of income on housing as gone up, from 25% in 2000 to 30% in 2013.”
I have a question for Governor Kasich: If you manage to gain traction in the race for the 2016 Republican nomination, how will you keep reporters away from Dayton?
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
The Woman Who Broke Charles Manson’s Heart
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Originally published by Breaking Modern:
This is the strange, true tale of how a man and woman conspired to steal the body of the (still living) notorious mass murderer Charles Manson.
Sheryl Sandberg’s Choreplay: Not Too Sexy
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Originally published by Breaking Modern:
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, famous for her “Lean In” book and its advice to women to be aggressive in the workplace, is now advising women to institute “choreplay” at home — basically, wives exchanging marital favors in exchange for husbands’ completion of household tasks. Whatever its merits, Choreplay certainly doesn’t sound sexy.
Robert Durst and ‘The Jinx’: Is watching TV the future of detective work?
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Originally published by The Los Angeles Times:
Police forces are constantly looking at new technology and new methods for catching criminals: DNA, drones, flying helicopters over high-crime areas to discourage the bad guys from carrying out their dastardly deeds. Could there be a new means of nailing suspects: watching TV?
Last weekend’s arrest of Robert Durst, the New York real estate scion who has been implicated in the deaths of three people over three decades, makes me wonder about that in this week’s cartoon.
Durst has been suspected of being involved in the 1982 disappearance and presumed death of his first wife and now has been charged with the killing of a friend, Susan Berman, in Los Angeles in 2000. He shot and dismembered a neighbor in Texas in 2001 but was acquitted, claiming it was self-defense.
While filming a six-part HBO documentary called “The Jinx,” Durst apparently failed to realize that his microphone was still “hot” (live) when he went to the restroom. Talking to himself, he asks rhetorically, like something out of a tale by Edgar Allan Poe, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
It isn’t clear whether this qualifies as a confession, at least enough to sway a jury, or whether it’s admissible in court. It also isn’t known whether this statement led to the request to the FBI by Los Angeles police to arrest Durst at a New Orleans hotel where he was staying under a false name, and to ask that he be extradited to California. Whatever the details, the revelation in the sixth and final episode of the documentary was pretty much as blockbuster as blockbuster gets – and it probably isn’t going to help him if and when he gets to trial.
Though the families of Durst’s alleged victims and the detectives who have been trying to nab him for years are no doubt pleased that he may be about to face justice for his alleged crimes, they must be a little frustrated that it was a true-crime documentary rather than traditional police work that finally did the job. That said, the police contributed mightily to where things currently stand.
The Durst case is unusual in several respects, none more than the open-mike gaffe. Generally speaking, alleged serial killers with a run dating back to the Reagan years don’t stay free by absentmindedly blabbing — even if it is to themselves in that most private of places.
In the end, it may not have been so much the cliché that Durst wanted to get caught as his succumbing to his outsize ego by agreeing to do the documentary and by taunting the authorities, like a real-life Hannibal Lecter. “Bob doesn’t seem to feel totally comfortable unless he’s at risk,” one of the documentarians told an interviewer. “He seems to like to put himself at risk. It may make him feel more vital. It may be something he’s just compelled to grasp for. In this case, we felt he had a kind of compulsion to confess.”
Sadly for detectives, murder suspects aren’t usually wired for thrills.
Why The GOP Letter To Iran Is Such A Huge, Major Deal
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Originally published by Breaking Modern:
In a supremely strange move this week, 47 Republican senators took the unprecedented step of directly writing the leader of a foreign government in order to get in the way of a US president’s foreign policy talks with it. This is even though the US constitution, as any ninth grader has learned in social studies, puts a sitting US president in charge of foreign policy.
In its letter to the Iranian government, the GOP senators said: Don’t bother cutting a deal with President Obama and the United States right. Because, it said, the next “Republican president” will just reverse any agreement “with the stroke of a pen.”
This astounded news watchers around the world. Here’s why this development is so disturbing and why you should follow these developments closely.
But first, let’s back up and look at the Iranian reaction to the letter. It certainly didn’t do much to dissuade Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif from continuing with US talks to limit nuclear weapons production in Iran.
In a public statement, Zarif said he wasn’t buying it, but that he now has a stronger understanding of constitutional separation of powers under the American system than the signatories of the letter do.
Confused in the USA
As American legal scholars and political analysts struggle to get their heads around the GOP letter and its implications, Iran’s Zarif offered some theories. The Republican senators, Zarif said, must “not understand international law,” said Zarif, a professor of international law, and they must not understand the US constitution, either. Either they are not “fully cognizant of the nuances of their own constitution when it comes to presidential powers in the conduct of foreign policy.”
Ouch. And he’s right, as any ninth grader making a B in the social studies could tell you straight away.
Under law and by custom, the executive branch is in charge of foreign policy – including treaty negotiations, which this is not.
While the Senate specifically and the legislative branch in general have a consulting role to play, especially in the ratification of treaties, the kind of agreement being contemplated between Obama and Iran is not one of them. In fact, President Bush arrived at a similar deal with Libya, which did not require congressional consent.
Furthermore, presidents historically honor their predecessor’s international promises regardless of their political party. They have to, for all the obvious reasons.
So, bottom line, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)’s notorious “bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran” plan will have to wait.
A Sign of Political Decline?
US lawmakers, for the first time anyone can remember, have publicly set out to undermine a sitting president during talks with a longtime adversary are astounding.
US Vice President Joe Biden accurately characterized the implications in this statement:
This letter sends a highly misleading signal to friend and foe alike that our commander in chief cannot deliver on America’s commitments — a message that is as false as it is dangerous.”
Of all people, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, got right to the heart of the issue.
The GOP letter, the Ayatollah said, is “a sign of a decline in political ethics and the destruction of the American establishment from within.”
Don’t All Countries Stick To Foreign Commitments Post Elections?
Forgotten in this tempest of partisan lunacy is a fact alluded to in Khamenei’s statement: “All countries, according to the international norms, remain faithful to their commitments even after their governments change.”
Iran knows this well. Why? Because if Iran hadn’t followed such “international norms,” it would be free to develop any nuclear weapons program they felt like, no matter what it had agreed to in the past. And that means there would never be grounds for the United States or any other country to impose economic sanctions on Iran.
This is why international observers in the US, Europe and in the Middle East are so blown away by the GOP letter.
The agreement that prohibits an Iranian nuclear weapons program is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran signed it in 1968, and agreed to an inspections regime in 1974.
Ah, but that was under the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The Shah was deposed in the 1979 Islamic revolution. The new government, the one currently led by Ayatollah Khamanei, nevertheless agreed to honor the international agreements signed by its predecessor, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
And this makes the Republican letter still more outrageous.
Why You Should Care
What you are watching now is a most bizarre spectacle. You’ve got the United States playing holier than thou, screaming to high heavens that Iran can’t be trusted and that the country poses a grave danger of developing nuclear weapons that it will sell or fire at Israel or even at us.
Yet Iran is and has been honoring a nuclear treaty signed by an entirely different government, one that was overthrown back in 1979.
But now you have 47 lawmakers contacting the leader of a foreign government directly, saying that, unlike Iran, anything the President of the United States negotiates with foreign countries becomes null and void when he leaves office. And this is not even after a full-fledged revolution, mind you, but just after an election.
Whatever moral high ground as United States once held on the international stage is collapsing into a deep deep valley. I’ll be watching these developments for you in the days and weeks to come.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Goofus Hillary vs. Gallant Hillary
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I’m calling bullshit on Hillary.
Not on Hillary herself. On the media’s portrayal of her.
“The private Hillary is as warm and charming a woman as anyone could conjure up. The public Hillary sometimes seems brittle, with the judgment of a raging rhinoceros,” writes fellow syndicated columnist Ann McFeatters.
I don’t mean to pick on McFeatters. Everyone (in the media) says the same thing: Hillary Clinton is so awesome one-on-one or maybe one-on-six, in private. For example, Mark Leibovich says she’s “quite human and funny” in private.
She’s been a high-profile national politician for more than 20 years. Why hasn’t she figured out how to charm the American public on TV?
These repeated accounts of Hillarity are less than reliable, issued as they are by the kind of people in a position to have met Hillary Clinton, which pretty much guarantees that they’re boring and bland and not very smart — the kind of people who think Obama means well and that Jon Stewart is a laff riot.
But let’s say it’s true. Who will we be voting for or against next year — Public Goofus Hillary or Private Gallant Hillary?
If you evaluate presidential candidates based on how much fun they’d be to share a drink or six with, Hillary presents a trust dilemma. Who wants to throw back cold ones with greedy tone-deaf Public Hillary, worth $20 million if she’s worth a dime, as she whines that she’s not “truly well off“?
But what if it’s true that Private Hillary rolls salt-of-the-earth style, wickedly funny and cool? Should you take a leap of faith, taking the word of the same press corps that gave us the Iraq War, and support the real — albeit secret and seen by few — Hillary?
Perhaps you’re one of those voters who views the presidency as a role to fill, and presidential elections as a casting call. For you, the POTUS is America’s representative on the world stage. He or she has to look — and feel — presidential. Your ideal prez would exude FDR’s charisma, wear Reagan’s suits, have Obama’s calm and JFK’s (or Mitt Romney’s) hair.
For you image voters too, Private vs. Public Hillaries are a problem.
Public Hillary is a nonstarter. She embodies the George W. Bush school of bull-in-a-China-shop diplomacy: the last thing we need is another war, one caused by her deployment of the same nasty exasperated expression she wore at the press conference where she tried to talk away her destruction of four years of electronic archives of the foreign policy history of the United States.
On the other hand, Loveable Private Hillary could bond with Vladmir Putin and other troublesome world leaders, banging out peace treaties and favorable trade agreements at karaoke bars from Pyongyang to Moscow. But what if Private Hillary is as much of a chimera as Saddam’s WMDs? Public Hillary Who Is Also Private Hillary could piss off so many old enemies, and make so many new ones, that we’d be fending off ICBMs in no time.
Or maybe you’re like me, an issues voter. As long as he or she supports the right policies and fight against the bad ones, you don’t care if a politician drinks, or womanizes, or drinks and drives a woman to the bottom of a pond. Show me the bills, dammit!
If you’re in it for substance over style, the Tale of Two Hillaries is even more difficult to tease out.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd calls Hillary a “feminist icon wallowing in regressive Middle Eastern states’ payola.” I’ll focus on the “feminist icon” part: what, aside from being a woman, has Hillary Clinton done for women? She has never proposed a significant piece of women’s rights legislation. Her 2008 presidential bid marketed her, not as a woman, but as a Margaret Thatcher-style “Iron Lady,” a man in woman’s clothing. Only now, echoing Obama’s double-win on the strength of historical symbolism, is she planning to emphasize the plight of girls and women in a patriarchal society.
On policy, Public and Private Hillary blend together. Not because she’s integrated. Because she’s a mess of contradictions: a liberal who supports wars of choice, obsessed with her own privacy as she runs interference for the NSA.
Even if Gallant is the real Hillary, and all that Goofus stuff is either her cynical attempt to work the system in a man’s world or reflects a personality unable to connect with people in large groups, I can’t vote for her.
She supports war and drones and the NSA. Who cares if she’s a barrel of laughs behind closed doors? So was Stalin.
Anyway, my invitation to hang out with her appears to have gotten lost in the mail.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
If It Doesn’t Die Right Away, Apple’s New Macbook Is Amazing
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Originally published by ANewDomain:
Apple’s new MacBook is amazingly tiny, thin and light, weighing it at just two pounds. But something’s missing — something you might miss. The three and a half-year old MacBook Pro I’m typing on now features two USBs, a Thunderbolt, a FireWire and a Kensington lock slot.
Only one survives. TechCrunch reports,
This MacBook only has a single USB-C and it does everything from charging, to sending video out and transporting data … It’s the only port on the computer meaning owners cannot charge the computer and an iPhone at the same time. It’s not possible to output video to a monitor and input data from an external drive — at least not without a hub.”
Just what I need, another Apple video port that won’t connect to the year-old (i.e., ancient) digital projectors owned by any of the libraries, schools or bookstores where I give talks. Of course that’s a problem easily (though annoyingly) solved by the purchase of another overpriced, easily lost, unreliable adaptor.
For my money the big story here is Apple’s longstanding unwillingness and inability to address the issue of battery power.
Mad with Power
Apple markets portable devices that can’t be carried around more than a few hours without needing to be plugged in. This makes said devices practically as portable as one of those “portable TVs” that weighed 60 pounds but had a handle on top. By that standard, the earth is portable if you attach a big handle to the North Pole.
With moderate use, my iPhone 5C sometimes makes it six whole hours without running out of juice. (And yes, I turn off my apps, use airplane mode, adjust my settings to lower light and never stream video or play games, just like all the articles about saving battery power advise.) This, I submit, is unreasonable for a phone. If you remember, the original reason you bought your first cellphone was that it would be perfect in an emergency — like your car breaking down in the boonies.
Alas. During the recent cold snap here in the Northeast, I actually watched my iPhone go from 100 percent charge to 5 percent in an hour. In an hour! Because, as Apple says, you’re not supposed to use it when it’s under 32 degrees, which, for those who don’t know, happens during the season of winter.
Even when it was new, my laptop never made it more than three hours of doing something wild and crazy, like keeping Word and Firefox open at the same time. Photoshop? Fugheddaboutit.
Crappy battery life on Apple products has turned me into Rae Dawn Chong in “Quest for Fire.” I’m constantly and obsessively searching for power, but looking a lot less cute. I carry a Mophie “juice pack” in case of, you know, an automobile mishap. When I fly, I favor carriers like Virgin America, which have power outlets. (Inexplicably, they have two outlets per row of three seats, which can lead to ugly scrambles between the knees. On the plus side, it keeps you limber and might lead to surprising romantic moments with other passengers.) At Starbucks, I’m the guy staring through — not at — your crotch to see if there’s a plug two feet above the baseboards.
Apple’s low-battery problems are well-documented. And, it turns out, intentional. Chief company designer Jony Ive admits the company intentionally ships its products with less capacity than rival Android. From the Financial Times:
Talking of performance, when the issue of the frequent need to recharge the iPhone is raised, answers that it’s because it’s so light and thin that we use it so much and therefore deplete the battery. With a bigger battery it would be heavier, more cumbersome, less ‘compelling.’
In other words, it’s our fault.
As much as I hate to admit it, the man has a point. As long as people keep paying top dollar for the smallest, lightest whatever, despite the fact that the power situation is objectively unacceptable, Apple has no reason to change.
Here’s What the Really Big Deal Is About the Apple Watch
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Originally published by Breaking Modern:
People who have spent time with Apple Watch were startled to learn that they found themselves using their iPhones (you have to use it in conjunction with an iPhone) far less than ever before, sometimes hardly at all. So now we have something different to get distracted by. That’s not a big difference for you. But it’s a big difference to Apple.
