Hasta La Gadget!

Intercepted conversations between representatives of the Iranian and Argentine governments point to a long pattern of secret negotiations to reach a deal in which Argentina would receive oil in exchange for shielding Iranian officials from charges that they orchestrated the bombing of a Jewish community center in 1994.

Without a doubt, the biggest surprise from today’s Windows 10 keynote at Microsoft’s Redmond campus was the outfit unveiling its HoloLens headset. Dubbed as the “first fully untethered, holographic computer” the device and its capabilities looked pre…

The newborn lamb lay alone in the grass, bleating feebly, abandoned by a mother far out of earshot. As dusk neared and cold gusts heralded a hailstorm, it seemed unlikely that the animal would survive the night. It was certain that no one would come to [his] rescue.

On Jan. 20, the New York Times broke the story of the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center in Nebraska, which is tormenting animals — with more than $22 million in taxpayer dollars for 2014.

At this lab, workers without medical or veterinary degrees are chopping open animals, “sometimes doing two or more major surgical operations on the same animal.”

And to repeat: Not a single one of these workers has a medical or veterinary degree.

The facts and anecdotes uncovered by the Times are gut-wrenching.

For example, a former worker tells of a pig who was “thrashing and gagging” as another worker tried to extract lung tissue from her. The worker doing the operation, “seemed to be getting some kind of enjoyment out of this thing, talking and shouting at the animal, ‘How do you like that, pig?'”

For five decades, this place has been tormenting animals in taxpayer-funded experiments that are absolutely loathsome in their cruelty. As just a few more examples:

• For 30 years, the center’s unqualified workers have been forcing cows to have multiple calves, who “often emerge weakened or deformed, dying in such numbers that even meat producers have been repulsed.”
• For the past decade, it has been allowing baby sheep to be “killed by predators, harsh weather and starvation.” The lab’s scientist’s “withheld help for the newborns, typically leaving them in the pastures — till death, if necessary — to test whether mothers would respond to the young ones’ growing desperation.” One-quarter to one-third die, including by being pelted to death from hail storms.
• Care is so pathetic that “of the 580,000 animals the center has housed since 1985 … at least 6,500 have starved.” More than one percent — have starved to death!
• “In one trial aimed at creating larger lambs, pregnant ewes were injected with so much of the male hormone testosterone that it began to deform their babies’ genitals, making urination difficult.” Many of these animals died.

Perhaps the most disturbing anecdote from the Times story is of a teenage cow, her “head locked in a cage-like device to keep her immobile,” with broken back legs, mounted by as many as six bulls for hours, until she died.

With our tax dollars.

It should go without saying that the federal government should not be spending tens of millions of dollars to do research and development for the meat industry. It should also go without saying that if something would be a felony if it happened in someone’s basement, it should not be legal — and labelled science — because it happens in a laboratory.

Kudos to the Times for some powerful investigative journalism. Now it’s up to Congress to shut down this torture chamber.

Because it is both playoff season in the football world and State Of The Union season in the political world, I felt it was high time to mix a metaphor or two. Because even though we’re at the very earliest stage of the 2016 presidential race, it seems like the Democrats are pretty close to locking in “home-field advantage” on the subject of wages and inequality in America. By which I mean Democrats will be debating Republicans on very familiar territory for the Democratic Party, and very foreign soil for the Republicans. As in sports, this in no way guarantees a victory in “The Big Game,” but it certainly does help the Democrats’ chances.

While President Obama’s “middle class economics” speech last night certainly laid down a few markers for Democrats in 2016 and beyond, the real reason it now seems Democrats will be playing on familiar turf comes from Republicans. There may be multiple reasons why there has been such a dramatic shift in Republican rhetoric in the past few weeks, but the shift is undeniably noticeable and drastic. One of the big reasons Republicans are now complaining about economic inequality is that Mitt Romney is thinking about making one last try, and he got burned so badly last time around because he kept saying laughably plutocratic and out-of-touch things on the campaign trail (the most memorable being his rant against the “47 percent,” of course). Mitt at least seems halfway serious about mounting another bid for the White House now, and he’s obviously talked to a few advisors about the image problem he had last time, so he’s shaken his own personal Etch-A-Sketch and drawn a new picture of compassion for the poor and champion of the middle class. How well this will work is anyone’s guess, really, since all things are possible in the political world. But that seems to be where the Republican trend started — with Mitt re-inventing himself one more time.

There may be deeper reasons why other Republicans took up the cry, though. The Republican Party as a whole has become, in the public’s eye, a party completely in line with Romney’s former image. The GOP is seen as the party of Wall Street, not Main Street, in other words, and this has been increasingly true in the past decade or so. Fresh new Republican voices (and a few stale old ones as well) know that this will hurt the party over the long run, so they are looking for a way to reach out to middle class voters. The answer may even be simpler, though, because it may be a last-gasp effort at knee-jerkism. Since everything President Obama ever does is (of course) going to wind up in ruin, there is just no way that the economy could possibly be doing better now. Maybe it’s not knee-jerkism, but head-in-the-sandism instead (can you even jerk your knee with your head in the sand?). In an effort to debunk all the positive economic numbers America is currently experiencing (Republican strategists figure), we’ll seek out the bad news among the good, and highlight it. Wages aren’t going up? Incomes are getting more unequal? Well, there you go — that must be Obama’s fault. They leap to this conclusion and then hastily prepare their talking points: Republicans will fix wage inequality!

By doing so, however, they are utterly ceding the home-field advantage to Democrats. At this early point, I don’t even think many of them have realized the magnitude of this tactical political error, either. The reason I’m so confident in awarding the home field to Democrats is that they’ve been thinking about things like wages and inequality for decades now. All the way back to Ronald Reagan, at the very least. They have thought about various policy proposals to fix the problem (or at least ameliorate it a bit), and have a wide range of ideas to choose from. Obama made his choices from this long menu of possibilities and came up with the items in his speech last night: free community college, paid sick and maternity leave, guaranteed overtime pay for the middle class, a rise in the minimum wage, fair pay for women, tax credits for childcare and for working parents. He could easily have chosen eight or 10 other equally interesting ideas to make wage-earners’ lives better, because the Democrats have so many possibilities waiting on the shelf.

What do Republicans have? Not much, and even that’s being polite. “We’ll give your boss a big tax cut; there will be trickling; then your life might get better.” That’s about it, really. Or, to give their core idea a slightly better spin: “Everyone will be rich one day if we give your boss a big tax cut.” That “everyone will be rich one day” is actually not too far off the mark of how Republicans think they’ll be able to sell more tax cuts for the wealthy, by dressing them up in wage-inequality language. If Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or any of the other contenders really want to go beyond this, they’re going to have to create some policy ideas out of whole cloth, because such ideas just don’t currently exist on the Republican shelf. Perhaps they’ll surprise me and truly come up with some sort of original conservative policies to help working people, but at this point I consider that a pretty long shot. But the point is, whether bad or good, any such policy plan is going to have to be created from scratch.

Democrats, on the other hand, not only have a raft of ideas to choose from, they can even fine-tune their choice. Progressive and populist ideas run the gamut among Democrats, ranging from timid and incremental to massive and radical, and everything in between. They can even choose an idea on the scale of how effective it might be, or how wide the reach any new benefit will have.

One thing worth noting is that if this does come to pass and Republicans decide to run the 2016 race on a Democratic playing field, Democrats have (so far) been pretty good about picking ideas that are very easy to describe and also very easy to understand. Take free community college. That’s three words. And no further explanation is really necessary to get the idea. You could quibble that it should really be stated as “free community college for all,” but that’s mere icing on the three-word cake. Now picture how Republicans are going to fight the idea. Explaining why free community college is a bad idea is going to quickly lead Republicans down a dead-end alley that Democrats usually find themselves trapped in — off in the wonky weeds trying to explain with graphs and charts why their position is the only one to have, while their opponents just smile and repeat three words (perhaps followed up by: “It’s the right thing to do,” just for emphasis). Most of the new Obama proposals are similarly short and sweet: Paid sick leave. Paid maternity leave. Guaranteed overtime pay. This is a notable reversal from historic trends, where Republicans have run circles around Democrats in the “keep it simple, stupid” category, and it also gives Democrats an advantage, for now (perhaps “having the wind at your back while kicking a field goal on your home field”). Republicans could rally on this one, though, as they are the masters of this sort of thing, so this advantage may evaporate eventually — but that would require Republicans to come up with their own proposals with equally snappy references.

Republicans were already at a disadvantage heading into 2016, since one of their core issues to whip up their base is about to fade away like the morning mists. It is hard to even calculate the political hay that has been successfully made by Republicans on the subject of gay marriage over the course of the past quarter-century. For more than two decades, it was a winning issue for them, guaranteed to turn out angry voters to the polls in droves.That all shifted under Republicans’ feet, and after the Supreme Court rules this June, it will no longer be an effective political issue. Once the court has ruled, there is only one possible remedy, and that is a constitutional amendment. This is a complete impossibility, politically, because the public’s attitude has changed so significantly so fast. Most Republican candidates will secretly breathe a sigh of relief when the court does rule, because they know that this will give them a free pass to stop talking about the issue, which is killing their chances of ever getting the youth of America to vote for them again. But gay marriage has been so central to the Republican culture wars that it’s hard to see what could easily replace it. Another round of anti-flag-burning, perhaps?

Gay marriage in all 50 states will leave a big hole in the Republican campaign playbook. If they’re serious about filling it with middle class policies and poverty-fighting, it’s hard to see how they’re going to square that circle with their pro-business, pro-wealthy conservatism. They’ll be playing on the Democratic home field if they even seriously make the attempt. All Hillary Clinton (the expected Democratic nominee) will have to do is start vocally supporting whichever of the president’s ideas she likes, or perhaps proposing a few of her own to show some “distance” from him. Whether she chooses from Obama’s ideas or Elizabeth Warren’s ideas or anyone else’s, a wealth of proposals are there for the picking. Republicans are going to have to work hard to even create their own ideas in this realm.

Obama gave a rousing speech last night (I posted my own snap reactions to it on my site, if you’re interested). He called for a middle class agenda that pretty much any Democrat could get behind, at least in part. It was very easy for him to do so, since there were so many good ideas to choose from. Republicans have a lot of catching up to do in this regard, if they really want to enter the debate over wage inequality in any sort of serious way. But even if they do come up with a plan, they’ll be playing on their opponent’s home field on the subject, throughout the entire election.

Chris Weigant blogs at:

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American politics has come to occupy a spectral plane of reality that bears little resemblance to the universe of fact and logic many of us are accustomed to. President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday — and the widespread reaction to it — is the ultimate confirmation that the gap between the virtual and the actual is unbridgeable. They no longer connect by any leap of imagination.

Obama presented Americans with a strongly argued case to press a progressive agenda that encompasses taxes, social spending and a variety of ancillary programs. It was rooted in the philosophical soil that has sustained the Democratic Party for nearly a century. It meets crying national needs. It conforms to principles of justice and decency that hold the Republic together. Unfortunately, it all amounted to little more than an exercise in rhetoric under current political realities.

Those realities are the ineluctable outcome of the Obama presidency’s abandonment of those very ideas from the day he entered the White House. The speech is six years and three elections too late — literally behind the times. That raises serious questions as to the authenticity of the apparent conviction with which it was delivered and, therefore, the president’s motivations in deciding now to assume the mantle of reformer that he unceremoniously discarded after the 2008 election. Has he experienced an epiphany, like Paul on the road to Damascus? Surely, he is on the road constantly at home as well as abroad but we know nothing of any stunning incidents occurring on Air Force One. Is he trying to bolster the Democrats’ chances in 2016 in a state of remorse of how low he has brought them in successive congressional elections and in state house races? Or, is Obama engaging in a campaign to shape his image for the afterlife of a former President in the public limelight and for posterity?

The last is most plausible. It also is the explanation ignored by the commentariat who are content to take the President’s declarations at face value. They, too, occupy a spectral space in which whatever happens today is disconnected from the recent past, to be viewed in existential isolation from the protagonist or his setting, and whose meaning for the incoherence of American public life goes unrecognized.

For those whose historical memory is short, here’s a quick cantor through the Obama record.

This is the man whose response to the Great Financial Crisis was to appoint to every position of authority persons who themselves had participated directly in its occurrence or its facilitation: Rubin, Summers, Geithner, et al. Obama actively opposed and succeeded in thwarting every serious legislative or regulatory attempt to reform the system. He is the man who, along with Attorney general Eric Holder, refused to pursue criminal prosecution of even the most egregious miscreants and then promulgated the doctrine that they could be made immune from prosecution if conviction might damage the national economy. Obama is the man who has put Social Security and Medicare in jeopardy by committing himself to deals with the Republican leadership that would markedly cut back benefits under both programs. This is the man who reneged on a pledge to workers that he would back moves that favor unionization. This is the man whose version of health care reform ruled out a public option but instead was built on a series of behind the scenes deals with Big Pharma and the health industry that pads their profits. This is the man who has all but declared war on public school teachers in stigmatizing them as the cause of what ails American education while campaigning relentlessly for the dubious panacea of profit driven charter schools.

One can go on and on. Obama has governed as what used to be called a Moderate Republican – leaving the long-standing, natural Democratic constituency in the dust. Even now, simultaneously with his progressive pivot, he has given two gift wrapped presents to the financial interests: one, lobbying with Jaime Dimon to gut a key provision of Dodd-Frank that put a barrier, albeit feeble, between the big banks trading on their account and trading on clients’ account; and, two, working with Wall Streeter Mary Jo White whom he appointed as head of the Security Exchange Commission to void regulations that were designed to restrict trading in volatile derivatives.

In the State of the Union speech itself, Obama made a strong plea for acquiescence is his prized Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement (and implicitly its Euro-American) that he has been negotiating in concert with business leaders while keeping all other parties including Democratic Congressional leaders in the dark. The proposed treaty’s main impact and intent is to undercut all national authorities’ regularity power across the board by ensconcing a corporate right to challenge any regulation in a supranational court whose members they would help choose.

There is no conceivable way that an all court press for passage of the TPP can be reconciled with Obama’s new-found progressive philosophy and vow of a dedication to reducing inequality in America.

What of the political implications for 2016? Certainly, the publicity given progressive ideas and the argument for them means that the issue cannot be ignored by the candidates — as Democrats like Hillary Clinton as well as Republicans have been inclined to do. The latter will use the current legislative session to undermine any concrete proposals to implement the agenda, will try to discredit the underlying ideas, and distract by stressing various social issues that play to their strength and their constituency. The challenge for the Democrats is greater. For the Clintons turned their backs years again on the very thinking and interests that the State of the Union speech is reanimating. Hillary thought nothing of pocketing $400,000 from Goldman Sachs for sitting next to Lloyd Blankfein on a stage for half an hour soothing an audience of fat cat clients.

Now, that image could be a liability were she to face a rival in the Democratic primaries. That looks unlikely, though, now that Elizabeth Warren has taken her name out of consideration and nobody else is stretching in the paddock. There is Bernie Sanders — a genuine liberal who could make things very hot for Clinton in debates. Indeed, one could argue that such might be the best thing that could happen for her. Her blemished image and limp public persona would be invigorated and Democratic voters reenergized. But Sanders is a maverick outsider.

Was this Obama’s Machiavellian intent? That seems highly improbable on several counts. Obama always has been a political loner who distances himself from his party. That was true in 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014. In fact, back in 2010 his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was smugly telling confidants that a Republican victory in the House would be to the advantage of the White House since President Obama no longer would be constrained to placate the progressives whom they both disdained.

So back to the question of why Obama “did it?” Following the Sherlock Holmesian axiom that once you have eliminated all other possibilities, whatever is left – however bizarre – is the truth, we are left with the conclusion that it was all about Obama. His imagined “legacy,” his public profile over the next 30 years in the public eye, what will get him the attention and adulation that he craves. Perhaps, he simply concluded that recasting himself as a liberal carried better possibilities than the fuzzy picture of a middle-of-the-roader who played footsy with the business establishment, kow-towed to the Pentagon and the Intelligence agencies, and couldn’t ends the endless wars on terror.

By retracing his steps, he hopes to place himself before the public as he was in 2008 — a Messiah without message or mission — but a Messiah nonetheless.