In this weekâs âParade of Bad Newsâ: Yes, the Wrongologist remembers where he was on 9/11, but where we are today is way more important:
Mr. Obama must plan carefully whenever the âCoalitionâ gets together:
Nobody said building an ISIS âstrategyâ would be easy:
After the speech, the âcoalition of the willingâ didnât include the 535 Commanders-in-Chief in Congress:
In other news, hereâs why the NFL didnât get it right the first time:
It seems that we have nearly reached peak moron, but since WWIII ainât gonna start itself, Mr. Putin and the guys at ISIS are trying to do what they can to move us in that direction:
NATO is happy to get back to an enemy it understands:
Putin wants peace with Ukraine, now that he owns about 1/3 of the country:
Turning to domestic news, on Monday, the Senate will vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. The Democracy for All amendment, Senate Joint Resolution 19, allows governments to distinguish between people and corporations. It wonât pass in the House, so the Koch Brothers will be free to continue marching the Country toward Fascism.
The public finally got behind the issue of personal privacy when nude celebrity photos were hacked from the cloud:
And the fight we really want to win goes on:
Finally, RIP Joan Rivers:
Difficult week. Ferguson MO, Iraq and RIP Robin:
The media is making a thing of Robin Williamsâs suicide. Media coverage and commentary is wall-to-wall, just like when Seymour Phillip Hoffman ODâed.
They ignore that CNN says that there are 22 suicides a DAY among Americaâs veterans. What has happened to proportionality in the press?
A study published this week in Health Affairs states that spending on behavioral health disorders is expected to decline from 7.4% of total health spending in 2009 to 6.5% in 2020, while actual dollars spent are projected to increase from $172 billion in 2009 to $281 billion in 2020. More needs to be done.
From the police blotter:
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We heard on Friday that Michael Brown may have stolen cigars from a convenience store. The media says that it shows the kid was no saint. But people arenât shot for shoplifting, they get arrested and need help from lawyers like these philadelphia criminal lawyers to help reduce their charges. This is despite the fact that shoplifting costs American retailers approximately $14B annually. Once again, the media are conflating the dead boy and his possible crime with the right of the people to free assembly to protest a grievance against their government, as well as the threat that is posed to ordinary Americans by militarized police.
The Ice Bucket Challenge throws cold water on Obama:
We revise our view of Iraqi history:
Iraq owns us. 4 US presidents in row have been called to action there:
On Sunday, we reach for humor and less seriousness, but lately, the cartoons arenât funny, they tend toward the ironic, or are downright scary. Maybe that is understandable, since we are back in Iraq. ISIS is now as bad as or worse, than Al-Qadea, which might be good news for the Wrongologistâs defense stocks!
Why is the Iraqi government outgunned by a rogue group of thugs?
Anyone?…Bueller?
Expanding âArabiaâ to the wider Islamic world, we Americans have been on very sandy ground, from Kabul to Baghdad to Benghazi. And, like quicksand, we canât escape:
⢠Weâre working with Iran in Iraq, but against them in Israel and in Syria
⢠Iran is working with Palestinians in Israel, but against them in Syria
⢠Turkey a member of NATO, supports Hamas against Israel, but is against Assad
Nations in the Middle East are frequently allies on one front and enemies on the other. Somewhere in that paradox is the solution. Now that we are out of Afghanistan, will we have to fight the new terror group of the month, or the new terror group of the year? Can we be the police department to the world, yet keep our social contract and our domestic freedoms intact?
Military recruiters are about the same the world over:
T.E. Lawrence â Britainâs âLawrence of Arabiaâ, warned that Arabia is not a hospitable place:
Iraq didnât stop being a cesspool when we left;
Reingagement is a tough equation to solve:
In other news, the leaders of Africa came to DC to hear our new pitch:
Finally, Jim Brady died this week. The Wrongologistâs company was a vendor to the Brady Center, and played a very small part in building public support for the Brady Bill:
For those on vacation, or without access to the Interwebs, here is a summation of this weekâs wrong:
⢠The Senate couldnât pass a bill to impose taxes on companies that move overseas
⢠The House didnât vote on Mr. Boehnerâs immigration bill because Sen. Ted Cruz blocked it
⢠We brokered a 72-hour cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that lasted 90 minutes
⢠The Times of Israel took down a blog post that made a case for genocide
⢠Mr. Obama admitted that we torture
That’s not a lot of humor to work with, but here are the best. Congress hurries to not finish their work:
Ted Cruz driving baby Boehner:
Genocide of Palestinians is contemplated in the Times of Israel:
Yochanan Gordon framed his premise as “a question for all the humanitarians out there”:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel. We have already established that it is the responsibility of every government to ensure the safety and security of its people. If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?
Umm, wasn’t that the excuse Nazis gave the world about Jews, Gypsies, and Homosexuals?
And Mr. Netanyahu told the White House not to force a truce with Palestinian militants on Israel. He apparently advised the Obama administration “not to ever second guess me again” on the matter.
So, it looks increasingly like we need a 3-State solution:
In yesterdayâs speech, President Obama said âWe tortured some folksâ and that âwe shouldnât be too sanctimoniousâ. The President:
It is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job those folks had… A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriotsâŚThat needs to be understood and accepted. We have to as a country take responsibility for that so hopefully we donât do it again in the future.
Apparently, some people didnât agree:
"We tortured some folks." Nope. Actually the CIA and the military did that. Don't try to put that shit on the rest of us, Obama.
— onekade (@onekade) August 1, 2014
What would cause Mr. Obama to make this “apology” for torture? Has he lost touch, or is he living in a bubble of intelligence advisers that he canât or wonât fire?
This is reminiscent of the way that J. Edgar Hoover controlled (or intimidated) presidents in what we used to think was another age. Who, or what, is making this president say such crap, and not take what are to most of us, obvious actions?
A corporatist meme took a face plant this week. Bloomberg Business Week charted CEO pay vs. stock market return, based on data supplied by the executive compensation consultants, Equilar. It shows that there is very little correlation between CEO pay and company performance.
Equilar ranked the salaries of 200 highly paid CEOs against their companyâs stock market return, and the scattering of data looks mostly random, implying that CEO performance appears to have little to do with CEO compensation. The graph plots the relative ranking of 2013 stock market return against the relative ranking of 2013 CEO total compensation. If you go to Bloomberg, the chart below is interactive. You can hover over a dot and see information on the CEO and company.
Bottom line: there’s essentially no link between how well CEOs perform and how well they are paid:
Based on this, it seems that corporate boards are unable to predict how well their chosen CEO candidate will do once on the job, since the trend line, which didnât plot in this screen capture, shows that the correlation is ~1%. That explodes the myth that a primary metric used by company board compensation committees to justify CEO pay is stock market return.
CEO pay isnât the government’s business, but corporate governance is. When governance is based on something other than what shareholders are told, it is worth a look.
In other news, the immigration issue continued, with Texas Governor Perryâs grandstanding. He was joined by many in Congress and in the media, some of whom wanted to be sure that the Texas National Guard was armed against the threat implied by children illegally crossing our border.
Lady Libertyâs meditation on immigration is lost in the noise:
An alternative strategy might build sympathy for the kidsâ plight:
In Obamacare news, courts made two opposite decisions using the same facts:
It was another week of some Advising but very little Consenting:
The loss of MH17 brought no new facts, just grandstanding here as well:
Gaza, along with Ukraine, show how missile use has changed in 45 years:
âNo one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.â â Edward R. Murrow
Your aspiring blogger visited the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan yesterday. It was very moving and quite crowded. A striking thing was remembering how uniform the reactions of other countries were. They all felt badly for America, many offered help.
Our citizens were very united, showing sympathy for the families of the people lost on that day, working together to search for possible survivors, supporting George Bush in his attack on Iraq.
We are paying a huge price around the world for invading Iraq and Afghanistan. We no longer have the sympathy of the world, many nations no longer trust us, and quite a few have become our enemy. Our overreaction to 9/11 here at home, from the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to the Patriot Act, to the rampant excesses of the NSA, to the financial disaster of going to war while we cut taxes, have left us divided at home. Our foreign policy is reactive, while we have no domestic policy.
The Museum is displaying a brick from Osama bin-Ladenâs Abbottabad compound:
Makes you wonder what ELSE they brought back from the mission. In other news, nobody likes Dick Cheneyâs bloviating about the Middle East:
The Malaysian Airliner disaster hurts the world, just like 9/11 did:
Keeping score in the Israel â Palestinian war:
What are we learning this time?
There were domestic issues to think about, like Obamaâs transparency:
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“As things now stand, we could easily become the first people in history to lose democracy and its constitutional freedoms simply because we have forgotten what they are about”– Sam Smith
Young children illegals could reach nearly 100,000 this year:
On the other hand, perhaps Texas can be convinced to keep a few:
Not that Texas wants them. All across Texas the fear of the diseased immigrant is reaching near epidemic proportions. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said recently:
…we donât even know what all diseases they have…Our health care systems canât withstand this influx
Err, wrong again, Louie. According to the Texas Observer, UNICEF reports that Guatemalan kids are more likely than Texans to be immunized for most infectious diseases. Guatemala has universal health care. Vaccines are 100% percent funded by the government. Overall, 93% of kids in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are vaccinated against measles. Thatâs slightly better than American kids (92%), and certainly it shows that there is no tsunami of sick crossing our border. BTW, according to the World Health Organization, neither Guatemala nor Honduras has had a reported case of measles since 1990.
Not so, here in America, where we have 500 measles cases this year. Why? Because, freedom.
In other news, Mr. Boehner has a lawsuit:
The 38th time that the House Republicans voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they passed the Authority for [Employer] Mandate Delay Act. That demonstrated the Houseâs willingness to delay the employer mandate. Then the Health and Human Services Department did exactly that, delayed the employer mandate. Strangely, that is EXACTLY what the Speaker’s lawsuit will say is the reason to sue Mr. Obama. Some of the GOP want to impeach Mr. Obama. They basically view a mechanism that was built in to deal with abuses of power as a way to nullify election results that they don’t like.
Sarah Palin was up front with her view:
If the House votes to impeach Mr. Obama, the Senate would then rule on the validity of the charges. It takes a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove a president from office. Even if the Senate goes to the Republicans, that isnât happening. So maybe they should move on:
Israel continues their drive towards Palestine:
On this Sunday of Independence Day Weekend, letâs think about the differences between patriotism and nationalism. We use them interchangeably, but they are not the same.
âPatriotismâ denotes a devotion to fundamental fellowship with other human beings belonging to a geographic region. Patriots love, support and defend their country.
âNationalismâ is a belief, creed or political ideology that involves identifying with, or becoming attached to, one’s nation. One definition of nationalism is excessive patriotism or chauvinism. Nationalism leads to asserting oneâs own nationâs interests to the total exclusion of the common interests of some nations, and not just those with which we might be waging war.
You should be a patriot. If you are a patriot, you stand when the national anthem is played. You serve your country in accordance with your abilities.
There is nothing wrong with chants of âUSA, USAâ. But, there is nothing right about them when the crowds in Murrieta, CA chant âUSA, USAâ at a bus load of illegal immigrants.
Americans will always profess support for American ideals, but chauvinists are far more willing to ignore those situations where America falls short. Those jingoistic Americans display an attitude that when America falls short, it is not a failing of “America” but rather some group (e.g. “liberals”, “the Tea Party”, “illegals”, “the 1 %”)
Remain suspicious of flag waving jingoists and their self-serving ways. Be true to your own beliefs and pay no attention to those who try to shame you into doing otherwise. Now, for some humor.
Can we march together anymore?
We the corps, in order to form a more perfect union:
One version of the Holy Writ:
And the Word was delivered unto them:
Let’s remind each other that at no time does a corporation: a) speak clearly, or b) take full responsibility for what they do.
And in international news, hope is dying in Israel:
Americans prefer not to think about, and rarely allow elections to turn on foreign policy. Events, however, are not cooperating.
No Exit from Iraq:
The cartoon points out a different, subjective “reality.” Objective reality knows that there is always an exit ramp out of that loop. We perceive it doesnât exist, since we fear the possible consequences. That blinds us to the options of seeing and using the exit.
Dems and Repubs send same message on Iraq:
Our options in Iraq are poor, and none:
However, sending Cheney to help ISIS might work:
In domestic news, Boehner digs in on Executive Orders:
The GOP feels that the primaries vindicated their approach:
Football not anywhere near as confusing as Cricket:
