All relatively new, last 2 weeks or so. There are types of music I don’t like so much but other than that please don’t accuse me of not being open to new experiences.

On the other hand…

Who Cares – Paul McCartney

Tourniquet – Breaking Benjamin

Blue on Black – Five Finger Death Punch

Que lastima pobrecitos. Lo siento tanto por ti.

‘You Control Nothing’: House Republicans Brace for Life in the Minority
By Carl Hulse, The New York Times
Dec. 29, 2018

About two-thirds of Republicans returning to the House for the 116th Congress this week have never experienced the exquisite pain of being on the outs in an institution where the party in charge is totally in charge. Majority control runs the gamut from determining the floor agenda to determining access to the prime meeting space. It will be a rude awakening for many who have known only their exalted majority status.

“They say you will have a lot more time on your hands and will vote ‘no’ a lot more often,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who was elected in the 2010 wave that handed control of the House to Republicans in President Barack Obama’s first midterm election.

The reign lasted eight years before the November midterms and the Democratic gain of 40 seats, a thorough beating that many Republicans did not anticipate. Mr. Kinzinger said the culture shift might be hardest on those colleagues who, unlike himself, believed the election was going to turn out quite differently.

“We have come to grips with the shock of the election,” he said, “but the shock of governing will still be a wake-up call for some people.”

Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and a veteran of stints in both the minority and the majority, groaned when asked what advice he had for his House brethren who had tasted only life on top.

“Oh. Sheesh,” Mr. Cole said, hemming and hawing before advising, only half-jokingly, “Smoke a lot; drink a lot.”

“You are going to get some real disappointment,” he said of his colleagues. “They are going to find out how good they had it in the majority, particularly when we had a Republican Senate, as frustrating as that could be.”

Unlike the Senate, where individual members can exert some influence whether they are in the majority or not, those on the sidelines in the House have few options. After years of being in the know about the House agenda and majority strategy, Republican lawmakers will now struggle to even ascertain what the schedule is.

“You control nothing,” said Representative Peter T. King, the New York Republican who will be experiencing his fourth transition in House power — 1995 to Republican control, 2007 to Democratic supremacy, back to Republicans in 2011 and now another reassertion of Democratic might. “As far as calling the shots, we have nothing like the Senate where one guy can filibuster. You have no recourse.”

Mr. King, a former chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, remembers being shut out of conference rooms when Democrats regained the majority in 2007. Republicans anticipate finding the convenient meeting rooms they took for granted will be off limits.
…
Republicans say they must adapt and try for a comeback.

“Everything changes rapidly,” Mr. Cole said. “Two years is not an eternity. You can get through these things. We need to hang together, pick our shots and keep moving.”

Too much centrism in this piece. What Pelosi should say is-

“I came here to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum and I’m all out of Bubble Gum.”

Academy Award winner, but a bad paperboy.

I didn’t play these at gigs much as they’re a little hard core for my audience.

I Love Rock And Roll – Joan Jett

Godmother of Punk.

Barracuda – Heart

Oddly enough most of the band didn’t object to this being adopted by Sarah Palin because it bumped their residuals up and reporters sought them out for their own political views.

Cherry Bomb – The Runaways

Ok, so you might think Joan Marie Larkin slightly over represented in this set but I swear I was thinking of Rocket and didn’t remember she had a band before the Blackhearts.

Besides, who doesn’t like the “Awesome Mix”?

Empty – Garbage

Fresh (well 2016 fresh), it was the lead single from their first album under their own label.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Noblemen in Russia kill Gregory Rasputin; Wounded Knee massacre takes place; Texas joins as the 28th state; Dissident playwright Vaclav Havel elected president of Czechoslovakia; First YMCA opens in Boston.

When we live up to our Constitution, let’s form a Conga line around the Capitol and bungee jump off the dome.

Paula Poundstone

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Do you know what you do when a toddler threatens to hold their breath until they die?

You let them try.

It’s impossible. If they are incredibly strong willed and stubborn the best they can accomplish is to pass out, after which their body will take over and they’ll start breathing again.

Thus we can take Unidicted Co-conspirator Trump’s empty threats to shut down the border (or the Government) in a tantrum because he’s not going to get his boondoggle Wall.

Not even worth commenting on really, but it’s a slow news day and I’m pretty desperate.

Trump threatens to shut down the border ‘entirely.’ Here’s why he can’t do that.
By Colby Itkowitz, Washington Post
December 28, 2018

Trump’s exact wording was that, absent Democrats’ agreeing to fund the wall, he would “be forced to close the Southern Border entirely.”

That’s not possible, said Leon Fresco, an immigration lawyer at Holland & Knight. First, Trump can’t lawfully stop U.S. citizens from reentering the country from Mexico, so there’s no scenario in which the border could be closed off completely.

What about closing it to foreigners crossing legally with visas? If the president tried that, it would face the same legal scrutiny as his travel ban of people from certain Muslim-majority countries, which has ping-ponged through the court system. And he’d have an even tougher sell closing off the southern border to legal entry, because he tweeted that his motivation to close the border is for political leverage and not an imminent national security threat, Fresco said.

The same would be true if he tried to further limit entry for refugees seeking asylum. His efforts already to restrict the ability of immigrants to request asylum at the border was struck down by a federal judge in California last week.

“He is generally frustrated he can’t stop illegal crossings by fiat. He can’t build a wall. He can’t turn off the asylum system,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute. “He has a mounting frustration — the one thing that was his central promise to his voters, and they haven’t found a way at it yet. Trump wants a quick fix, and there’s no quick fix.”

The only way Trump could potentially shut down the border would be through trade. But certain statutes in the North American Free Trade Agreement restrict him from stopping commerce between Mexico and the United States without a national security concern. And even then it would be for a limited period of time.

The business community in the United States and Mexico are afraid that Trump could introduce trade barriers gradually. But doing so would be “suicidal,” because it would hurt U.S. manufacturers, Selee said.

“His problem here is not with Mexico, it doesn’t get him anywhere with Democrats, and it really hurts American industry,” Selee said. “You have this picture of trying to threaten someone, but it’s like telling a kid, ‘I’m going to take away the toy from this other kid.’ ”

Trump could theoretically pull out of NAFTA and then stop allowing commerce over the border, but that would also invite legal challenges. Fresco said many people with businesses that rely on Mexican goods would sue.

“There is no actual governmental compelling interest that led to you being taken out of business,” he said. “It can’t be just because the president is angry.”

So, ultimately Trump’s threat is fairly empty. There’s very little he can do to shut down the border that would stand up legally.

“The president is articulating these things that are so far outside the bounds of constitutional norms, we cannot divorce ourselves and think they can be implemented — they just can’t,” Fresco said. “He’s not thought through when those statements are made.”

It would be farce if it wasn’t a tragedy. Two children, 7 and 8, are dead and at least 50 families (conservatively, could be thousands depending on how you count) are still separated, sacrificed on the altar of blind racism.

And yes, I do hold the gutless, cowardly Republican Party responsible individually and as an institution, along with their bigoted base. Those people must never, ever hold positions of power and responsibility in the United States again.

Not even Dog Catcher. If they’re like Mike Huckabee’s son they’ll take every pet they find and hang it from the neck until dead for sport and amusement. They are nothing but psychopaths who should be under heavy medication and treatment as a threat to themselves and others.

Every last one of them.

Herr Doktor Professor gives them too much credit.

Bad Faith, Pathos and G.O.P. Economics
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Dec. 27, 2018

What you need to know when talking about economics and politics is that there are three kinds of economist in modern America: liberal professional economists, conservative professional economists and professional conservative economists.

By “liberal professional economists” I mean researchers who try to understand the economy as best they can, but who, being human, also have political preferences, which in their case puts them on the left side of the U.S. political spectrum, although usually only modestly left of center. Conservative professional economists are their counterparts on the center right.

Professional conservative economists are something quite different. They’re people who even center-right professionals consider charlatans and cranks; they make a living by pretending to do actual economics — often incompetently — but are actually just propagandists. And no, there isn’t really a corresponding category on the other side, in part because the billionaires who finance such propaganda are much more likely to be on the right than on the left.
…
Do economists’ political preferences shape their research? They surely affect the choice of subject: Liberals are more likely to be interested in rising inequality or the economics of climate change than conservatives. And human nature being what it is, some of them — O.K., of us — occasionally engage in motivated reasoning, reaching conclusions that cater to their politics.

I used to believe, however, that such lapses were the exception, not the rule, and the liberal economists I know try hard to avoid falling into that trap, and apologize when they do.

But do conservative economists do the same? Increasingly, the answer seems to be no, at least for those who play a prominent role in public discourse.

Even during the Obama years, it was striking how many well-known Republican-leaning economists followed the party line on economic policy, even when that party line was in conflict with the nonpolitical professional consensus.

Thus, when a Democrat was in the White House, G.O.P. politicians opposed anything that might mitigate the costs of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath; so did many economists. Most famously, in 2010 a who’s who of Republican economists denounced the efforts of the Federal Reserve to fight unemployment, warning that they risked “currency debasement and inflation.”

Were these economists arguing in good faith? Even at the time, there were good reasons to suspect otherwise. For one thing, those terrible, irresponsible Fed actions were pretty much exactly what Milton Friedman prescribed for depressed economies. For another, some of those Fed critics engaged in Donald Trump-like conspiracy theorizing, accusing the Fed of printing money, not to help the economy, but to “bail out fiscal policy,” i.e., to help Barack Obama.

It was also telling that none of the economists who warned, wrongly, about looming inflation were willing to admit their error after the fact.

But the real test came after 2016. A complete cynic might have expected economists who denounced budget deficits and easy money under a Democrat to suddenly reverse position under a Republican president.

And that total cynic would have been exactly right. After years of hysteria about the evils of debt, establishment Republican economists enthusiastically endorsed a budget-busting tax cut. After denouncing easy-money policies when unemployment was sky-high, some echoed Trump’s demands for low interest rates with unemployment under 4 percent — and the rest remained conspicuously silent.

More Football!

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Pres. Woodrow Wilson is born; John C. Calhoun becomes first US vice president to resign; Alexander Solzhenitsyn ‘Gulag Archipelago’ is published; Actor Denzel Washington & comic book creator Stan Lee are born.

For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.

Charlie Pierce

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