Author: A.T.

My pal Bobby Monks explains here how the Obama Labor Department proposes two radical new rules re your retirement account:

1. Brokers must act in the best interests of their clients.
2. All the fees they collect must be disclosed.

Typical lefty bleeding-heart type stuff, right?  Never fear: the industry is fighting it, as they fought Dodd-Frank.

Read Bobby’s post and write your Congressperson?

A quick break from politics, money, and antique food.  (A personal best! I just consumed Kraft Caesar Italian Fat-Free dressing I found open in the back of the refrigerator dated June 1, 2001!)  But what’s more important than education?

So:

You know I’m a fan of Success Academy charter schools (here and here, etc.) — astounding results that break the cycle of poverty for thousands of kids in New York’s toughest neighborhoods.  It is a big, big deal that should be replicated nationwide.

The New York Times doesn’t think so.  Most recently, it focused on a Success Academy teacher ripping up a little girl’s paper in front of the class and speaking harshly to her: all caught on video.

The New York Times is indispensable.  (Subscribe!)  But in their ongoing attacks on Success Academy, they seem to have lost perspective.

Here‘s a letter to the Times from the grandparent of a Success scholar suggesting just that.

. . . My grandson attends Success Academy Cobble Hill. He attended a district school kindergarten before transferring. He hated kindergarten and didn’t want to go to school. Every week, we heard about some incident that rivaled the video you have been featuring for the last two weeks. His parents met with the principal, who agreed that my grandson and the teacher were not a good fit. But she said her hands were tied. She vowed if they would leave him in the school, she would ensure that he got a more appropriate teacher for first grade. Instead, they transferred to Success Academy, and for the past three years he has cried on the last day of school because he had to leave behind teachers he loved. If we had been smarter, we would have sent him to kindergarten with a cellphone and told him to video one of his teacher’s frequent outbursts.  Would we then have been able to get the Times to do a series of stories about the incident? Unlikely, because it wouldn’t have fit into some preconceived notion you had about this school and its policies, but would represent only an unfortunate single incident in a single classroom. But that pretty much is what the Success Academy video is, too. . . .

And here is a video of Success Academy parents who seem to adore the teacher in question.

Read the Times piece.  Join the Times and everyone else — including that teacher — in acknowledging she went too far.

But the big picture is that we should be rushing nationwide to turn all our most troubled public schools into wild successes like the dozens of Success Academy public schools . . . free and open to all (or at least all those fortunate enough to win the lottery to attend them).

Tomorrow: back to our regularly scheduled programming.  (And some really old Greek olives.  I haven’t decided yet whether to try them.)

What?  You haven’t been watching Samantha Bee?  The only things wrong with her show are that it’s on only Mondays (10:30 PM on TBS) and only half an hour.  Here’s a sample from one of her first four shows.

(I actually disagree with her first bit — lampooning how we always say “this is the most important election of our lives.”  That can only be true, of course, if they’ve become successively more important — but they have.  Remember Kennedy / Nixon?  Very different people, but largely shared policy perspectives.  Coke versus Pepsi.  As the moderate Republicans have been all but eliminated from Congress (but not the moderate Democrats! it’s not symmetrical!), the choice has become ever starker . . . Coke versus V8 . . . Coke versus a pickle . . . Coke versus Ted Cruz.  But why quibble.  Watch.)

Well, 5% off everything you buy on Amazon, if you have Amazon Prime — which for me is practically everything.

Click here for details.  No annual fee for the card.  Just be sure to pay it off in full each month (I’ve set mine to debit my bank account automatically) — it carries a crazy interest rate.

(And note the cautionary reviews — 54% five-star, but 23% one-star.)

Meanwhile, it turns out Trump University is way worse than most of us knew.  Check it out.  Thank you, Vox.

. . . Trump University wasn’t a university but a multilevel marketing scam

Trump University — which was never licensed to call itself a “university” — shut down in 2010. But the legal fallout, including Schneiderman’s suit, has continued.

The university, Schneiderman has charged, was a “bait and switch,” a classic multilevel marketing scheme: People are told that the real benefits they want are only available if they keep paying, essentially urging them to throw good money after bad.

People were lured into a free workshop with marketing materials that promised they’d learn Trump’s real estate secrets from his “handpicked” instructors and maybe even from Trump himself. Instead, they were urged to sign up for a three-day seminar that cost nearly $1,500. And at that seminar, they were pushed to sign up for an elite mentorship program that could cost as much as $35,000 per year.

Trump didn’t handpick the mentors. He didn’t write the curriculum. He didn’t even show up at the seminars. Instead, students got to take a photo with a cardboard cutout of him.

Even the most expensive mentorship didn’t deliver, Schneiderman’s lawsuit charges. Some mentors simply vanished. Others had no background in real estate at all.

The lawsuit accuses Trump University of other shady behavior, such as asking students to fill out information about their financial assets — so that Trump University could pick out the wealthiest participants to urge them to pay more for the next level.

They also urged participants to seek a credit line increase with the promise that it would improve their credit score. That’s sometimes the case, but greater access to credit also made it easier for participants to pay more for the next level of Trump University “advice.”

Trump fought back by claiming his university has a 98 percent satisfaction rate, and by suing Schneiderman, saying the attorney general used the lawsuit as a threat to force Trump’s attorneys and family members to contribute to Schneiderman’s campaign. But the state ethics commission dropped that complaint. . . .

If the students were 98% satisfied, one wonders why the business isn’t thriving to this day.  Oh, well.  Have a great weekend.

However fractured they are otherwise, the Republicans are united on this much: a Democrat must not be allowed to win in November.

We could have 8 more years like Clinton!

(What a disaster!  Barely 19 million new jobs, not a single real war, the deficit turned into a surplus — peace and prosperity run rampant.)

We could have 8 more years like Obama!

(What a disaster!  Depression averted, two wars ended, deficit slashed, ten times the new jobs created under Bush — just look at the record.)

And they are united on something else, too: worship of Ronald Reagan.

But as the bold-faced bits below suggest, they may be slightly misremembering his presidency.

Today’s Delanceyplace selection [thanks, Glenn] is from These United States: A Nation in the Making 1890 to Present by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue. Though he famously stated the “government is the problem” in his first inaugural speech, President Ronald Reagan presided over one of the largest escalations of government spending in U.S. history and gave an enormous boost to technology research in the process. Government spending under Reagan gave an indispensable boost to the rise of high tech centers such as Route 128 corridor outside Boston, the Research Triangle in North Caro­lina, and the semiconductor center of Austin, Texas. In fact, by the end of the 1980s, 40 percent of all research and development in the computing industry was federally funded and university computer science programs received 83 percent of their funding from the U.S. government:

“. . . Suburban Boston, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles were flush with federal dollars, pulling them out of the economic slump sooner than most of the rest of the country. Federal spending also launched a high-tech economy. Universities introduced student-accessible computer centers in the early 1980s, the personal computer went from a novelty item to a mass-produced necessity in less than ten years, and microchips transformed everyday elec­tronics. The number of jobs for electrical engineers and computer scien­tists skyrocketed. By the early 1990s, local area networks and the Internet began connecting computers into what would be later named the World Wide Web.

“The rise and success of American high-tech industries did not result from tax cuts and deregulation. In fact, no American industries relied more on government spending than did computing, electrical engineering, and communications equipment. . . . Between 1982 and 1988, federal research and develop­ment spending nearly doubled. By the decade’s end, 40 percent of all research and development in the computing industry was federally funded; nearly half of communications technology research — including the systems that were the basis of the Internet — came from the federal government. Government programs also bankrolled university laboratories, computer science, and electrical engineering. In 1985 alone, computer science pro­grams received 83 percent of their funds from the federal government.”

Three economy-boosting things the Republicans have for seven years steadfastly blocked:

(1) Put people to work revitalizing our crumbling infrastructure.  They refused to pass the American Jobs Act.

(2) Hike the minimum wage.  They cut it each year by not allowing it to rise with inflation.

(3) Enact comprehensive immigration reform.  Passed 68-32 in the Senate, they refused to bring it up for a vote in the House.

All three will strengthen our economy and our society.  All three have broad popular support. All three will get done if enough people vote “Democrat” this November.

Roger Cohen, in the pages of the indispensable New York Times (subscribe!):

Trump’s Il Duce Routine

Roger Cohen February 29

LONDON — Europe, the soil on which Fascism took root, is watching the rise of Donald Trump with dismay. Contempt for the excesses of America is a European reflex, but when the United States seems tempted by a latter-day Mussolini, smugness in London, Paris and Berlin gives way to alarm. Europe knows that democracies can collapse.

It’s not just that Trump retweets to his six million followers a quote attributed to Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” It’s not just that Trump refuses to condemn David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who has expressed support for him. It’s not just that violence is woven into Trump’s language as indelibly as the snarl woven into his features — the talk of shooting somebody or punching a protester in the face, the insulting of the disabled, the macho mockery of women, the anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican tirades. It’s not just that he could become Silvio Berlusconi with nukes.

It’s the echoes, now unmistakable, of times when the skies darkened. Europe knows how democracies collapse, after lost wars, in times of fear and anger and economic hardship, when the pouting demagogue appears with his pageantry and promises. America’s Weimar-lite democratic dysfunction is plain to see. A corrupted polity tends toward collapse.

Trump is telling people something is rotten in the state of America. The message resonates because the rot is there.

He has emerged from a political system corrupted by money, locked in an echo chamber of insults, reduced to the show business of an endless campaign, blocked by a kind of partisanship run amok that leads Republican members of Congress to declare they will not meet with President Obama’s eventual nominee for the Supreme Court, let alone listen to him or her. This is an outrage! The public interest has become less than an afterthought.

Enter the smart, savvy, scowling showman. He is self-financed and promises restored greatness. He has a bully’s instinct for the jugular and a sense of how sick an angry America is of politics as usual and political correctness. He hijacks a Republican Party that has paved the way for him with years of ranting, bigotry, bellicosity and what Robert Kagan,in The Washington Post, has rightly called “racially tinged derangement syndrome” with respect to President Obama.

Trump is a man repeatedly underestimated by the very elites who made Trumpism possible. He’s smarter than most of his belittlers, and quicker on his feet, which makes him only more dangerous.

He’s the anti-Obama, all theater where the president is all prudence, the mouth-that-spews to the presidential teleprompter, rage against reason, the backslapper against the maestro of aloofness, the rabble-rouser to the cerebral law professor, the deal maker to the diligent observer. If Obama in another life could have been a successful European social democrat, Trump is only and absolutely of America.

Part of the Trump danger is that he’s captured an American irredentism, a desire to reclaim something — power, confidence, rising incomes — that many people feel is lost. Trump is a late harvest of 9/11 and the fears that took hold that day. He’s the focus of vague hopes and dim resentments that have turned him into a savior in waiting. As with Ronald Reagan, it’s not the specifics with Trump, it’s a feeling, a vibration — and no matter how much he dissembles, reveals himself as a thug, traffics in contradictions, the raptness persists.

Europe is transfixed. The German newsweekly “Der Spiegel” has called Trump “the world’s most dangerous man” and even waxed nostalgic for President George W. Bush, which for a European publication is like suddenly discovering a soft spot for Dracula.

The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, has tweeted that Trump “fuels hatred.” In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has attacked Trump’s proposed ban on non-American Muslims entering the United States, and more than half a million people have signed a petition urging that he be kept out of Britain. This weekend Britain’s Sunday Times ran a page-size photo of Trump in Lord Kitchener pose with a blaring headline: “America Wants Me.”

So do a few Europeans, among them the French rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, is a fan, as are some Russian oligarchs. Judge a man by the company he keeps.

This disoriented America just might want Trump — and that possibility should be taken very seriously, before it is too late, by every believer in American government of the people, by the people, for the people. The power of the Oval Office and the temperament of a bully make for an explosive combination, especially when he has shown contempt for the press, a taste for violence, a consistent inhumanity, a devouring ego and an above-the-law swagger.

As Europe knows, democracies do die. Often, they are the midwives of their own demise. Once lost, the cost of recovery is high.

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He may or may not get the Republican nomination, but he won’t be President.  At the end of the day, America is better than that.  Here’s the link.  Share it on Facebook?

I assume you’ve seen the John Oliver by now? It’s only the greatest 21 minutes in the history of television or American politics.

What an appropriate way to celebrate Super Tuesday.

Enjoy.

*He’ll still win today.  These things take time to sink in.  But the Presidency?  Not gonna happen. Which means Democrats have to redouble their efforts, as Cruz or Rubio would be even worse.

Jeffrey Toobin on the late Antonin Scalia: charming and brilliant — but a force for progress?  Mmmm . . . no.

And yes of course the President should appoint a replacement, as the Constitution requires.  Here is his exceptionally thoughtful statement on how he’ll go about it.

(And here: conservative commentators blasting the Republican vow to reject anyone he picks.)

Yes, yes . . . “Barack Obama has been a disaster for this country.”  Republicans have been saying that from Day One — a “stupid, stupid” leader who has made the worst deals the Republican front-runner has seen in his entire life.  A child could make better deals.

Things are horrible in America!

But does that relieve the President of the responsibility to appoint a ninth Justice?

Just because we’ve all lost dozens of friends and relatives to Ebola and terrorism home prices continue to fall and no one can even afford a full tank of gas — does that mean the President no longer has the authority and obligation to fill Court vacancies?

But — and this is the point Republicans want to stress — things are horrible.

Have you seen Marco Rubio’s ad?  Its stock footage actually depicts Canada (oops).  But forget that little gotcha — what about its substantive assertions?

It begins:

“More men and women are out of work than ever before in our nation’s history.”

Huh???

With nearly triple the population we had during the Depression — and an aging population at that — if you count all the out-of-work 80- and 90-year-olds maybe there’s some crazy way to turn this chart upside down.  But I doubt it.  A more accurate statement would be that “thanks to 71 consecutive months of private employment growth, the 10% unemployment rate at the peak of the Great Bush Recession Bush has been cut to 4.9%.”  And would be more robust still if the Republicans hadn’t blocked three measures a majority of Americans wanted and economists agreed would add juice to the economy: the American Jobs Act, to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure; a higher minimum wage; and the comprehensive immigration reform that Rubio himself voted for but now decries.

Next:  “People pay more taxes than they will for food, clothing, and housing combined.” 

Huh???

Some people do — billionaires, most dramatically.  But come on.  Here‘s one stab at the average household budget: 29% on housing, food, and clothing versus 12% on taxes.  On what planet is 12% more than 29%?

And by the way?  Those taxes go mainly for things people really want:  schools and roads and the world’s strongest military.  And the Medicare they want the government to keep its hands off.  And Social Security!  And disaster relief!  And interest on the trillions in debt that the Reagan/Bush tax-cuts-for-the-rich have racked up.

Speaking of which, the ad concludes: “Nearly $20 trillion in debt for the next generation.  Double what it was just 8 years ago.”

Huh??? 

Reagan/Bush inherited a National Debt under $1 trillion and quadrupled it, handing Clinton a $4 trillion debt.  Clinton tamed the deficit and handed Bush 43 “surpluses as far as the eye could see.”

Bush 43 slashed taxes on wealthy investors, needlessly invaded Iraq, and handed Obama a near-depression, $10 trillion in National Debt, and a $1.5 trillion deficit (so, basically, a $11.5 trillion Debt.)  Obama averted the depression, cut the deficit by two-thirds, and got the Debt once again growing more slowly than the economy as a whole.

So all three assertions in Rubio’s ad are misleading at best.

Things are not horrible.

There are supposed to be nine Justices on the Court.

How about Judge Sri Srinivasan to replace Scalia?  He spent five years working for George W. Bush’s Solicitor General.  In private practice, he represented Enron’s king-pin.  The Senate confirmed him 97-0 to the D.C. Circuit Court.

The Republicans might be wise to advise and consent to a moderate candidate like that because their refusal might not sit well with voters and the next President, if a Democrat, might nominate someone they’d like less.

(And Senate just might change hands by then, to boot. On Duckworth! on Feingold!  on Kander and Strickland!  on Hassan and Bassan* and Grayson or Murphy!)

Anyway: read the Toobin piece if you’d like perspective on the late Justice Scalia.  And the President’s statement if you’d like to be reminded what a remarkable man we elected and reelected and would almost surely if it were legal elect a third time.

*A made-up candidate, for the rhyme.

Dalia Mogahed was not one of the thousands of Jersey City Muslims Donald Trump claims to believe were seen cheering as the World Trade Center fell.  Watch her TED talk?

Who knew they could dive?  These giraffes are just too graceful for words.  Enjoy.

Hey!  Is it possible that, after Monday’s notice, you still haven’t seen Michael Moore’s “Where to Invade Next“?

Hmmm.