Ron Paul’s potential victory in Iowa may make the caucuses irrelevant

Wait, so you mean the results in one small state aren't indicative of how the entire country will vote? Politico:

Paul poses an existential threat to the state’s cherished kick-off status, say these Republicans, because he has little chance to win the GOP nomination and would offer the best evidence yet that the caucuses reward candidates who are unrepresentative of the broader party.

“It would make the caucuses mostly irrelevant if not entirely irrelevant,” said Becky Beach, a longtime Iowa Republican who helped Presidents Bush 41 and Bush 43 here. “It would have a very damaging effect because I don’t think he could be elected president and both Iowa and national Republicans wouldn’t think he represents the will of voters.”

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Brazil grew into the seventh largest economy

After years of democracy, things are certainly working out for Brazil. Their middle class has been growing quickly as well which is great news as well. In the past, the Brazilian economy was always up and down with plenty of inflation but it's finally on the right path. Like any fast growing economy, there's likely to be an end to the run but there's been a lot of progress down there and a lot of people pulled out of poverty in recent years.

Brazil has overtaken the UK to become the world's sixth-largest economy, according to a team of economists. The banking crash of 2008 and the subsequent recession has relegated the UK to seventh place in 2011, behind South America's largest economy, which has boomed on the back of exports to China and the far east. Russia and India are expected to benefit from a surge in growth over the next 10 years and push the UK into eighth place. Like most economies, India is struggling with high inflation and slowing growth, but its highly educated workforce and skills in growth areas from IT and services to engineering will push the economy into fifth place. After a decade of selling oil and gas to Europe and other parts of Asia, Russia will be at number four. The only compensation for ministers concerned by Britain's relative fall is that France will fall at a faster pace. Nicolas Sarkozy can still boast that France is the fifth-largest economy behind the US at number one, China, Japan and Germany, but by 2020, the Centre for Economics and business Research (CEBR) forecasts it will fall past the UK into ninth spot. Germany will also slip to seventh place in 2020.

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Congress welcomes winter with home heating budget cuts

Heaven forbid Congress does anything to stop handouts for the 1% bankers or Big Oil, but you can always count on them to throw the poor under the bus. How very moral and decent of them. The Hill:

Just days before the holiday season, the Obama administration released more than $800 million to states as part of a program to help low-income people pay their heating bills during the winter months. But the move comes as the program, known as the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), faces major funding cuts. A year-end spending bill approved by Congress in recent days slashes funding for LIHEAP. The legislation funds the program at $3.48 billion, down from about $4.7 billion last year. That’s about a 25 percent reduction.

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Taibbi: Where most of us have shame, the rich have an "extra set of balls"

Much has been made of this Max Ableson article in Business Week detailing the Song of the Whiny Rich.

Here's a taste:

[JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie] Dimon, 55, whose 2010 compensation was $23 million, joined billionaires including hedge-fund manager John Paulson and Home Depot Inc. co-founder Bernard Marcus in using speeches, open letters and television appearances to defend themselves and the richest 1 percent of the population targeted by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.

If successful businesspeople don’t go public to share their stories and talk about their troubles, “they deserve what they’re going to get,” said Marcus, 82, a founding member of Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit that develops talking points and op-ed pieces aimed at “shaping the national agenda,”[.]

The 0.1% are striking back, using, among other venues, the pages of Business Week. About those protesters, the aforementioned Home Depot magnate Marcus said:

“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”

Other pleasantries from the article include:

“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said [billionaire founder of payroll processer Paychex Inc. Tom] Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles

Monica Seles? Tom Golisano must be "still in the game" (insert aging-male weight-loss link here).

And then there's this delight, which forms the center of a Matt Taibbi reaction (my emphasis throughout):

“You have to have skin in the game,” said [Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen] Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”

If you haven't figured it out, that reflects his thought that those who are so poor they don't pay taxes have no "skin in the game."

In my mind, that's a great example of the 180 Tell (my phrasing), a statement that's exactly opposite to what's actually true. Not just opposite — 180° opposite. In fact, the poor have nothing but skin in the game, and Schwartzman has exactly none.

Here's Matt Taibbi to explain. In one of his best blog posts ever, he skillfully exposes this for what it is.

First, about Schwartzman:

The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman’s quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world – a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).

As Taibbi has pointed out elsewhere, people like Schwartzman win by stealing. Why? Because they can.

Next, about those who are too poor to have "skin in the game":

[I]f you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.

You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.

Finally, about those super-rich — they have no skin in the game at all:

The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government. ... [C]itizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government[.] ... Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks? Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done. Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break? Guys like Schwarzman, and Apollo’s Leon Black, and Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus’s doorstep, and they get it killed.

As I've written elsewhere, the air is perfumed before them, their feet never touch the ground, and their wives and daughters never face porno-scans at the airport.

If they stub their toe, they call their senator, who sends their congressman to bandage it.

This great piece ends with a long story about Jamie Dimon (see first quote in this article) and his incestuous relationship with the New York Fed — a revelation worthy of its own blog post. Please do read if you have a few minutes.

Taibbi closes with one of his great lines:

[T]hese people don’t have shame. What they have, in the place where most of us have shame, are extra sets of balls.

Or maybe just a lot of skin.

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Sketchy Santas

Christmas ain't over yet.  Here's that hysterical Web site with all the photos of kids freaking out over their first (or near first) visit to Santa. Read the rest of this post...

Gingrich’s campaign manager concurs, Newt not getting on VA GOP primary ballot is "like Pearl Harbor"

That reminds me of the time I was at the circus and tried to get one of those cute little stuffed animals by using the big metal hooks that you control like a crane inside a glass box.  I remember constantly dropping the toy before I could move it to the retrieval slot.  Then time ran out.  It was like Auschwitz.

More on Newt not making the VA ballot.  Rick Perry didn't make it either. Read the rest of this post...

Pope urges followers to move past commercialization of Christmas and glitter

But it's so hard to look past those Gucci slippers and the extravagance of The Vatican which has glitter all year. Oh to live the simple, humble life.

In his homily, Benedict lamented that Christmas has become an increasingly commercial celebration that obscures the simplicity of the message of Christ's birth. "Let us ask the Lord to help us see through the superficial glitter of this season, and to discover behind it the child in the stable in Bethlehem, so as to find true joy and true light," he said. It was the second time in as many days that Benedict has pointed to the need to rediscover faith to confront the problems facing the world today. In his end-of-year meeting with Vatican officials on Thursday, Benedict said Europe's financial crisis was largely "based on the ethical crisis looming over the Old Continent".

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MoJo on why Newt is not going to be the GOP nominee

From Tim Murphy at Mother Jones:

Newt Gingrich is flying high. The former speaker of the House has rocketed to the top of the Republican polls, taking a 30-point lead in Florida and giving one-time GOP front-runner Mitt Romney a run for his money in New Hampshire. What's more, the competition around him seems to be collapsing. Herman Cain is history; Romney has slowly but steadily lost support nationwide; Rick Perry is still making fun of himself for a gaffe everyone else stopped talking about last month; Michele Bachmann fell in a crowded primary forest and never made a sound. Gingrich, for one, is ready to declare victory. As he told ABC's Jake Tapper on Thursday, "I'm going to be the nominee."

Well, Gingrich may be on a roll, but he's overlooking the one truly formidable candidate who stands between him and the nomination: former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. He is in many ways the perfect foil for the current GOP front-runner. Here, in 13 episodes, is much of the baggage you're likely to see aired soon in anti-Gingrich attack ads. For him, it won't be Christmas in Iowa.

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GoDaddy losing tens of thousands of customer over SOPA support

You might remember GoDaddy from the past, when the CEO bought off people in Zimbabwe so he could shoot an elephant. More recently the company has been in trouble due to it's support of SOPA. The good news is his support is coming with a price that will hit the company in its wallet. Customers are running away from the company and hopefully many more will leave as well. Techi.com:

Despite a massive Twitter campaign and a blog post that claims “Go Daddy no longer supports SOPA legislation” the company and their CEO have dodged questions about opposing the bill. In essence, they are taking a lesser role by not showing support for the bill. They have not opposed it. This week, they lost around 72,000 domain registrations. At a yearly discounted rate of $6.99 (most registrations are higher), that’s over half a million dollars per year. It is apparently not enough for them to speak out against the bill.

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TSA confiscates cupcake over "dangerous" icing

Wow, who doesn't feel safer when we have TSA agents who rough up elderly women and confiscates cupcakes? What an expensive joke the TSA has become.

A Massachusetts woman who flew home from Las Vegas this week says an airport security officer took her frosted cupcake because he thought its vanilla-bourbon icing could be a “security risk.” Rebecca Hains told ABCNews.com today that a Transportation Security Administration agent at Las Vegas- McCarran International Airport confiscated her cupcake, saying the frosting sitting atop the red velvet cake was gel-like enough to violate regulations.

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France to offer expat-specific MPs

This is a really positive step for expats and frankly, it's something the US should have. French expats do not pay any taxes back home but they still have deep ties to their country. In the US, unlike most every other industrialized country, expats still need to file taxes and often pay taxes despite receiving no benefits from those taxes since they don't live there. There are even some halfwits in Congress (but I repeat myself) such as Republican Senator Grassley of Iowa who somehow thinks Americans abroad are getting a free ride. He's never really explained how and since they aren't, he's not likely to ever answer that question. But to be fair here, neither the Democrats or the Republicans ever do much for expats. The last time I tried sending a message to my Congresswoman online, it was rejected because my IP address was outside of the US. How welcoming for a voter. Why should I be denied my ability to communicate with those who serve me in Congress just because of my location? In exchange for filing and paying taxes while abroad, American voters have the pleasure of registering to vote and often not even receiving the proper voting documents. After taking special care to vote and send in the paperwork on time, expats can then rest comfortably knowing that their voting papers will rarely, if ever, be reviewed by anyone. Only if there's a close call are they ever reviewed. Wow, what an honor! For the supposed greatest democracy in the world, our voting for expats is antiquated and little more than election theater. France makes as many mistakes as other countries but on this one, they're doing the right thing.

Now, after decades of promises dating back to François Mitterrand, France wants to position itself as a model of expat rights, giving the 2.5 million French people abroad their own MPs for the first time. French officials have sliced the world into 11 constituencies, which will next year give France far-flung politicians including an MP for the US and Canada and an MP for north and east Africa. With the second biggest diplomatic network of embassies and consulates in the world after the US, France now joins a small group of European countries, including Italy, which allows its diaspora to choose its own expat MPs. Paris's geographical carve-up has already caused political spats. The Socialist presidential candidate, François Hollande, failed to secure a close aide the candidate's ticket in north Africa, Christine Lagarde had been tipped as MP for the US before she left for the International Monetary Fund and the industry minister Eric Besson, supposed to be running as MP for Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Monaco, said he wanted to quit politics.

I should also point out that when French expats vote, they are given the option of either voting in person at their local embassy/consulate or sending their voting cards to that location, rather than just overseas. Read the rest of this post...

Tens of thousands again protest Putin

More power to them. It takes guts to do this and as this goes on, it's likely to get even more dangerous.

Tens of thousands have taken to the streets of Moscow to protest against allegedly fraudulent elections, as opposition leaders issued scathing personal attacks on Vladimir Putin in the hope of preventing his return to the presidency next year. Mikhail Gorbachev has urged Putin to follow his own example and step down. Former leader Gorbachev said on Ekho Moskvy radio that if Putin stepped down now he would be remembered for the positive things he did during his 12 years in power. Security sources said 80,000 people turned out for the four hour protest on Moscow's Sakharov Prospect, despite a freezing temperature of -5C. Police put the number at 29,000 while protest organisers said up to 120,000 had gathered.

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