The Daily Kos has the post Why I’m Leaving the South. Before I get any questions, let me make it clear that this is not my post, so the “I” in the headline does not refer to “me”, Steve Greenberg. Sharon and I have already decided that we cannot move to Florida, even if the climate is appealing in the winter.

Anyway, back to a quote from the post.

I have a master’s degree in counseling, and I’m particularly good with teenagers. For ten years I had a decent career, although counselors aren’t paid much. Then the economy tanked and social services were cut. I lost my job. Then another job. Nobody was hiring counselors; I got an hourly wage job. Lost my health insurance, lost my car, lost everything. I went into default on my student loans.

Things began to pick up for counselors, but there was a new question on applications: are you in default on your student loans? South Carolina and a few other red states passed a law saying that such persons cannot be hired by any agency receiving state funding, which for me and my degree, is nearly all the jobs here. Getting out of default would be feasible if I had a professional job, but on $8 an hour? No way. As a single person with no family, meager survival is nearly possible on that low of a wage.

I can just imagine the response from the legislators who thought that punishing people for defaulting on their loans would get them to pay up. As we always used to say in the Army when caught doing something stupid and being asked why we did it, usually by a sergeant, “Gee, Sarge, it sounded like a good idea at the time.”

The Huffington Post has the story Hillary Clinton Focuses On Middle-Class Wages In Sweeping Economic Policy Speech.

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton focused on the problem of stagnant middle-class wages on Monday in the first major economic policy speech of her presidential campaign.

In sweeping remarks at the progressive New School in New York City, the Democratic candidate said that higher wages are driven by strong, fair and long-term growth, offering policy proposals that fit into each of those three categories. Clinton praised the policies pursued by President Barack Obama, but suggested that more needs to be done to help middle-class families. Her message echoed themes espoused by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has made her mark on the Democratic Party by arguing that the economy is rigged against the middle class.

I don’t like Hillary’s message as much as I like Warren’s message, but if Hillary is able to sell it better than her rival candidates, then less power to her. It would be a shame if she were able to convince us that her husband’s policies weren’t a big part of the problem.

If only she felt that she could be completely honest about the whole story, she might be a candidate that I could eventually support. The fact that she has to gloss over certain facts (some would call it lying), makes me suspicious that she would be able to do all that needs to be done if she were ever to become President.

You can tell in the paragraphs above how my take on Clinton’s remarks changed even as I wrote the words.

Thanks go to Wesley Chrabasz for posting this on his Facebook page.

Americans Against the Tea Party has the article If You Love Bernie Sanders, You’ll Love Him Even More After Seeing This!

No matter how much you love Bernie Sanders, you will love him even more after hearing this!

During an appearance on The Thom Hartmann Show earlier, Sen. Sanders (I-VT) went on a rant against the Koch brothers and a recent video they produced which makes the asinine claim that the American middle class is just fine and, in fact, anyone making over $34,000 is wealthy. Charles Koch also said in an interview on Tuesday with The Wichita Eagle that we should abolish the minimum wage because it would help poor people.

I guess we’re not the only ones who feel ill when billionaires pedal this kind of condescending claptrap.

Sharon registered her dissent over the headline. She noted that Sanders didn’t answer the caller’s question. That just drives her wild when politicians do that. Elizabeth Warren had the habit of going into her standard spiel no matter what the question, and I sometimes did get annoyed at that. However, I have also noted that this is one of Sanders’ campaign and interview strengths. This caller’s question was a good one, but in circumstances where pundits and interviewers try to side-track Sanders, it doesn’t take him long to get back onto his talking points.

Let’s get back to this caller’s question. One of the answers to this question is that what the oligarchs and the rich have done throughout history is to push things so far that it leads to revolutions which overthrow their class. Still it is not absolutely crazy of them to behave that way, even given the history. After all, any particular oligarch or rich person might get through his or her own life without experiencing any of the eventual turmoil. Let the descendants worry about the consequences.

The National Law Journal has the article Holder’s Return to Covington Was Six Years in the Making.

Eric Holder Jr. didn’t wear a tie, didn’t stand to speak, didn’t have his security detail hovering when he reintroduced himself to Covington & Burling’s law partners a few weeks ago. He didn’t need to. They already knew him.

The 900-lawyer firm celebrates a homecoming this week as Holder, the nation’s first black attorney general, rejoins the firm as a white-collar partner. Covington plans to announce the news Monday, and his official start date will be in September.

“This is home for me,” Holder said. Margaret Richardson, his former chief of staff, also is joining the firm as an of counsel.

Holder, 64, left the U.S. Department of Justice in April after serving for six years. Before that, he had been a partner at Covington from 2001 to January 2009.

I was just saying that perhaps Jimmy Carter was the last honest President we had. Although, I didn’t know what skeletons might have been in his closet, or might have taken up residence sine he left office. Then I read this quote from this article about Holder’s plans for his “new” career..

He said he wouldn’t necessarily model his practice after any other well-regarded Washington lawyer, though he did mention his respect for the practice and law firm involvement of former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti. Civiletti served at the end of the Carter administration as AG, led Venable until 2006 and was the first lawyer in the U.S. to report a $1,000 hourly rate.

Salon has the article Why Eric Holder’s new job is an insult to the American public.

If Las Vegas took bets on whether recently departed Attorney General Eric Holder would return to corporate law firm Covington & Burling, the casinos would have run out of money faster than Greek banks. Newborn infants could have guessed at a homecoming for the former partner at Covington from 2001 to 2009. Last year, Holder bought a condo 300 feet from the firm’s headquarters. The National Law Journal headlined the news, “Holder’s Return to Covington Was Six Years in the Making,” as if acting as the nation’s top law enforcement officer was a temp gig. They even kept an 11th-floor corner office empty for his return.

If we had a more aggressive media, this would be an enormous scandal, more than the decamping of former Obama Administration officials to places like Uber and Amazon. That’s because practically no law firm has done more to protect Wall Street executives from the consequences of their criminal activities than Covington & Burling. Their roster of clients includes every mega-bank in America: JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America. Yet Holder has joined several of his ex-employees there, creating a shadow Justice Department and an unquestionable conflict of interest. In fact, given the pathetic fashion in which DoJ limited punishment for those who caused the greatest economic meltdown in 80 years, Holder’s new job looks a lot like his old job.

We won’t have a more aggressive media until the people demand it. How can readers’ demands be more powerful than the corporate medias instincts to protect its own interests? I think that refusing to view or read corporate media except to expose it might get some corporate executive’s attention. I have already cancelled my subscription to The Boston Globe.

The current campaign will saturate this blog with all the links I can find relating to the Holder story. The first post was Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold.

RollingStone has the article Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold. It has the subhead of:

Barack Obama’s former top cop cashes in after six years of letting banks run wild

The article shows the following interview of Matt Taibi on Democracy Now.

This all came to my attention with an email from Credo Action. The main points of that email are in the petition on their web site Tell Congress: Subpoena Eric Holder’s communication with his corporate law firm. There are references to their sources of information in the petition. Here is an excerpt from their explanation.

Worse, it was just reported that the firm, Covington & Burling, has kept an empty 11th floor corner office for Holder awaiting his return. Combined with Holder’s purchase a year ago of a $1.5 million condo just 300 feet from his new office raises serious questions about how long Holder knew he would be getting a major payday from his old firm even while it continued to represent companies under Department of Justice investigation. If the firm and Holder agreed on a future job offer, that alone could violate criminal laws

Now you get a hint as to why Obama is pushing this awful “trade” deal, called TPP despite the majority of Democrats in Congress being dead set against it. I wonder where Obama is going to work when he leaves office. This is the type of behavior we saw from Bill Clinton when he went along with the Republicans to eliminate the Glass-Steagall regulations despite the efforts of the Democrats’, in Congress at that time, to stop him

If you think you want Hillary Clinton as our next president, either you are not paying attention, or you are purposely not looking. If she gets into office and pulls stunts like her husband and Barack Obama have, then don’t come whining to me about how you didn’t know.

I hear talk about how it would be historic for Hillary to be the first woman President. Is that the kind of history we want for this country? The first woman President and more crooked than any male President before her. Just like Obama is going to go down in history as the first black President, and more crooked than any white predecessor.

Naked Capitalism has the story Gaius Publius: The Clinton Campaign Notices the Sanders Campaign, or How to Read the Media.

But also, mainstream insider corporations are completely aligned with the insider game for the obvious reason — they’re part of it. No one inside the game wants to see it damaged. Hayes and Maddow, as people, may or may not prefer Sanders over Clinton, but MSNBC has a clear favorite and if you listen carefully and consistently, it shows. Their owners, and all of the other big media owners, can’t afford (literally afford, as in, there’s major money at stake) to play this one straight. You may find some unskewed reporting, but not a lot of it.

This article thoroughly uncovers the way news is subtly, and not so subtly, biased in favor of the insiders. The gist of the story shouldn’t surprise anyone, but the detail is interesting.

My project to write a replacement for Quicken was getting to the point where I decided I needed some version control of my software. I have used many flavors of this kind of software during my career. I think the first was DEC’s C(ode) M(anagement) S(ystem) – CMS. I have also used SCCS, RCS, CVS, and Cleartool. Rather than just use one of the tools I have used before, I decided to look into what is current. I have heard a lot about GIT. I decided to give it a try.

There is a book out, Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub and published by Apress. This should give you more idea of what GIT is, if you don’t already know.

I had GIT up and running very quickly, but there were a few operations that I was used to that I could not figure out how to do. All of the documentation that I could find on the web assumed you understood a key concept that I wasn’t getting. It finally dawned on me what the issue was, so I drew a picture to clarify the idea. If you are a GIT beginner, you might find it helpful.

My issue was that I had two cloned repositories and I wanted to update one from the work in the other. At the time, I had not created a hub, and didn’t know why I would need one. Now I see that the clone repositories aren’t really meant to talk to each other. Their common means of communication is only through the hub. It is possible to set up a local hub. It only took me 39 different commands to do it. Only the last 4 of those commands were necessary.