The Yellow Something Something

The Last Word On This Blog's Location

2011-05-13T20:50:00.000-05:00

The last word is... I don't have to decide, and you don't have to know, because I license a domain I specifically created long ago to use for this blog. I probably won't physically move the blog's content to that domain, but I can simply point that URL to wherever I intend to blog. Here is the one and only address you need for me:

http://www.yellowdoggereldemocrat.org/

That's it. Bookmark that, and it will take you where I am at any given moment.

Of course, the hardwired versions will still work to get to the individual sites, at least for now.

Something Else Blogger Failed To Restore

2011-05-13T20:01:00.000-05:00

Blogger bloggers...

Did you have any static pages (the ones created/edited using Edit Page, not dependent on date and time)? Yes?

Among those, did you have any pages to which you did make changes on a regular (say daily) basis? Yes?

Then you lost any changes to those pages you made since the great crash yesterday morning. This happened to my "Quotes from the Top" page.

Love 'Em And Leave 'Em... And Leave 'Em... And Leave 'Em...

2011-05-13T17:00:00.001-05:00

At this rate, I'm going to have changed to a new blog more often that Newt Gingrich has changed wives. But more than 24 hours after the initial crash of Blogger, the failed restore, etc. etc., I finally have all my posts back on this blog, but a bunch of comments have simply not reappeared. They're just gone, apparently.

That is not acceptable. And so until Blogger gets its Shift-key together, I'm going to relocate, probably temporarily, to a wordpress.com blog with a similar URL:

http://yellowdoggereldemocrat.wordpress.com/

I've overlapped one post on the new site: the 'Getting their Goat' doggerel. Starting with that post, I'll ask you to make comments on the new site, not on this site.

I don't know if I'll move back here or not, but I'll keep you posted. If you made a comment here on Wednesday or maybe even Thursday, you might want to check to see if the comment is still there.

After OBL's Death? More Of The Same

2011-05-12T14:17:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald addresses the commonly heard suggestions that with Osama bin Laden dead, wars will end, troops will come home, civil liberties will be restored, etc., etc.

The reality? Not so much. Meet the new Boss Obama, same as the old Boss Obama. According to Greenwald, we can...

Expect expansions of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Expect ongoing wars and even some new ones.
Expect to learn about secret wars already underway.
Not reasonably expect Guantánamo to be closed.
Expect Congress to issue a new AUMF. (This is already underway in the House Armed Services Committee.)
Not expect Obama's executive-detention-without-trial policy to end.

And so on. Read Greenwald's article.

Quoting Greenwald reporting on a letter from the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, among other org's:

In a joint letter to Congress, about two dozen groups -- including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights -- contended that the proposal amounted to an open-ended grant of authority to the executive branch, legitimizing an unending war from Yemen to Somalia and beyond.

"This monumental legislation -- with a large-scale and practically irrevocable delegation of war power from Congress to the president -- could commit the United States to a worldwide war without clear enemies, without any geographical boundaries" and "without any boundary relating to time or specific objective to be achieved," the letter warned.

We seem headed inexorably toward an executive-only government. I, for one, am not happy about that.

Florida Passes Law Which May Ban All Sex

2011-05-12T09:33:00.000-05:00

It has to do with the fact that humans are animals, and the law bans sex with "dumb animals." Details are at Bryan's place, but I'll tell you the story in man-on-doggerel:

Getting their Goat

So now the moment has arrived Floridians all dread:
The threat of bestiality has reared its Mossy Head!
They think they're safe when people chafe at human-livestock sex,
But soon they'll find it isn't only Oedipus it wrecks!

The men may not be COWards and perhaps they don't do CHICKEN;
The women aren't full of BULL; with human males they're stickin'.
But gals or blades must note, their clades appear in ANIMALIA...
It's laws on bestiality with which they'll try to jail ya!

And thus with "animals" the Legislature is researchin':
Have all the KIDS gone wild? or is each goat a bestial virgin?
Now on each "date" they tabulate what everybody did...
It ain't just Chucky Cheese's WHERE A KID CAN DO A KID!

- SB the YDS

Nashian Rhyme For Lily

2011-05-12T07:29:00.000-05:00

Age-Related Annoyance

Almost any adolescent
Will at times behave unplescent.

- Steve Bates

Full-Blown Bat-Shit Crazy - UPDATED

2011-05-11T21:25:00.000-05:00

That would be the Republ(ic)ans in Congress:

The GOP's New Constitutional Amendment: Give States Veto Power Over Federal Laws
Evan McMorris-Santoro and Ryan J. Reilly | May 11, 2011, 4:50PM

...

A group of Republicans in the House and Senate are proposing an amendment to the Constitution that would allow a vote by two-thirds of the states' legislatures to override any federal law they did not agree with.

The proposed constitutional amendment, a tea party favorite, is being touted by Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) in the Senate and co-sponsored by Sens. John Barasso (R-WY) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT). In the House, Reps. Rob Bishop (R-UT), Morgan Griffith (R-VA) and Paul Broun (R-GA) are leading the charge.

...

That's it for me. If the federal system goes, I go, too. I will not live here under a form of government that our Founders considered, more-or-less tried before the Constitution was ratified, and discarded as being weak and utterly chaotic. In our own time, the United States cannot effectively exist as a patchwork of 50 different independent regions run by an assortment of radical right-wing governments, varying in degree, manner and details of craziness, with no congressional power to keep a firm hand on those right-wing state legislatures. That way lies madness.

You think you've heard the worst the Tea Party can come up with, but they're always prepared to disappoint you and sink to new depths one more time. "Full-blown bat-shit crazy" is the only description adequate to the nutsiness...

UPDATE: In my anger and haste I probably exaggerated the implication of likelihood that such an amendment to the Constitution could actually pass, even in these crazy times.

There are two ways to propose amendments and two ways to ratify them:

to propose, you must gain the support of two-thirds of both houses of Congress, or persuade two-thirds of state legislatures to call a constitutional convention, which then approves the amendment;
to ratify, you must gain the approval of three-fourths of state legislatures or three-fourths of ratifying conventions in each state.

I doubt they can get this dog past the houses of Congress, which is the route they obviously intend to try, because there are some Teabaggers in Congress. So I'm not packing my bags just yet.

Mad Kane...

2011-05-11T08:33:00.000-05:00

... has something rather astringent to say about the men of Der Tzitung, the Hasidic newspaper in Brooklyn with a policy against publishing women's pictures so strict that they literally airbrushed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton out of a photo in the White House Situation Room. And of course, Mad being Mad, she rhymes what she says!

What are you doing, why are you still here? Go... read...

President: Commander Or Dictator? - Terrorist: Criminal Or Warrior?

2011-05-10T16:56:00.003-05:00

Glenn Greenwald addresses these and one other vital question in his article, "Democratic principles in the War on Terror."

First, outside of the fever-riddled brain of John Yoo and the icy heart of Dick Cheney, is there any basis in a constitutional democracy (remember? that's what we're supposed to aspire to be) for assigning our chief executive total and unreviewable power over citizens and noncitizens alike, including the unilateral power to decide life and death, when those people are far from any battlefield, and when the only "war" going on is what the late lamented Molly Ivins used to call a "war on a noun"?

Second, is terrorist behavior really combat in a war, requiring massive military response and comparably great compromises of our civil liberties in pursuit of victory? Or is it straightforward criminal behavior which can, and in the past, has been, dealt with in our duly constituted courts system, with all its trappings of due process?

Greenwald points out that even Eric Holder, during the Bush administration, answered those questions "no" and "criminal," offering compelling arguments for both answers... but he has now reversed both positions and argues in behalf of Obama's assuming breathtaking powers.

Greenwald quotes Yglesias, who in turn quotes a Rand Corporation study. Greenwald's conclusion is devastating:

... In 2004, the Democratic nominee John Kerry famously (and correctly) said -- echoing Cole's words above -- that Terrorism was comparable to prostitution, gambling, and organized crime: "nuisances" to be dealt with primarily through law enforcement but that will never go away entirely. In a 2008 Atlantic article, Matt Yglesias declared that "Kerry was right" when he " said something about counterterrorism being primarily a question to be dealt with through law enforcement and intelligence rather than something that should be understood as primarily a kind of war," and as proof, Yglesias cited this study from the Rand Corporation, which concluded as follows:

Its report said that the use of military force by the United States or other countries should be reserved for quelling large, well-armed and well-organized insurgencies, and that American officials should stop using the term "war on terror" and replace it with "counterterrorism."
"Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests there is no battlefield solution to terrorism," said Seth Jones, the lead author of the study and a Rand political scientist.
That view now, of course -- once the centerpiece of the Democratic Party's Terrorism arguments -- is decreed to be a fringe and radical view. The same is true for Cole's argument that Terrorists should be deemed criminals, not warriors, and treated exactly the same way we treat criminals: with the full range of due process rights under our normal system of justice. Believe me, to make that very same argument now is to prompt accusations of radicalism and even Terrorist sympathies. ...

All of those views -- Democratic Party orthodoxy a mere three years ago -- have become relegated to the fringe under the Obama presidency ... But it's worth recalling that they were indeed the backbone of the Democrats' once-vigorous opposition (at least in rhetoric) to the Bush/Cheney worldview of using war and battlefield theories to fight Terrorism and to erode core Constitutional and civil liberties.

I would like to think that it goes without saying that our civil liberties as American citizens, even in wartime (which this arguably is not), must not depend on who sits in the White House, and what expediencies s/he is willing to resort to in pursuit of goals that may be as much politics as national security.

How do we get from here to there? Perhaps I have too much faith in the core of the old Democratic Party from bygone days, but I can only hope that at least some of old-timers can and will pressure President Obama not to become former "President" Bush, but rather to apply some of that constitutional scholarship he so proudly claims in his speechifying, to leave off his literal assaults on American citizens in a war that isn't a war, pursued not in his role as C-in-C of the armed forces but as a genuine leader in the face of confrontations against an opposition party of certifiable crazies who have no intention of governing, but rather are intent only on milking America dry and scaring her electorate half to death.

Does Mr. O have it in him? I don't know, but under the circumstances, we'd better Hope he can Change.

What Texans Reasonably Expect Of Louisiana

2011-05-09T21:36:00.001-05:00

I once had a good job offer at a major university in Louisiana. I turned it down entirely because it would have required me to live in Louisiana. The man who offered me the job, a friend and colleague of mine, asked me forthrightly what the difference was between Texas and Louisiana. I answered, "About 200 years."

That was about 30 years ago, and one could hope things would have changed by now. One would hope that... in vain. Louisiana has put in place something called the Louisiana Science Education Act, R.S. 17:285.1, which requires public schools to allow teaching of creationism and/or "intelligent design" in their science classrooms. The state BOE's discussion made the classic "teach the controversy" argument, which is of course invalid on two grounds:

first, a taxpayer-funded public school may not legally, under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, teach any tenet of any religion in any classroom, and
second, a more substantive objection, there is no legitimate sense of the word "science" in which creationism is a science... it is wholly a religious doctrine.

The law also allows schools to include climate change denial in science classrooms... this is less a religious issue than a political one, but the content permitted is just as false.

One 17-year-old student has organized a petition drive, implemented by change.org, demanding that the Legislature repeal the law. It is an open petition, which means you and I may sign it. I have already; I hope you will do so.

And Never The Trains Shall Meet

2011-05-09T15:24:00.001-05:00

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) seems to have decided that Americans are not sufficiently put upon by machines that effectively strip them naked when they board a plane, lists that prevent some Americans from boarding a plane at all, with absolutely no recourse for people added to that list in error (or deliberately, with political malevolence), etc. etc.

So Sen Schumer wants to remedy a disparity: he wants to impose similar restrictions on people who ride Amtrak trains. That's right: he wants a "no-ride" list, initially including the demonstrably faulty "no-fly" list.

Um, Sen. Schumer... [stage whisper...] it's not about the passengers. America will be the target of terrorism even if we check every passenger on every city bus against a printed list that would extend from here to the Moon. Terrorism will persist if we stop and check all drivers in all vehicles for driver licenses, voter IDs, passports, whatever. Terrorists will assault America if they have to walk to the next town to do it. Terrorists intent on attacking trains will attack tracks, tunnels and bridges, not the passenger compartments of railroad cars, because they can do so much more damage that way. Terrorist attacks are the inevitable fate of anyone who decides to play the biggest mofo on the block... and the US seems determined to be just that.

In Iraq, are those who use IEDs aboard the vehicles they blow up? No? Then why would they be aboard a train they intend to destroy? They know where it's going: it's not as if the train is going to change routes all of a sudden. Measures to discover IEDs brought aboard trains are a reasonable precaution, and monitoring tunnels, bridges etc. may be worth the effort. But no-ride lists are nothing but security theater. It's simply not about the passengers.

There's also the fact that a bomb on a train... literally on the train... has a relatively local destructive effect. Blow up a plane, and everyone aboard dies; gravity does part of the work. Crash a plane into a skyscraper... well, you know about that. But set off a bomb in a railroad passenger car? It would have to be quite a bomb to kill more than a few people.* No, terrorists will go after tracks, tunnels and bridges.

Senator... this is the stupidest proposal I've heard in a long time, excepting only Paul Ryan's "Path to Pathology" budget. Why don't you just give it up now, before we spend billions of dollars on totally ineffective "anti-terrorist" measures that probably make real terrorists laugh?

* In the 2004 Madrid commuter train bombings, thirteen IEDs were placed on trains and set off at peak traffic times. While many people were injured, fewer than 200 were killed. Bombs carried onto trains are, at best, devices to terrorize, not devices to kill large numbers of people.

Oh, Kay...

2011-05-09T11:27:00.000-05:00

If you aren't visiting Kay's Thinking Cap at least once a week for her Groaner of the Week, you must be no more than half groan. This week's downright criminally bad pun sent both me and Stella into fits of groaning and shaking our heads!

Read This

2011-05-08T19:46:00.002-05:00

FDL Book Salon hosts Tad Daley on his book Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World. Hosts: Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson. Need I say more?

Actually, I'll say just a bit more. This reminds me of a book I read about 30 25 years ago called The Fate of the Earth, by Jonathan Schell. I found it reprinted perhaps 10 years ago; it is still available in local bookstores. So far, I haven't located Daley's book other than on Amazon and the above-linked Rutgers Press; Houston Public Lib ain't got it, dammit.

A Fence Taken

2011-05-08T16:02:00.001-05:00

My back neighbor has been wielding a chainsaw along his side of the fence line, removing large tree branches and cutting them up. He has a perfect right to do so, and probably a need as well, given that hurricane season will be approaching sooner than I'd like to think. But...

DAMN, it's hot in this office (my back bedroom)!

My electricity provider sends me a weekly bill summary by email. Between two weeks ago and last week, the usage literally doubled. This summer is gonna hurt, in more ways than one...

Mutterer's Day

2011-05-08T09:01:00.000-05:00

In about 1988 my Mother passed behind the veil of Alzheimer's disease. The portal hidden by that veil is largely one-directional: brilliant, vibrant, articulate people go in; only their incoherent mutterings come out.

Two years later, Mom's body died. It was a tough two years... for Dad, for me, and yes, for Mom: in the early stages of that terrible disease, the Alzheimer's victim is at least partially aware of what is happening to her.

So here's a toast to Mom as I remember her from earlier, better days. If I enjoy wit, poetry, music and fine Southern cooking, it is all because of Mom. Solo singer that she was, Mom must also have been a saint to love and marry my Dad, with his complete lack of pitch sense...

Note To Andy Card: Fuck You

2011-05-07T17:28:00.002-05:00

Sometimes the Republan exceptionalism is breathtaking:

President Obama has 'pounded his chest' too much and taken too much pride in the success of the mission to take out Osama bin Laden, according to, of all people, George W. Bush's former Chief of Staff, Andrew Card.

...

Card, of course, was a top official in an administration noted for its theatrical press events, most notably the decision to have President Bush land a fighter jet on board an aircraft carrier before delivering his famous speech celebrating the invasion of Iraq in front of a giant "Mission: Accomplished" banner.

...

Does Card have any idea how much his shit stinks? IMHO, he knows exactly how much it does. And doesn't care. Optics for the next election? Fuck optics, says Card; elections can be bought, or if necessary, stolen...

UPDATE: on the above-linked thread, commenter Mickey Bitsko nails it precisely:

Sounds like this Card is missing a full deck.

Yep!

Floridians: Beware Your Locally Grown Crops!

2011-05-07T15:34:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Turley tells you why:

Florida House Approves Use of Human Waste To Treat Crops For Human Consumption
Published 1, May 6, 2011

Some Chinese may be steaming eggs in urine but Florida is about to grow its crops in such waste. After a heavy lobbying effort by industry, Florida is about to rescind a ban on the use of human waste to treat crops. Soon more than 90 companies will be pumping waste from about 100,000 septic tanks on to their fields — an estimated 40 million gallons treated with lime. ...

(Emphasis mine.)

We've only known of the dangers of doing this for, um, what? two or three millennia? I suppose the lime is supposed to make everything hunky-dory, but somehow I wouldn't want to depend on that to render the human waste literally safe for consumption.

And I thought Texas was bad...

Obama Issues Presidential Assassination Orders - Revisited

2011-05-07T11:53:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald is among the very, very few columnists who address this issue: on what possible constitutional basis is the President granted the unilateral power to issue an assassination order against an American citizen, omitting due process altogether and playing the roles of judge, jury and executioner, as he has done in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki? Isn't this the sort of thing, among many others, that led to the original American Revolution? Isn't this the sort of tyrannical, arbitrary punishment without due process of law that caused our Founders to craft the Bill of Rights in the first place?

Greenwald points out that the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution "expressly guarantees that 'no person shall be deprived of life[, liberty, or property,] without due process of law' -- and provides no exception for war." The U.S. has managed to survive numerous terrible wars and one extended, ideologically driven Cold War without sacrificing that guarantee to the degree Obama seems willing to sacrifice it. When a president begins ditching constitutionally guaranteed liberties as easily as he would pour out yesterday's coffee, I have a problem with that... and you should, too.

I will not be voting for Mr. Obama in 2012. I will not be voting for his Republan opponent, either, but on the matter of fundamental civil liberties, I see very little difference between President Obama and his predecessor... except that Obama has actually issued assassination orders against American citizens far from any battlefield context, something that even the deplorable GeeDubya Bush never did. How could I vote for someone who illegitimately claims the power to assassinate American citizens without due process?

We are nothing without our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Without those guarantees, none of us... not one solitary American... has anything that can reasonably be called "security." I do not have an easy answer to Obama's behavior, but I know with certainty that if he is not confronted and the behavior addressed concretely, we can kiss our freedoms goodbye, no matter what terrorists Mr. Hopey-Changey manages to kill.

Friday Fat Cat Blogging

2011-05-06T00:01:00.005-05:00

Lily has grown rather large, larger than Esther, larger than any cat Our House has ever had in residence...

I am glad I never met Lily's father; he might be rather frightening!

Jobs A Priority? Not To House GOP: See HR 3

2011-05-05T08:58:00.002-05:00

H.R. 3, just passed by the Republan-dominated House with the assistance of 16 Democrats, is a draconian anti-abortion bill. It goes so far as to penalize businesses (by eliminating their tax credits) for offering employees insurance that covers abortion... even when the insurance is paid for with private money. Now there's a "conservative" maxim for business owners: "you can't spend your own money on a legal procedure, indeed, a constitutionally protected right, if we disapprove of the procedure." The bill also redefines rape in a way that requires a woman to prove she was forcibly raped before allowing her an abortion... now that's just what society has always wanted, a way to force a woman to bear her rapist's baby. [/snark] I've always said today's GOP has a cruel, dictatorial streak running right through it.

Once again, for the record, though I have grown tired of saying it: the Hyde Amendment, attached as a rider to a succession of funding bills since 1976, already prevents federal funds from being used for abortion. Although that amendment slashes access to abortion for poor women by removing it from Medicaid coverage, that's not the issue here. This bill goes much further than that: now the GOPers want to place the same restriction on the use of private funds. It seems to me that is mighty close to burdening a woman's right to an abortion as established in Roe.

Reportedly this bill has zero chance of making it into law. That's presuming the Senate does what it says, or Obama actually keeps a promise and vetoes it. But the fact that this is the third bill introduced in the GOP-controlled House shows just how much the GOP cares about dealing with unemployment, declining wages, home foreclosures, rising prices of every damned thing, etc.

Welcome to the Republan brave new world, where radical social-conservative measures displace basic bread-and-butter issues at the top of the priority list. Are those your priorities? No? Remember that fact in November 2012.

Obama Refuses To Release Bin Laden Death Photos

2011-05-04T16:37:00.000-05:00

... says (at least) CBS News.

In other news, an estimated 572 photos allegedly of bin Laden's corpse, some obviously faked, immediately appeared on the Web... [/snark]

(Seriously, though: the FBI has announced that at least one email purporting to show bin Laden dead is a carrier of a virus. Be careful what you open.)

On Our Terms Or Bin Laden's Terms?

2011-05-04T11:06:00.001-05:00

Rachel Maddow examines the issue. Long, but full of insights on both process and substance:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

AFTERTHOUGHT: I did not know that a headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security is being built in Anacostia on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeth's mental hospital. Need I say more?

Government By Poll

2011-05-04T09:33:00.000-05:00

Obama's poll approval jumped by 9 points in the wake of bin Laden's assassination:

Immediately following the announcement that American forces had killed Osama bin Laden, President Obama's approval rating leapt to its highest level since 2009 in a Washington Post/Pew poll.

In the poll, which was conducted on Monday, 56% of Americans said they approved of Obama's job performance, compared to 38% who said the disapproved. That's a marked turnaround from one month ago, when 47% of Americans gave Obama positive marks on his job performance, while 45% said otherwise.

...

It worked for GeeDubya Bush; why shouldn't it work for Barry Obama? Americans luuuuuvs them some violence: if a president's approval ratings are slipping, he (or she, someday soon, please?) can always improve them by ordering direct military action. We are not a subtle people, and we (that's the generic "we," not including me) don't want a subtle president.

But time and Rove wait for no man, and I am certain as I sit here that Obama's lead will evaporate long before November 2012: the truths told about him will be bad enough, and the lies will be still worse.

Low Teacher Pay

2011-05-03T21:53:00.002-05:00

This PSA is brought to you courtesy of a post by PZ Myers of Pharyngula, reflecting an NYT op-ed by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari... TEACHER PAY SUCKS BIG-TIME. The op-ed contains many interesting facts, but the center of it from my perspective is in these three grafs:

At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.

So how do teachers cope? Sixty-two percent work outside the classroom to make ends meet. ...

We’ve been working with public school teachers for 10 years; every spring, we see many of the best teachers leave the profession. They’re mowed down by the long hours, low pay, the lack of support and respect.

When I was born, Dad, trained as a schoolteacher, was working as a shipping clerk for a railroad, basically so he and Mom could afford to have a kid AND rent a very modest place to live. (Two-income households were uncommon in the working class in those days.) A decade later, when Dad decided he really, really wanted to teach school, we made the decision as a family, because it meant a drop in annual income from $13k to under $10k. Add another decade; Dad's salary was still not back to where it had been, though he was well over halfway to a Master's degree earned at UH in night classes, and I went to work in my first full-time job as a programmer... at a salary higher than Dad's salary at the time.

Add 40+ years, and not a damned thing has changed except the dollar amounts. Forgive me if I barf on the next person who says a bunch of damned lies about public school employees including teachers having such a great deal. That person is already soiled in my opinion; it's going to be difficult to see exactly how much of them to wipe away...

Another Question Answered: Torture, Once Again, Did Not Work

2011-05-03T12:44:00.001-05:00

You all know by now that bin Laden was located at least in part by his use of a courier. In all the bragging since bin Laden's assassination, some security hawks have claimed that "harsh interrogation techniques" (let's call it what it was: torture) led Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to reveal the name of the courier.

As with all such claims to date, this one is bogus. Since I'm going to quote AP from ABC News, you'll have to depend on Mother Google to find the quote; I don't need the harassment:

Mohammed did not discuss al-Kuwaiti while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He acknowledged knowing him many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.

Bolds mine. Only a news wire wholly owned by the tough guys on the right would say that it leaves matters "up for debate"; clearly, torture didn't work, and standard interrogation did. Suck on that, nut-cases!

(H/T jamie of IntoxiNation.)

Killing Him Was The Mission

2011-05-03T07:12:00.000-05:00

I don't often send you to Politico, but there are a couple of interesting items in this article:

...

The SEALs took fire on their way to the compound’s third floor, where bin Laden had been sleeping, officials said. The encounter with bin Laden lasted only seconds, and ended with a kill shot to his face.

...

“They were told, ‘We think we found Osama bin Laden, and your job is to kill him,’” an official recalled.

...

So at least in theory, and with some risk, the SEALS presumably could have captured bin Laden... but their specified mission was to kill him. I take that to mean that bin Laden knew things that some Americans did not want said aloud.

How long before WikiLeaks releases the contents of those hard drives? [/snark]

Fair Play For The Texas Senate - UPDATED

2011-05-02T17:24:00.001-05:00

The Texas Tribune:

Senate lawmakers have tentatively passed a controversial measure to require women seeking abortions to receive sonograms — and have the details of the fetus described to them — prior to the procedure. Pending a final vote tomorrow, the bill will head back to the House so the lower chamber can sign off on the Senate's changes.

...

This bill is certain to pass, and Gov. Goodhair is certain to sign it. I found this exchange very revealing, between Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston) and Sen. Wendy Davis (D-Ft. Worth):

Davis alleged the purpose of the bill "is to traumatize women." Patrick fired back: "You know me better than that."

Oh, indeed, we know you well, Sen. Right-Wing-Radio-Talk-Show-Host-Turned-Right-Wing-Pol. We know you better than you want to imagine.

OK. Once we've established in law that the State of Texas can require a doctor to perform a procedure that is medically unnecessary but conforms to a set of social/religious views, I propose the introduction of a similar law, one that requires every male state representative or senator who voted for that law to undergo a sonogram every time a woman in their district is compelled to undergo the same.

But wait... how can a male be given such a sonogram? Isn't it biologically impossible? No, it's not. Have you ever seen the device used to treat urethral meatal stenosis in a man, a thick steel rod? Surely the transducer of a sonogram isn't much larger than that. Just cram that muthafucka into that muthafucka and PUSH...

AFTERTHOUGHT: a friend reminded me on the comment thread that in my anger I advocated avoidable violence and the resulting pain. Perhaps I am becoming what I most abhor. More likely, I was just mad as hell at people bent on harming women. Either way, in the light of day (actually it's not quite dawn yet), I retract my fantasy violence. Dog knows there's enough of the real thing out there.

Glenn Greenwald

2011-05-02T14:34:00.000-05:00

... offers a sensible assessment of the killing of Osama bin Laden. What he says is not that different from what I said upstream, but as always, he says it much better than I ever could.

Limericks 101 Assignment

2011-05-02T13:59:00.000-05:00

OK, class, we have more serious material than usual available to us today. In the spirit of the Lipinski-Lewinsky-Kaczynski limericks of a few years ago, please write a limerick that rhymes...

Obama
Osama
yo Mama

You have 30 minutes. Use your time wisely.

Let The Mythology Begin

2011-05-02T12:33:00.001-05:00

From the Guardian: Osama bin Laden corpse photo is fake. They even show the original images of which the fake is a composite. The photo has already been out on the intertubez for two years, in various publications with various labels.

Here we gooooooo...

Follow-Up: Interview With Baratunde Thurston About His Trump Video

2011-05-02T10:18:00.000-05:00

Here's the interview by Steven Thrasher in Village Voice. As Thurston also works for The Onion, don't miss this one-panel jewel. He swears it came from The Onion's staff writers, that he had nothing to do with it...

H/T Kay for the link to the interview.

'Obama 1, Osama 0'

2011-05-02T07:31:00.008-05:00

Thus spake a handmade cardboard sign, reminding us that bin Laden's death is a political victory for the president. After all, this is America; every president has to prove himself (herself? will that ever happen?) as a mighty warrior. If signs could contain more words, this one might have held another line: "Obama succeeded where Bush failed." Of course, neither president was really there when the deed was done; if there's to be credit, it must go to the troops in that firefight. But whatever. I am content to allow Obama to bask in reflected glory; it's the American way.

Meanwhile, TPM offers a large number of snapshots of the celebrations in NYC and DC.

I can understand that in these awful times the public needs a victory of some sort. We've lost our jobs; many of us have lost our homes. But by damn, we killed bin Laden... and no one else is ever gonna pull a stunt like 9/11/2001 on us again. [/snark]

These scenes are heartening in their own limited way. But jeez, folks, it ain't VE Day. I just looked around and all my problems are still here this morning. How about you?

AFTERTHOUGHT: the NYT can never resist a partisan political cheap shot. Headline: "Bin Laden is Dead, Obama Says." Awwww, c'mon, folks... maybe, just once, you could, like, do some actual reporting and find sources to tell you whether bin Laden is dead, rather than using that maybe-it's-not-true voice? I don't recall any headline 10 years ago that read, "Mission Accomplished, Bush Says" ...

AFTERTHOUGHT: I will bet you money that this gets the wing-nuts chattering:

US officials say that Osama bin Laden has now already been buried at sea.

Islamic tradition calls for quick interment, preferably within hours of death. But that won't keep the nut-cases from talking endlessly about how he's not really dead, the body buried was not really Osama, etc., etc. ad nauseam. "Show me the death certificate!!1!11!!!!"

Osama Bin Laden Killed

2011-05-01T23:30:00.000-05:00

Details here.

Over the decade in which I have written this blog, I have had a tacit policy of not celebrating anyone's death; doing so seemed at best tasteless and at worst counterproductive. I think you will forgive me if I suspend that policy in this one instance: Good riddance to bad rubbish. Yet even that celebration is counterproductive.

Bin Laden's death changes essentially nothing, at least nothing for the better. The United States is still involved in (arguably) three wars directly and ineffectively related to terrorism, and some unspecified number of covert conflicts that are wars in all but name. The US is also still violating treaties, international laws including the Geneva Conventions, its own military laws, and various US policies against things like torture, as if there were no tomorrow and none of America's actions would ever come back to haunt us.

Meanwhile, our civil liberties are being revoked at a breathtaking pace, allegedly in the effort to curb terrorism, but we all know the real reasons. As some of our enemies predicted, the US is effectively destroying itself.

Bin Laden, on the other hand, seems to have gotten everything he wanted. Economically, militarily, and in terms of international relations, the US is headed downhill so fast it makes our heads swim. And presumably Osama is busy with those 72 virgins...

I have only one arguably partisan question: why did this never happen during the administration of George W. Bush? Forgive me if I doubt that omission was accidental: they wanted to leave this on the Democrats' plate. I suppose that turns out to have been a political fuck-up on the part of the GOP.

But before you dance on bin Laden's metaphorical grave, remember this: our nation is probably being buried along with him. To use the phrase popular in 2001... the terrorists have won. Welcome to Hell; enjoy your stay.

Supremes Effectively End Class Action Lawsuits Against Corporations

2011-05-01T21:58:00.000-05:00

Elaine Magliaro on Jonathan Turley's blog has details.

The case is AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. Along classic 5-4 ideological lines, the Court voted to validate contracts with clauses that require arbitration or mandate individual rather than group claims in the event of disputes. As you might surmise, corp's can fight such a lawsuit simply by exhausting an individual's resources: even if there are thousands of such individuals, they can be drained and defeated one-by-one using the corp's effectively unlimited supply of lawyers.

Welcome to the new order. Maybe you can fight City Hall, but I doubt seriously you have the money to fight AT&T.

Don't Proselytize Me

2011-05-01T12:16:00.000-05:00

There I was, "easy like Sunday morning," sitting in my most comfortable chair, sipping soda and reading an excellent murder mystery.

There was a knock at the front door. The mystery was suspenseful enough that the knock made me jump, but there are a few friends who know me well enough to be welcome to drop in, so I got out of my comfy chair, onto my walker and galumphed my way to the front door. I could not see anyone through the peephole, so I didn't open the door; I merely said "Who is it?"

After a second, a young family, dressed for church and carrying their bibles, appeared. The young man said something; I didn't understand and asked him to repeat. Rather than repeating himself, perhaps influenced by my reluctance to open the door, he said "Have a nice day" and departed.

My strong feeling is that these good people came by with the intention of converting me to their religion. Maybe they are "required" to do so by some mandate, real or imagined, of that religion. Usually they are not interested in the give-and-take of real discussion; they know they have the One True Religion, and they need only tell me about it... truly a one-directional communication... for me to be Saved, as they already are.

I know these people are exercising their First Amendment right, and I do not begrudge them that. I am invariably civil in my interactions with them. But they are wasting their time with me, and life is too short for them to waste their time, or mine.

Unlike one friend's car, I am not convertible. I have my views on Life, the Universe and Everything, and I'm just not interested in buying a package someone else is selling. Threatening me doesn't work, either; I find it utterly incredible that an all-powerful god would bother to condemn anyone to an eternity of hell, for any reason whatsoever. If belief in your god requires me to accept the existence of a hell, I don't want to waste your time or mine talking with you. (Atheists and agnostics, on the other hand, are welcome here. Have a seat and I'll fetch you a beer.)

In earlier days, in another house, on Sundays, in pleasant Spring weather, I often sat inside with my front door open, with a screen door to keep out mosquitoes, reading and sipping, enjoying the breeze. Unfortunately, the whole proselytizing game became too popular in that neighborhood, and I found myself becoming less than polite to those not easily discouraged by a first rebuff. Eventually I started closing my door. Bye bye, Spring breezes.

So let me make it clear to anyone walking in my neighborhood: I don't buy anything sold door-to-door. That includes religion and politics, even though I've done some block-walking myself in the past. If you're a friend or neighbor, come on in. If you are walking for a candidate, please stick a brochure in the outer door. If you have any other agenda, please just keep walking.

Republans At It Again: Gerrymandering Texas

2011-05-01T09:10:00.004-05:00

You may have thought that Republans (note: I shall continue to lose the "ic" in "RepublICan" until Republans stop losing the "ic" in "DemocratIC Party") could not possibly do any more redistricting damage than they did in a mid-cycle redistricting in 2003 through the efforts of now convicted criminal money-launderer Tom DeLay (R-Jailhouse). But if you thought that, you would be wrong.

Republans in the Texas House have created a plan that does more minority packing than I would have thought possible after what DeLay already succeeded in doing less than a decade ago... but no, the state House succeeded in diluting-by-combining minority voting strengths, both African American and Hispanic, even more than was done in 2003. State Rep. Garnet Coleman (D-Houston) (official site/political site/public statement on this issue) has written a heads-up letter to US AG Eric Holder regarding the problems this unreservedly Republan plan has with respect to the Voting Rights Act. Read Coleman's letter to see what the bastards are up to this time. It's at least as ugly as what DeLay & Co. did in 2003. And it's being done without even minimal input from the Democratic delegations of counties most affected.

I'm sorry to have to say it... these people are just plain evil. They have, or at least display, not the smallest shred of conscience, nor the tiniest intention of submitting to the will of the majority. If I believed in Hell, I'd cheerfully consign them there.

Last Gas, 90 Miles, Um, I Mean, Last Books, 90 Days

2011-04-30T18:07:00.000-05:00

Today was the last day open for a while for the nearest branch of the Houston Public Library, the one that is only 1½ blocks from our house, the one that supplies us most of our fiction, our movies, our new audio CDs, etc. in this era of, um, limited resources. Starting tomorrow (well, OK, technically it's Monday) our branch will be closed for renovations for approximately 90 days. Damn!

What renovations? The plant is at most 10 years old; what needs renovating so desperately that we have to lose our library for three months? Good question. Stella asked them parts of that question; I asked other parts.

The building is very open-looking, more or less one humongous room under a swoop-shaped space-age roof, glass walls in every direction. They plan to add some more internal glass walls for the sake of sound insulation: apparently, the various age-group-specific events (kids' storytelling, teen book discussion groups, computer workstations, etc.) were not adequately separated to prevent a lot of complaints about crosstalk. This seldom bothered me, but any IT professional who has worked in industrial environments develops an ability to concentrate in the face of almost any amount of noise, so I'm not a good test.

Beyond that, apparently, the topmost parts of some of the windows are not sufficiently sun-blocking, with the consequence that at some times of the day, significant parts of the library are simply unusable for reading or computer use.

There is some good news in all of this. The staff is being temporarily redistributed to other branch libraries (HPL has literally dozens of branches) rather than fired or furloughed, and will return to us once renovations are complete. This is good, because as a former library worker in my younger days, I have high praise for these people: they're good, and I am glad we are not losing them.

Books on hold (often brought in from other branches) will be available for pickup about five miles away at another branch. In sprawling Houston, five miles is like nothing. Indeed, the branch for pickup was at one time our closest library, before the swoop-roofed one was built.

Still, I am having some difficulty getting used to the idea of not having my very own branch library a block away. Let's hope they really do finish the work in under three months.

If You Ever Had The Misbegotten Notion...

2011-04-30T09:51:00.000-05:00

... that Mitch Daniels is some kind of moderate, read this:

TPMMuckraker
Daniels To Sign Bill Stripping Federal Funds From Planned Parenthood in Indiana
Melissa Jeltsen | April 29, 2011, 5:15PM

Republican Governor Mitch Daniels released a statement Friday afternoon saying he will sign legislation stripping federal funds from Planned Parenthood in Indiana, the first state to make such a move.

The statement reads:
I will sign HEA 1210 when it reaches my desk a week or so from now. I supported this bill from the outset, and the recent addition of language guarding against the spending of tax dollars to support abortions creates no reason to alter my position. The principle involved commands the support of an overwhelming majority of Hoosiers, as reflected in greater than 2:1 bipartisan votes in both legislative chambers.
...
...

Once again, a Republan in a powerful position not only sets out actively to discriminate against women, but attempts to justify an infringement on a woman's right to choose abortion by a reference to public opinion.

This is what Roe v. Wade attempted to clarify: abortion is a right. Rights are not subject to public opinion. Rights are not subject to majority rule. Rights cannot be voted on. If something is a right, it may not be suppressed by a plebiscite.

I suppose Daniels is going to run for preznit. Fine; let him... but I hope this incident puts to rest the notion that he is anything less than a full-fledged right-wing nut-case.

Planned Parenthood of Indiana will survive, no doubt with greatly reduced services. There will be thousands (millions?) more women in Indiana without contraception. As a consequence, there will be vast increases in the number of children that have to be supported in whole or in part by the state (or sent out on the street to starve). There will be substantial increases in STD rates in the Indiana population, including, probably, the infection of a few Republan politicians.

And... I'll say it if Mitch won't... there will be more abortions. Many, many more abortions. Great job, Mitch.

Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge

2011-04-29T21:53:00.000-05:00

Mitt Romney talked today about "hanging" something around President Obama's neck. From the linked Boston Globe article:

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Expected Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney tread on dangerous ground tonight as he talked about "hanging" a misery index around the neck of Barack Obama, the nation's first black president.

Romney almost immediately caught himself, with the English major declaring "metaphorically" speaking, but the mix of nervous laughter with applause indicated at least some in the audience realized its potency.

...

I'm sorry... there's not a chance in Hell that this was accidental on Romney's part. This was a message to the most racist among the Republan base. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Absolutely, totally morally deplorable.

Powerful, Moving Deconstruction Of Donald Trump

2011-04-28T10:17:00.000-05:00

Comedian, political commentator and blogger Baratunde Thurston has had it up to here with Donald Trump. His commentary on Trump's racist birther rhetoric (NSFW if your coworkers are sensitive about even occasional well-chosen profanity) is among the most powerful and inspiring condemnations of racism I have ever seen. Indeed, I am reminded of the late great Langston Hughes's poem "Let America be America Again," with its refrain "(America never was America to me.)"

As Thurston reminds us, the most dismaying thing about Trump's recent tirades is that they are happening now, almost a century and a half after the theoretical end of slavery in America. That fact has given me reason to believe that our nation is fragmenting in ways that may never be repaired. And people like Trump are part of the cause. Ironically, Trump would be lucky indeed to possess an intellect even remotely comparable to Thurston's. But he does not. Instead, he possesses only great wealth and an unjustifiably self-pleased attitude. If ever there were a one-man argument against rule by the rich, Donald Trump is it.

Barack Obama has not been the president I hoped and anticipated he would be. His track record on civil liberties places him squarely in the middle... the middle if the right-wing Republican crazy crowd. But this is not about whether I like Obama, or whether you or I voted for him (I think you know I did), or whether there is reasonable hope for national sanity if he is re-elected. This is about one thing and one thing only: the fact that President Obama is Black. To the birthers, nothing else matters... nothing. And their attitude is morally deplorable.

H/T Mustang Bobby.

Manually Generated Comment Spam

2011-04-28T08:00:00.000-05:00

To me, it seems the hard way to do things, but I suppose it doesn't require hiring an IT professional or buying software. There has been a rash of comment spam lately, obviously manually generated (copy-pasted?), with comments along the lines of "Nice post" followed sometimes by a URL... anything to get those numbers up, I suppose. This has become common enough in the past week that from now on I'll delete it unremarked.

What an annoying phenomenon! In other news, water is wet.

The Panetta/Petraeus Shuffle

2011-04-27T11:17:00.000-05:00

Obama is reshuffling his national security structure, and I found David Dayen's take on the matter enlightening. Dayen concludes:

Panetta was Chief of Staff under Bill Clinton and before that a US Representative from the Central Coast of California. He’s been CIA Director in the Obama Administration, which as I understand it now is basically the Secretary of Defense job, given all the covert operations. And then you have a military commander moving to the CIA. So the merging of the military and the intelligence community is complete. Within a few years it’ll just be one big black op. The good news is they can cut the military budget then, and put everything into the secret, off-the-books intelligence budget so as not to raise suspicion.

(Emphasis mine.)

Our Founders had the foresight to place the military under the command of the most powerful civilian in our government. But they surely had no notion of a military-industrial complex, no notion of literally waging war by a series of black ops, and no concept of a government agency with the mandate and secret budget of the CIA.

Perhaps this simplification by merging of functions will help the folks who merely pay for it all with their taxes to understand better: now there's just one big entity that does all this stuff, and it works behind the scrim.

Feel better now?

Krugman On Obamacare/Romneycare

2011-04-27T10:54:00.000-05:00

Paul Krugman examines the fundamental provisions of Obamacare one by one, then declares that Obamacare is essentially Romneycare (Massachusetts health reform). Krugman concludes:

There are no more conservative alternatives — not unless you give up on the whole idea that everyone should have coverage. There are alternatives to the left — single-payer, VA-style government provision — but Obamacare is already as conservative as a plan to make health insurance more or less universal can be.

Which means, of course, that the GOP has no interest in covering everyone under any plan whatsoever. For their money (so to speak), people who would be unprofitable should just go ahead and die, as long as insurance companies get their big bucks first.

Are You American? Could You Get A Passport Today? - UPDATED

2011-04-27T00:29:00.001-05:00

H/T ellroon, who points us to digby, who says...

Remember when Alaskan extremist candidate Joe Miller cited East Germany's border fence as a fine example and we all laughed and laughed because their fence was built to keep their own people in rather than keeping foreign people out?

Well, the laugh's on us. We may not be literally building such a fence, but we are creating a virtual one:

If you don’t want it to get even harder for a U.S. citizen to get a passport — now required for travel even to Canada or Mexico — you only have until Monday to let the State Department know. The U.S. Department of State is proposing a new Biographical Questionnaire for some passport applicants:
...

It seems likely that only some, not all, applicants will be required to fill out the new questionnaire, but no criteria have been made public for determining who will be subjected to these additional new written interrogatories. ...

...
...

Digby's assessment:

This is Big Brother stuff --- they are setting up a series of roadblocks to use "just in case" they want to deny someone a passport. The question is, who and why? ...

Big Brother stuff. Is that too strong a statement? I really don't know, and I hardly ever travel these days, domestically, let alone internationally.

But about a couple years ago, some time after I moved to this house, I ran across my old passport as I unpacked from the move. It was about to expire, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Something told me that it was worth the time and money (which was considerable; I missed the renewal date by ONE DAY) to have a current passport. I doubt seriously that I shall outlive this new one, but I had a sense that it was not a good idea to wait until I had imminent travel plans to undertake the renewal. I promptly renewed the passport. Now I can at least visit the West Coast of Canada again if I'm lucky enough to regain my physical ability to travel; that was one very beautiful place, and I'd like to see it again before I step on a rainbow.

Why is this happening? What kind of USA wants to make international travel difficult for ordinary citizens? It makes no sense, even for the purveyors of empire, to restrict travel. Hell, it's bad for business of just about any kind. Why are they proposing to do this? I cannot think of an innocuous reason; can you?

UPDATE: BadTux says this turns out to be just another way of obtaining a passport, the only way if your original proofs of citizenship are lost. Let us hope that's all it is. See BadTux's comment on the thread of this post.

No Barbour-ous Presidential Candidate

2011-04-26T17:20:00.001-05:00

Gov. Haley Barbour (R-Racism) says he will not run for president, and gives his reasons:

A candidate for president today is embracing a ten-year commitment to an all-consuming effort, to the virtual exclusion of all else. His (or her) supporters expect and deserve no less than absolute fire in the belly from their candidate. I cannot offer that with certainty, and total certainty is required.

Fire in the belly? Barbour? Water on the brain, maybe...

Elizabeth Warren: Recess Appointment To Head CFPB?

2011-04-26T10:04:00.000-05:00

David Dayen has details. Needless to say, appointing someone apparently both sane and expert would be a first for Obama, and I doubt she can be confirmed when it's time to re-up. But Warren is so obviously the right person for the job that... um, never mind; I forgot for a moment what world I'm living in. Stay tuned.

Newly Leaked Docs: Guantánamo 'Quite Simply A Mess'

2011-04-25T18:09:00.001-05:00

The quote is from Obama, in May 2009 as reported on McClatchy in the article linked below.

The mess... well, if the WikiLeaks documents are valid, to say that Guantánamo has suffered mission creep is far too kind. Please read Amy Davidson in The New Yorker and Carol Rosenberg and Tom Lasseter of McClatchy. Americans, prepare to be embarrassed on behalf of your country, or perhaps even ashamed of it.

Two Via Digby

2011-04-25T16:05:00.000-05:00

H/T Digby for links to the following two articles:

Inside the GOP's Fact-Free Nation, by Rick Perlstein in Mother Jones,
The WikiLeaks Blog for 4/25, by Greg Mitchell in The Nation.

Both are rather long; both are worth your time.

Want To Cut The Budget? Reduce Military Spending

2011-04-25T10:36:00.002-05:00

Sorry I missed this when it came out, and thanks to TrueMajority for emailing me a reminder: amazingly, the New York Times is on board with the "Not $1 More" campaign fronted by several progressive groups.

Let's face it: if we're going to leave people jobless and homeless in a quest for ~~more money for rich folks~~ budget reductions, we really ought to recognize two things: one, our military budget exceeds in size the military budgets of all other major nations combined, and two, the horrendous size of that budget... $7.5 trillion over the next decade, apparently not counting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan... is so large in part because it addresses force structure and procurement needs for a bloated Cold War context that is simply no longer applicable.

If even The Newspaper of Wreckers recognizes (wreck-ognizes?) the scope of the problem, you know it's got to be bad. If the GOP is serious about deficit reduction (OK, stop laughing; I do know exactly one Republican who really means it, and he's not a happy camper these days), they will cooperate in addressing the item that overwhelms the rest of the budget. If not... very likely IMHO... we know it's business-as-usual into the foreseeable future.

RELATED INFO: Krugman talks about the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget proposal.

More About iPhone And Android Tracking

2011-04-24T17:31:00.003-05:00

David Drumm on Jonathan Turley's blog provides more details on the warrantless tracking info aggregated on modern smartphones and transmitted to the companies that provide services, or other companies, as the manufacturer may choose. First, the basics:

iPhones and Android smartphones regularly transmit their locations back to Apple and Google. The location information is used for the estimated $2.9 billion location-based services market. Location-based advertising targets consumers with location-specific advertising on their mobile devices.

According to research, the HTC Android phone collects location information every few seconds and transmits the data back to Google several times an hour.

What if you don't want to be targeted for location-based advertising?

According to Apple, GPS and cell tower data collected by the device and transmitted to Apple is assigned a random identification number that cannot be associated with a particular customer or device. Although, Apple could easily and secretly change this as part of a software “upgrade.” iPhone customers also have the option of disabling location-based service capabilities under the “General” menu under “Settings.” If this option is disabled, no location information will be collected. The more iPhone users that opt-out, the less location-based service revenue for Apple.

Anyone even remotely technologically inclined will realize that if the location service can be turned off locally by a user, it can surely be turned on remotely by the service provider. I suspect the ability to disable location service is a temporary provision, until Apple etc. can pay their tame members of Congress to fix the laws to allow location service to be activated silently and without permission.

Is it constitutional? does it amount to a "search" when a network locates a user for commercial purposes without the user's permission and without a warrant? Well, there's ~~an app~~ a Court for that...

My location is "at home" probably more than 99 percent of the time. And I am not particularly secretive about other places I may go. And my phone is old and cheap; obviously the cell tower system can find it, but I doubt seriously there's enough capacity in it to do the kind of real-time tracking described above.

But if I replace my phone, as one inevitably does if s/he lives long enough, I'll probably start turning it off when I'm out and about, unless I'm expecting an imminent incoming call or about to place a call myself... in other words, I'll use the phone more as a glorified answering machine. Call it my small personal stand for minimal privacy.

The feature I shall miss most if I turn my phone off is the displayed date and time. But they still sell devices that perform only that function; if I recall, they're called "wristwatches" ...

Drumm concludes with this thought:

... If police have warrantless access to your cellphone’s tracking data, the tagline will become “let me see your driver’s license, registration, proof of insurance, and cellphone.”

Happy Easter To My Christian Friends

2011-04-24T11:47:00.002-05:00

And please be kind to bunnies!

The Cult Of Zero

2011-04-23T13:45:00.000-05:00

I have just returned from a thread on emptywheel's blog, on which I learned that there are still people defending Obama even for his utterly inappropriate public claim that PFC Bradley Manning "broke the law." As far as I know, Manning has been charged with, but neither tried for nor convicted of, the acts for which Obama publicly condemns him.

It is a truism of American justice (reinforced implicitly in the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution) that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty under the law before a duly constituted court. What part of "innocent until proven guilty" does our self-proclaimed legal scholar president not understand?

At some point, support of Mr. Obama... even as he defies the law and the legal tradition of due process, proclaiming Manning's guilt in public, a public including military service members who will eventually serve as Manning's jurors in trial proceedings by a military of which Obama is commander-in-chief... amounts to a kind of cultism in which Obama, just by being Obama, is above the law.

I'm sorry... that just won't wash.

It Was All A Misunderstanding

2011-04-23T08:11:00.001-05:00

An afterthought on an earlier post about Sen. Jon Kyl's "misstatement":

Sen. Jon Kyl's aide did not, after all, say that Sen. Kyl's Planned Parenthood comment was "not intended to be a factual statement." What the aide surely actually said, which of course never made it onto the evening news, was that it was "not intended to be a fuck-you-all statement." But as they're all Republicans in that office, even that statement is a lie.

A Hitch In Time

2011-04-22T17:59:00.000-05:00

Christopher Hitchens is dying of cancer. The link is to Hitchens's farewell letter to the American Atheist convention, which he was to have addressed, but was physically incapacitated past any hope of speaking. A big H/T to PZ Myers for publishing the letter. It may be the best thing Hitchens ever wrote.

Let's get something out of the way up front. Hitchens is a cantankerous man who drinks too much and has a real capacity for offending people. OK, I've posted the obligatory qualifier. But I am pretty cranky myself, and I don't write a tenth as well as he does. (I almost said "did" ... but as far as I know, he is still hanging on.) We can respect him for his good aspects. Speak no ill of the (almost-) dead, and all that.

Over the course of my 62 years (can you believe it? Hitchens is younger than I am) I have transitioned from non-belief (my very early exposure to Christianity simply didn't "take") to quasi-New-Age belief (I was influenced by friends toward that), to write-your-own-belief (I was a UU... an agnostic who admires our nation's Founders could do worse than to be a UU) to leaning-toward-unbelief, which is where I stand these days. The physical universe contains so many improbabilities, and their number and conceptual complexity seem to increase every time I revisit them after a few years, that I can no longer find it in myself to profess doctrinaire belief in any formal religion. And I seem to be able to speak God's alleged name only when I'm cussing a blue streak.

I've played music in services offered by an astonishing variety of Unitarian-Universalist churches, Christian churches both Catholic and Protestant, Jewish synagogues, and so on. That means I've heard sermons by a lot of different kinds of preachers. All I can say is, it is a good thing I was paid for listening to those preachers, um, I mean, playing those services...

Some preached moral truths; some among those actually addressed moral issues rather than listing thou-shalt-nots. Some stuck to the thou-shalt-nots.

Some preached Christian or Jewish stories; some of those stories were part of traditions thousands of years old... and none of them, not a damned one, was true in any literal sense, not that they didn't have their attractions and uses as myths.

Some UU ministers preached that I should create my own religion and traditions and stories from scratch or with help from any sources I chose. That came closest to fitting my needs (though I was too lazy to engage in much myth-making), and I stuck around for several years at one UU church.

But eventually I did not need a church for fulfillment. (I confess I do miss the music... but for performers, the music goes away one day, no matter how much you wish it wouldn't.) And as I don't need a god for salvation, blessing, justification for what I do, or formalizing of my human relations, I left most of my sense of God behind when I left the churches. I still have a vague, nebulous, nonspecific and certainly non-doctrinal sense of Presence, but I'm the first to admit that it could be (and likely is) brain chemistry.

So I have a great respect for the path chosen by Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and the other serious atheists of our era, as well as the street fighters in behalf of that tradition, such as PZ Myers.

As for Hitchens, I shall miss the cranky bastard when he's gone. I offer no prayers, but I shall raise a glass in his memory.

Amazon Weather Forecast: Not Cloud-y, Community Suffers

2011-04-22T16:29:00.000-05:00

According to Reuters, Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service has experienced serious problems, starting early Thursday and continuing into today. This has affected me principally in the absence of login and comment facilities on Talking Points Memo; those services just returned to me within the past hour.

Yes, I know, some of you don't like TPM... or FDL, or Kos, or one side or the other of occasional blog wars between smaller blogs. Nothing wrong with that. But many of us find our blogging experience considerably enhanced by the presence of a community associated with a large blog.

For example, I learn more than a little bit by reading the comments on FDL; many of their commenters (yes, I am one, though only occasionally, under the name "SBtheYDD") are themselves bloggers in the manner of journalists, who do serious research and post at least some of it in comments or personal blogs on that site.

I am not as much a member of the TPM community (though I do post an occasional comment under the name "doggerelist"), but I lurk on their threads. It is not difficult to filter the good stuff from the crap, and sometimes the good stuff represents quality work by people not as well-known as the named authors.

So the commenting facility on a blog is a community-building tool, for progressives and liberals as surely as for wing-nuts. I am glad TPM seems to be back "on the air" with its full community visible from here once again.

Kyl Erases His Bogus Planned Parenthood Statement From Senate Record

2011-04-22T15:38:00.003-05:00

Of course anyone who has ever had anything to do with following the doings of members of Congress knows that the congressional record is NOT anything like an official transcript of proceedings: basically, any member of Congress can change it, introducing, deleting or rewriting parts of speeches they made on the floor.

But the senator who can spell neither John nor Kyle properly, who claimed on the Senate floor that "[i]f you want an abortion you go to Planned Parenthood and that's well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does," then later responded to criticism of the statement by issuing a disclaimer, "[h]is remark was not intended to be a factual statement," has retroactively changed what he said, in the congressional record. Visit David Kurtz's account in the TPM Editors Blog at that link.

Next week, Sen. Kyl will reassure us that the federal government does in fact spend 15 percent of all taxpayers' money on foreign aid, that Social Security is broke and is going broker, that Saddam Hussein plotted 9/11 with the Saudi conspirators, that welfare mothers live better than you do, etc., etc.

Shorter Jon Kyl: it doesn't have to be true; it just has to sound good from one's own ideological perspective. Hey, maybe I'll remember that next time... nah. Unlike some people, I couldn't live with myself if I flung that kind of bullshit.

AFTERTHOUGHT: just in case you are wondering, Planned Parenthood does do abortions; according to their 2009 report, abortions represent about 3 percent of all services they provide. Much of the rest... women's reproductive health exams including cancer screening (17 percent of services), STD exams (31 percent), and supplying contraceptives (36 percent)... vastly exceeds the total for abortions. Planned Parenthood is often the only reproductive health care available to women of limited means and to teens whose parents, for one reason or another, will not provide them necessary medical care. Source: Media Matters... but practically any honest site on reproductive health can tell you that.

If 'God' Be Against Us, Who Can Be For Us?

2011-04-22T13:23:00.006-05:00

"God" in this case is Barack Obama, who said in public about PFC Bradley Manning that "he broke the law."

Well, maybe he did, although I'd feel better about that assertion if they, like, you know, tried Manning and convicted him before the President of the United States went around proclaiming his guilt...

In a just world, in a just nation, this alone would be grounds for a mistrial in all subsequent trials of accusations against Manning. But I suspect Obama has no intention of ever letting the question of Manning's guilt see the inside of a courtroom. He's just going to hold him forever, shuffling him from one detention facility to another to try to defuse public discontent over the manner of Manning's imprisonment. And the Pentagon has as much as admitted it. From the same FDL article by Michael Whitley:

As a reminder: the Pentagon plans to hold Manning indefinitely. Might as well, since they think he’s guilty already.

Follow the above link and read the quote from the Pentagon's lawyer at the press conference: they're planning on holding Manning

... for what we expect will be a longer period of pre-trial confinement...

and

... we are probably months off from the trial of this case.

Why? Manning has been imprisoned for most of a year. He has been charged with a laundry list of crimes, at least one of them capital, for several months. Why is the prosecution not prepared, after all this time, to try him? I can only conclude that "justice" is far from the object of this case. The word "persecution" comes to mind instead. And the real crime? defying the will of "God."

Liberal Economist Jared Bernstein Is Out At The White House

2011-04-22T13:13:00.001-05:00

Some things are simply not destined to work out. No genuine liberal could possibly do effective work in the Obama administration; his advisors come in two flavors: conservative and more conservative. So Bernstein is moving on, to the excellent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where he presumably won't have a boss who shuts him down (or up).

The best of success to Mr. Bernstein in his new venue. I'm sure Obama regards his moving on as a success: he now has no liberal economists among his advisors. Screw the base; never mind what we think we voted for...

The Oh-Dash-It-All Of Hope

2011-04-22T08:05:00.000-05:00

Found thanks to Avedon:

No, no, no! Please take it back to the kitchen. Perhaps I didn't make myself clear: I ordered the audacity of LEGITIMATE hope!

Of course I don't blame all those problems on Obama and the Dog-awful Congress he has to work with. But significant, systematic, effective, society-wide approaches to all those problems require government involvement and funding. Without that, there's no... um... hope.

Obama DOJ: We Won't Say If We Intend Warrantless Reading Of Emails, Texts

2011-04-21T21:49:00.000-05:00

ACLU Blog of Rights:

Last week the Justice Department squandered an opportunity to reassure Americans that as technology advances our civil liberties will not be left behind. The Justice Department was called before Congress to say whether it should be permitted to read people's email, text messages and other electronic communications without a probable cause warrant — that is, without a judicial determination that it has a good reason to believe a search will turn up evidence of a crime. The clear answer to this question should have been "no." After all, a warrant has been required for postal mail since at least the 1870s and for telephone conversations since the 1960s. Why shouldn't our email receive the same protection?

Unfortunately, instead of agreeing whole-heartedly with this basic concept of constitutional law, the Justice Department refused to take a position one way or another — leaving members of Congress and the public to wonder: does the Obama administration believe it should be able to read our text messages and emails without a warrant? This dismaying development proves once again that the courts and Congress have a vital role to play in keeping government surveillance in check and ensuring that Americans' privacy rights are fully protected.

...

(Emphasis mine.) If you voted for Obama, did you anticipate your basic rights, including privacy, would be better protected than they would have been under, say, John McCain? Many of us did vote for him with that expectation among others, only to learn that there is actually very little difference between the Obama administration and the Bush administration in matters of civil liberties: both presidents and their administrations seem not to give a good damn whether they comply with the Bill of Rights or not.

There is no question that the technological means exist for the federal government to capture literally all emails and text messages. We know they already do it with all international phone calls; it wouldn't surprise me if they already do it with emails and texts. But things are not really constitutionally different between letter mail and email: if the former is protected from government snoops absent probable cause and a warrant, the latter should be protected, too. Text messages are in some ways more like phone calls than emails: they are by their nature short, interactive and real-time. Considering all the innocent "Luv, I be off wk 7pm; shld I buy bread on way hm?" messages that are almost certainly scooped up already whether or not the feral gummint actually reads them, the degree of invasion of personal privacy inherent in warrantless searches of text messages is enormous.

So this is a big deal. At base, we either have privacy in our communications, including privacy from government snooping, or we don't, and scenes from the novel "1984" come to mind. Why is the Obama DOJ so reluctant to stand on the side of our constitutional rights? Exactly what does it intend to do with that information acquired by warrantless searches?

Japan: Radioactive Iodine Found In Breast Milk

2011-04-21T20:56:00.000-05:00

I haven't visited the topic of the Fukushima disaster in a while, but AMERICAblog provides me the latest:

The Telegraph:

The radiation contamination came to light after tests were conducted on breast milk samples taken from nine women living northeast or east of Tokyo.

Four of these women were found to be contaminated, with the highest reading of 36.3 becquerels of radioactive iodine per kg detected in the milk of the mother of an eight-month-old baby in Kashiwa, Chiba prefecture.

...

Sigh. This is worse than anyone initially expected. Those women face an awful dilemma: use formula (or breast milk) from other parts of Japan (formula is usually a bad idea), or feed their babies 36.3 becquerels of radioactive iodine per kg of their own breast milk. You know, nobody anywhere should ever have to face that choice.

An' So's Yer Old Man!

2011-04-21T12:45:00.000-05:00

In an FDL post on a largely unrelated topic of the perils of pursuing accused terrorists with trials before military commissions, I found this excerpt interesting:

Aha, but isn’t al Nashiri an “unlawful combatant?” No he’s not. In fact, the Obama administration has rightly deep-sixed the Bush-era term “unlawful enemy combatant,” for Guantanamo detainees, replacing it with “unprivileged enemy belligerent.” This is consistent with a recognition that under the laws of war, participation in hostilities by civilians is not “unlawful.” Since military commissions may only take up crimes in violation of the laws of war, everything charged in connection with the Cole attack would be out the window, with the possible exception of perfidy.‬‪ ‬‪

Emphasis mine. Bush's "unlawful enemy combatant" passes from the dialog, and I had only just gotten accustomed to the phrase. I don't know that I like "unprivileged enemy belligerent" any better; it still seems to make a lot of assumptions about things that IMHO it would take a trial to prove. But asking Obama to grant combatants due process according to international standards is like, well, it's like asking him to follow up on his promises... don't hold your breath.

PolitiFact Destroys Its Own Credibility On GOP's Ending Medicare

2011-04-21T10:59:00.001-05:00

This is so transparent that bugs bounce off it as they try to pass through. TPM's Brian Beutler:

If Democrats proposed to turn Medicare into a system that only provided free veterinary services to seniors, would Republicans be lying to say Dems wanted to "end Medicare," without including the caveat "as we know it"?

Of course not. But that's more or less the charge PolitiFact is leveling at Democrats over a new DCCC ad (below) which flatly charges Republicans with proposing to "end Medicare."...

...

Republicans call this new health insurance system "Medicare." But it's a completely different program from today's Medicare. PolitiFact doesn't see it that way.

"But to say the Republicans voted to end Medicare, as the ad does, is a major exaggeration," PolitiFact writes. "All seniors would continue to be offered coverage under the proposal, and the program's budget would increase every year."

...

Indeed, seniors would be provided vouchers to pay for private medical insurance, and those vouchers would increase annually... by nowhere nearly enough to keep up with rising medical costs. This is just another way of murdering seniors, slowly, by financial starvation. It's the GOP way; it's who the GOPers are, right down to the bone.

As for PolitiFucked, if we could co-opt Harry Potter to turn a horse into a rattlesnake, would they still call it a horse and try to ride it? IMHO, PF's credibility, never all that great, just took a significant hit.

Republican Budget: Is The GOP The Ritual Suicide Party?

2011-04-21T10:03:00.002-05:00

ABC News, in announcing the House's passage of Paul Ryan's "Road to Ruin" budget (or as I've been calling it, the "Path to Pathology"), says the bill includes a "controversial plan to transform Medicare."

An email from MoveOn (sorry; I don't have an online ref) puts it more bluntly:

Unbelievable. They really voted to eliminate Medicare.

Last week, all but four House Republicans voted for a budget that eliminates Medicare for anyone born after 1957.¹

Right. Republicans: "Medicare is only the most popular government program of all time, so let's eliminate it." Yes, doing so fits their ritual kowtowing to the most bloody insane of their base. So why not do it? The world can live without the Republican Party, whatever they may believe.

(The footnote leads to the ABC News piece linked above.)

So... how popular is Medicare? From the above-linked ~~MoveOn~~ Medicare for All article:

The dual situations of Medicare popularity and the control of opinions by those who have not experienced Medicare are summarized by Mark Blumenthal of the National Journal:
“… Americans experienced with “government-run” health insurance (Medicare) like what they have and don’t want to change it, and younger Americans enthusiastic for change don’t know what they’re missing.”

Article of 6/29/2009: “Who’s Afraid Of Public Insurance?
Health Care Consumers Give Medicare Higher Marks Than Private Plans”

Polls referenced by Mr. Blumenthal in support of single-payer,Medicare for All, include these support levels:
      67%, (80% from a poll of 65 and older) (Kaiser Family Foundation polls)
      72% (CBS News / New York Times)
Highest marks (rating 9-10) from what Blumenthal describes as a “massive collection of data”:
      56% for Medicare (152,600 responses)
      40% for private plans (190,722 responses)
See Mr. Blumenthal’s complete article

Any questions? How do you spin those numbers as "Medicare is unpopular"?

Kill Medicare? Based on the above, sane people would want to expand it into a population-wide system, Medicare-for-all, and go about finding a way to pay for it. As I said earlier this week in a thread on Bryan's site, I personally favor an "eat the rich" approach, and I say that only half ingest. (Awwww, did he really say that? Yep.)

Seriously: Robert Reich points out:

If the rich were taxed at the same rates they were half a century ago, they’d be paying in over $350 billion more this year alone, which translates into trillions over the next decade. That’s enough to accomplish everything the nation needs while also reducing future deficits.

Need I say more? If the GOP had set out intentionally to hand the Dems an ideal campaign issue for 2012, they couldn't have done a better job.

Some murderers, in a fit of remorse, commit suicide. Here's the GOP, planning to murder millions of senior citizens. Have they, too, decided to commit party suicide? Probably not... to do that, they'd have to have either a brain or a heart, and they're lacking both.

Dis-Occidentalization

2011-04-20T21:08:00.001-05:00

A few hours ago... how many hours I'm not sure... I settled in for an afternoon nap. I woke up about an hour ago (at about 8 pm CDT). It was dark outside. I kept waiting for it to get light, but it didn't. I meandered into the bathroom and took my morning meds. I located Stella and said "good morning." She replied "good evening." Oops. Now I am truly disoriented; I keep thinking I have a full day ahead of me. And now that I've taken those meds, I'll never sleep tonight.

I wish I could claim this is the first time that has happened to me, but it seems to happen about once every few years. So, going with the flow, I say "good morning" to all of you!

The BP Disaster After One Year

2011-04-20T11:22:00.002-05:00

Sierra Club:

One Year after the BP Disaster: Gulf Communities are Still in Crisis

Stunning Inaction by Congress after the Largest Environmental Disaster in American History

New Orleans, LA – One year after the largest oil spill in American history, Big Oil continues to rake in record profits, Congress has still not acted to hold BP accountable and thousands of working families and small business owners in the Gulf are still struggling to recover.

...

The rest of the page, from a Sierra Club mailer, contains Executive Director Michael Brune's statement on the matter. He doesn't go easy on BP, of course... but he also faults Congress for its inaction. Read it; it's short.

If I recall correctly, Sierra Club policy opposes all deepwater drilling, on the grounds that the technology is not established as safe enough to protect the surrounding environment. It is a tragedy that we had to experience the effective destruction of the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico before the message sank in (or did it?): don't deepwater drill.

Don't let anyone tell you the Gulf was unharmed, or has returned to normal: that, to use Ms. Maddow's favorite expression, is bullpucky. The chemicals BP used mostly had the effect of sinking the leaking oil to the bottom, where it is less visible but just as deadly to sea life, enabling BP's spurious claim that it has cleaned the Gulf. The Gulf will probably not return to anything resembling a normal condition within my lifetime, and possibly not yours, either.

Meanwhile, Congress has done nothing to regulate such drilling, and BP is requesting bolder and riskier drilling permits, even in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Meanwhile also, the "awl bidness" is patting itself on the back, proclaiming 2010 its best year ever. I dread seeing their worst year when that comes along.

Call Me A Socialist. Please!

2011-04-19T23:38:00.002-05:00

According to davidswanson at Corrente, a Republican member of Congress did exactly that, on the floor of the House, to one or more Democratic members, referring to the Congressional Progressive Caucus's defense of its "People's Budget." Everything ground to a halt while that caucus's co-chairs, Reps. Keith Ellison and Raul Grijalva, demanded the accusation be transcribed for the record, and the Republican (who? davidswanson declines to say) retracted the "slander."

What folly. What a waste of time. Our country has a deep and vibrant tradition of socialism, and even of Socialism, complete with social programs that are undeniably socialist... Social Security, Medicare (notwithstanding Tea Partiers' "hands off" cry), Medicaid, WIC, unemployment compensation, food stamps, etc. etc. Small-s socialism is one of the tools in the American toolkit. If Tea Partiers go into fits when they realize the program they're defending is socialist in its very nature, well, that's nobody's fault but their own... as some conservatives used to shout "get a job" at hippies, I'll cheerfully fling "get an education" at the TP folks.

So yes, by all means, call me a socialist... that's partially accurate. Or a capitalist... that's partially accurate, too. You may choose to omit communist from your list of epithets, but I won't insist you take even that one back if you fling it at me, because if you do that, it can only mean you haven't a clue what the word means (as indeed I do not, at least in any detail), and are only grasping for a pejorative to spit at me. But I have no aversion to the label "socialist"; it places me squarely in one of the great American traditions, no matter who has vilified the term in the past few decades. Say it, to my face, if it makes you feel better... unlike Reps. Grijalva and Ellison, I'll just smile in response.

(H/T Avedon for the Corrente link.)

Poll: Majority Of American Adults Support Same-Sex Marriage - UPDATED

2011-04-19T21:01:00.001-05:00

Jon Terbush of TPM:

As Republicans and President Obama square off over the Defense of Marriage Act, a new CNN poll shows that a small majority of Americans now support legal recognition for same sex marriages.

In the poll, 51% of adult Americans said they thought same sex marriages should be recognized by law, while 47% said they should not. That's a significant reversal from the same poll two years ago when Americans opposed same sex marriage by a 10-point spread, with 44% in favor and 54% against.

It's the second time in as many months that a pollster has for the first time found majority support for legalizing same sex marriage. In March, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that 53% of adults supported legalizing same sex marriage, while 44% opposed it.

...

As a proud (albeit straight) member of that majority, I am glad that majority has come to be. For one rare time, President Obama has done the right thing: his DOJ will not defend DOMA in court.

But John Boehner will spend up to $0.5 million in lawyer's fees in his attempt to sustain a law which never should have been passed and signed in the first place, a law which blatantly violates the human rights of a significant segment of America's population.

I hope he spends every penny of that half million... only to see his effort fail utterly and entirely. No one deserves failure more than a powerful public official who attempts to deny American citizens their human rights.

UPDATE: My bad on this. I didn't understand, as Mustang Bobby tells us, that this is TAXPAYERS' MONEY that Boehner and the House are using to defend DOMA, and the half million can be increased by agreement between the parties with the approval of the House. Mustang Bobby puts it this way:

...

So let me get this straight...so to speak. According to Mr. Boehner, the country is "broke," but he's willing to spend a half a million dollars to keep discrimination on the books?

...

Please read the rest of Bobby's post. I'm still not sure how the House can spend a half million without Senate concurrence and a presidential signature, but a lot of things happen these days that old folks like me with a more traditional understanding of the intent of the Constitution don't comprehend.

People-Unfriendly

2011-04-19T17:08:00.002-05:00

Ah, I see that Houston Early Music (fka Houston Harpsichord Society) has not changed significantly since my days as a participant. This time it's a concert by the Flanders Recorder Quartet, which I would be interested in hearing except for HEM's choice of venue:

FLANDERS RECORDER QUARTET with SOPRANO CECILE KEMPENAERS: The Six Wives of Henry VIII
Trinity Episcopal Church
Houston, TX
...
Kid Friendly: No
Dog Friendly: No
Non-Smoking: No
Wheelchair Accessible: No

That speaks volumes. Historically (so to speak), this org has been interested mostly in presenting good concerts for the enjoyment of wealthy people while treating both musicians and non-wealthy audience members the way I'm sure the people in charge of the org believe they deserve. Picking a wheelchair-inaccessible, smoking-allowed venue (really? a church allows smoking? one hopes this is a misprint) is just par for the course for this org.

What? you say I am biased? Damned right I am biased! Twenty to thirty years ago, I was among the musicians and audience members maltreated. I am not quick to forgive in any case, and I am especially not quick to forgive misbehavior by wealthy people toward the rest of us. I just hope the FRQ has an ironclad contract with them. Things got so bad a few decades back that one famous harpsichordist demanded prepayment to appear on their series. I am willing to bet that at least some of the org's board are the same people now as then. Musicians beware!

Days Of Wine And Charoses

2011-04-19T08:40:00.000-05:00

A Jewish friend was kind enough to invite us to his Passover Seder. I have attended one before, probably 30 years ago, but I had forgotten almost everything. The ritual was fascinating, the story told was indeed one to be remembered, and the food... well, sad to say, while the food was wonderful at the time, this morning, the food is disagreeing with me. I don't know if it was the unfamiliarity of the spices or the sheer quantity I ate, but I'm not feeling well this morning. Blogging should resume by sometime this afternoon.

Obama Continues Assault On Due Process

2011-04-17T22:29:00.001-05:00

Regular readers (both of you) are aware that my exasperation with Obama stems in large part from his unmitigated attack on the due process rights of citizens as specified in (at least) the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Jeralyn of TalkLeft informs us about the Obama administration's latest such assault... prolonged warrantless GPS tracking of a suspect's vehicle:

In August, 2010, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals became the first federal appeals court to rule that prolonged GPS tracking of a suspect's vehicle without a warrant violated the Fourth Amendment. In doing so, it reversed a conviction and life sentence of an alleged major drug trafficker.

This week, the Obama Administration petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari in the case, asking it to find neither probable cause nor a warrant is required. You can read the petition, which has the circuit court's opinion attached, here. [More...]

Among the reasons DOJ wants to avoid getting a warrant: it wants police to be able to use the device at the beginning of an investigation, to help them establish probable cause (which is needed for search warrants, wiretaps and indictments.)

...

Using prolonged GPS tracking is to my way of thinking so obviously a "search" in the Fourth Amendment sense that using GPS to establish the probable cause necessary to pursue that search in the first place effectively eviscerates any mechanism by which a suspect (presumed innocent, remember) can protect him- or herself against an arbitrary search. (Disclaimer: IANAL.)

If police use a GPS device (presumably secretly installed) on anyone's vehicle, they can doubtless learn a lot about them; otherwise why would they bother to do it. But if it is done, there is no way it is done with any intent by the police other than to perform a search. That's why the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant: otherwise, police could simply track "known criminals" (i.e., anyone they feel they would like to arrest) with no judicial oversight, no counterbalance to the very considerable power of continuous location surveillance.

If the suspect is in fact guilty, and there is genuine probable cause established by basic police work, there is no judge who would deny police a warrant for supervised tracking, if that were necessary to establish guilt. But think about it... should they allow unlimited warrantless tracking to establish probable cause? What if... as the law presumes... the suspect is innocent? His or her privacy has just vanished, a victim of an increasingly invasive government.

If the Obama administration succeeds in persuading the Supreme Court to grant cert, you know good and well what will happen to our Fourth Amendment rights: "And another one gone, and another one gone... another one bites the dust..."

Amtrak: 40 Years Old And Still Useless

2011-04-16T15:02:00.000-05:00

Stella's big birthday-ending-in-0 comes up in late July.

Trying to figure out something unusual and enjoyable for us to do to celebrate, I recalled our trip for Stella's last birthday-ending-in-0, an adventure in multiple modes of transportation: flying to Seattle, taking a small boat in the Strait of Juan de Fuca for two days and a night in Victoria, BC; returning to Seattle (stopping for a night of truly great jazz); renting a car to visit Olympia and some of the nearby national parks; driving back to Seattle and boarding the Coast Starlight for a mostly tedious but occasionally stunningly beautiful journey down the West Coast; eventually arriving at Oakland where we were met by a Berkeley-based musician friend for a day's visit before flying back to Houston.

Somehow I doubt we'll be able to match that adventure this time around.

Both of us do like trains, and that is one mode I can be fairly confident of being able to use. So I plunged into the Amtrak schedule to see what was available in late July starting from Houston. The short version: there's damned little available, and if we want a short trip, e.g., to Austin or San Antonio or Galveston, either ya can't get there from here, or the trains are already booked solid (please note... it's three months in advance!).

In any case, back to the post subject. Amtrak was founded in 1971, so it is 40 years old this year. It was useless back then (at least to Texans), and it's just as useless and considerably more expensive now. No one, at least no one in this part of the country, can use rail for business travel because the actual trip times (including being shunted onto sidings, sometimes for an hour or two, to let higher-paying freight trains pass) are excessive by today's standards. And as for using trains for recreational travel... well, I hope you have deep pockets and a gentle(wo)man's lifestyle providing you with unlimited time.

A local train enthusiasts' club is arranging a day trip to/from Lafayette, LA on May 6, but that's not a good time for us, and I at least have no reason to go to Lafayette at any time. So I am once again left without any travel-related ideas. No, I won't fly anywhere; apart from my principled objections, the sheer logistics of flying when you live in a huge reinforced boot and walk in a standard walker wider than a typical aircraft's aisle are just more than I could bear.

Maybe we can ride Metrorail downtown, and Stella can load me in a wheelchair for a sweaty walk to Discovery Green, which I have never seen because they built it while I was busy becoming a cripple. Oh, yeah, that would be lots of fun, especially for Stella!

As they all say, getting old is not for sissies...

Is Pelosi The Target Of An Obama (Political, Metaphorical) Hit?

2011-04-16T11:13:00.000-05:00

What a headline. But considering that Obama has used executive orders to put out contracts for the assassination of American citizens, I felt the words in paren's were necessary to clarify that I am not suggesting that Obama is literally trying to kill Pelosi. We live in strange times when such clarifications are necessary.

OK, on to the specifics: Phoenix Woman of FDL believes the answer is Yes, and points to evidence of many recent anti-Pelosi columns in Politico, the WaPo, and even the usually more reliable McClatchy (see PW's post for links), articles asserting that Pelosi's power is waning, which (as PW demonstrates in still more links) is manifestly not true.

So where does all the apparent bullshit come from? PW thinks it's probably from the Obama White House itself:

...

My guess is that this may well be coming from the Obama White House. Why? Because she’s one of the few things that’s standing between him and his total destruction of any reason to vote Democratic over Republican. She has to be neutralized so he can successfully embed his plan to destroy Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security as a Democratic Party platform plank. He’s already pushing a Republican budget plan as the furthestmost “left” of all possible plans (and there’s already a plan endorsed by Conservadem Claire McCaskill and her Republican buddy Bob Corker that’s even worse) — what happens should Pelosi work to stop it in its tracks and replace it with a much better plan, as she tried to do with the Ryan plan two weeks ago?

...

And a paragraph later, this sentence:

... Yet Obama is busily undercutting any stand-fast messaging Pelosi and other real Democrats might attempt: ...

I don't often quote Stella on political matters; she has her own (mostly nonpolitical) blog if she wants to speak her mind. But I'll make an exception to this extent: Stella is one of the first people I know, early in Obama's term, to proclaim without reservation, "Obama is a Republican." No qualifiers, no hedges, just "he's a Republican." For some time now I've believed she is right.

Can Pelosi save the Democratic Party from its own worst excesses, whose names are Obama and Biden? Or will she become merely another of Obama's victims in the cause of political expediency? Sit right here while I pop some popcorn; at the very least, this should be entertaining.

I Missed This Jewel Back On April 1...

2011-04-16T10:33:00.000-05:00

Peterr of FDL provided us a proposal for a "bold refashioning of government," a restructuring of Congress as a House of Corporations and an Industrial Senate. Peterr's details are amusing; this is worth the short time it takes to read it.

Which Side Are You On?

2011-04-15T16:22:00.000-05:00

I asked myself that musical question today when I resigned from the local musicians' union, Local 65-699 of the AFM. (Sigh!) I paid my last half-year's dues (and some late fees... oops) so as to be able to resign in good standing, just in case my disabilities all vanish and I am able someday to perform again. But let's face it, if my doc's are right (and they've seldom been wrong), I'll never play for an audience again. Damn!

I was a union musician for well over two decades. During that time, I duly filed my contracts, worked only through union contractors, certainly didn't scab, showed up timely for rehearsals and jobs and delivered suitably professional performances. That's not because I'm such a great guy, but because I genuinely believe in unions as an organizing force for the benefit of labor of just about any sort... if there had been an IT professionals' union, I'd have joined that, too.

The thing is, union membership has obligations that come with it, and in the performing arts, those obligations include delivering consistently high quality performances every time you show up for a job. You have to perform well, or at least well enough, even on those nights when you feel like crap, and Dog knows I've played my share of those jobs. But I am physically unable to provide the dependable quality performances I used to, so it's time for me to retire as a musician. I am happy to say that Houston is full of young musicians who do what I used to do, and probably even better... life goes on.

Lady Liberty Goes Postal

2011-04-15T15:51:00.001-05:00

Well, actually, her smaller replica in Las Vegas goes postal, the portrait of the Vegas Liberty look-alike having been used by mistake in a new series of stamps. But hey, it's a small sacrifice for the privilege of having a privatized post office, and there's a rumor that the Vegas Liberty will be fitted with an Invisible Hand of the Market...

Maybe they need a new slogan for this series: "You Can Bet On Our Liberty!" Nah. If only it were so...

If You Can Read This Righteous, Angry Screed, Thank A Teacher

2011-04-15T09:56:00.000-05:00

Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station has a lot of good things to say in his post "Teacher Bashing 101." Go; you'll be glad you read the post. Teachers among you will soon be nodding your heads vigorously.

Jobless Claims...

2011-04-14T23:43:00.000-05:00

... went up last week. When will it end? Will it end?

Sierra Club Wins One... Big-Time

2011-04-14T17:56:00.005-05:00

Straight from the Sierra Club:

Blockbuster Agreement Takes 18 Dirty TVA Coal-Fired Power Plant Units Offline
Southeastern U.S. Takes Huge Step to Slash Air Pollution Thanks to Pressure from Environmental Groups, State and Federal Officials

CHATTANOOGA, TENN. – The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) board of directors approved a landmark agreement today with three citizen groups, four states and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), marking one of the largest pollution reduction agreements in the nation’s history. This agreement requires TVA to phase out 18 units at dirty, coal-fired power plants and install modern pollution controls on three dozen additional units, thanks to more than 11 years of pressure from environmental groups, Southeastern states and the EPA. The blockbuster agreement – which includes the affected states of Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee – represents the largest ever reduction in air pollution in the Southeastern United States. This agreement permanently retires an unprecedented 2,700 megawatts of dirty coal-fired electricity and will drastically reduce TVA’s emissions of dangerous sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and carbon pollution. Clean Air Task Force estimates that coal-fired power plants in the region cause more than 1,800 premature deaths and more than 2,400 heart attacks each year in the four-state region, and are a major source of area air pollution woes.

...

Power plants have a way of lasting forever, because no one wants to bear the cost of replacing them when they are truly worn out, not to mention too dirty for words. This victory is huge. Please support the Sierra Club if you are able!

(An aside, completely off-topic: if you are designing a document which, in some incarnation, may appear on the web, DO NOT USE UNDERLINED TEXT for any purpose whatsoever, except for the native underlining of links. The 'U' tag and the "text-decoration: underline;" style property introduce completely needless confusion when the document eventually goes up on the web. Just resist the temptation.)

Fixing The Misspelled Headline Of The Day

2011-04-14T15:39:00.000-05:00

Like this:


Boehner Sidesteps Questions
                      a
About Republican Defec^tions

There... fixed it.

$0.350 Billion: 'License To Spend' - UPDATED

2011-04-14T13:48:00.003-05:00

If you are as confused as I am about how the budget cut numbers came out so different from those the GOP announced, TPM has an explanation for you.

The first obvious fact is that two numbers as different as $350 million and $38 billion must refer to different quantities... and they do.

The second figure includes cuts that will be realized only over a period of years.
That same figure also counts money already in each recipient's account from previous budgets (rightly IMHO) as a reduction in spending, since it does not have to be budgeted toward this year's expenditures because it's already there.

Again IMHO, there are no grounds for complaint there: it would be a terrible mistake to punish an agency for having used its previous year's budgeted money efficiently. We can all see where that would lead. Well, I presume we all can, but I'm uncertain how the GOPer mind works.

Read the article for more details.

Did Obama really pull off the biggest coup of his presidency? Did the Big Orange Boner really fuck up completely? It sounds unlikely, but one is reluctant to dismiss a report by the CBO; they usually do not miss on weighty matters. All I can say at this point is this: stay tuned.

UPDATE: see the very relevant update on the next post upstream, below.

AFTERTHOUGHT: now we REALLY get to see the Boner weep! See the pic on this TPM post. Do you think we'll miss him when he loses the Speaker's gavel?

Now Wouldn't It Be Embarrassing To The Boner... UPDATED

2011-04-14T13:21:00.001-05:00

... if he had to depend on Democrats rounded up by Nancy Pelosi to pass the budget bill? She says she'll do it rather than allow the government to shut down. The question is whether the Big Orange Boner has the votes in his own caucus to pass the bill. Ever since the CBO released numbers showing that the bill will reduce direct payments by only one percent of the advertised $38 billion, there have been threats of defection in the GOP House caucus.

Of course Nancy Pelosi, for all her flaws, knows that Dems riding to the rescue of this GOP bill would allow her to demand a few things for her side. The only question for the rest of us is a simple one: Is her side... our side?

UPDATE: it took 39 Democrats to pass the Republan bill in the allegedly Republan-majority House. Big Orange Boner owes Pelosi big-time now. But if he pays off what he owes, his own caucus will shit in their pants. I love watching Republans squirm!

Oh, No! Sierra Club Promo Product Line Hits Bottom

2011-04-14T10:19:00.005-05:00

The latest from the Sierra Club:

San Francisco, California – April 14, 2011 – PACT, a stylish underwear brand that blends design and sustainability with support for powerful social and environmental causes, launches a new line today that proudly supports the Sierra Student Coalition’s “Campuses Beyond Coal” initiative. Today, PACT announces the public availability of their latest collection, “Beyond Coal,” from renowned designer Yves Behar, who has created an abstract pattern that evokes coal pollution in a blue sky. The print, which is available today at www.wearpact.com, supports this movement to educate about coal’s dangers to environmental and public health.

Over the past few weeks, students from coal-powered campuses have already used the underwear line in conjunction with organized events such as flash mobs, where students spontaneously strip down to their “Beyond Coal” underwear, and a race to renewables, a cross-campus underwear run to advocate for the use of cleaner fuel sources. Included in these actions, Miami University students staged a pants-less rally to “Expose Coal” in front of their campus coal plant on March 31^st, while University of North Texas students held an event in front of their administration office on April 1^st.

...

And that's the news in brief(s). Other events are listed; there may be one in YOUR neighborhood!

Broun: FDR Was A Commie

2011-04-14T09:42:00.003-05:00

The commie-baiting wars are starting again. Jillian Rayfield of TPM points to a floor speech by Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA):

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) thinks President Franklin Delano Roosevelt loved Joseph Stalin so much that he sent advisers to Russia to see "what Stalin was doing there so that FDR could replicate it here in the United States."

Broun was speaking Tuesday on the House floor about how the "original intent" of the Constitution was to promote the "general welfare of the nation, not welfare of individuals." The concept of promoting the "welfare of individuals" started with Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, he said: "Both progressives. Both had socialist beliefs."

"In fact," Broun continued, "Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent his advisers, his close friends, his Cabinet people to go visit with Stalin in communist Russia to study what he was doing, what Stalin was doing there, so that FDR could replicate it here in the United States. And he did everything that he possibly could to do so."

...

Video available at the link above.

Republans have a tendency to rewrite history when they don't like its implications [added: or to perpetrate a personal smear]. Broun is no exception. But I can't help noticing that the ghost of Joe McCarthy has become faintly visible in the Capitol Building lately...

AFTERTHOUGHT: the coin Rep. Broun is playing with has two sides. There are old political smear tactics other than commie-baiting available for revival from the same era. How would Rep. Broun feel, for example, about a resurgence of race-baiting, something seen in Tea Party events prior to the 2008 presidential election, and in mainstream Mississippi politics (*cough* Haley Barbour *cough*) more recently? I'm just asking if this is a political trend Broun really wants to see revived...

Caution: Obama Speech Parsing In Progress - UPDATED

2011-04-13T15:28:00.001-05:00

I hope you have your shovels close by and in good condition, because Obama gave a speech today, in which he promised to "put[] every kind of spending on the table." His thumbnail history of the Eighties and Nineties is not too bad:

...

But as far back as the 1980s, America started amassing debt at more alarming levels, and our leaders began to realize that a larger challenge was on the horizon. They knew that eventually, the Baby Boom generation would retire, which meant a much bigger portion of our citizens would be relying on programs like Medicare, Social Security, and possibly Medicaid. Like parents with young children who know they have to start saving for the college years, America had to start borrowing less and saving more to prepare for the retirement of an entire generation.

To meet this challenge, our leaders came together three times during the 1990s to reduce our nation's deficit. They forged historic agreements that required tough decisions made by the first President Bush and President Clinton; by Democratic Congresses and a Republican Congress. All three agreements asked for shared responsibility and shared sacrifice, but they largely protected the middle class, our commitments to seniors, and key investments in our future.

As a result of these bipartisan efforts, America's finances were in great shape by the year 2000. We went from deficit to surplus. America was actually on track to becoming completely debt-free, and we were prepared for the retirement of the Baby Boomers.

But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program - but we didn't pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts - tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our national checkbook, consider this: in the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.

...

Or, if we had simply omitted the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy... or even if we allowed them to expire now... there wouldn't be even the appearance of a problem. Probably it would have helped not to allow Big Pharma to extend patent rights on drugs to obscenely long time periods, but our government belongs to them, not to us, so that's probably too much to expect.

The problem is of course the metaphor, "our national checkbook." The bank balance behind that checkbook is unlike any bank account an individual has ever experienced: the government can adjust its contents according to economic circumstances. The metaphor is simply wrong for the national budget: it doesn't work that way. But with Obama and every Republan talking about "our national checkbook," the concept has settled into everyone's brain. It's dishonest as hell, but there it is: people believe our government has a fixed amount of money.

There's more bullshit in the pile: Republans have consistently not only not helped bring our national budget into balance, they have done everything possible to give their wealthy "clients" obscene amounts of federal money (often in the form of "temporary" tax breaks that aren't temporary), and then claim the government is too broke to meet its obligations to mere ordinary citizens. Many of America's problems are bipartisan in origin: this one isn't. Republans alone are to blame. Obama is wrong to suggest any kind of "compromise" with (i.e., giveaway to) Republans.

So that's how our fiscal challenge was created. This is how we got here. And now that our economic recovery is gaining strength, Democrats and Republicans must come together and restore the fiscal responsibility that served us so well in the 1990s. We have to live within our means, reduce our deficit, and get back on a path that will allow us to pay down our debt. And we have to do it in a way that protects the recovery, and protects the investments we need to grow, create jobs, and win the future.

Ah, now we begin in earnest. Excuse me a moment...

BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT!

Sorry, but somebody has to say it, and if it isn't shouted, it won't be heard over the chatter. In an economy that is, at best, fragile (and arguably is not headed for recovery at all yet), the last thing our government needs to do is to "live within our means, reduce our deficit, and get back on a path that will allow us to pay down our debt." That way lies catastrophe of the sort Herbert Hoover pursued, until the nation replaced him with FDR. Indeed, even FDR didn't "get it" for a while. This turns out to be as simple as one can imagine: the government must be the employer and customer of last resort. When no one else is hiring, and no one else is buying, the government must hire and buy. When no citizen can afford medical care, the government must provide it.

Once the economy is up and running again, then private enterprise can pick up the thread, but let's face it: the major employers of the Noughties and Tennies just aren't doing the job right now. It is a fundamental flaw in capitalism ("what! that filthy commie! he said capitalism has a flaw!") that it has intrinsic feedback mechanisms that drive the economy in the wrong direction when things are at their worst, when people are out of work, losing their homes, living on the streets, losing resources such as public education for their kids, etc. etc. There is simply no choice: in these circumstances... and I mean right now, in case you haven't figured that out... government simply must step in. Old right-wing slogans notwithstanding, your government really should be there, and they really are there to help.

UPDATE: Krugman basically likes what he hears... but as an endpoint, not a starting point.

Graham 'merican Hypocrites - Lindsey Edition

2011-04-13T12:23:00.002-05:00

Sorry, Glenn Greenwald had no opportunity to put this one in his recent book. But TPM gives us the story:

Graham Vows To 'Tie Senate In Knots' Over $50K Left Out Of Budget Deal
Susan Crabtree | April 13, 2011, 9:08AM

...

In fact, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was down right incensed over the decision not to include a mere $50,000 for an Army Corps of Engineers study on deepening the Port of Charleston in his home state and vowed to "tie the Senate in knots" by holding up Obama administration nominations.

...

Ah, yes, another Republan signature motto: "Earmarks for me, but not for thee." Holding up Obama's appointments may irk Obama, but I've been hard put to tell the difference between Obama's appointments and any Republan president's appointments, so I, for one, don't care.

Taxes Done

2011-04-13T09:54:00.000-05:00

My tax return is complete and e-filed. This year I get no refund and owe no taxes. I earned no income this year; the only reason I had to file was to report the "gain" ... read that as "(loss)" ... on some mutual funds I sold to have enough money to live on.

I'll be honest about those funds: I invested for a bad reason. They were one of those "socially responsible" funds that attempt to avoid trashing the planet in their choice of investments. I have finally realized, far too late, that you can't make money investing only in green products. Trash the planet and retire comfortably... or else. The satisfaction of knowing your investments are eco-friendly is tempered rather drastically by the knowledge that they lost you a ton of money.

What can I say about Wall Street vs. the ordinary citizen? I'll keep it short: a shoebox, or maybe a mattress for better security, will give you a better rate of return. Here ends the lesson for the day.

Headline Of The Week

2011-04-12T23:43:00.002-05:00

On FDL...

America Likely to Continue Futile Search for Party That Doesn’t Suck
By: Eli Tuesday April 12, 2011 6:01 pm

Yep.

House Dems To Obama: Whack Social Security? Fuggedaboutit!

2011-04-12T23:25:00.001-05:00

Brian Beutler of TPM:

House Democrats just sent a letter to President Obama warning him not to cut Social Security as part of the deficit reduction program he'll outline Wednesday, or risk losing their support.

"As you know, 137 members of the United States Congress signed a letter last year opposing any cuts to Social Security Benefits, including raising the retirement age," write Reps. John Conyers (D-MI) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), in a letter obtained by TPM.

"The signatories also stated their opposition to any effort to privatize Social Security, in whole or in part... we believe that any discussion of long-term debt issues must consider the strong fiscal integrity of Social Security--which is prohibited by law from adding to the national budget deficit and will have built a $4.3 trillion surplus by 2023."

And then the clincher:

[W]e remain concerned that the Bowles-Simpson proposal may serve as a starting point for budget negotiations. We consider this plan to be flawed in several key areas, especially with respect to its proposed cuts to Social Security Benefits. We believe that any proposal that includes cuts to a popular, fiscally sound program lacks credibility and does not reflect the political center.

I still have one question: why was this letter delivered on the eve of the president's speech? Why were these House members not talking up saving Social Security months ago, in hopes of counterbalancing all the deficit-cutting bullshit flung by Obama, Bowles, Simpson and the whole GOP for months, to the point at which most of what the public has heard is a massive, well-contrived and well-delivered LIE about how these cuts are necessary to save the economy? (In fairness, a few Representatives have been vociferous on the matter from the beginning.)

I think if I hear another public figure... especially a Democrat... ranting on about how our national budget is like a family budget (it fucking well isn't) and how in tough times that government must cut back on all spending (it damned surely must not, unless it wants to drive recession into depression, possibly worldwide), I shall throw up on the person who says it. My patience is truly wearing thin.

A Rare Concurrence Of Opinion

2011-04-12T12:39:00.000-05:00

Over the years I've had my disagreements with Josh Marshall of TPM. In early days, before the site became so vastly famous and popular, I occasionally exchanged emails with Josh, and we didn't always agree on things. OK, we frequently disagreed on things.

Which makes it all the more significant that Josh and I agree wholeheartedly on this post he just put up on the editors' blog on TPM:

Call It a Day, I Guess (Gone Fishin')
Well, if you'd harbored any illusions about the coming budget battles not being a complete friggin' disaster for the Dems, it might be time to push those illusions overboard right now and just kick back and enjoy the fishing.

With Republicans staking out their ground on the back to the 19th Century Ryan Budget plan, Dems and apparently the White House are deciding to make their starting point the ... Bowles-Simpson Plan.
--Josh Marshall

That's right. Obama's starting point is the Catfood Commission. WASF!

Rough Trade: The GOP-Driven Budget Manhandles The Environment

2011-04-12T10:34:00.000-05:00

And that's putting it politely. TPM has a summary article about the size and targets of the cuts. Here's a bit of the environmental depredation:

...

One of the hardest hit institutions is the Environmental Protection Agency, whose power Republicans have sought to curtail in recent years through a variety of legislative means. The agency will receive $1.6 billion less in funding than current levels, a 16 percent drop, including a $49 million reduction in climate change programs and $149 million cut to the Land and Water Conservation Fund. In a press release, Senate Appropriation Committee Democrats noted that the EPA cuts, while tough, were nearly $1.6 billion less than Republicans' original proposal. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also saw a $142 million reduction in funding and is prohibited from creating a Climate Service.

In addition to programs protecting the environment, programs aimed at boosting energy efficiency for power plants and transportation also were major targets. Energy efficiency and renewable energy were cut by $438 million while fossil energy R&D was reduced by $226 million and nuclear energy funding was cut by $56 million. Funding for high speed rail, all $2.9 billion of it, was zeroed out entirely. In the wake of the Japan disaster, energy security appeared to catch a reprieve -- the National Nuclear Security Administration actually saw an increase of $697 million in funding.

...

As long as Obama and his Congress allow the kind of blackmail we saw last week, this will continue to happen. And if you think it can't get worse, you aren't thinking clearly. What kind of "compromises" (cave-ins) will come with the raising of the debt ceiling?

The problem as I see it is that Obama & Co. are trading permanent irreversible environmental changes for temporary economic changes. As we are discovering, many of GeeDubya Bush's policies are turning out to be effectively irreversible, simply because executive power never decreases from one president to the next. It is no surprise to see Obama assuming the powers Bush stole over the civil liberties of Americans, but I confess I did not expect Obama to give away the store on environmental matters. More fool I, I suppose.

If we are to survive the changes in our government perpetrated mostly over the past ten years, we are going to have to reverse some of those changes. Forbidding NOAA from creating a Climate Service is not going to do a damned thing to delay global climate change. And the wealthy are not immune: all the gated communities in the world will not suffice to stop the onslaught of floodwaters, storm surges, rises in sea level, etc. And the longer we burn fossil fuels as our primary energy source, the quicker we will approach and overtake the tipping point; the climate doesn't give a damn what Congress, Democrats, GOPers or even the almighty Obama thinks.

The only way to begin is to begin. Somebody has to draw a line. Somebody has to say NO, more than once and not so faintly, to the BPs of the world. And there isn't much time in which to do it.

Will life on Earth survive the reign of America? Life is amazingly adaptable, and some forms of life (yes, cockroaches among them) will survive even the worst we can do. But humanity will not. If we want humankind to survive, we have to stop pissing away our environmental future. As it is clear that Daddy O is not going to take away the credit card, we must somehow persuade most Americans, on their own initiative, to restrain their environmentally destructive inclinations. What's the incentive, where's the motivation for them? I don't know. Maybe, just maybe, they'd like to see their grandkids survive to adulthood...

At Common Sense She Gaily MOX

2011-04-11T10:38:00.001-05:00

Here's a good summary article about a nuclear fuel that is not new but is newly highlighted in the wake of the Fukushima disaster: mixed oxide, or mox. The idea is to dispose of an excess of weapons-grade plutonium (America has 43 tons of the stuff) by mixing it with uranium and using it as a fuel for commercial power reactors.

Supported by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one project is underway at Savannah River to build a plant to produce mox. To date, the project is partially finished and has cost five times the projected amount ($5 billion rather than $1 billion) to build. And customers for the fuel are not exactly lining up at the door.

Yes, one of the reactors that melted down at Fukushima is a mox-fueled reactor. There's no necessary causal relationship there... the other two partial meltdowns were in conventionally uranium-fueled reactors, and the cause of all three catastrophes is a combination of earth-shattering natural forces and all-too-human screw-ups, not the choice of fuel. But plutonium, though safe enough to handle, is vastly more deadly (if, for example, inhaled as dust) than uranium. And of course it can be stolen and returned to its original use... nuclear weapons... much more easily than uranium.

Read the article and see what you think. Me? I doubt seriously that this is a suitable long-term solution to our industrial energy needs. But then again, as a child in America I grew up with two things: the threat of The Bomb, and the conventional promise of "power too cheap to meter." I didn't believe that promise even when I was a kid. But I certainly believed, and still believe, the threat. Good luck to us all; we're going to need it.

(A note about the subject: it's almost a quote from Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance: "How quaint the ways of Paradox! / At common sense she gaily mocks!")

Supremes: Taxpayers Lack Standing To Bring Establishment Clause Suit

2011-04-10T12:06:00.001-05:00

Not content with trashing the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to our Constitution, our current out-of-control Supreme Court has decided to eviscerate the First Amendment, in particular, the "establishment" clause.

While I have some reluctance to appropriate the entire of Howard M. Friedman's post, his excerpts are perfectly chosen, and his setups are concise and appropriate:

Supreme Court Holds Taxpayers Lack Standing To Challenge Tax Credits For Tuition Contributions

In a 5-4 opinion today in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, (Sup. Ct., April 4, 2011), the U.S. Supreme Court held that taxpayers lacked standing to bring an Establishment Clause challenge to Arizona's program that provides tax credits for contributions to school tuition organizations that in turn provide scholarships to students in private schools-- many of them religious schools. Kennedy's opinion (joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito) rejected plaintiffs' argument that the standing rule announced in Flast v. Cohen applies, saying:

In their view the tax credit is, for Flast purposes, best understood as a governmental expenditure. That is incorrect. It is easy to see that tax credits and governmental expenditures can have similar economic consequences, at least for beneficiaries whose tax liability is sufficiently large to take full advantage of the credit. Yet tax credits and governmental expenditures do not both implicate individual taxpayers in sectarian activities. A dissenter whose tax dollars are “extracted and spent” knows that he has in some small measure been made to contribute to an establishment in violation of conscience.... In that instance the taxpayer’s direct and particular connection with the establishment does not depend on economic speculation or political conjecture. The connection would exist even if the conscientious dissenter’s tax liability were unaffected or reduced...... When the government declines to impose a tax, by contrast, there is no such connection between dissenting taxpayer and alleged establishment. Any financial injury remains speculative.... And awarding some citizens a tax credit allows other citizens to retain control over their own funds in accordance with their own consciences.
Justice Scalia also wrote a concurrence, joined by Justice Thomas, urging that Flast be overruled.

Justice Kagan wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor, arguing that the majority's "arbitrary distinction" between expenditures and tax credits:

threatens to eliminate all occasions for a taxpayer to contest the government’s monetary support of religion. Precisely because appropriations and tax breaks can achieve identical objectives, the government can easily substitute one for the other. Today’s opinion thus enables the government to end-run Flast’s guarantee of access to the Judiciary.

If taxpayers have no standing to bring such a matter, then the establishment clause is totally impotent for its original purpose of preventing government contributions to support a particular religious organization over others, or to support religion in general over an absence of religion. With this ruling, we are well on our way to allowing a state legislature effectively to establish a theocracy.

Is anyone out there still going to argue that it doesn't matter that six (6) members of the current SCOTUS are Catholic? I realize that the vote split was along the typical conservative/nonconservative lines and that at least one of the Catholics (Sotomayor) dissented, but it still makes me uncomfortable that two-thirds of the highest court in the land may feel pressured to rule according to the tenets of a particular religion.

Who Really Got The Bailout Money? - UPDATED

2011-04-10T10:34:00.005-05:00

Forced by Congress, the Fed finally tells us... and Jonathan Turley passes it on to us:

Who Got Secret Fed Bailouts?

The Big Winners

Goldman Sachs received nearly $600 billion
Morgan Stanley received nearly $2 trillion
Citigroup received $1.8 trillion
Bear Stearns received nearly $1 trillion
Merrill Lynch received some $1.5 trillion
Deutsche Bank, a German lender, sold the Fed more than $290 billion worth of mortgage securities
Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank, sold the Fed more than $287 billion in mortgage bonds
Also receiving secret Fed bailouts
General Electric
McDonald’s
Caterpillar
Harley Davidson
Toyota
Verizon

Your tax dollars at ~~work~~ leisure... you don't really think those corp's did anything with that money to stimulate the economy, do you? A few executive bonuses, a few big parties, and what do you know, where did it go? it's all gone!

AFTERTHOUGHT: can anyone explain to me why ANY of this money went to foreign-based institutions? Even in theory, what stimulative effect was THAT supposed to have for the US economy?

CORRECTION: although the post appeared on Turley's blog, it was written by guest blogger Elaine Magliaro.

UPDATE: BadTux, who knows far more about economics than I do, has the following to say in comments. I reproduce his comment in its entirety because all of it seems relevant:

The mortgage bonds held by the foreign banks were sold to the Fed as part of the AIG bailout. They were U.S. mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by AIG, and AIG would have been on the hook if they'd stayed in foreign hands.

The top 5 there doesn't surprise me at all. The entire banking system was insolvent.

Regarding the "secret" Fed bailouts of companies, no. Those were bond purchases by the Fed, and occurred exactly because the banks were insolvent and could not meet their daily obligations to the companies involved. Usually those businesses would have met their needs in the bond markets run by the top 5 on your list, but those companies were insolvent and the markets non-functional. The money was paid back when the bond market revived and the Fed currently doesn't own any bonds from those companies.

All of this is actually what the Fed is *supposed* to do, by design, when the banking system becomes insolvent -- inject massive liquidity into it via purchasing bonds and other assets from banks and companies. The goal is to prevent a repeat of the Panic of 1908 or the collapse of 1932 where the entire banking system was on the verge of collapse because banks couldn't sell the assets they had (the loans on their books) to anybody when depositors came a'callin' for their funds. The Fed was designed to be the purchaser of last resort in that case.

The problem is that the insolvency is due to a combination of a bad economy and massive fraud, and the Fed isn't set up to deal with either. Congress is supposed to deal with a bad economy by passing a massive jobs program to get Americans back to work. Seen that lately? And the Justice Department is supposed to prosecute fraud. Seen that lately? From my perspective, the Fed has done exactly what it was designed to do. Unfortunately, what the Fed did isn't enough -- the rest of the system has to step up and do what it's supposed to be doing too to make this whole system work the way it's supposed to work, and that hasn't happened.

- Badtux the Economics Penguin

April 12, 2011 2:28 AM

What's In The New Budget... And What's Not

2011-04-09T12:33:00.001-05:00

David Dayen of FDL has a good item list in his post, The Ugly, the Ugly and the Ugly: A Look at the 2011 Funding Deal. Go read it, but realize what this budget does NOT deal with:

Note that there’s nothing in here about one looming item: the debt limit. America reaches that sometime in May. That’s next month’s big fight. It’s not logical to hope for a better outcome.

No indeed, it is not. A couple weeks ago, ABC News reported this:

...

The Treasury Department estimates that the United States will reach its debt limit between April 15 and May 31. Administration officials are ringing alarm bells and warning of dire consequences if the $14.3 trillion ceiling isn't raised.

[Geithner's warning at that embedded link included the following:
• Treasury defaulting “on legal obligations of the United States, causing catastrophic damage to the economy, potentially much more harmful than the effects of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009”;
• This would also require the imposition of substantial taxation on every American since interests “rates for state and local government, corporate and consumer borrowing, including home mortgage interest, would all rise sharp”:
• No longer paying U.S. military salaries, Social Security and Medicare benefits, or student loans.
- SB]
But Republican lawmakers say they won't commit to such a move until President Obama takes bold steps in tackling entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that are weighing down the country's pocketbook.

...

Senate Republicans reportedly are working on a Balanced Budget Amendment, a Constitutional amendment that would require a balanced budget every year, as a condition to raising the debt ceiling.

...

That amendment has been on the wingnut wish list forever, but I know of no sane economist who thinks it is even possible, let alone a good idea, to force the budget to balance every single year. Such a law flies in the face of everything we learned in the Great Depression in the 1930s; it is the path Hoover took, and the path FDR initially embarked on in an attempt to appease his political opposition, before reversing himself and ultimately saving us from the Depression.

The only thing the Tea Nutcakes have learned from history is how to ignore mistakes when it is about to repeat them. WASF!

Shutdown Averted - UPDATED, CORRECTED

2011-04-08T22:22:00.003-05:00

No details yet. Best preliminary article is by David Dayen of FDL, who says this:

Essentially, Democrats bought Planned Parenthood’s continued life for between $1-$4 billion, depending on who you believe.

Such a deal! Planned Parenthood provides basic reproductive health care... completely aside from abortion, I'm talking about pap smears, contraception, well-baby checks, and other basic testing... that would be provided by the government in any civilized Western democracy. But our Western society is neither a democracy nor civilized. So we have to bribe the motherfuckers... good word for them, no?... to keep them from whacking that basic care. It almost makes me wish I weren't a UU, so I could really believe in a Hell they could go to.

More details when they're available, or perhaps tomorrow morning.

UPDATE: a few details are trickling in Friday night. Brian Beutler of TPM says the cuts will total, as Boner put it, "$78.5 billion below the President's 2011 budget proposal..." Yes, seventy-eight-point-five billion, vastly higher than even the Republans' original number.This of course will absolutely ruin any stimulus, and probably send us into the depths of a genuine depression.

Oh, and Senate Republans have been promised an up-or-down vote on riders to defund Planned Parenthood and to kill health care reform. So don't think for a moment that those are gone forever.

My first impression: this is a bad deal for Democrats, and a bad effort by Democrats. WASF!

CORRECTION: according to the NYT, the figure for the cuts is $38 billion. (Other sources say $38.5 billion.) But hey, what's a few dozen billion among friends, as long as they make sure the poor starve and the elderly lack medical care...

GOP Women Representatives Refuse To Address Policy Rider Issues - UPDATED

2011-04-08T17:36:00.004-05:00

GOP women in the House of Representatives held a press conference on the budget/abortion stalemate. It was a fairly ugly business; one could almost feel embarrassed for them... except that they so deserve to be embarrassed. This comment struck me as particularly relevant:

Pressed on the issue, members said they could not answer questions about whether they would support a proposal that did away with policy riders on women's health until they saw a final deal.

"We're going to wait and see what comes back," [Rep. Marsha] Blackburn [R-TN] said.

Ah. I understand now: the anti-choice policy riders are not moral issues; they're tokens to be traded for a better deal on the budget cuts. I can't help being reminded of an old joke which ends, "We've already established what you are. All we're doing now is haggling over the price."

UPDATE: Tea Party Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) makes it even clearer that the anti-choice policy riders are not a moral issue but a simple quid pro quo:

As Republicans, we promised in the pledge to America to cut $100 billion off of Obama's plan. If we're going to come back with less than that, we've got to come back with some policy riders to say look, I took less than $100 billion, but I've defunded Planned Parenthood or abortions in the District of Columbia. Or I've ended Obamacare...

So tell me, Blake: just how many billion is women's health care (remember, it's all for health care: abortion has already been excluded in all federal spending since the mid-1970s) worth to you in trade for budget cuts? And how can you possibly claim the moral high ground to the social conservatives in your district, if you're willing to trade the issue away for a few billion?

What a bunch of damned hypocrites the GOPers are!

While You Wait For The GOP Response...

2011-04-08T10:39:00.000-05:00

... please read Paul Krugman's column about Paul Ryan's budget over which conservative pundits are oohing and ahing. (Curious: "oohing" passes the spell check; "ahing" does not.) H/T Mustang Bobby.

Reid: Take It Or Leave It

2011-04-08T09:48:00.000-05:00

Harry Reid has delivered what is being called a "final offer" on the budget to Republans. The deal reportedly involves the last agreed-upon budget numbers... no car-dealer add-ons by the GOP... and no defunding of Planned Parenthood or other anti-choice measures.

I suppose now it's up to Obama to insist on a cave-in...

Real Reason For Looming Government Shutdown: Abortion, Environment

2011-04-07T18:51:00.000-05:00

I'm tired of typing; read these guys instead. Brian Beutler of TPM and David Dayen of FDL have both done a good job of explaining how the Tea-Nutcakes takeover of the GOP will shut down government services tomorrow: they don't like women making their own decisions, and they want a free hand in destroying the environment. Simple, no? and so very, very related to the budget...

Oh, and Boner is still moving the goal posts: the latest change is from a tentatively agreed-upon $33bn spending cut (ack!) to what now appears to be a $45bn cut.

I am starting to entertain fantasies which a person who has been committed for decades to nonviolent means really doesn't want to think about. Grrrr...

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