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

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...

... 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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'

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

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

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

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

And please be kind to bunnies!

The Cult Of Zero

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

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

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

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

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.