ACLU Challenges Government Classification Of Every Word Detainees Speak In Gitmo Trials

What's classified in a Gitmo detainee's trial? No less than every word spoken by a detainee. Yep. Everything a defendant says is presumptively classified, notwithstanding the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a "speedy and public trial." So much for the "public" part! Read what Pro Publica's Cora Currier documents for us. Here's Currier on the ACLU's action:

...

The ACLU filed a brief in May saying that the government’s order of presumptive classification and the forty-second delay [in the livecast of trials to American news agencies] violate the public’s right of access to the trial. The ACLU’s motion takes issue with the idea that the government has declared detainees’ “personal knowledge of their detention and treatment in U.S. custody” classified. Their exposure to classified information was forced upon them, the ACLU states, in CIA detention and interrogation programs that are now outlawed.

The ACLU argues that an executive order on classification signed by Obama in 2009 says in part that, in order to be properly classified, information must be “under the control of the United States Government.” The ACLU’s brief challenges whether that authority could be extended “categorically to human beings under the government’s control.” [emphasis in original]. The ACLU also argues that the detainees were not in any kind of contractual relationship which would make them liable for the classified information they were exposed to.

...

It's just another battle in the bipartisan war on rights and liberties.

Once again, we need to remind our leaders that the Bill of Rights is written to apply to all persons, not just citizens. That fact and five bucks will get you a frappuccino at Starbucks...

Stella's Birthday!

I may not be around much today... my lady love and I have some celebrating to do!

The Great American Drought Of 2012

Dr. Jeff Masters will tell you about it. Under some very reasonable assumptions, "the July 2012 drought is second only to the great Dust Bowl drought of July 1934 in terms of the area of the contiguous U.S. covered by moderate or greater drought." You might even think it was a symptom of global climate change. But... oh, look, Al Gore wants to take away your guns and place you on death panels! [/snark]

Sadie Enters This World

Best wishes to NTodd, Ericka and young Samuel on the birth of Sadie! Happy day! (I suppose for Samuel's sake I could post the song Sister Sadie... nah; too obvious.)

'Lesser Evilism'

Adgita Diaries (presumably Michael or Trace; the post is unsigned) points us to a post by Andrew Levine at CounterPunch, who offers us Better Than Lesser Evilism, Version 2012, a long and systematic examination of the choice facing every American voter who stands to the left of today's much-mutated Democratic Party. It is worth at least skimming this article, not that it will change your mind, but it may inform your decision.

I am persuaded that, by my criteria, Obama is in fact the lesser evil, and I shall close my eyes and vote for him on that basis... after which I shall go home and wash my hands. I have tried hard to muster any enthusiasm for the man... he is, after all, an excellent speaker... but in the long run, I have concluded that in 2008 I was taken in by a very slick marketing package, and that Obama does not have the seed of greatness in him, ready to sprout any moment now. He doesn't, and it isn't.

However, they have absolute gotten to me with the "who else ya gonna vote for" argument. Obama appears to be reasonably solid on a woman's right to choose abortion, and appears determined to trump attempts by fundamentalist crazies and Catholics to interfere with widespread distribution and use of contraceptives in America. He seems at least persuadable on many environmental issues, and does not believe that a scientific response to global climate change is somehow a Communist plot. His record on civil liberties is execrable, worse than GeeDubya Bush's; that's why my hands will need washing after I vote for him for the office of Assassin-in-Chief.

I will not fault anyone who decides not to vote for Obama. But I will remind everyone that a Rmoney presidency, especially if he has at any time a GOP-dominated Congress, could well spell the beginning of the end, a true and unmitigated plutocracy in which all of us who are now citizens will effectively be, at best, wage slaves, and at worst, a starving mob.

I'd say the choice is yours, but the more I read, the more I wonder if that is really so. Nonetheless, if I have only one rock (vote), I have to cast it, and in my long tradition of purely strategic voting, I have to cast it for Obama. Dog help us all in the next four years.

Good News: Courts Dismissing Challenges To ACA Contraceptive Rule

Sarah Lipton-Lubet at the ACLU Blog of Rights:

...

Just one day after a federal court in Nebraska threw out a lawsuit brought by seven anti-Affordable Care Act attorneys general, a federal court in D.C. did the same in a case filed by a religiously affiliated college. On Wednesday, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit filed by Belmont Abbey College (the first of the two dozen challenges to the birth control rule).

This isn’t the first time that Belmont Abbey College has thumbed its nose at federal laws designed to stop discrimination against women in health care.  In 2009, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission concluded that the College was discriminating against its employees based on their gender because it withheld coverage for prescription birth control, which only women use, while providing insurance coverage for other prescription drugs. But as far as we know, the college is still resisting the EEOC’s decision and has yet to come into compliance. So it came as no surprise when it challenged the administration’s contraception rule, despite the fact that the rule is on solid legal footing, while the college’s claims are bogus.

...

If Belmont Abbey had its way, as jams pointed out in comments a couple of days ago, its male employees could still get their Viagra, but its female employees would be deprived of birth control.

If this is intended by the College as civil disobedience, it's a damned poor example: it forces people who don't hold the expressed opinion to put themselves at personal risk for that opinion. I propose that the College be assessed a small fine, starting at, say, $5.00 a day the first day, doubling every day until they come into compliance. Ultimately, the fact is that ACA is the law, and we don't get to decide which laws we obey and which we ignore, without incurring penalties.

Ann Rmoney And 'You People'

From an ABC interview of Ann Rmoney, as reported by Igor Bobic of TPM:

“We’ve given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation and how we live our life,” she said.

Take that, peasants! "You people" have no right to ask us royal personages for details provided by all presidential candidates for several decades. We are not amused!

I am really sick and tired of the plutocratic arrogance of the American "nobility" regarding their roles in government. We damned well have a right to information about people we hire to serve us in public office. Mrs. Rmoney may as well get used to it. And get over herself. And get over her attitude.

Here We Go Again - House GOP Tags Must-Pass Bill With Anti-Contraceptive Rider, Threatens Shutdown

If you had told me when I was a young man that one day, one of America's major political parties would repeatedly introduce amendments to must-pass legislation attempting to make contraceptives less available to women, I wouldn't have believed you. If you had told me during or after the Clinton presidency that the GOP would one day threaten not one but two government shutdowns as blackmail in the run-up to an election, I'd have laughed you out of the room. Yet that is exactly what's happening. Sahil Kapur of TPM informs us of the GOP insanity:

...

House Republicans renewed their effort Wednesday by advancing a measure through the Labor-HHS appropriations subcommittee with a rider to roll back President Obama’s contraception mandate. Authorized by the Affordable Care Act, the rule requires employer-provided health insurance plans to cover contraception without co-pays, with carve-outs for churches and religious non-profits. Republicans on the panel defeated a Democratic amendment to strip the provision, suggesting they’re willing to pick the fight.

...

Senate Republicans have clearly indicated their preference for avoiding the fight altogether, and extending funding for government programs through the election at levels the parties agreed upon during last August debt limit fight. Under pressure, the House GOP leadership appears to be warming to that idea, lest they be held accountable for inciting a government shutdown weeks before Election Day.

...

Republicans took a beating earlier this year after their failed push to roll back Obama’s contraception rule in its entirety, a battle that yielded significant gains for President Obama among women voters. The GOP eventually backed off, recognizing the toxicity of the issue. ...

Just another battle in the GOP War on Women...

Internet Defense League Launches Tomorrow

Do you give a damn whether private corporations with unfriendly agendas prevail upon their lackeys in Congress to give them effective control over the Internet? Do you care whether SOPA/PIPA and its descendants impose ridiculously stringent restrictions on your web sites' content? You do, and you do? Great! Sign up to be part of the Internet Defense League. Before you sign up, take a look at their list of early institutional members; I think you'll feel you're in good company.

Here's a selection: Mozilla, WordPress, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), FightForTheFuture, reddit, CHEEZburger (!), Open Technology Institute, ... just go look for yourself, so I won't have to type dozens of links. And yes, your doggerelist is a member; I signed up many weeks ago.

Oh, and for members (free to sign up... donations accepted, of course), there are all kinds of cool logos for your site, including the cat face in the sidebar here.

Newsy Video On DISCLOSE Act Followup; Another On ACLU And Family Lawsuit Over Awlaki Death

Derek Hamm of Newsy Community has requested in an email that I embed a video they have made on the DISCLOSE Act failure. Instead, I'll refer you to the Newsy site for the video. It's a good video, but I'm trying to spare some of my lower-bandwidth readers, and I've already posted several videos still on this current main page, so you can watch it over there instead.

UPDATE:  I am indebted to newsy.com for informing me of the lawsuit by the ACLU and the family of Anwar Al-Awlaki against the US government for the assassination of Awlaki and his 16-year-old son in a targeted drone strike. You may recall from my earlier posts that Awlaki was an American citizen not engaged in any battlefield action against American troops at the time of his assassination, and therefore should have been captured and put on trial for any alleged acts of terrorism. Instead, his name was added to President Obama's "kill list," and with no trial, no arrest and not even any showing of probable cause, he was assassinated. As I've said before, this is as un-American as it gets; our nation's founders are surely turning in their graves.

The New Undue Burden On Voters

Ryan J. Reilly of TPM:

More than 10 million potential voters in states with voter photo ID laws live over 10 miles from an office which issues such identification more than two days a week, according to a new report from the Brennan Center.

Of that group, 500,000 do not have access to a car or another vehicle, according to the report. While many of those individuals may already have identification, the report argues that such a burden discourages individuals from exercising their right to vote.

“The result is plain: Voter ID laws will make it harder for hundreds of thousands of poor Americans to vote,” the report states. “They place a serious burden on a core constitutional right that should be universally available to every American citizen.”

...

If there were a Hell (and regular readers know I dismiss the notion as highly improbable), there would surely be a special place in it for Republicans who spend their money and their efforts suppressing the vote of people less fortunate than themselves.

NOTE: the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has done outstanding work in the areas of voting rights, campaign finance reform and constitutional protection in these parlous times. They will be on the blogroll soon, as a resource for us all on those issues.

Rmoney's Secret Taxes And The American Economy

Paul Krugman offers two current hypotheses... guesses, really... about why Rmoney refuses to release his tax returns:

... (There are two competing theories about his tax stonewalling. One is that he had one or more years of zero taxes. The other is that he actually made a lot of money in 2009, because he shorted the market. We may never know which is true.)

It doesn't matter to me what Rmoney's income was, per se, but it does matter very much how he obtained the money and whether he paid anything remotely resembling a fair share of taxes on it. As long as he refuses to release his tax returns, I have to assume two things:

• Rmoney obtained the money legally but through various shady dealings,
• He paid proportionately less in taxes than the proverbial "nail lady."

But Krugman, in the same post, talks about the real reason the American public stands divided, and it has nothing to do with Obama's allegedly "attacking capitalism." First, after-tax income from 1979 to 2007 grew in the first four quintiles, with increases ranging from roughly 20% to 50% (the growth was roughly proportional to the income level), while in the same period, the income of the top 1% grew by nearly 300%. Second, starting in about 1980, i.e., the Saint Reagan era, median family income began decoupling from average household income and, even more importantly, from productivity, such that the fruits of the productivity gain overwhelmingly went to the wealthiest, not the workers who created it. (When the average increases and the median doesn't, it means rich people are getting richer relative to everyone else.) To me, this has a real 19^th- and early 20^th-century flavor to it: Gilded Age II, here we come here we are. I'm sorry, but that is simply unjustifiable. Please see Krugman's charts, based on CBO data.

And Rmoney wants to double down on the policies that made all this happen. If Rmoney is elected, or if the GOP manages to steal yet another one for yet another wealthy scion of another powerful family, this is what we'll see much more of. I'd say "it's your choice," but as much effort as the GOP is putting into voter suppression, I don't know that it actually is your choice. One can hope... and fight... and vote.

Joyful Flashmob In Sabadell

H/T an old colleague of mine, N.M., in an email... best viewed full screen, if your computer and connection can handle it:

DISCLOSE Act Fails

From SFGate, a hostile editorial (op-ed? not clear):

D.C. Democrats are pushing the Disclose Act again. Disclose stands for Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections. The ACLU and National Right to Life Committee oppose this bill because they fear it would chill free speech. As far as the anti-abortion group is concerned, Disclose stands for "Deterring Independent Speech about Congress except by Labor Organizations and Selected Elites."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., frames this year's bill, which failed to win a floor vote in the Senate on Monday, as a reform made necessary by the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 decision to allow independent expenditure campaigns to spend unlimited money from corporations, plutocrats and unions.

...

For once, I find myself opposed to the ACLU position. If spending truly were speech, chilling campaign contributions by identifying contributors might have a chilling effect on free speech. But the Roberts Court notwithstanding, spending is not speech: inequalities in campaign spending are surely the most corrosive influence on actual free speech by natural humans (not corporate entities, and not PACs or SuperPACs) of any in the long history of campaign abuses. Historically, the party that spends the most money on advertising (usually negative advertising, but put that aside for now) is the party that wins a given office, and historically and at present, that party is almost certainly the GOP. What could be more inimical to free speech regarding a partisan contest than effectively unlimited "speech" (i.e., spending) by Republicans and severely limited "speech" (i.e., spending) by Democrats? They should have renamed the Citizens United decision the "GOP Victory Assurance" decision. However imperfect the DISCLOSE Act may be, the notion that we can merely do nothing about this inequity and yet continue to call ourselves a representative democracy is ludicrous.

I'll revisit this topic, but right now I have other responsibilities.

Greece: Could Syriza Win?

Ari Paul, reporting for The Nation, examines the possibility:

Greece’s new center-right government is set to impose fresh austerity measures in the fall, including further privatization of utilities, railways and ports. With unions already angry over wage and pension cuts, more work stoppages and demonstrations are expected. Three ministers have already resigned their posts, including a deputy labor minister who said the ruling coalition has no intention of keeping its campaign promise to renegotiate with the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund), which had insisted on more austerity as a condition of continued aid to avert bankruptcy.

The government is already unstable. With labor’s help, the people could bring it down, observers say, giving the once-marginal Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza), the biggest opposition group in Parliament, a chance of forming a labor-backed government opposed to the Troika’s demands.

...

Paul then examines the relative strengths of Pasok (the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, the traditional party of labor in Greece) and Syriza (which Paul refers to as the "radical left"), the difficulty of persuading labor voters to switch their votes, the likelihood of strikes and work stoppages, etc. ... things which hardly ever happen in America due to the weakness of our labor movement, but which are more common tools in Europe.

As usual, I am in no position to comment on the desirability of such a change, but I'm sure l'Enfant will tell us.

As MA Gov, Rmoney Raided State Environmental Funds To Pay For Football Rally

From Mike Ludwig of Truthout...

Forget tailgating, Mitt Romney went all out when the New England Patriots went to the Super Bowl in 2005. Romney, then governor of Massachusetts, diverted $45,000 from the state's Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) to hold a send-off rally for the [Patriots] football team ...

Five days after the rally, four high school students were struck by a pickup truck in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. School officials blamed the accident on poorly plowed roads. Governor Romney blamed the DCR ... and quickly fired DCR Commissioner Katherine Abbott ... .

Surely the word "Recreation" in the department name is not intended to mean "pro football rallies." But this wasn't Rmoney's first run-in with the DCR; read the linked article. Here's another assessment...

...

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a nonpartisan alliance of local, state and federal environmental resource professionals, places at least some of the blame for the accident on political games and Romney's decision to divert public funds to pay for the Patriots' rally. The group says the fiasco is a prime example of Romney's "take-no-prisoners" management style ...

"He approached governance like a hostile takeover and this resulted in gutted agencies, crippling reorganizations and poor morale among workers," said New England PEER Director Kyla Bennett, a former enforcement attorney with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). ...

...

(Bolds mine.) Please read the rest. Rmoney as governor consistently, one might say relentlessly, acted to the detriment of the environment and of public employees. How could anyone justify putting somebody in charge of government and the environment who detests the whole notion of government and doesn't give a good damn about the environment? Of course that doesn't work: it was never intended to work. In our era, the GOP sees its sole mission as making sure government doesn't work. And they're distressingly good at it.

There's only one solution. Charge Rmoney with misappropriation of state funds; convict him; dump him in a jail for a few years ($45,000 is almost certainly a felony). That would, at least temporarily, spare the nation's forests, lakes, rivers etc. the wanton destruction Rmoney would surely bring.

One Of Colbert's Best

David Taintor of TPM quotes pseudo-conservative comic Stephen Colbert as saying that Obama, in campaigning against Rmoney's business record, is “hellbent on making the word ‘Bain’ synonymous with a source of harm or ruin.” Really? Hmmmm...

Journalism Outsourced, Pseudonymized

This story is all over the place. Well, no, it's not in "hyperlocal" sections of local newspapers, and it isn't under fake bylines; that would be telling on itself. The practice is the outsourcing of local news by local publications; the company, Journatic, is used by some major large-city dailies including Chicago Tribune and yes, to my regret, the Houston Chronicle. Here's Mark Coddington of Harvard's Nieman Journalism Center:, to pick one of hundreds of articles, mostly because it has good links:

...

The Chicago Tribune just outsourced its hyperlocal TribLocal sections to Journatic, and it began investigating Journatic’s work for fake bylines. The Chicago Sun-Times, Houston Chronicle, and San Francisco Chronicle also reported fake bylines on Journatic stories in their papers, and the Sun-Times and the newspaper chain GateHouse ended their contracts with Journatic, though GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram reported that those contracts expired before the fake-byline story came out. Journatic’s CEO sent a memo rallying the troops and declaring that its aliases would be discontinued.

The revelations pointed toward a larger discussion over how to do the tough work of making local journalism sustainable, summarized well by NPR’s David Folkenflik. Northeastern journalism professor Dan Kennedy said operations like Journatic’s “pink slime journalism” are a function of the fact that local journalism is difficult and expensive to do well, though the solution will ultimately come from the bottom up, not from cookie-cutter approaches. Free Press, meanwhile, urged us to demand better out of local news.

...

Coddington goes on to quote people who actually think this is a good thing, or inevitable given the economics of the news business, or some other claptrap. Personally, I think it's just plain dishonest. If they're going to outsource local news to nonlocal writers, and pseudonymize the purported journalists' bylines, how are they any better than a thorough and careful blogger, that "evil" [/snark] individual whom mainstream journalists are always condemning?

One Nation Under Surveillance: FDA Spies On Its Own Scientists

Mordor - Total Information Awareness

From the NYT, we learn that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) engaged in a "wide-ranging surveillance operation... against a group of its own scientists", using "an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails" to everyone from Congress to journalists and the president:

...

The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.

The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists’ claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation.

A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists’ medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed “a substantial and specific danger to public safety.”

...

It seems very likely that the FDA's actions were worthy of reporting. But nothing could so effectively reinforce the mostly false image of scientists as brilliant in their field of study but naive about political matters as those scientists' allowing their external communications to be spied upon.

A few simple rules of thumb would probably have allowed the scientists to continue undetected and unimpeded: use your own personal equipment to send the emails, not something your employer's IT department supplied to you; don't use your employer's network to transmit the emails; obtain and use your own personal privacy keys to encrypt the email; don't make copies of files onto removable media. Yes, all of that makes whistle-blowing considerably more inconvenient, but if you're going to do it at all, you may want to exercise at least that much common sense and good judgment.

(H/T Mustang Bobby.)

Detention And Rendition Under Obama

While I was at Pro Publica (which is now on the blogroll), I noticed that Cora Currier and Suevon Lee have posted a collection of The Best Reporting on Detention and Rendition Under Obama. When I've worked my way through the articles they link, I'll post anything regarding matters of usual interest on this blog, particularly civil liberties and human rights.

Trackers

Peter Maass and Megha Rajagopalan at Pro Publica provide us with details of how your cell phone can easily be the subject of warrantless location tracking: many of the 1.3 million law enforcement requests for called numbers and location information last year alone were warrantless. To me, that bears the stench of being forced to testify against oneself.

Maass and Rajagopalan conclude by suggesting we drop the term "cellphones" as no longer adequately describing their multiplicity of functions. Call them "trackers," they say. Excuse me, my tracker's ringing...

You Don't Know About LIBOR?

Avedon Carol points us to this Pro Publica article as a starting point. Of course, if you want a blow-by-blow, the signature blog on the issue is Matt Taibbi's.

The Tax-Cuts-For-The-(1%,99%) Election

Paul Krugman calls it "The Class Warfare Election", and who am I to deny it. Please look at Krugman's chart, comparing the change in effective tax rates under an Obama presidency and under a Rmoney presidency, according to their own proposals. This isn't rocket science, and it isn't about whether Obama is an OK guy compared to Rmoney. (He isn't, based on his civil liberties record alone. But please look at Krugman's chart.)

Obama would raise taxes on the 95^th percentile of income, with modest tax increases by income. Rmoney, starting with the 20^th percentile of income and moving upward, would cut taxes for everyone, more or less in direct proportion to their income, the highest-income folks getting the highest percentage cuts. Such a plan means, inevitably, cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid aid to states, and other safety-net programs to pay for those tax cuts for the wealthy. It's a sort of "reverse Robin Hood" program... rob the poor; give to the rich. And this is only what the two candidates have openly announced.

Here's Krugman's conclusion:

So like it or not, we have an election in which one candidate [Obama] is proposing a redistribution from the top — which is currently paying lower taxes than it has in 80 years — downward, mainly to lower-income workers, while the other [Rmoney] is proposing a large redistribution from the poor and the middle class to the top.

It's your choice. You can't control what either candidate does in the international sphere, or what Obama does regarding civil liberties... probably about what Rmoney will do. So what are you going to vote on? I'm going to vote on two things: economic policy and women's rights. YMMV, and I won't criticize you if it does. But those two issues are sufficient to tip the scales for Obama, in my opinion. Yes, I hate having a choice like that.

Judges Question Texas Voter ID Law

A panel of three federal judges (one each appointed by GeeDubya, Bill Clinton and Obama) asked tough questions during closing arguments in the trial examining whether the law is discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act.

This law, a solution to the nonexistent alleged problem of rampant voter fraud, was the GOP-dominated Texas Lege's idea of how to make a red state even redder, but if the questions of the panel are any indication, they may be thwarted in that attempt.

While the political machinery of Texas, gerrymandered to hell by the likes of criminal Tom DeLay and his successors, may lean toward GOP victories, Texans in general are not necessarily overwhelmingly conservative, especially the ethnic communities. If everyone who lives here were permitted to vote without undue burden, portions of the state might turn blue... and apparently the GOP knows that. Stay tuned, and don't assume we're going to lose.

Robert Reich: What's At Stake In The 2012 Election

Reich explains the radical Right's four-point plan to change the fundamental nature of America from representative democracy with wide public participation in policy decisions into something downright unsavory:

 

'I Said I'm Not Concerned About The Very Poor...'

The title quote is, of course, from Mitt Rmoney.

I received an email today from the Harris County Democratic Party which contained a statement that "nearly 30% of Houston’s population lives below the poverty line," I did some searching, and allowing for the expected political exaggeration, the figure is probably about right. In the 2010 Census, the number seems to have been between 19% and 22%, depending on whose word you take, with the brunt of the burden falling on young adults ("26.1% of those under the age of 18"), the elderly ("14.3% of those 65 and older") and people of color. That was two years ago, and I'm sure things have not gotten better since then.

---

One of my favorite mystery/crime fiction writers is Sara Paretsky, whose novels star a woman private detective named V.I. Warshawski, a child of Chicago's South Side. Paretsky's works appeal to me enough that I own most of her novels, despite my living a block from a public library. At present, I'm reading Paretsky's novel Blacklist, which is set in the period immediately following the 9/11 horrors, and depicts characters many of whom are obscenely wealthy and one of whom is a poor Arab boy in Chicago, accused, apparently falsely, of terrorism because he let his visa expire and... well, the cops needed to show they were doing something about terrorism in those insane times... excuse me, these insane times. Paretsky's determination to write such a novel came from a personal experience of falling under suspicion when a woman saw her working on her notes for a novel and mistook the notes for actual plans for a terrorist act. The essay about that experience used to be online, but apparently she has turned it into a book, Writing in an Age of Silence, in which Paretsky "explores the traditions of political and literary dissent that have informed her life and work, against the unparallelled repression of free speech and thought in the US today." As you can tell, and as best I remember the web version of the essay, Paretsky doesn't spare the lash when confronting political repression.

Why bring Paretsky into this? That's easy: she contrasts rich and poor in her novels with an acerbic style apparently born of experience... of the low end; even the best and most successful crime fiction writers seldom experience wealth. Her character V.I. is highly aware, moment to moment, of the class distinction that requires much of her and demands little or nothing of the wealthy people she encounters in her detective work.

In my days as a musician, I worked for several dozen rich people; for better or worse, they are a primary source of demand for live chamber music and can afford to hire groups for their social events small and large. On the whole, I found these wealthy people to be polite to me (if somewhat patronizing), and a few of them even thought it was important to pay me on time. [/snark] But by and large, even the politest among them were utterly certain that I, along with everyone else who entertained or fed their society events, existed solely for their benefit. I have never personally been poor... my parents came damned close one year, but Dad found work in time to prevent us from bottoming out... but it is very easy for me to understand how Mittens is "not concerned about the very poor." He doesn't have to be. He doesn't even have to identify with them emotionally. As in Lily Tomlin's Phone Company skits, his attitude is "We don't care. We don't HAVE to care." And the best evidence from his years at Bain Capital demonstrate that uncaring outlook. Personally I think that is a grievous flaw in a potential president.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Listen to Sara Paretsky reading from one of her essays... this is well worth your time!

OMG - O My Godwin!

TPM's Evan McMorris-Santoro:

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) on Thursday simultaneously apologized for and doubled down on comments he made last week equating the IRS with the Gestapo.

LePage told Vermont weekly Seven Days that he understands why his claim about the IRS — voiced after the Supreme Court upheld the health care law — offended some.

LePage then "apologized" to every ethnic, racial and national group of American citizens under the Sun, and then, astonishingly, reaffirmed his original comparison:

“What I’m trying to say is that the Holocaust was a horrific crime against humanity and, frankly, I would never want to see that repeated,” he said. “Maybe the IRS is not quite as bad. Yet.”

LePage explained that the connection between the Holocaust and “Obamacare” comes from what he called “rationing” contained in the law:

...

If this passes muster under Godwin's Law, then, even though Mike Godwin is very much still alive, please count me as a follower of the "Godwin is Dead" movement.

Right To Inspect Ballots Does NOT Conflict With Right To Voter Privacy

BlackBoxVoting.org (the ".org" is important; there are other unaffiliated "BlackBoxVoting" sites with different top-level domain extensions) points to several states in which either election officials or state courts are denying citizens' requests to examine original ballots, asserting that doing so violates voter privacy. Both rights are intrinsic in America. Quoting from the linked article:

RIGHT TO INSPECT - The public, in exercising its right to self govern, and under principles of Freedom of Information, has a right to examine the original evidence (the ballots) to authenticate reported results in elections.

...

RIGHT TO SECRET BALLOT - The public also has a right to a secret, anonymous ballot.

At ground, there is no actual conflict between these rights: ballots from an election, paper or electronic, may be stripped of identifying information and published for inspection and (presumably) verification by interested parties.

But some states, e.g., Washington state on 21 occasions, have denied many requests by citizens to inspect ballots. And New Hampshire's 2003 Right-to-Know law included a provision, apparently never discussed publicly, explicitly exempting ballots.

Colorado has a different kind of problem: officials have been placing unique bar codes on individual ballots, allowing someone with the key to learn how any individual voted. So much for the privacy of the ballot! The judge in the Colorado case has threatened a gag order on proceedings, an act guaranteed not to inspire confidence.

Here's my personal interest in the matter, even though I don't live in one of the named states:

One voting machine vendor, Hart Intercivic, has been especially brazen about printing unique bar codes on each ballot, a dead cinch for stripping out data on how you voted with absentee voting. Hart dominates most Colorado counties (where absentee voting is approaching 50% of all votes), and Washington State, which is now 100% vote by mail.

Hart InterCivic manufactured the voting machines used here in Harris County, TX (i.e., a large part of Houston). The Hart InterCivic system was chosen by a Republican county clerk some years back. Word has it that all electronic voting system manufacturers are owned by Republicans; I have not personally verified that, but it's a troubling assertion if true. Mind you, I have no objection to Hart's voting machine interface; it's very straightforward and uses a finger dial instead of a touchscreen. But there's the same problem with the system as with any electronic system: its software inevitably stands between the "ballots" and the person wishing to examine them.

And those bar codes... those are news to me. You know how everyone says you should vote absentee because that way there's a paper ballot in case of a "recount" (word used with reservation)? Well, here's a counterbalancing reason not to do that: your ballot privacy is utterly gone.

Some people have said I have an unreasonably negative opinion of the Republican Party (just because I despise every policy it espouses, I suppose). But my biggest complaint has nothing to do with policy positions: it is that the GOP acts in ways that are antidemocratic (small-d) every chance it gets. And this is one of those chances.

Democracy is meaningless if the votes are manipulated: deleted, diluted, whatever. It's also meaningless if votes are individually identifiable, so that people can be threatened (or bribed) based on how they actually voted. And it's meaningless if independent organizations are prohibited from examining the cast ballots to verify the election results (which is trivially always the case with e-voting systems).

You want democracy, for real, not just the appearance? Paper ballots, with a strict chain of custody and a counting process involving representatives of all interested parties, are still the way to go, after more than two centuries of use. Take all your electronic voting systems to the middle of an ocean and deposit them in the deepest trough you can find. I understand fish don't care if their votes are secret and properly counted.

'Beyond Outrage'

That's the title of Robert Reich's current book, but today I want to point you to Reich's blog. Reich is on fire these days. Here are the last few posts; if you have time, read them all:

• The Truth About Obama’s Tax Proposal (and the Lies the Regressives are Telling About It)
• The Wall Street Scandal of all Scandals
• The Jobs Doldrums and Obama’s Future
• How Not to Get Big Pharma to Change Its Ways

I came to admire Reich during and immediately after his days as President Clinton's Secretary of Labor. The condensed version of that episode: Reich really didn't fit in. He was too committed to the truth and to the well-being of the nation to toe the Clinton line; eventually he moved on. He is now a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, where I suspect he is a good deal more comfortable. Politics aside, Reich is a brilliant economist and, in my opinion, a gifted teacher. I hope you enjoy his posts, if "enjoy" is the right word when the subject matter is so depressing.

The Warmest Year

That would be 2012, the warmest year in the US in recorded history. Let David Dayen at FDL tell you about it.

UPDATE: NTodd, in comments, points us to an article at MediaMatters, Why George Will Is Wrong About Weather And Climate, which contains graphics that should clarify matters for all but the most stubborn climate change deniers. The short version is that the climate trend rides atop the weather cycle, so that extreme individual weather events, whether or not a given event can be attributed to climate change, become more frequent over the years as climate changes. Lately the frequency of such weather events has leaned disproportionately toward heat events rather than cold events, and the change in frequency of heat events has accelerated in a very small number of years, as shown in this government chart borrowed from the linked article:

Will these events become even more frequent over the course of this century? The following map, taken from the government report Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, answers with an emphatic yes:

Confronted with this projection, deniers can either dispute the science (usually by finding contrarians willing to go on record saying things far from the consensus opinion among climate scientists), dispute the magnitude of the effect (harder to do every year, as shown above) or shrug and say "It's not our problem," meaning "We won't be alive by then; let our children deal with it." Most of the deniers I have encountered are on the political right, with everything that entails including the typical arrogant self-assurance; it occurs to me that they may also have financial motives to keep things just as they are until it's too late... if it isn't already too late.

Welcome to our world: created by idiots, maintained by imbeciles and led by morons. A bit more intelligence would be very helpful about now...

What's For Breakfast? Southern-Fried America

There seems to be a newfound interest in the South lately, and in how its history affects America's politics and race relations today. On the whole the news is not good, at least if you believe in human equality and republican (as opposed to Republican) government. These two stories are a good starting point (H/T Fallenmonk; see link below):

• Sara Robinson at AlterNet: "Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America"
• Fallenmonk (who is himself a liberal Southerner): "The South Has Risen Again"

You'll have to look elsewhere if you want a link to Asshole Ted Nugent's assertion that we'd all be better off if the South had won the Civil War. For the record, he did say something like that, but I'm not going to link to it.

The problem is that the consequences of slavery, an institution that never should have been permitted to arise in a self-proclaimed free society (Robinson's post contains a good explanation of how it did arise), have never been fully dealt with. I could hope that when heretofore racial minorities become, in aggregate, the majority, maybe we can make some headway, but I just don't see it happening in states like Texas, which is already "majority minority." (How I hate that phrase! But it is current usage.) And nationally, old-style Southern thinking, some of it done by Southerners and some not, is leading the nation somewhere many of us perceive as straight to Hell. Here's Robinson:

...

For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic of noblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they've done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.

...

Which brings us to that other great historical American nobility -- the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain “order,” and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.

...

Well, yes. And today's racists, who are by no means exclusively confined to the South and are often very conservative in other aspects of their sociopolitical views, are gaining power, in an apparently intentional effort to transform the United States into something other than what it had evolved to be. Authors like Robinson avoid talking about the nation's origins, in which many of the founders were themselves slaveholders. But That was Then, and Now Everything is Different... Except in the South. If that were true, we would face a much smaller problem. But it isn't, and we don't.

I always remember an experience I had when I was 22 years old, right out of college, working for Texas Instruments in their Software Branch. (The Software Branch was about hardware, and all the other branches were about hardware... it was, and probably still is, the nature of TI.) The company contracted to construct a control system for a major radio station and network headquartered in NYC. Having worked on developing TI's general-purpose control software, I was assigned to adapt it for use by the network. I was to work with a guy named Kevin, sent from NYC to Houston for the duration of the project. Kevin was, like me, a man of lower-class origins. Unlike me, Kevin was an unrestrained racist, and he felt that because he was in "the South" (I could spend a paragraph attacking the concept that Texas is really the South, but I won't), among the white men who dominated the Software Branch, he could freely voice his racist tendencies. He just assumed I would agree with him. I couldn't fight back; it was worth my job to have fought back. So I bit my tongue, tapped my code and somehow got through it. Perhaps I'd have responded better if I had had a few years in the field and a reputation that enabled me to walk out the door and find another job right away. But all that came later. In my solo contracting career, I had the luxury of not putting up with racists, but not in that first job.

It is very important that every person of good will, anywhere in America, who participates in the effort to overcome America's latent (and sometimes blatant) racism, not make automatic assumptions about individuals based solely on their region of origin. If you do that, you'll be wrong more often than right... and you'll damage your cause more than you can imagine. Give us a break. Many of us are pedaling as hard as we can, fighting against obstacles you may understand intellectually but not viscerally. Do not oversimplify the obstacles we face: it doesn't help us, and therefore it doesn't help us to help you.

Stella's Brother

Stella's brother Jim is undergoing a quadruple bypass today, scheduled to start at about noon ET. This is a surprise to us, too. If you're the praying sort, your prayers are appreciated; if not, you can join me in hoping for steady surgeons' hands and a good outcome.

(This post will float to the top today until there's word on the surgery, which is several hours long.)

UPDATE about 6:25pm CT: we only just got word that Jim is fine; the surgery went OK. Why did we not get word sooner? Because the (expletive deleted) waiting room had a cell phone blocker in operation. (Sometimes I feel like pounding the truly stupid who are in charge of most things these days into an even deeper oblivion.) But never mind all that; thank Whom it May Concern that Jim is all right!

UPDATE Tues. morning: it turns out that the surgeons discovered Jim actually needed a quintuple bypass! As of this morning, he is still doing well. Thanks to everyone for your kind thoughts.

When They're Watching You... Oo-oo-ooh... Oo-oo-ooh

Please read Glenn Greenwald's speech on America's surveillance... government and corporate... of just about every damned thing you do, delivered to  * redacted * .

You and Thomas Jefferson may have thought that when things got as bad as this, there would be a revolution to correct them. But if there is, the revolution will not be televised... or blogged... or telephoned... or based on any other sort of electronic communication that the government-military-industrial complex can monitor... or acted upon in any place visible to America's estimated 30 million surveillance videocams (estimated in 2004 by Popular Mechanics).

Without communication, there is no revolution... peaceful or violent, lawful or otherwise. And with at least two government agencies (the FBI and the No-Such-Agency, and I'm guessing the CIA as well), and even some local police departments, and major telecom corporations, possessing the technology and having apparently been assigned the mission of tracking American citizens in America as they once tracked foreign spies and organized criminals, I doubt anything that one could reasonably call a revolution will happen. Read Greenwald for such details as are publicly available.

Orwell missed the date by a couple of decades, but I think the reality is here. Americans (and others), welcome to the rest of your sorry, surveillance-ridden lives.

UPDATE Tues. 7/10: Here's an excerpt from an ACLU mailer I just received:

A front-page story in yesterday's New York Times makes a stunning revelation: mobile phone providers received 1.3 million law enforcement requests for customer records last year alone.

(Bolds original.) As I was just saying...

'Monsanto Rider' Slipped Into 2013 Ag Bill

Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Biotech) wants to kill us all. Actually this bought-and-paid-for congressman for the biotech industry just wants us... and the courts and the USDA... to be rendered incapable of saving ourselves from pretty much anything Monsanto or any other biotech firm wants farmers to plant. Here's Alexis Baden-Mayer at TruthOut:

...

A so-called "Monsanto rider," quietly slipped into the multi-billion dollar FY 2013 Agricultural Appropriations bill, would require – not just allow, but require - the Secretary of Agriculture to grant a temporary permit for the planting or cultivation of a genetically engineered crop, even if a federal court has ordered the planting be halted until an Environmental Impact Statement is completed. All the farmer or the biotech producer has to do is ask, and the questionable crops could be released into the environment where they could potentially contaminate conventional or organic crops and, ultimately, the nation's food supply.

Unless the Senate or a citizen's army of farmers and consumers can stop them, the House of Representatives is likely to ram this dangerous rider through any day now.

...

If you like your frankenfood with components you were never engineered to digest, let this pass. Otherwise, sign one of the petitions listed in Ms. Baden-Mayer's post.

(H/T SouthernDragon at FDL.)

UPDATE: all the action links in the FDL article are scrambled. Try these: Organic Consumers Association, Center for Food Safety, FoodDemocracyNow!, the Alliance for Natural Health USA.

New! Greek Austerity... Now With... Privatization!

One would think it was bad enough that the New Democrats in office are not, contrary to their campaign promises, pursuing a renegotiation of the draconian terms of their bailout. Their creditors warned them that such a request would be turned down. So, in a move that is to me inexplicable politically, the leading party in the ruling coalition isn't even going to try. But as I said, that's not the worst of it.

No, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras says they're going to privatize everything.

Americans, how do you like your Postal Service, with its new, longer delivery times and its ever-increasing postage rates? That's an example of privatization. Or how about the privatized prison systems of most states, in many of which police have been quietly instructed to fill up the jails despite a decrease in crime in the last decade or so? How do you like having family breadwinners serving often mandatory terms for possession of small amounts of marijuana, just so the privatized prisons can make a profit? How do you like the outbreaks of violence in some prisons, attributable in part to the employment of inadequately trained, underpaid guards? Is it possible the Invisible Hand of the Market is raising its invisible middle finger at all of us?

Greece's New Democratic leadership is contemplating privatizing the railways, elder care and child care. Good luck with that, I say: every intrinsic governmental function that has been privatized in the US has ended up providing lower quality and quantity of service for no less money. The more that issues of economy of scale affect a given service (e.g., medical care), the more the cost of privatization goes up. Greeks, take it from Americans: privatization is a bad deal for your public tax money.

(H/T Enfant de la Haute Mer for the various links. Read her post for more information and a lot more links on the economic situation in Greece.)

Higgs Humor

... of highly variable quality, though only one commenter resorted to a remark about a "Hardon Collider":

• From MSNBC,
• From boingboing,
• From John Huth at Quantum Diaries. A decently well-crafted fantasy of Mark Twain's reaction.

As I said, the quality is uneven, and there are a lot of trolls on the threads who contribute nothing that I would call humor. Still, there are enough good lines that I can't begin to list them all here. Take a look. MSNBC has the best list of sites with jokes and a video of someone reading her Higgs sonnet, but if you have time for only one, read the Twain imitation.

Dean Baker: Tax Wall Street Trades

Specifically, Baker advocates a per-trade tax of 0.03 percent, as a discouragement to financial speculation... i.e., gambling... as proposed in the Joint Tax Committee of Congress by Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. Peter DeFazio:

As the presidential election builds up steam, the Washington elites in both parties are actively scheming to find ways to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for retired workers. The media have widely reported on efforts to slip through a version of the deficit reduction plan developed by Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson. Since the vast majority of voters across the political spectrum reject cuts to these programs, the Washington insiders hope to spring this one on us after the election, when the public will have no say.

That is the sort of anti-democratic behavior we expect from elites who naturally want to protect their own interests. Of course the rest of us are more concerned about the well-being of the country as a whole rather than preserving the wealth of the richest 1 percent.

For the 99 percent there are much better ways of dealing with whatever deficit problems may arise down the road. Most obviously, insofar as we need more revenue we can look to tax the sort of financial speculation through which the Wall Street gang makes its fortunes. A very small tax on trades of stocks, options, credit default swaps and other derivative instruments could raise a vast amount of money.

The Joint Tax Committee of Congress estimated that a tax of just 0.03 percent on each trade, as proposed by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Peter DeFazio, would raise more than $350 billion over the first nine years that it is in place. This is real money. It is an order of magnitude larger than the measures that have been suggested to go after the wealthy, such as President Obama's bank tax or most versions of the Buffet Rule.

...

This sounds right to me. People and corporations that use algorithms to execute ceaseless trades every millisecond or so are not contributing to the soundness of society or the economy, whether they make tons of money or not, and they should be made to pay for the practice. Slightly off topic, I also see no reason why capital gains should be taxed at a dramatically lower rate than earned income, but as far as I know, changes to that practice are not even on the table.

(Full disclosure: I have a relatively small amount of money invested. Literally none of my investments were speculative: all were chosen after I did considerable research to be as certain as I could be that the companies behind them are socially responsible (or better still, socially useful), and all have been held long-term. For my troubles, I have lost a fair amount of money in the market; I'd have done better with money in the mattress. But at least I didn't fund bombs, nuclear plants or genetically modified organisms. I sleep well with my decision. But in a legitimate market, I'd have been able to do well by doing good.)

If Baker is right, and the plans of Bowles and Simpson are sprung upon us after the election, it may well be that in this respect (as in so many others) it really doesn't matter who you vote for. Obama's advisors and cabinet members (i.e., department heads) are straight from the Street; none of them are going to do a damned thing in behalf of the 99 percent. Then again, there's Rmoney... he's the man who milks and then discards successful corporations, destroying jobs, using other people's money and taking a large cut himself, not to mention refusing to talk about his offshore accounts. Given that Rmoney apparently has Crossroads support, I guess you could call him a "Rove-ing gambler." So no matter who wins the presidency, no per-trade tax will happen, Washington will be awash in money as always, and the 99 percent... well, we lose. We always do.

Still, it's good to keep a per-trade tax in mind, just in case there's ever (ahem) an extraordinary change in the climate in Washington and actual change is possible. One can dream.

Typo Of The Day

From Marc Ambinder's GQ article, Exclusive: In His Second Term, Obama Will Pivot to the Drug War:

... The same language was used to describe the dangers of the marijuana culture during the 40s and the cocaine culture during the '80s is now used to cast meth users as social deviants, and slowly, the incarnation rate of white people is inching up.

Before that, white people must have been bodiless...

Despite its many typos, the article is worth reading.

Online Privacy In America - Quickly Vanishing If It Ever Existed

The FTC, which is the agency charged with ferreting out inappropriate and illegal data mining and tracking operations online, lacks an adequate budget, and has the support of neither major political party, because even businesses who have had a reputation for consumer-friendliness (think of Google's "don't be evil") want to be able to do such mining and tracking free of government regulation. Yes, Google does some of these things, including some questionably legal interceptions of inadequately protected Wi-Fi signals from its Street View cars as they troll the streets ostensibly only for 360° photos.

Illegal Wi-Fi interception notwithstanding, as long as companies engage in mining and tracking, your online habits are followed in minute detail by certain kinds of tracking cookies placed in your browser by web sites you visit, placed there by advertisers who want to watch you shop. (Note: most cookies are innocuous, and for purely practical and technical reasons, web sites you visit may need to save information from one session to the next, mostly for your convenience. There may be circumstances under which you will want to clear your cookies, but in general, doing so only inconveniences you and does not obstruct those tracking you all that much.)

What's next, mosquito-sized drones with cameras, following you as you walk through a physical shopping mall? The effect is not that different, and the drones are said to exist already... just google "mosquito-sized drone". Cell phone tracking by businesses that want to sell you something is already infamous, especially for smartphones. Electronic and visual tracking is the staple of retail business in our age.

Peter Maass at ProPublica.org offers a long but fact-filled story on the practices, the ambiguity of laws, the actions of the FTC, etc. If you spend much time online, and especially if you buy anything online, it's worth your time to read the article.

'Affordable Care Cat' Pics

... here!

(H/T Avedon.)

Weather Underground Sold (Out) To Weather Channel Companies

Yes, it's true:

The announcement on Monday that the Weather Channel Companies, owners of television’s Weather Channel and weather.com, would buy one of its rivals, Weather Underground, set off howls of displeasure on social media platforms and around water coolers across the nation. The purchase price was not disclosed.

In the eyes of Weather Underground’s ardent fans, the Weather Channel appears to represent the wrong kind of weather information: personality-driven sunniness and hype, they say, rather than the pure science of data. ...

...

My first reaction: !@#$%^*!=[]/!!!.

I hope they got a good price. I am still trying to figure out how to sell out, but first I have to figure out just what it is that I have to sell...

UPDATE: I neglected to quote the part of the article informing us that the Weather Channel is "owned by a consortium that includes Comcast, Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group." Charming... Mittens can now ax Wunderground if he chooses to.

UPDATE:  I am experimentally running both Wunderground and WeatherBug widgets in the sidebar. Eventually I will choose one. The weather station for WeatherBug is at the elementary school one block west of me, so the numbers should be about right... as long as the kiddies don't stick their fingers in the works.

UPDATE: WeatherBug's widget seems not to work properly. For now, I'm removing it.

It's The Higgs Boson, Higgs-Damn It!

Or I suppose one could call it the "Dog particle" ... no scientist I know would willingly label it with a phrase meant more to hype an undeservedly popular book (even if the book is by a Nobel prizewinner) than to clarify scientific, let alone theological matters. The particle, found by the LHC's ATLAS and CMS experiments, is... well, let me yield to the authors of the CERN press release:

"The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."

That certainly sounds like the Higgs particle required by the Standard Model, though they are wise to take the time to analyze the data more thoroughly. This is a great day for particle physics.

It could have been a wonderful 236^th birthday present for America, except we were too damned cheap to build the superconducting super collider... America's abandonment of basic science funding from the era of Saint Ronald Reagan forward will eventually, one way or the other, render America either defunct or irrelevant.

Congrats to the CERN team responsible for the find, whatever it turns out to be.

ADDED: please read Matt Strassler at Of Particular Significance, my favorite young physicist and interpreter of particle physics matters for the general public, for an extremely and deservedly excited report of the status of the Higgs search. (Some physics specifics, not all easy for the layperson to understand, but not so as to overwhelm us.)

ADDED: Need an intro to the Higgs field and particle? Strassler's got you covered.

Interdependence Day

There was a time when that was a good name for it. "E pluribus unum," and all that, was a staple of the American belief system. For all that we squabbled, fretted, battled and shouted past each other, those were the good old days. We took care of each other. We fought like siblings, not like bitter enemies. This is not a romanticized past seen through an old man's rose-colored glasses: I was there, and that's how it once was.

 

Now we have the likes of Mitch McConnell, saying why he wants to be Senate Majority Leader, and this is in October 2010:

MCCONNELL: We need to be honest with the public. This election is about them, not us. And we need to treat this election as the first step in retaking the government. We need to say to everyone on Election Day, “Those of you who helped make this a good day, you need to go out and help us finish the job.”

NATIONAL JOURNAL: What’s the job?

MCCONNELL: The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.

For one rare time, my reaction was about the same as Joe Scarborough's:

...

This morning, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was floored by McConnell’s open admission that his single most important goal is to defeat Obama. “Mitch McConnell said that?!? … He admitted that on the record?!? That is embarrassing,” he said. “Can I just say for the record – that is pathetic.” ,,,

,,,

Pathetic or not, that is today's America: an absolute refusal by Republicans to declare our interdependence, to celebrate it, to admit that anyone other than them has a legitimate claim on power... subsequently tossing a spanner in the works to see to it that their opponent cannot govern, never mind the suffering of the American people while their government is failing. That is not "pathetic," nor is it merely lamentable... it is morally deplorable. One would think the perpetrators of this scorched-earth strategy would lose elections, but after Citizens United, I wouldn't bet on it. Nor would I bet on the nation's survival another two decades, and if it does survive, I wouldn't bet on its survival as a representative democracy.

I shall close with a song that I consider the signature of America in the modern era, Paul Simon's "American Tune." Here is a 1975 recording; gawd, Simon looked young back then...

Happy Fourth. Stella and I plan to have veggie hot dogs in celebration. Y'all be careful around all those open fires, especially the self-propelled ones.

Google Places Its Heavy Hand On Firefox Users - CORRECTED

Google/Blogger has just inserted the following message atop the Blogger dashboard:

Your browser is no longer supported by Blogger. Some parts of Blogger will not work and you may experience problems.
If you are having problems, try Google Chrome.

My browser is Firefox 11.0 for Ubuntu Linux. As it turns out, for my simple needs, Blogger seems to work OK in Firefox 11.0. I have no particular dislike of Google Chrome; I switched back to Firefox a couple of weeks ago because Chrome seemed to have an ongoing disagreement with AdBlock+ on Linux, apparently a memory-related matter, and I wanted a smoother moment-to-moment experience, which I found in Firefox.

At first I shrugged. Then it occurred to me to wonder: is Google using Blogger as leverage to push a totally separate product, namely, its browser? I realize that Google Chrome has increased and Firefox decreased in market share recently, but I have to wonder about the... well, I'll say it, the sanity... of any web development company that would abandon Firefox support at this moment.

Does anybody have any information about this?

CORRECTION: I may be a bright guy, but in some matters I'm as dumb as a brick. While Google Chrome automatically updates to the latest version on its own, Firefox does not... it applies minor-version changes automatically, but newer major versions have to be manually installed. I've done that now, and Blogger works fine now. Thanks to all who left notes.

ObamaCare: A 'Death Panel' For Private Insurance?

Rick Ungar of Forbes explains why he thinks the answer is "yes":

...

That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

...

That clause, says Ungar, ultimately makes offering private insurance unprofitable. Given how the biggest thieves in the modern business world operate, I have my doubts. But the article is worth reading.

(H/T ellroon.)

Fur Cat, Tin Cat

Esther shares her sunny window spot and a couple of toys with a blackwood-and-chrome cat sculpture:



I've waited over a year for the opportunity to get a shot like this!

In Case You Didn't Know...

... let Mother tell you. That would be Mother Jones's David Corn, in his article, "Romney Invested in Medical-Waste Firm That Disposed of Aborted Fetuses, Government Documents Show." Like most non-fundagelical Republicans, Romney is a damned hypocrite on the abortion issue. Be sure to tell your fundie friends and colleagues.

Federal Judge Blocks Draconian MississippiAbortion Law

Reuters has the basics:

(Reuters) - A federal judge on Sunday temporarily blocked Mississippi from enforcing a new law that requires doctors who perform abortions at the state's sole abortion clinic to have admitting privileges at a local hospital.

The state law, challenged last week by the Jackson Women's Health Organization, has threatened to make Mississippi the only U.S. state without an abortion clinic. It was set to take effect on Sunday.

...

The law signed by Republican Governor Phil Bryant in April requires all doctors performing abortions at a Mississippi clinic to be certified in obstetrics and gynecology, as well as to have admitting privileges at a local hospital.

...

Mississippi is a state that seems to me never to have learned the outcome of the Civil War, or possibly even the American Revolution, or at least the Constitutional Convention. Mississippi's predilections notwithstanding, federal law on abortion, beginning with Roe v. Wade which established a woman's "fundamental right" (i.e., constitutionally protected right) to an abortion prior to fetus viability, will surely find a state law effectively eliminating access to abortion for the women of an entire state unconstitutional. But as far as I can tell, no minds will be changed, and state legislatures will continue cranking out draconian, unconstitutional anti-abortion laws until the republic falls. We can all hope that won't happen next week.

Rmoney Botches Spanish-Language Ads

If I were Hispanic, I would find this insulting:

...

Republican candidate Romney trails Obama badly among Latinos, according to polls released last week, and isn't counting on them to propel him to victory. Even so, his Spanish-language advertising has been minimal and clumsy, the experts said. Some of his ads are simply translated versions of his English-language commercials — a particular no-no when trying to reach Latino consumers.

Obama has spent more heavily, and created more effective ads than his rival, but some experts said that so far he has failed to craft a campaign that keeps pace with the rapidly increasing size and sophistication of the Latino population, which climbed to 50.5 million in the 2010 census, from 35.3 million a decade earlier.

Neither campaign has adopted the approach honed over the years by businesses targeting Spanish speakers — one that not only depicts Latinos in positive settings, but also reflects attention to cultural nuance. ...

...

Rmoney has also spent only pocket change ($33k to date) "between mid-April and mid-June in the battleground states of North Carolina and Ohio, while Obama spent $1.7 million" on Spanish-language ads in the same time frame and area.

If you're going to run an ad in a language other than your own... advisable in the Southwest part of the US, where many Latinos speak Spanish almost exclusively among themselves, even if they speak English at work... at an absolute minimum your Spanish usage should be idiomatic and grammatical. It isn't that hard to do in Texas... I have Hispanic friends and colleagues, people whose English is often more polished than my own, who surely do a comparable job in their native language. But a badly translated ad, or an ad lacking sensitivity to basic cultural differences, is an ad asking to be ignored... and probably resented as well.

Houston is already (I cringe as I type the atrocious term) "majority-minority" because of its Hispanic‑American, African‑American and Asian‑American populations (listed in approximate order largest to smallest, if memory serves me [update: this is correct]). A campaign here that doesn't cut it with Hispanics is a campaign guaranteed to lose elections. Shame on Mr. Rmoney for not attending to this basic fact, and it seems to me that Mr. Obama, who overwhelmingly has the Hispanic vote at the moment, would be wise to pay more attention to the ways in which his campaign to Hispanics is faulty. In this election, more than any past presidential elections, Americans other than Caucasians and African-Americans carry incredible clout, and may not be neglected by any candidate who would win.

(H/T TPM for the LA Times link.)

GeeDubya Bush - Winner And Still ChampionIn The Destructiveness Contest

Robert Merry at Salon tells us, in an excerpt from his (new? forthcoming?) book, Where They Stand, what Dubya's worst flaws were and presumably still are. As commenters point out, the article's list of flaws is incomplete (my inclination was to say "read the book"), but the combination of incompetence, indifference, hostile personality and uncompensated sense of privilege serves to render Bush, in the words of Helen Thomas, the "Worst. President. Ever." I concur. O'Bummer is bad, but he doesn't come close to GeeDubya... stupid‑and‑evil trumps merely evil any day.

(H/T ellroon.)

On Texas Aggies Crossing The TX-LA BorderThereby Increasing The Average IQ Of Both States

Via NTodd, we have this shining pile of brilliance documented in the LA Times book blog:

Citing budget concerns, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has signed a $25-billion budget that eliminates almost $900,000 in state funding for its libraries. In a statement, the governor’s chief budget aide, Paul Rainwater, said, “In tight budget times, we prioritized funding for healthcare and education. Operations such as local libraries can be supported with local, not state dollars.”

On Thursday, Library Journal took a look at that assertion. What they found was that while some local parishes may be able to cover the funding gap, others will feel the loss. Rural parishes will face a particularly daunting challenge.

...

So... will any reporter ask Mitt Romney for a comment on whether he approves of this line item? Will he answer "yes and no"? Has Mitt Romney ever read anything other than a balance sheet or a stock prospectus?