Year: 2011

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?!?

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Newt Gingrich is slamming Paul Ryan’s plan to eliminate Medicare:

Presidential contender Newt Gingrich took a potshot Sunday at Republican House Budget Chairman Paul D. Ryan’s proposal to reform Medicare, becoming the most prominent Republican to distance himself from the plan.

Ryan’s proposal, which was passed by the GOP-controlled House in April, would have people 54 and younger choose from a list of coverage options and have Medicare make “premium-support payments” to the plan they chose.

“I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” Gingrich scoffed in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

House Republicans, including Speaker John A. Boehner, have stood behind Ryan’s plan, which was the subject of fierce debate at town-hall meetings nationwide. Other Republican presidential contenders have praised Ryan’s political courage without going so far as to endorse the budget blueprint.

Let’s be clear here: We know just what Newt is, an opportunist, so his condemnation is not a mark of any real problem with the idea of selling seniors to insurance companies to be ground up into Soylent Green, after all, he pretty much proposed that in the 1990s.

Instead, it is an acknowledgment by Gingrich that the proposal is a complete political loser, and so he thinks that by joining its condemnation, he will be able derive political advantage.

What the IMF Has Been Doing to 3rd World Nations For Years…

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At least there is symmetry

So it should come as no surprise, that IMF President Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been arrested for raping a hotel housekeeper:

The arrest of International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on sexual-assault charges threatened to upend French politics and weaken the IMF’s central role in resolving Europe’s deepening debt crisis.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62 years old, was expected to be arraigned Sunday night on charges of attempted rape, criminal sexual assault and unlawful imprisonment of a maid in the New York City hotel where he was staying, police said. Mr. Strauss-Kahn retained prominent defense attorney Benjamin Brafman, whose clients have included singer Michael Jackson and rapper Sean Combs. Mr. Brafman said Mr. Strauss-Kahn would plead not guilty.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arraignment was delayed late Sunday when police sought a search warrant to examine the IMF chief’s body for scratches or the accuser’s DNA, a law-enforcement official said.

We are living in weird times.

Obviously, rape is not something to be made light of, but the similarities in predatory nature of the IMF and the alleged crimes are striking.

Yep, The Revolving Door is Shut down

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4 Months after approving the Comcast-NBC merger, outgoing Federal Communications Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker will go to work for them as a lobbyist:

Washington’s revolving door is spinning again this week, with Federal Communications Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker’s announcement that she is resigning to become a lobbyist for Comcast.

Baker’s last day on the commission will be June 3, a few weeks before the end of her term, and just over four months after she voted to approve the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal.
Federal Communications Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, shown at a hearing on Capitol Hill in March, is resigning to become a lobbyist for Comcast.
Enlarge Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Federal Communications Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, shown at a hearing on Capitol Hill in March, is resigning to become a lobbyist for Comcast.
Federal Communications Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, shown at a hearing on Capitol Hill in March, is resigning to become a lobbyist for Comcast.

Back in 2009, when the merger was proposed, Baker said on C-SPAN that the commission shouldn’t try to regulate too much.

“You shouldn’t attach conditions that are extraneous to the actual deal in front of you,” she said at the time.

And when the vote came last January, Baker complained that some extraneous conditions were there. She said that FCC rulings were too regulatory and could discourage job-creating investment. Still, she voted with the 4-1 majority for the merger.

An important point to make here is that she is not a Bush retread finishing out a term.  She was appointed by Barack Obama.

She pretty much had to be a ‘Phant, the law requires that no more than 3 members of the 5 member commission belong to the same party, but she was hip deep in Bush policy and deregulation, and she is the daughter of the smarmiest bastard ever to hit Washington, DC, James Baker.

In a sane Washington, DC, Comcast would let her go now that the proverbial cat is out of the bag, but I think that sane Washington, DC is an oxymoron.

It Isn’t Real Until They Start Convicting White Billionaires

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Yes, hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam was found guilty all 14 charges of which he was accused, primarily insider trading and conspiracy, and there is a lot of talk about how this presages a new era of enforcement.

It isn’t, for a couple of reasons.

First, notwithstanding his wealth and power, Rajaratnam was still very much an outsider in the rather lily white halls of high finance.  Simply put:  He was never a member of the club, he was just a guest, and so it was an easy shot for prosecutors to get.

Second, is the likelihood that this investigation, and his wiretap, likely had something to do with his extensive ties, and extensive philanthropy toward, his native Tamil community in Sri Lanka, which likely investigators to suggest that there were potential material support issues regarding the Tamil Tigers, the now defunct terrorist group.  (A caveat here, I’ve heard nothing but rumblings on this, but if I were dealing with a judge dubious about a wire tap warrant, I’d let “Tamil Tigers” slip out).

It may be the start of something bigger, but I will not believe it until we start seeing big fish with pale complexions being frog marched in handcuffs.

Republicans in Florida Bans Sex

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You see, in the process of banning bestiality, they banned any person having any sort of sexual contact with an animal outside of the norms of animal husbandry and veterinary science:

An act relating to sexual activities involving animals; creating s. 828.126, F.S.; providing definitions; prohibiting knowing sexual conduct or sexual contact with an animal; prohibiting specified related activities; providing penalties; providing that the act does not apply to certain husbandry, conformation judging, and veterinary practices; providing an effective date.

Unfortunately, it appears that none of these folks took high school biology.

To quote Mel Brooks, “Ooh, baby, you are so talented! ……… And they are so *dumb*!”

Newt or Spay Your Presidential Candidate*

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Yes, the “disgraced former Speaker of the House” Newt Gingrich is officially running for President:

Newt Gingrich is entering the 2012 presidential race as a familiar face — a 20-year veteran of Congress who served a polarizing turn as House speaker before assuming a career as a prolific political commentator and author.

But Gingrich, who officially announced his White House bid Wednesday, is bringing a decidedly different approach to this contest than he did to his previous stint in public office.

In his speeches and campaign appearances, Gingrich is expected to lay out a political vision that intertwines fiscal and social conservatism, drawing from a newfound interest in religion he has infused into his work in recent years.

It’s a message he’s expected to make Friday at the Georgia Republican Party convention in what advisors are billing as his formal announcement speech, an address that will marry the concept of American exceptionalism with an emphasis on God-endowed rights.

“American exceptionalism with an emphasis on God-endowed rights” appears to mean sleeping around on your wife and dumping her when she gets cancer, or MS, while attempting to impeach Bill Clinton for getting a blow job in the white house.

I’m beginning to think that I need to add a tag, Clown Show to my list of standard tags to descripe the ‘Phant Presidential field this year.

 *Credit goes to JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for coming up with this bon mot.

Do You Want Some Cheese With That Whine?

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So, after voting to abolish Medicare, the Republican freshmen have sent a letter to Obama demanding that the Democrats not beat them up over this:

Politicians usually don’t begin press conferences with an admission of guilt.

But that’s exactly what happened Wednesday, when freshman Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) called on the president to condemn the scare tactics Democrats have used against Republicans on Medicare — the same type of attacks Republicans used against Democrats throughout the 2010 campaign that helped put many of the GOP freshmen in office.

“We’ve all been guilty at one time or another of playing partisan politics with key issues facing our country, but now is the time to hit the reset button,” Kinzinger said, as if to pre-empt accusations of hypocrisy coming from Democrats. “As a freshman class, we have the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and … not continue the petty politics we’ve seen in the past.”

Last year, as a candidate, Kinzinger sang a different tune: He criticized the Democratic health care overhaul, saying it would amount to $500 billion in cuts over 10 years, removing 4 million patients from Medicare and putting 15 million on Medicaid, according to local news reports.

I’m sorry, but if these guys are not strong enough to defend themselves from a 72 year old constituent with blue hair, how can they be expected to protect us from bin Laden Saddam Hussein Fidel Castro anyone more threatening than the Easter Bunny?

You know the attacks against the rat f%$#s are different from the death panels, because they are true, which has counted for something in the United States since the days of John Peter Zenger.

Why do House Republicans hate America?

Schadenfraude Alert

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It looks like a lot of big anonymous donors to political advcocy groups are facing a tough choice, pay a 35% gift tax, or contest the rules in open court, where your anonymous donations to Karl Rove will become a matter of public record:

The Internal Revenue Service appears to have begun to enforce a tax on gifts to the non-profit organizations that were a key vehicle for anonymous politics in the last five years and had promised to play a large role in the presidential cycle, a move which could reshape the place of money in politics in 2012.

“It appears that the IRS Estate and Gift Tax team has also started paying attention to 501(c)(4) organizations,” a Los Angeles tax lawyer who has followed the issue closely, Ofer Lion, wrote in a memo to clients today.

Gifts to other political organizations are not taxable under federal law, and lawyers informally say many donors do not typically pay the gift tax — which may run as high as 35%, mirroring income tax rates — for contributions to 501(c)4s.

The IRS focus would only apply to quite large donors: the first $13,000 annually are exempt. The rest of the contributions, however, reduce a donor’s lifetime tax exemption, which stands currently at $5 million but stands to drop to $1 million in 2013, a fact which would mean a donor’s heirs lose substantially more to estate taxes, including potentially a “clawback” of money that’s already been given away back into the taxable estate.

………

“[C]ontributors wishing to remain anonymous may feel the need to pay sizable gift tax assessments rather than challenge the tax in open court, and on the public record,” Lion wrote.

My heart bleeds borscht for the Koch suckers who now face Morton’s Fork.

Can Someone Please Primary Steny Hoyer

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The moron is talking about means testing Medicare:

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) offered cautious support Tuesday for the idea of adopting further means-testing of Medicare and Social Security to help shore up the finances of both programs. But the devil, he said, will be in the details.

“I don’t want to get into means testing until we look at specific proposals,” Hoyer said at his weekly Capitol briefing in response to a question from TPM. “Generally speaking, we do, as you know, have certain means testing in both Medicare and SS at this point in time. … I think clearly we’re going to have to make both of those programs sustainable over the long run, and I think to some degree it would be clearly appropriate to look at — without endorsing any specific proposal — the insuring that the least well off are protected and to do that look at the best off … in terms of what level of support they get.”

First, if you cut off the top ½%, you don’t save any money, and if you cut off any more than that, and you destroy the program, which makes it bad policy.

Then you have to follow that up with the fact that the Republicans are killing themselves with this, but good old Steny feels the need to give them an opportunity to point at the Dems and say, “See, they are trying to cut your Medicare!”

Is he trying to lose?

Actually, considering him, he might be.  I think that he figures that he becomes the Dem leader in the House if Pelosi does not get back the House in 2012, so he wins by the country losing.

Another Shanda Before the Goyim

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The original


Der Tzitung


De Voch

Not one but two Heredim (black hat ultra Orthodox) publications, Der Tzitung and De Voch photoshopped Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and and White House aide Audrey Tomason out of the iconic picture of staff watching the progress of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.

It appears that they consider even a photograph of a woman to be too sexually salacious.

It just proves that medieval hyper-religious nut-jobs are not limited to al Qaeda, or the talibaptist whack jobs, but includes fellow Jews.

As my brother is wont to say, “Schwer zu Sein a Yid.”  (It ain’t easy being a Jew.)

H/t Failed Messiah.

At Least This Wasn’t the Obama Administration’s Coverup

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In this case, it’s big Ag (We’re Beatrice), who have been leaning on their running dog lackeys in state legislators to pass laws to make the taking of photographs, videos, and recordings of farms illegal:

So, proposed legislation in three states – Iowa, Minnesota and Florida – that would criminalize the filming, photography or audio recording of farms (the general assumption seems to be that the bills are meant to protect CAFOs – concentrated animal feeding operations, also referred to as factory farms – but could apply to any farm of any nature) raised a major red flag to me, and to others who follow and write about such issues. People you’d expect to raise a protest, like Humane Society’s Wayne Pacelle and Animal Welfare Approved director Andrew Guenther have done so, but mainstream media, especially the New York Times, has also done a great job, with this pointed op-ed and Mark Bittman’s excellent “Who Protects the Animals?” (in which he coins the phrase “ag-gag”).

I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised, considering the popularity of veggie libel laws, but the pure venality and hypocrisy here just boggles my mind.

I would hope that the courts declare this unconstitutional before the ink is dry, because it is banning the practice of journalism.

Making the Teabaggers Look Good

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It turns out that there is a group of people who are less well suited to running government than the Teabaggers, it is the current government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Case in point, some of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s aides have been charged with sorcery:

Close allies of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being “magicians” and invoking djinns (spirits).

Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as “a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds”.

This is a level of political dysfunction that just boggles my mind, particularly in the 21st century.

This is why the Neocons are wrong about us taking down Iran.  The only thing that preserve this clown show is an external military threat.

A New Firefox (and Chrome) Add On That I Highly Recommend…

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It’s called MAFIAA Fire (note: it is listed as Experimental on Mozilla.org.)

MAFIAA stands for the Music and Film Industry Association of America, and it redirects from sites that have been seized under conditions of dubious legality by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

I probably never would never have heard of it, except for the fact that the Department of Homeland Security demanded that Mozilla.org pull the plug in:

The Department of Homeland Security has requested that Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, remove an add-on that allows web surfers to access websites whose domain names were seized by the government for copyright infringement, Mozilla’s lawyer said Thursday.

But Mozilla did not remove the MafiaaFire add-on, and instead has demanded the government explain why it should. Two weeks have passed, and the government has not responded to Mozilla’s questions, including whether the government considers the add-on unlawful and whether Mozilla is “legally obligated” to remove it. The DHS has also not provided the organization with a court order requiring its removal, the lawyer said.

“One of the fundamental issues here is under what conditions do intermediaries accede to government requests that have a censorship effect and which may threaten the open internet,” Harvey Anderson, Mozilla’s lawyer, wrote Thursday on his blog.

The net result of this is that the total number of downloads has gone from 6433 when Wired wrote the article to 38,560 as I am writing this.

As JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS observes, this is a classic example of the Streisand effect.

I’m adding this to my Firefox Extension links (below blogroll on right hand column).

I don’t really have a need to install it, I’ve yet to run into one of the redirected sites, but it’s worth whatever small amount of attention that I can give them.

I’ve listed their developers’ reasons for this software after the break:

Why?

Well, in one word: fairness – and balance of power.

A little while back the scumbag anti-piracy organizations like the RIAA and MPAA (Also known as the Music and Film Industry Association of America – (jokeingly known as the) MAFIAA)  ran to the American government whining like they usually do and got ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) involved with taking down websites – local AND foreign websites, completely overriding the laws and rights of non US / foreign citizens who owned these sites.

These anti-piracy (MAFIAA) companies submitted a wish list of sites that they did not like and ICE (like good lapdogs) started to seize those domains.
(At this point I would like to mention (in fairness) that we are in no way affiliated with the below sites)
Some of the seized domains were perfectly legal, like TorrentFinder.com which only had links to other sites and RojaDirecta.com which was declared to be a legal site in Spain – twice!

“Not all bad men wear masks”
Looking at court documents it becomes obvious that ICE does not do any diligent footwork but takes the music and film industries word as the gospel truth, or are downright sloppy at best.
The best example of how sloppy and mad with power ICE is can be is found in how they took down 84,000 sites for 3 days  in a “mistake”.  These innocent sites were run by small businesses, mom and pop garage startups etc and for 3 days had a big official splash page displayed to all visitors that it had been taken down due to child porn.

It’s hard to bounce back from something like that and it’s a safe bet to assume a lot of businesses / people went belly up because of being wrongly accused of peddling child porn (something the music industry loves, by the way).
To make matters worse there is currently a law being drafted (called COICO) that will make such types of domain name seizures easier.

Enough is enough.

There is a time to bitch and moan and there is a time to take action – the time to be taking action has been long overdue.

Governments around the world are either censoring for the entertainment companie’s never ending woes or using that as an excuse to slowly get more control over the internet for their own agendas – and trampling over our rights in the process.

Before it was “think of the children”, then came “the terrorists win” and now its “piracy”. While there were few genuine exceptions it’s mostly bogeymen, unicorns and leprechauns or the music industries 75 trillion US dollars in losses due to one companies p2p software.

Our right to privacy should outweigh any outdated business model, unfortunately average Joe cannot afford a $10,000 plate dinner to speak to his representatives so his voice is drowned out by the vultures who can pay and get a politician’s ear for “business”.

People With Way Too Much Free Time…

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Perusing what Uncle Ted called “a series of tubes,” I came across Think Tank: The Economics of Death Star Planet Destruction:

Lee
What’s the economic calculus behind the Empire’s tactic of A) building a Death Star, B) intimidating planets into submission with the threat of destruction, and C) actually carrying through with said destruction if the planet doesn’t comply?

Doesn’t the Empire take a huge economic loss from the lost productivity of an entire planet? They were presumably paying taxes and providing resources to the rest of the Empire. Presumably the loss of that planet’s output would have to be made up by increased output from other planets that were either slacking in productivity due to rebellion or threatening to rebel and withdraw from the Empire altogether. It doesn’t seem to make good economic sense.

McNeil
This is a pretty standard imperial tactic for dealing with rebellion. The Romans would do this in the eastern empire every once in a while. A city would become a hotbed of rebellion, threatening to pull other cities into the action. The Romans would wipe out that one city, no matter how wealthy (Palmyra comes to mind) to put any other potential rebels on notice. Kind of like a mastectomy. You lose one productive part of the body in order to keep cancer from spreading.

…………

Lee and Mcneil, along with Perich, Fenzel and Stokes (read the whole thing provide an interesting dialogue on economics and governance that is (I think) unintentionally a rather trenchant analysis of the current American imperial hubris.

Just read it.

Vermont Passes Conference Committee Version of Single Payer

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So it now goes to the governor, who has promised to sign the bill.

My take on this is very straightforward: It won’t get the waivers needed to be implemented, because employers in the region would leave skid marks to open up offices in Vermont if it did, which would have a cascading “race to the top” which would render much of the US health insurance irrelevant, and Barack Obama aggressively lobbied to prevent such an option for the states for his healthcare bill.

I’m not sure whether it is philosophy (Obama honestly believes that the solution has to be private because of his philosophy), or if it is expediency (Obama needs to raise a billion dollars for the 2012 campaign, and the FIRE sector is the source of much of that money), but the effect is the same:  He will not allow this plan to proceed to fruition.

Still Not Enough

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The monthly jobs report is out, and 244,000 non-farm payroll jobs were added last month, which is better than recent history, but still means that we would be over 8½ years away from the already anemic job market that existed in 2008. (8 million jobs lost, natural growth of the labor force is about q75K, so we have about 70k in job “claw back” this month.

Conversely, the unemployment rate actually rose to 9.0%, but this was not because of more entering the workforce, but fewer jobs reported in that study:

Some readers have asked whether the unemployment rate can rise even as employment is growing because more people start looking for work — and thus count as officially unemployed. Theoretically, the answer is yes. This does happen sometimes. But it didn’t happen in April. The unemployment rate rose last month because the household survey showed a decline of 190,000 jobs, not because of a surge in job seekers. That’s why there is no way to reconcile last month’s results of the household survey and employer survey. They make sense only in the context of previous months.

So, your mileage may vary on all of this.

Today’s results are either better than expected but still crappy, or somewhat worse than that.

Jon Stewart Convinced Me………

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Release the f%$#ing photos

All the arguments about the bin Laden death photo are a part of the bigger picture, which is that essentially nothing resembling accurate and impartial photojournalism is ever allowed in our “war on terror”, and this is intentional.

A more accurate picture of the forever war we are involved in would inevitably result in a substantial erosion in the support for it, which would mean that Blackwater Xe would not be able to support John Ashcroft in the manner to which he is accustomed.