Month: June 2013

Appeals Court Slaps Down Obama on Contraception Restrictions

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They sided with the lower court, and ordered the Obama administration to make emergency contraception (AKA Plan B) over the counter:

The Obama administration has in part lost its push to sustain age limits on over-the-counter sale of Plan B One-Step, commonly known as the morning-after pill.

After a lower court recently slapped down all age limits, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday granted the Justice Department’s request for a stay on one-pill variants of emergency contraceptives but denied it for two-pill variants, declaring that the appellants have “failed to meet the requisite standard.”

This is a very well deserved smackdown.

The Obama administration’s behavior in this mater has been craven, dishonest, and hypocritical. They have taken what should be a core value, and used it as a political football.

Ewww!!!!!!

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Last night, I noticed some fleas on Destructo, so tonight, I got some flea and tick spray from the pet store, and sprayed both cats.

Meatball seemed to be relatively flea free, but when I wiped Destructo’s face with a cloth moistened with the spray (as the instructions say), about a dozen fleas crawled out of the fur on his face.

Shudder

This Has Disaster Written All Over It

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You’ve doubtless heard about the rebound in housing prices.

Well, it turns out that it’s a flood of Wall Street money behind much of this.

This is completely insane. You cannot manage single family rental housing from

The last time the housing market was this hot in Phoenix and Las Vegas, the buyers pushing up prices were mostly small time. Nowadays, they are big time — Wall Street big.

Large investment firms have spent billions of dollars over the last year buying homes in some of the nation’s most depressed markets. The influx has been so great, and the resulting price gains so big, that ordinary buyers are feeling squeezed out. Some are already wondering if prices will slump anew if the big money stops flowing.

“The growth is being propelled by institutional money,” said Suzanne Mistretta, an analyst at Fitch Ratings. “The question is how much the change in prices really reflects market demand, rather than one-off market shifts that may not be around in a couple years.”

Wall Street played a central role in the last housing boom by supplying easy — and, in retrospect, risky — mortgage financing. Now, investment companies like the Blackstone Group have swooped in, buying thousands of houses in the same areas where the financial crisis hit hardest.

Blackstone, which helped define a period of Wall Street hyperwealth, has bought some 26,000 homes in nine states. Colony Capital, a Los Angeles-based investment firm, is spending $250 million each month and already owns 10,000 properties. With little fanfare, these and other financial companies have become significant landlords on Main Street. Most of the firms are renting out the homes, with the possibility of unloading them at a profit when prices rise far enough.

………

The story, though, often looks more complicated on the ground. Joe Cusumano, a real estate agent in Riverside County, Calif., said that in recent months 90 percent of his business had been for companies like Invitation Homes, a Blackstone subsidiary. Home values in Riverside County have risen by 15 percent in the last year, according to CoreLogic.

But Mr. Cusumano said he wondered if faraway investors would properly maintain the homes they buy. He said that Invitation Homes had been willing to put money into the properties, but he was not so sure about the other players. He also worries what will happen when these investors start selling, as they inevitably will.

The first question is not whether the big investors will keep up tens of thousands of properties. It’s whether they can manage tens of thousands of single family homes.

I have dealt with a single family home managed by a local property management firm. It was a complete clusterF%$#.

If they honestly think that they can manage single family homes for properties they are nuts.

Or maybe they are just lying.  They are banksters, after all.

Canada Says “Nothing” is Not an Appropriate Response to an Oil Spill

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No, seriously, the government of British Columbia just denied a permit to build a tar sands pipeline to a company that refused to offer remediation plans for a potential spill”

Oil spill cleanup concerns have led the British Columbia Government to reject a proposed multi-billion dollar tar sands oil pipeline that the Canadian company Enbridge wants to construct across the province.

 In its final submission Friday to the federally-appointed Northern Gateway Pipeline Joint Review Panel, the province states that it cannot support the Enbridge Northern Gateway project because the company “has been unable to address British Columbians’ environmental concerns.”

 Environment Minister Terry Lake said, “British Columbia thoroughly reviewed all of the evidence and submissions made to the panel and asked substantive questions about the project including its route, spill response capacity and financial structure to handle any incidents. Our questions were not satisfactorily answered during these hearings.”

 “Northern Gateway has said that they would provide effective spill response in all cases. However, they have presented little evidence as to how they will respond,” Lake said. “For that reason, our government cannot support the issuance of a certificate for the pipeline as it was presented to the Joint Review Panel.”

 ………

 “It shows that Northern Gateway would have comprehensive oil spill response plans for all Project components and would substantially improve existing emergency response on Canada’s pacific coast – something unprecedented for a pipeline project. It shows that the Project has been developed with a comprehensive public and Aboriginal engagement program that would continue throughout Project construction and operation,” the company said in its submission.

 But the B.C. government’s submission points out that the company’s proposal indicates that “doing nothing is a possible response to a spill.”

(Emphasis mine)

<snark> Are they Communists in Canada or something?   Don’t they know this is supposed to work?

Silly Rabbit, the profits go to the energy companies, and the taxpayer pays for the cleanup! </snark>

H/t Americablog

Chris Christie Splits the Baby

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Chris Christie had a conundrum.

With the death of Frank Lautenberg, this leaves a vacancy that needs to be filled.

This was a problem for governor Chris Christie.

First, there are two conflicting statutes as to whether the governor appoints a replacement until the next election, or whether a special election is held.

Second, if he makes an appointment, Republicans will demand that he appoint someone with a Ted Cruze/Michelle Bachmann level of the crazy, which might interfere with his reelection bid this November.

Third, if he holds a special election at the same time as the gubernatorial election, it brings out more Democrats to votes, which would hurt his chances, though he already pretty much a shoe in.

So, his solution was to called a special election in October:

At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) called for a special election to replace the late Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg to be held on Oct. 16. A primary will take place on Aug. 13. Christie will appoint an interim replacement to serve in Lautenberg’s Senate seat until the election is concluded. Though he did not reveal whom he plans to choose, his deft handling of the situation has already allowed Christie to sidestep several potentially sticky situations and may have created an obstacle for one of his top rivals.

Prior to his announcement, Christie was seen as having multiple options for scheduling the Senate election. One statute was reportedly cited by Jersey Republicans as giving Christie power to appoint a replacement who would serve the remainder of Lautenberg’s original term, which ends in 2014. Christie said he did indeed have this power, but wanted to do the “right thing” and let the people of the Garden State pick their representatives in the Senate.

………

Christie’s decision also allows the governor to sidestep a series of problems the vacancy in Lautenberg’s seat presented to his current re-election bid and rumored national ambitions.

………

While other similar attacks are likely to come down the road, Christie’s masterstroke of election scheduling comes with a potent, built-in defense that he is simply standing up for the needs of the voters.

While it would seem having a handpicked senator as long as possible could be advantageous to Christie, making an appointment who serves for the absolute minimal amount of time came with a third side benefit for the governor. Christie has turned himself into a highly touted potential 2016 presidential contender based in no small part on his image as a GOP governor who isn’t afraid to make compromises with the other party. If he made a pick that would serve for a substantial amount of time and they were seen as insufficiently conservative it could damage Christie’s standing with Republicans nationally, while an unequivocally conservative pick could hurt Christie’s bipartisan branding. Allowing his choice to serve for only a few months will almost assuredly burnish Christie’s magnanimous reputation while also decreasing the spotlight on the appointment — and the chance it could reflect negatively on him.

Well played, Christopher, well played.

Elvis (Impersonator) Has Left the Building

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It’s now official. Paul Kevin Curtis, the Elvis impersonator originally accused of being the Mississippi ricin mailer, has been exonerated, and Wayne Newton impersonator James Everett Dutschke has been indicted:

A federal grand jury has indicted a Mississippi man suspected of sending poison-laced letters to President Barack Obama and other officials, according to an indictment made public Monday.

The 5-count indictment charges 41-year-old James Everett Dutschke (pronounced DUHS’-kee) with developing, producing and stockpiling the poison ricin, threatening the president and others and attempting to impede the investigation.

………

George Lucas, an attorney for Dutschke, said he had not yet seen the indictment and had no immediate comment.

Dutschke is the second person to face charges in the case.

Paul Kevin Curtis, a 45-year-old Elvis impersonator, was arrested on April 17, but the charges were dropped six days later.

So yes, the Wayne Newton impersonator attempted to frame the Elvis impersonator, and he got caught, and now his lawyer, George F%$#ing Lucas is waiting for the details.

This is beyond the wildest dreams of the writers for The Daily Show or The Onion.

Background here.

Well, Duh………

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Better than ST:TNG

The Writers Guild of America has the original Star Trek series higher than they did Star Trek: The Next Generation:

The Writers Guild of America has announced the 101 best written TV shows of all time, and I would like to draw your attention to a small excerpt from the list:

33. Star Trek

 79. Star Trek: The Next Generation

I am not surprised.

In my opinion, the best written SF show around the time of ST:TNG was ALF.

Notwithstanding the fact that Jean Luc Picard might have been a better captain than James T. Kirk, particularly if I were Ensign Liebowitz of Starship Security, the characters never worked as well.

You could see Kirk being adored by the crew, while Picard was distance, intellectual, and sarcastic; the sort of commander who you would call “The Old Man”, when he wasn’t around.

Spock not wanting to move onto command worked, it was completely absurd for Riker.

And let’s not go with the “Ships Counselor”, or Wil Wheaton’s first turn in the series as the boy genius.

Geebus, it sucked.

As an aside, I am heartened that The Prisoner was on the list as well, though I would have put that at number 1.

Medicare Trust Fund Lifetime Extended

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Score another one for Obamacare, the exhaustion date for the exhaustion of the Medicare trust fund has been pushed back:

Falling health-care costs are brightening the financial outlook for Medicare, extending the life of the trust fund that supports the program until 2026 — two years later than previously forecast.

The new projections, released Friday by the program’s trustees, credit President Obama’s Affordable Care Act in part for the improvement in the finances of the federal health insurance program for the elderly. The act’s limits on Medicare Advantage, a more expensive form of Medicare run by private insurers, are proving more effective than previously forecast, the report said.

The trustees also cited lower-than-expected spending in “most . . . service categories — especially skilled nursing facilities,” a development that is not well understood. Costs have been slowing throughout the health-care industry, partly because of the recent recession, economists say, but also because of what appear to be more fundamental changes aimed at reducing waste and improving health outcomes.

This is particularly interesting when juxtaposed against the New York Times article on the pricing of colonoscopies:

A major factor behind the high costs is that the United States, unique among industrialized nations, does not generally regulate or intervene in medical pricing, aside from setting payment rates for Medicare and Medicaid, the government programs for older people and the poor. Many other countries deliver health care on a private fee-for-service basis, as does much of the American health care system, but they set rates as if health care were a public utility or negotiate fees with providers and insurers nationwide, for example.

………

But she noted that gastroenterologists in Austria do have their financial concerns. They are complaining to the government and insurers that they cannot afford to do the 30-minute procedure, with prep time, maintenance of equipment and anesthesia, for the current approved rate — between $200 and $300, all included. “I think the cheapest colonoscopy in the U.S. is about $950,” Dr. Ferlitsch said. “We’d love to get half of that.”

Dr. Cesare Hassan, an Italian gastroenterologist who is the chairman of the Guidelines Committee of the European Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, noted that studies in Europe had estimated that the procedure cost about $400 to $800 to perform, including biopsies and sedation. “The U.S. is paying way too much for too little — it leads to opportunistic colonoscopies,” done for profit rather than health, he said.

The real problem here is that prices are are not transparent, and they are excessive to boot, being many times for routine procedures compared to the rest of the industrialized world.

The idea of market driven healthcare does not work, because there is no transparency in pricing, and even if there were, much of the time there is no opportunity to engage the market as a rational actor (auto accident, gun show wound, etc.).

It’s why, even with its apparent benefits, Obamacare, does not address the core of the problem, which is that healthcare in the US is tremendously overpriced.

Why Species Patents Suck, Part Gazillion

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Stuck in the middle of an article about the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS) is this tidbit about how a lab is claiming all rights to its genome, impeding research on the illness:

But impeding an effective response is a dispute over rights to develop a treatment for the virus. The case brings to the fore a growing debate over International Health Regulations, interpretations of patent rights, and the free exchange of scientific samples and information. Meanwhile, the epidemic has already caused forty-nine cases in seven countries, killing twenty-seven of them.

At the center of the dispute is a Dutch laboratory that claims all rights to the genetic sequence of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus [MERS-CoV]. Saudi Arabia’s deputy health minister, Ziad Memish, told the WHO meeting that “someone”–a reference to Egyptian virologist Ali Zaki–mailed a sample of the new SARS-like virus out of his country without government consent in June 2012, giving it to Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.

“The virus was sent out of the country and it was patented, contracts were signed with vaccine companies and anti-viral drug companies, and that’s why they have a MTA [Material Transfer Agreement] to be signed by anybody who can utilize that virus, and that should not happen,” Memish said.

Though Memish referred to a “patent,” the Dutch team has not patented the viral genetic sequence but has placed it under an MTA, which requires sample recipients to contractually agree not to develop products or share the sample without the permission of Erasmus and the Fouchier laboratory. Memish said that the Dutch MTA was preventing Saudi Arabia from stopping the MERS-CoV outbreak, which appears to have started eleven months ago in the Eastern part of his country. The Dutch team denies the MTA is slowing work on the outbreak, saying it has given virus samples to any lab that has requested it.

If you thought that the idea of patenting software was bad, patenting genes and species is a whole new level of f%$#ed up.

In today’s world, when we are in the middle of a potential epidemic, our first priority is to make the world safe for scumbag profiteers.

Call Your Congress Critter

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The SHIELD act has been proposed to to rein in patent trolls:

Shell companies that threaten legal action over patent infringement without actually producing anything themselves could be driven out of business if the newly proposed and risibly backronymed Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act becomes law.

In an all-too-rare display of US congressional bipartisanship, representatives Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) announced the legislation, which would make the infringement accuser liable for both sides’ legal fees should they lose. Universities and companies that actually produce an end-product to sue about are exempt.

“These trolls are hampering innovation, slowing companies down and locking them up in lawsuits,” said Chaffetz at a press conference.

Basically, it requires the trolls to cover the other side’s court costs unless they can show that their suit had a reasonable chance of success, which means that fighting the trolls becomes a lot cheaper.

BTW, much like the banking system, much of the dysfunction in the banking system goes back to the Clinton administration”

In 1994, Bill Clinton broke the long-standing and utterly sensible tradition that an actual patent lawyer should be Commissioner of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and instead appointed Bruce Lehman, who was at the time the chief lobbyist for the Software Publishing Industry.

Under Lehman’s leadership, the USPTO changed the rules to allow much broader patents to be issued, often spanning completely different technological areas. These types of patents are the troll’s weapon of choice, with some so broad they could cover pretty much anything on the internet, for example. At the same time the amount of patents issued by the office began to increase.

Lehman was also one of the main authors of the widely reviled Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and helped negotiate the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights trade agreement. In 2006, he was inducted into the first International IP Hall of Fame by Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) magazine.

One of the distressing characteristics of the Clinton administration was its embrace of rent seeking as an economic model, whether it be banksters or patent trolls.

Read This

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This is a devastating take-down of the culture of high finance. What’s more, it does so from a sociological and anthropological perspective, as opposed to a conventional economics analysis, which suits my temperament better:

The excessive pay can be interpreted as a sign of unfair or inefficient markets. It is that, but I think the deeper cause is not so much economic as sociological. Financiers have persuaded the broader society that they are modern aristocrats. Pampered lives are part of the package. They go along with an unthinking sense of entitlement and a mix of self-righteousness and self-centredness, with just a hint of condescending tolerance for limited criticism.

Of course, today’s financial aristocracy is different from traditional nobility. The contemporary titles (partner, managing director) and privileges (first-rate education, political influence) are not exactly hereditary, and long hours on the job have replaced a life of leisure. But I believe the commonalities are more significant.

………

In my view, the sociological analysis provides more insight into the industry’s condition than the more common argument about “heads I win, tails you lose” incentives. I rarely meet financiers who would admit to being reckless or wasteful. What I observe is sublime and blind self-confidence.

Living largely with other members of their caste, they rarely have doubts. To them, more finance is always better than less and higher margins always better than lower. They welcome the development of more complicated financial products; they don’t worry much about the effect of these products on the rest of the economy.

Read the whole thing.

I think that his analysis is spot on, though his last ‘graph is a bit too optimistic for my taste.

Neat Tech

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Specifically, among other whiz bang, they are using cell phone camera technology in order to make cheaper missile sensors: (paid subscription required)

One program singled out for praise is wavefront coding, envisaged as a way of potentially reducing weight and complexity of the seeker optics in the front of a weapon. The idea—which has been developed to keep cell phone cameras inexpensive—is being examined by experts from MBDA, Selex ES and two universities in Scotland. In current missiles, heavy optics are necessary because the seekers have to operate in a wide range of temperatures, requiring correcting lenses and complex surfaces in order to maintain acceptable performance.

 Wavefront coding introduces a simpler seeker layout and software processing, eliminating the need for the correcting optics. Designers place a cubic phase mask in one of the optics , which disrupts and aberrates the normal image. But knowledge of the characteristics of the phase mask means that software processing can be applied to allow sharp images to be recovered, even for objects well outside of the conventional depth-of-field of the original optical arrangement. Engineers point out that this could help reduce weight of current missiles by as much as 10%.

I always wondered how cell phones managed to “focus”.

I always figured that they weren’t using conventional moving lenses, there is not a whole bunch of space for that, and mechanical actuators at that size could drive up the price.

Gee, Another Case Where the Chain of Command Does the Wrong Thing When Sexual Assault is Alleged

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In this case, it’s the Naval Academy in Annapolis:

Three football players at the U.S. Naval Academy are under investigation in an alleged sex assault involving a female midshipmen almost a year ago, according to a Defense Department official.

 According to the official, the three midshipmen were first accused by her at the time of the alleged incident, but she dropped her complaint a few months after the incident. She then made a complaint again earlier this year, and the investigation is now underway by the Navy. The alleged victim’s lawyer, Susan Burke, said her client has participated in wiretapping as part of the investigation at the request of NCIS.

Normally, I would not be sure if this is a military thing, or if it is a sports thing, but reading this:

In a statement to CNN, attorney Susan Burke said the woman went to an off-campus party at a “football house” in April 2012 and became intoxicated, and woke up there the next morning “with little recall” of what occurred.

 “She learned from social media and from friends that three football players had claimed to have had sexual intercourse with her while incapacitated,” Burke said.

 She reported the incident to Navy authorities and explained that she could not provide much information because she had been intoxicated, Burke said.

 Burke said the woman was disciplined for drinking and the case was closed without further action by the academy.

Leads me to believe that the problem here is not sports culture, but military culture.

At this point that non only does sexual assault need to be moved out of the chain of command under the UCMJ, but every crime not directly related to military operations and discipline needs to be moved out of the chain of command.