Not a good initial jobless claims report, with initial claims rising to 365K, and still the Federal Reserve is taking a wait and see position.
Author: Matthew G. Saroff
Latest Big Brother Bill Fails
Yes, Joe Lieberman’s attempt at a combined police state wet dream/vanity legacy project, the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, failed failed to break a filibuster, and so it’s dead for this session.
I’m happy, but Barack Obama is bumming, because, well, the worlds worst constitutional law professor wants to be able to spy on people without any independent review.
Hed of the Day
Ann Romney’s Horse Fails to Win Dressage but Avoids Offending British
Courtesy of The Grauniad.
Deep Thought
From Facebook.
I Know Who Should Do the Next Army Recruiting Ad.
These guys:
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the find.
If Putin Wants Us to Stay in Afghanistan………
The “Graveyard of Empires”, it’s a pretty good indication that our continuing involvement is not in our benefit:
NATO forces should stay in Afghanistan until their job is done, Russia President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday, suggesting they should stay beyond a planned withdrawal of most combat troops in 2014.
“It is regrettable that many participants in this operation are thinking about how to pull out of there,” Putin said at a meeting with paratroopers in the Russian city of Ulyanovsk. “They took up this burden and should carry it to the end.”
He isn’t suggesting this because he cares about the Afghan people, and he isn’t suggesting this because it’s in the interest of the US or its NATO allies.
He’s doing this because it places stress on the US military and NATO, and as such it serves to ameliorate the threat that he perceives from them.
Say what you will about Putin, but our best interests is ths last thing that he has on his mind,
Lieutenant John Pike No Longer Works At UC Davis
Breaking news,
University of California Police Lieutenant John Pike is no longer employed as a police officer:
Lt. John Pike, the UC Davis police officer who became a focal point of last November’s pepper-spraying incident during a campus protest, is no longer employed by the university, a spokesman confirmed late Tuesday.
UC Davis spokesman Barry Shiller said he could not discuss the details of Pike’s departure, but in response to queries from The Bee, he said Pike was no longer employed there as of Tuesday.
“Consistent with privacy guidelines established in state law and university policy, I can confirm that John Pike’s employment with the university ended on July 31, 2012,” Shiller said. “I’m unable to comment further.”
Pike, 39, declined to comment when reached by The Bee as he was sitting in a meeting on campus where he said he was being terminated.
Pike’s 2010 salary was listed as $110,243.12. He has been on paid leave since the debacle unfolded last year, sparking worldwide outrage, numerous investigations and calls for the resignation of UC Davis leaders.
It certainly took long enough, he spent something like 8 months on paid administrative leave, but don’t blame the unions.
He’s a Lieutenant, and management, and so not covered by a labor agreement.
Instead blame an internal police department disciplinary process that is pretty much written by, and for, the benefit of the cops, not the general public.
H/t the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the PhotoShops.
It’s World Middle Finger Day
What the F%$#?
So, I’m driving to work, and they are discussing auto insurance rates, and they note that Massachusetts is one of the 3 cheapest states for auto insurance in the USA.
Over lunch, I confirm this.
I went to school in Massachusetts, and I had friends who used friends and relatives addresses in New Hampshire to register their car to save on insurance costs.
We have entered Bizarro world.
The idea that Massachusetts drivers have among the lowest rates in the nation is mind boggling.
Deep Thought
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Interesting Point About Religion
One of the things that honks me off is the phrase, “Judeo Christian”.
I consider it to be code words for “White European”.
Jews are not Christian.
More than the whole “Jesus thing”, there are profound differences in how textual analysis is applied to scriptures, attitudes toward sex in marriage, the application of historical data to the analysis, and the acknowledgement of the oft contradictory character of the writings.
In any case, I came across a rather interesting analysis of one of the more troubling parts of Torah, the divine instructions to engage in what essentially was genocide in the conquest of Canaan following the exodus from Egypt.
Dr. Science of Obsidian Wings, a Jew by choice, compares two blog posts, one from an Evangelical Christian minister, and one from a Reconstructionist Jewish Rabbi, and puts to words a core difference in the intellectual approaches that I have always found difficult to put to words:
The two ministers come across as reasonably similar in personality and emotional tone — I suspect they would get along quite well. Both read the Bible in historical-critical context, but they insist that it is necessary to read the Bible, not to just follow your bliss. Neither is willing to accept the “genocide commandments” as-is, but neither is willing to just throw them out or ignore them, either.
And they approach this text from different perspectives: asking different questions, using different tools. I was brought up as a Christian (in a Catholic/Lutheran family) but am now a practicing Jew, so I find a compare/contrast very illuminating. In this case, the Christian asks about the character or personality of God; the Jew asks what we Jews should *do*.
(Emphasis mine)
At its core, this is why fundamentalism is not really a part of normative Judaism. (Maimonides made the point nearly 900 years ago that a strictly literal interpretation is not compatible with a meaningful study of Torah.)
If you view scriptures as instructions on how to conduct your life on a daily basis, it is impossible to take scripture literally, because the myriad contradictions and inconsistencies become manifest, thus you need to put your brain in gear, and ask yourself, “What does this mean, and what do I have to do?”
It’s why the term Orthodoxy, meaning literally one way of thinking, is really not an accurate description of observant Jews. Their practice of religion is very nearly the same, they are all a bunch of guys in black hats, but when you ask them why, or attempt to get an opinion on a part of Tanach (Torah, Prophets, and Writings) you will find them coming to this from distinctly different viewpoints. (See Orthopraxy)
I am Sick to Death of Right Wing Democrats
Case in point, the Obama’s OMB chair turned overpaid Wall Street puke ( Vice Chairman of Global Banking at Citigroup) Peter Ortag, who is suggesting that the solution to the problems of the US Post Office is to let the financial industry to steal it from the American people:
Those who believe in the usefulness of government must be vigilant about making sure all its activities are vital ones, since the unnecessary ones undermine public confidence. With this in mind, Congress should now privatize the U.S. Postal Service.
Further evidence for why this should happen came last week, when the Postal Service announced that it would be unable to meet billions of dollars in payments that are coming due in August and September for future retiree health benefits. Privatization is not always the best way to improve efficiency, but the problems facing the Postal Service will be difficult to address if it remains within the government, and there is no longer any sound reason for it not to go private.
This ignores the fact that the US Post Office, one of the functions specifically mentioned in the Constitution, is actually running a primary surplus.
It is having money problems because, in 2006, the Republicans required them to fully fund their pension plan out to 75 years over a 10 year period.
Right now, the Post Office is on track to default on a $5.5 billion pension payment to the US treasury tomorrow:
The U.S. Postal Service affirmed it won’t make a required $5.5 billion payment due tomorrow to the U.S. Treasury for future retirees’ health care, an obligation the agency said must end for it to become financially viable.
The service has said for months it couldn’t afford the payment, which was initially due last September, nor a $5.6 billion payment required by Sept. 30 for this year. Postal legislation passed by the U.S. Senate on April 25 would slow the schedule for those obligations. The House hasn’t acted on a different postal measure aimed at changes to help the service cope with declining mail volume.
“This has no effect on mail processing or delivery, no impact on post offices, and employees will continue to get paid,” Dave Partenheimer, a Postal Service spokesman, said today in a phone interview.
Just in case your wondering, the USPS is on a pace to lose about $12 billion this year, after taking into account paying for the retirement of people who haven’t been born yet.
Their pension is grossly over funded, (A true rarity in the US) and if they did not have to make these payments, then they would be turning something on the order of an $8 billion profit.
But according to Orzag, the real problem is that Post Office is not able to unleash its free market super-powers.
It’s really all about allowing his cow-orkers at Citi to generate the enormous fees that would be the product of any privatization this massive.
Oh No You Didn’t!!!
In an interview with Huffpo (no link, I don’t link to them), Harry Reid threw down in a most spectacular way:
Saying he had “no problem with somebody being really, really wealthy,” Reid sat up in his chair a bit before stirring the pot further. A month or so ago, he said, a person who had invested with Bain Capital called his office.
“Harry, he didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years,” Reid recounted the person as saying.
“He didn’t pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain,” said Reid. “But obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look?
Mitt Rmoney, you just been served.
High five to Harry Reid.
So, When is Mark Zuckerberg Going to Jail?
I’ve always thought that there was something odd about how Facebook does business.
Even by the litigious standards of the various dot-com bubbles, the number of law suits that have have been filed alleging that he took money from people to develop stuff,. and walked off with said work product.
It’s entirely reasonable to see the enormous amount of money involved as an inducement to file suits, after all, even a small settlement will still be a lot of money, but I’d make sure to dot my “i”s and cross my “t”s if I dealt with Facebook in a commercial capacity.
This is what online market provider Limited Run has discovered, when they realized that 80% of the ad click-throughs that they were paying through were bots:
Hey everyone, we’re going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do. A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still, we couldn’t verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here’s what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn’t on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn’t have JavaScript, it’s very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What’s important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we’d keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That’s correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes. But let’s move on, because who the bots belong to isn’t provable.
While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name, because we’re not Limited Pressing anymore. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. They said they would allow us to change our name. NICE! But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month. That’s correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage. So we did what any good hardcore kids would do. We cursed that piece of sh%$ out! Damn we were so pissed. We still are. This is why we need to delete this page and move away from Facebook. They’re scumbags and we just don’t have the patience for scumbags.
(%$ mine)
I’m thinking that the people who will win if this story goes mainstream will be the newspapers.
Much of the allure of online advertising is its ability to closely track response to a specific ad. If that turns out not to be true, then print ads become much more attractive.
H/t Naked Capitalism.
Fabulous!!!
The Democratic Party has decided to place a marriage equality plank in the party platform:
The Democratic Party platform drafting committee approved on Sunday language endorsing same-sex marriage in addition to other pro-LGBT positions as part of the Democratic Party platform, according to two sources familiar with the drafting process.
Retiring gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who sits on the committee, told the Washington Blade on Monday that the 15-member panel unanimously backed the inclusion of a marriage equality plank after a national hearing over the weekend in Minneapolis, in which several witnesses testified in favor of such language.
“I was part of a unanimous decision to include it,” Frank said. “There was a unanimous decision in the drafting committee to include it in the platform, which I supported, but everybody was for it.”
Frank emphasized that support for marriage equality is a position that has been established for the Democratic Party, from the president, who endorsed marriage equality in May, to House Democratic lawmakers who voted to reject an amendment reaffirming the Defense of Marriage Act earlier this month.
There is a lesson to be learned here, if you relentlessly hound Barack Obama, protest his fund raisers, confront his contributors, and organize a donation boycott, then he will EVENTUALLY he’ll do the right thing.
Rmoron
I’m generally not a superstitious person, but I have 2 rules:
- I will not have anything to do with the Hope diamond. (Like that would happen)
- I’ll avoid doing substantial on Tisha b’Av. (Literally the 9th of the Hebrew month Av) The history is just too bad:
- The reports of the spies, which led the Jews to spend 40 years in the desert.
- The destruction of the 1st temple.
- The destruction of the 2nd temple.
- The crushing of the Bar Kokhba rebellion.
- The first crusade, which set of an orgy of pogroms and murder.
- The expulsion of the Jews from Spain.
- The expulsion of the Jews from England.
- The start of WWI.
- Etc.
So, making a political trip to Israel on Tisha b’Av is not something I would do.
I’d move it a week one way or the other.
It is the saddest on the Jewish calendar, and it is observed by a day of fasting, and by listening by the chanting of Eicha (Lamentations).
One of the peculiarities of Tisha b’Av is that if it falls on a Shabbos, as it did this year, the observance is moved to the next day.
Whether you subscribe to my particular bit of superstitious silliness or not, it is self evident that if you decide to hold a $50,000 a plate fundraising banquet that starts while the fast is still ongoing, you don’t have a bad luck problem, you have a “Your an idiot problem”:
Presumed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will host a fund-raising event in Jerusalem this month at $60,000 or more per plate, The Jerusalem Post learned on Wednesday.
Delegates are set to fly in from the US for the event on July 29, which a Republican source said would be “a small meeting, but a big fund-raiser” as the Tisha Be’av fast ends. Immediately after the fund-raising meeting, Romney will host a conference in Jerusalem, where he will lay out his Middle East policy.
To be fair, the actual serving of food was not to start until after the fast was technically over, and once it blew up in Mitt’s face, they moved it to a breakfast get together the next morning.
But still, what sort of Rmorons does Mitt Rmoney have working for him?
Yep, No Racism Here
The former head of the Florida Republican party is now saying that the Republican voter ID law was specifically intended to suppress the black vote, and that this was explicitly discussed behind closed doors:
In the debate over new laws meant to curb voter fraud in places like Florida, Democrats always charge that Republicans are trying to suppress the vote of liberal voting blocs like blacks and young people, while Republicans just laugh at such ludicrous and offensive accusations. That is, every Republican except for Florida’s former Republican Party chairman Jim Greer, who, scorned by his party and in deep legal trouble, blew the lid off what he claims was a systemic effort to suppress the black vote. In a 630-page deposition recorded over two days in late May, Greer, who is on trial for corruption charges, unloaded a litany of charges against the “whack-a-do, right-wing crazies” in his party, including the effort to suppress the black vote.
In the deposition, released to the press yesterday, Greer mentioned a December 2009 meeting with party officials. “I was upset because the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting,” he said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. He also said party officials discussed how “minority outreach programs were not fit for the Republican Party,” according to the AP.
One hopes that his testimony is introduced in the suits that the DoJ is filing against Rick Scott and his merry band of racists.
This is the proverbial smoking gun.
Win
You know, I’ve never been a fan of the zombie genre.
I’ve never sat through a whole zombie movie (though I do want to see the genre bender Shaun of the Dead), and I really don’t get the whole zombie walk thing.
However, the ziomnbie protest of Fred Phelps’ twisted bigoted family is a genius:
Counter-demonstrators dressed as zombies outnumbered protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church at a military base near DuPont, Washington over the weekend.
Melissa Neace, 27, launched a Facebook group to organize the zombies event after she learned that the radical ant-LGBT church would be picketing Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Seattle.
“We wanted to turn something negative around, into something people could laugh at and poke fun at,” Neace explained to The News Tribune. “It was the easiest way to divert attention from something so hateful.”
Over 200 people committed to attending the event on Saturday, which she called “Zombie’ing Westboro Baptist Church AWAY from Fort Lewis!”
Of course, this is completely unrealistic.
Zombies eat brains, and they’d starve if they had to depend on Westboro Baptist.
Obama’s Torture
It looks like there is going to be testimony offered on the torture of Pfc. Bradley Manning by the military with the active support of the administration:
A comprehensive motion containing allegations and evidence from the defense for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks, was filed on July 27. The 110-page motion, which Manning’s defense lawyer said should “shock the conscience of the court” during a motion hearing this month, included a request to the Fort Meade court to dismiss all charges with prejudice because he was subjected to “illegal pretrial punishment” while imprisoned at the Quantico Marine Brig for nine months.
The defense’s motion was not approved for publishing; however, two other motions involving the defense’s request for witnesses to appear during argument on “unlawful pretrial punishment” were posted to the defense’s website. One of the motions reveals Manning will likely take the stand to give testimony on how he was subjected to “unlawful pretrial punishment”—what many have called cruel and inhuman treatment or even torture. His testimony may include what he knows about a video of his interrogation at Quantico, which the government claims does not exist.
Obama knew, or was deliberately and willfully blind to Manning’s torture.
He admitted this in an open press conference, when he said:
With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are. I can’t go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well.
Manning was arrested in 2010.
Everything that has been done to him, in what is a transparent attempt to coerce Manning into providing false testimony against Julian Assange to allow for a prosecution under the 1917 Espionage Act.
One of the positions of the Obama administration is that officials should not be prosecuted for matters of policy.
I could not disagree more. (Roll prosecushun kitty)
We won’t begin to fix the damage done to core rights, and the concept of the rule of law until the most senior members of the executive branch face criminal prosecutions.
My Heart Bleeds Borscht
TV stations are required under federal law to provide their lowest rates to candidates, but this does not apply to Super PACs:
To make his closing argument to Iowa voters on the day of the Jan. 3 caucuses, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spent $1,000 to air a minute- long television ad during one of the Des Moines market’s top- rated morning news programs.
That same airtime on CBS affiliate KCCI-TV was in demand by a super-political action committee helping Romney, and Restore Our Future paid a 50 percent premium to place its commercial.
Come September and October, when Romney and President Barack Obama, House and Senate candidates and dozens of outside political groups will be demanding ad space, super-PACs can expect stations to begin charging what Democratic media consultant Peter Fenn calls “super-gouge rates” of as much as four times what candidates pay.
“Stations are rabid for this money,” said Kip Cassino, research director of Borrell Associates, which tracks the television industry and is based in Williamsburg, Virginia. “The super-PACs are like a kid with money burning a hole in their pocket.”
While I am not a fan of the TV industry, I am still amused gouging the Super PACS and their rich pig backers.