Author: Matthew G. Saroff

What a Surprise

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If you diss organized labor by holding a convention in an anti-union right to work state, they are not inclined to pony up sponsorship money:

Democrats are struggling to raise money for the party’s national convention this summer in Charlotte, N.C., in part because they’ve barred corporations and lobbyists from contributing.
Democrats are struggling to raise money for the party’s national convention this summer in Charlotte, N.C., in part because they have barred corporations and lobbyists from contributing. Peter Nicholas has details on The News Hub. Photo: Reuters.
Now, one set of donors the party was banking on—organized labor—says it won’t help pay for the event or will scale back contributions, partly because it is upset that the convention will be in a state considered unfriendly to unions.
Labor unions chipped in $8.6 million of the $60.5 million the party spent in 2008 in Denver. This year, a number of construction unions, as well as the labor organization Unite Here, plan to give nothing, officials say.
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers gave $1 million in 2008, but it isn’t planning to contribute this year. It cites North Carolina’s “right to work law” that is opposed by unions, as well as labor’s need to spend money on grass-roots campaign work. “Registration drives, get-out-the-vote drives and leafleting—that’s where we can make our best contribution,” said spokesman Jim Spellane.
“We are making no contribution this year,” said Tom Snyder, a top official at Unite Here, which contributed $100,000 to the 2008 convention. “That’s all I’m going to say about that,” he said.

With about four months to go before the Sept. 3 opening of the Charlotte convention—which has been scaled back from the one in Denver four years ago—Democrats are about $20 million short of their fundraising goal of $36.7 million, according to two prominent Democrats who have been briefed by convention planners.

You know, if you sell your base down the river, this is what happens.

Anyone regretting the Obama administration decision to actively slow walk the Employee Free Choice Act over the past 3 years?

Probably not.

Well, It Looks Like Wimp is the Meme that Mitt Will Have to Fight

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Case in point, is the exit of Richard Grenell from the Romney campaign:

It was the biggest moment yet for Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team: a conference call last Thursday, dialed into by dozens of news outlets from around the globe, to dissect and denounce President Obama’s record on national security.

But Richard Grenell, the political strategist who helped organize the call and was specifically hired to oversee such communications, was conspicuously absent, or so everyone thought.

It turned out he was at home in Los Angeles, listening in, but stone silent and seething. A few minutes earlier, a senior Romney aide had delivered an unexpected directive, according to several people involved in the call.

“Ric,” said Alex Wong, a policy aide, “the campaign has requested that you not speak on this call.” Mr. Wong added, “It’s best to lay low for now.”

For Mr. Grenell, the message was clear: he had become radioactive.

It was the climax of an unexpectedly messy and public dispute over the role and reputation of Mr. Grenell, a foreign policy expert who is gay and known for his support of same-sex marriage, his testy relationship with the news media and his acerbic Twitter postings on everything from Rachel Maddow’s femininity to how Callista Gingrich “snaps on” her hair.

They hire this guy as a national security expert, he organizes a conference call on the subject, but because the Talibaptist knuckle draggers hate “te ghey”, the Romney campaign folds like overcooked broccoli.

Somehow, I don’t expect him to go for a Sistah Soljah moment.

H5N1 Gene Studies Finally Published

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The US state security apparatus was trying to suppress these studies, because ……… zOMG Terrorists!!!!!! ………, but the research the likelihood of it making a jump to human transmission has been published anyway:

Avian H5N1 influenza viruses in the wild may be one small step away from spreading effectively between mammals. That is the sobering message from a controversial study by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, published online by Nature1 after months of debate about how to release the findings publicly.

“After wanting to read it for so long, it was like eating again after fasting,” says Vincent Racaniello, a virologist at Columbia University in New York. “And it does not disappoint.”

H5N1, commonly known as bird flu, is highly pathogenic and often lethal in humans, but it cannot spread efficiently between people and cases seem to be rare. To find out if H5N1 could evolve easy transmissibility between humans, Kawaoka and his team mutated its haemagglutinin (HA) gene, which produces the protein that the virus uses to stick itself to host cells. Because flu viruses in the wild can also gain new properties by swapping genes, the researchers combined this gene with seven others from a highly transmissible flu virus, the H1N1 strain that caused a pandemic in 2009.

Kawaoka found that the hybrid virus could spread between ferrets in separate cages after acquiring just four mutations. Three of these allow the HA protein to stick to receptor molecules on mammalian cells, and the fourth stabilizes the protein. “Before we initiated this experiment, we knew that receptor specificity is important,” says Kawaoka. “We didn’t know what else was needed.”

Worryingly, some Middle Eastern H5N1 strains can already recognize human receptors2. Kawaoka’s work suggests that they could be just one stabilizing mutation away from being able to spread between humans. Discovering “that HA needs to be stable to be transmissible through the air between mammals” is a key finding, says influenza virologist Wendy Barclay at Imperial College London.

We knew that H5N1 was only few mutations away from H2H since well before as soon as the security Mafia’s heads started to explode in an orgy of security theater.

The post 911 security apparatus doing more harm than good.

It’s All About the Racism

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I tend to see a lot more racism in American politics than most other white* people, and here we have a a case where it manifests as a primary motivation for anti gay bigotry:

Nance said he recorded a conversation with the woman, whose name is Jodie Brunstetter, on video, and that she confirmed that she used the term “Caucasian” in a discussion about the marriage amendment, but insisted that otherwise her comments had been taken out of context by other poll workers.

…Nance paraphrased the remarks, as told to him by those who were present: “During the conversation, Ms. Brunstetter said her husband was the architect of Amendment 1, and one of the reasons he wrote it was to protect the Caucasian race. She said Caucasians or whites created this country. We wrote the Constitution. This is about protecting the Constitution. There already is a law on the books against same-sex marriage, but this protects the Constitution from activist judges.”

Nance said he recruited a friend, who works for the Coalition to Protect All North Carolina Families, to witness his interview with Jodie Brunstetter. He said Brunstetter reluctantly acknowledged that she had used the term “Caucasian” and then repeated the statement previously attributed to her, but substituted the pronoun “we” for “Caucasian. Nance said Brunstetter insisted there was nothing racial about her remarks, but could not explain why she used the term “Caucasian.”

When you look at many of the motivations on many of the hot button issues of “social conservative”,† you find either racial animus or racial paranoia at its core.

First, we amp up gun regulations in order to take guns from the Black Panthers, and then the NRA goes insane because they want to have guns to protect themselves from black people.

It’s like 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, only instead of Kevin Bacon, it’s racism.

*Nominally white. I’m Jewish, and my brother suggested that, while we are European pale, we aren’t any more white than an Irish immigrant was in 1880.
†For example, the right wing jihad against the courts, started with Brown v. Board of Ed, and Roe v. Wade didn’t become a cause celebre for the right wing until it became a proxy for Runyon v. McCrary, which held that private schools can be denied tax deductible status for being segregated.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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And it’s good news, with initial claims falling by 27K to 365,000, beating estimates, and continuing and extended claims fell as well, though the less volatile 4-week moving average rose.

The real news on the economy though is the fact that Euro zone unemployment  hit a record high:

Rising unemployment and plunging business confidence in the euro area revealed the increasingly fragile state of the region’s economy on Wednesday, as voters in France and Greece prepare to deliver their verdict on austerity in Sunday elections.

Official figures showed that unemployment across the 17-member single currency zone increased by 169,000 in March, for the 11th consecutive month, to hit 17.37m. The unemployment rate was 10.9%, the highest level in its history.

Even in Germany, which has so far largely escaped unscathed from the downturn sweep of the labour market, unemployment began to tick up in March, though it remained at just 5.6% of the workforce.

There was also evidence that businesses are being hit by what many analysts expect to be a eurozone-wide recession. The manufacturing PMI for the zone in April – a measure of confidence among businesses – registered a sharp decline, from 47.7 to 45.9, the lowest since June 2009, and well below the 50 mark which signals growth.

BTW, in the US, consumer confidence to a 2 month low.

To quote Bette Davis, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

The Oatmeal Nails It

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Basically, the artist described his experience attempting to legally rent Game of Thrones.

Here are the first few frames:


link

Read the whole thing.  It shows how the need for control makes the studios sh%$ on their customer, which in turns drives people who want to act in accordance with the exclusive license that the content producers hold to Bit Torrent and the like.

Read the whole thing.

It Looks Like the IRS Crackdown on Foreign Banks is Creating Real Results

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The number of rich expat Americans who are renouncing their citizenship has increased as a result of new banking regulations:

Rich Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship rose sevenfold since UBS AG whistle-blower Bradley Birkenfeld triggered a crackdown on tax evasion four years ago.

About 1,780 expatriates gave up their nationality at U.S. embassies last year, up from 235 in 2008, according to Andy Sundberg, secretary of Geneva’s Overseas American Academy, citing figures from the government’s Federal Register. The embassy in Bern, the Swiss capital, redeployed staff to clear a backlog as Americans queued to relinquish their passports.

The U.S., the only nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes citizens wherever they reside, is searching for tax cheats in offshore centers, including Switzerland, as the government tries to curb the budget deficit. Shunned by Swiss and German banks and facing tougher asset-disclosure rules under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, more of the estimated 6 million Americans living overseas are weighing the cost of holding a U.S. passport.

Good.

If they renounce their citizenship, they cannot make political contributions to buy legislators.

I’m Not the Only One Who Thinks Google’s Upgrades Suck

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John Aravosis of Americablog has seen the new blogger update, and it has him planning to move the whole blog to WordPress:

Welcome to my own personal hell. Welcome to the new Blogger content management system, created by Google, that is incompatible with iPhones or iPads, and whose iphone app is a complete and utter disaster.

They’ve gotten similar responses about their changes to Gmail (here’s a hint, go with the high contrast theme to make it bearable)

I’m beginning to wonder if they are intentionally screwing the pooch.

Nicolas “Petain” Sarkozy

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So, Nicolas Sarkozy is going thoroughly right wing and anti-Muslim:

Nicolas Sarkozy has stepped up his appeal to France’s far-right by lauding national identity, borders and French Christian heritage at a vast open-air rally in the shadow of the Eiffel tower.

………

Sarkozy’s alternative May day Labour rally, which he initially said was a defiant celebration of “real” work versus the traditional trade union marches, had caused a political slanging match in France.

A Communist newspaper and various commentators likened the president to Marshal Pétain, the leader of France’s Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime in the 1940s, for trying to appropriate the “values of work” for the right. His party slammed the parallels as shameful and disgusting.

(emphasis mine)

You have to understand: The French Republics (all of them) have had a tradition of militantly secular, as in, “If you get married in a church, it doesn’t count, do it again at the town hall.”

He doesn’t get why National Front Leader Marine Le Pen got so many votes.  While part of it is the fact that she puts a softer and more sophisticated edge on the right wing xenophobic message, the rest is because both Sarkozy and Hollande were perceived as being too EU friendly, and in particular, they are not fond of German hegemony in the EU.

Sorkozy does not get it:  He won’t get their votes in sufficient quality because he is Merkel’s toady, and Merkel’s frantic attempts to bolster his reelection efforts just makes it more obvious.

Shareholders Revolts Against Executive Compensation is Getting More Common

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This time it’s Barklays, and once again it failed:

Shareholders have demonstrated their mounting anger over runaway boardroom pay, delivering a huge protest against Barclays pay policies – including the £17m package for chief executive Bob Diamond.

Nearly a third of shareholders failed to back the remuneration report at a sometimes hostile annual meeting in the Royal Festival Hall, London, where one shareholder warned of the damage to the bank’s reputation because of its pay deals.

Shareholders also handed a severe rebuke to Alison Carnwath, the non-executive director who sanctioned the pay deals. More than one in five investors failed to support the re-election of Carnwath, a veteran of many boardroom battles, to the board – a huge protest given that directors usually expect near-unanimous support for their positions.

You used to hear about this once a decade.

We’ve had 3 in the past 6 weeks.

Even if they lose, it’s a step in the right direction.

What a Crybaby

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David Prosser is now claiming that the judicial investigation of his choking of a fellow justice is an infringement of his speech rights:

State Supreme Court Justice David Prosser said Monday that the Wisconsin Judicial Commission’s investigation into his alleged ethical violations is itself a violation of his constitutional rights, according to a court filing.

Prosser, the subject of an ethics complaint filed in March with the Supreme Court, said in his response to the complaint Monday that the commission “may not investigate or prosecute protected speech, advocacy and etiquette of Wisconsin Supreme Court justices when they are deliberating in confidential closed conferences.”

The three alleged ethics violations stem from a June 13 incident in which Prosser acknowledges putting his hands around the neck of Justice Ann Walsh Bradley “to protect himself” and a February 2010 incident in which he admits calling Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson “a total bitch.”

First, it wasn’t a closed conference, it was a discussion in Bradley’s office, and he was asked to leave, and he is alleged to have assaulted her.

Beating up on a woman is not, “deliberating in confidential closed conferences.”

As an aside, anyone want to bet that this isn’t the first time that he’s been “alleged” to have assaulted a woman?

Still???

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The SEC still hasn’t finished its investigation of Lehman?

It’s been 4 years, and we’ve not seen anything:

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is still probing Lehman Brothers more than three years after the investment bank collapsed during the global financial crisis, agency chairman Mary Schapiro said on Wednesday.

Schapiro told lawmakers it would be inappropriate to comment on a matter that “remains under investigation,” but assured lawmakers that the SEC has conducted interviews with management at the highest levels and has reviewed millions of pages of documents.

“It is still under review,” she said at an SEC oversight hearing before a House Financial Services subcommittee.

Schapiro’s comments come after “60 Minutes” on Sunday aired a segment revisiting the March 2010 findings by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc’s court-appointed examiner, Anton Valukas.

Valukas’ report said that Lehman used accounting gimmicks and had been insolvent for weeks before it filed for bankruptcy in September 2008.

But we haven’t even seen administrative actions.

Nobody has been banned from the securities industry, no prosecutions, no fines, no nothing.

The fix is in.

Nice Golden Egg, Bird. See the Farmer With the Axe?

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In a development that should surprise no-one following Comcast’s purchase by NBC, Hulu will start requiring a cable account for access:

Viewers who stream network TV shows may soon discover the free ride is not so free.

Hulu, which attracted 31 million unique users in March under a free-for-all model, is taking its first steps to change to a model where viewers will have to prove they are a pay-TV customer to watch their favorite shows, sources tell The Post.

In fact, the move by Hulu toward the new model — called authentication because viewers would have to log in with their cable or satellite TV account number — was behind the move last week by Providence Equity Partners to cash out of Hulu after five years, these sources said.

And it’s not just Hulu making it tougher for cable-cutters to stream shows and other content.

Fox, owned by News Corp., which also owns The Post, is expected to begin talks soon with Comcast on a TV Everywhere deal that will require authentication. Plus, Philadelphia-based Comcast is expected to switch to an authentication model for this summer’s Olympic Games (see story at right).

The move toward authentication is fueled by cable companies and networks looking to protect and profit from their content.

Their content?

With all due respect to the fine gentlemen at Comcast, about the only work of convincing fiction that they produce are their own advertisements.

It also appears to be a violation of their agreement that the FCC required for the NBC/Comcast merger:

“The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was asked to include as a condition of Comcast’s takeover of NBCU that subscription to a pay-TV service not be required for access to Hulu,” said Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn. “It is a shame the Commission declined to do so.”

Free Press saw it differently. “This sudden move to big cable’s preferred business model raises serious questions about whether Comcast is violating the conditions of its merger with NBCUniversal,” said the group, “a deal that gave the company a large ownership stake in Hulu.” As a condition for approval of the merger, the cable giant agreed to relinquish any right “to influence, control or participate in the governance or management of Hulu.”

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” said Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood, “or at least a compelling reason to investigate. Under the terms of its acquisition of NBCUniversal, Comcast is forbidden from influencing Hulu’s operations. Today’s announcement looks an awful lot like an example of such influence.”

what is going on here is that they are killing the business in order to maintain control.

In the short run, it may make sense, since this allows them to maintain their monopoly rents on their subscribers, for a while at least.

One of thei early investors, however, bailed out on Hulu:

Hulu.com owners Walt Disney Co. (DIS), Comcast Corp. and News Corp. (NWSA) are close to buying out Providence Equity Partners Inc.’s stake at a price valuing the company at about $2 billion, said two people with knowledge of the matter.

Providence is selling its 10 percent share in Los Angeles- based Hulu for about $200 million after investing $100 million when the venture began in 2007, according to the people, who weren’t authorized to talk publicly.

“This would be the optimal outcome,” David Bank, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets in New York, said in an interview. “The real value of Hulu will be discovered on a longer time frame than what’s likely optimal for Providence.”

It ain’t the time frame, it’s that their interest is in the success of Hulu, and not of the cable companies, and they realized that the management is the cable companies’ moles.

Truth be told, except for the wonderful Alec Baldwin brain sucker ads, this does not really effect me, but it’s seriously galling.

What Has Happened to America?

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It appears that one of the consequences of privatizing prisons is that these private companies are renting out prison labor for a profit:

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and GEO, two prison privatizers, along with a third smaller operator, G4S (formerly Wackenhut), sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.

Seriously, our country is becoming something profoundly disturbing.

Not Safety and Simplicity, Too Many Parts

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So someone has decided that it might be a good thing to add even more moving parts to a rotorcraft:

A strange, 16-propeller vertical take-off and landing craft has been awarded the Lindberg Prize for Innovation at the Aero-Friedrichshafen 2012 airshow in Germany. It is an example of the unusual configurations made possible by distributed electric propulsion.

This is true. It is unusual.

It’s also completely impractical.

There is not a single multi-engine aircraft that takes off with an engine out, and in this case, there are 16 engines that might fail.

If you lose an engine, you either don’t take off, or, if you are in flight, you set down as soon as you can.

While this aircraft may (according to its inventors) be able to land safely with “several props failed”, it won’t make its destination with even one of the props failing.

If They Buy a White Persian Cat, Call Daniel Craig

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So, a collection of eccentric billionaires have decided to start as company to mine the asteroids:

Some time in the next 18 to 24 months, Planetary Resources, Inc. will launch a series of mass-produced 9″ space telescopes, dubbed Arkyd Series 100 spacecraft. They’re specifically designed to identify which of the roughly 8,900 near-Earth asteroids are both smaller than 50 meters and suitable targets for retrieval back to Earth orbit. These small near-Earth asteroids represent a transient population, with life spans in the millions of years, typically cut short by running into a planet or being thrown out of the solar system by Jupiter.

That mission, according to Planetary Resources co-founder Eric Anderson, will be completed well enough within the ensuing year or two that the follow-up spacecraft, the Arkyd Series 200, can track some of these asteroids as they fly by in high Earth orbit. Still later, Arkyd Series 300 swarm spacecraft can begin launching to survey those asteroids from a closer perspective, gathering information on spin, shape, and composition.

In theory, several spacecraft could be launched every year for as long as necessary. At some point, the company would have enough information to launch spacecraft built to travel to an asteroid and retrieve them over several years, ultimately delivering them to a high Earth orbit. By some time in the next decade, both robotic and manned spacecraft would be waiting in orbit for the asteroids as they arrived.

…………

These angel investors form an amazing list. They include Google’s CEO Larry Page and Chairman Eric Schmidt, Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi, Ross Perot Jr., and James Cameron. Charles Simonyi has been to space twice via one of Eric Anderson’s previous ventures, Space Adventures. Ross Perot and James Cameron are also known as adventurers in their own right, and Cameron just returned from a solo submarine voyage to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. All are willing to contribute large sums of money at high risk of loss for what could be a long period of time.

When you look at these guys, Cameron, Perot, the Google Twins, etc., you see a lot of ego.

Maybe I’ve watched one too many bond films, butthe idea that these guys want to go and place a number of asteroids, each about ½ a million tons (50m of solid iron weighs that) at a Lagrange point, where they can be given a nudge toward, for example, Fresno, unless we meet their demands.

I’m wondering what their nefarious demands will be.

Not Enough Bullets

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The banksters have discovered another way to pay their obscene levels of executive pay, they push poor customers to high fee products:

An increasing number of the nation’s large banks — U.S. Bank, Regions Financial and Wells Fargo among them — are aggressively courting low-income customers like Mr. Wegner with alternative products that can carry high fees. They are rapidly expanding these offerings partly because the products were largely untouched by recent financial regulations, and also to recoup the billions in lost income from recent limits on debit and credit card fees.

Banks say that they are offering a valuable service for customers who might not otherwise have access to traditional banking and that they can offer these products at competitive prices. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new federal agency, said it was examining whether banks ran afoul of consumer protection laws in the marketing of these products.

In the push for these customers, banks often have an advantage over payday loan companies and other storefront lenders because, even though banks are regulated, they typically are not subject to interest rate limits on payday loans and other alternative products.

Some federal regulators and consumer advocates are concerned that banks may also be steering people at the lowest end of the economic ladder into relatively expensive products when lower-cost options exist at the banks or elsewhere.

“It is a disquieting development for poor customers,” said Mark T. Williams, a former Federal Reserve Bank examiner. “They are getting pushed into high-fee options.”

“We look at alternative financial products offered by both banks and nonbanks through the same lens — what is the risk posed to consumers?” said Richard Cordray, director of the bureau. “Practices that make it hard for consumers to anticipate and avoid costly fees would be cause for concern.”

Seriously, we should have tarred and feathered these f%$#s, not bailed them out.

Here’s hoping that the CFPB takes a look at this.

The “Educational Reformers” in a Nutshell

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Doug Lynch, University of Pennsylvania’s vice dean of its Graduate School of Education was found to have been lying about having a PhD, and nothing happened, until the Inky found out, at which point he was first put on leave and then he resigned.

It appears that the university wasn’t going to do anything meaningful until it became public:

Earlier Wednesday, Penn officials said they became aware of the misrepresentation a couple of months ago, taking unspecified “appropriate sanctions” but deciding to leave Lynch in his leadership role.

That changed after The Inquirer placed a call to Penn president Amy Gutmann for comment. The university then issued a one-sentence statement from Stephen J. MacCarthy, vice president for university communications.

“Doug Lynch has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of an ongoing investigation,” MacCarthy’s statement said.

As to why he was kept on, it was because he was so in tune with the educational reform “crap on teachers” orthodoxy:

Since joining Penn, Lynch has become a lightning rod for controversy. He has pushed entrepreneurial methods and supported programs such as Teach for America, which puts bright college graduates who lack education degrees in some of the nation’s toughest public schools for a two-year commitment.

A February 2011 feature on him in Penn’s alumni magazine said: “What happens when you unleash an entrepreneurship evangelist on an education school? Meet Doug Lynch, the vice dean bent on making Penn GSE a hub for social entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and next-generation educational reform.”

Because bringing in the private sector will allow Wall Street to do to our schools what they did to our retirement savings.

It appears that everyone in the educational reform is a fraud on some level.

H/t Atrios.