Since the start of the Eurosystem our brave inflation warriors at the ECB regularly praise themselves what a heck of the job they are doing about their primary objective the maintenance of price stability. But yesterday the German Daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) published an article (German), that our guardians of price stability fight another good fight. The employees of the ECB want their own pensions to be inflation protected.
So the same folks who lecture member states of the Eurozone about the danger of private sector labor and pension contracts being inflation-indexed because of moral hazard want their own pension contracts inflation-indexed. For this fight to be successful ECB employees deploy a very evil institution: the central banker union IPSO. According to the FAZ article a former employee sued the ECB with the help of IPSO at European Court of Justice.
Seriously, I cannot think of of a better illustration of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the so-called experts who want to tell us how we are supposed to run our economy.
The attacks, they said, were “orchestrated.” Or, if the people reporting them were being particularly precise, the attacks were “carefully orchestrated.” The order of the adverbs is the order of battle. In Kabul on Sunday, Taliban fighters attacked the Afghan parliament building, and several embassies, and a NATO base. There also were attacks in the provinces. Those people old enough to remember the Tet Offensive can be excused if they mention the obvious parallels. Whatever its historical ambiguity as a military operation, Tet was a mind-quake in the United States. It forced the country to face squarely the sheer mendacity of its own government’s statements about the war as a war. It redefined for the United States what “winning” in Vietnam meant and it redefined it as an impossibility. In Afgantsy, his admirably lucid history of the Russian catastrophe in Afghanistan, Rodric Braithwaite quotes an old aphorism of which the guerrilla fighters in that country were fond: The foreigners have the watches, but the locals have the time.
But the fact is that, in terms of the domestic reaction it provoked, Tet was closer to a beginning than it was to an end. The war would grind on for seven more years, two years longer than the Americans chose to stay with it. The domestic antiwar movement was just building toward a crescendo that few people could imagine; the shootings at Kent State were still two years away. Lyndon Johnson was still president, and the presumptive nominee of his party. Nixon was still something of an underdog. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. — they were still alive. The Vietnam War was just beginning to reach all corners of American society like a dark, living thing with a thousand faces.
That being said, Charlie explains that this is in some ways worse than Tet, because we’ve already lived through Tet, and apparrently have learned nothing:
And that is the biggest reason why what happened in Kabul this weekend is not Tet: because, when Tet happened, we didn’t have Tet to remember and to learn from. Afghanistan was supposed to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, and it did rather work out that way. But it turned out that Afghanistan was a worse Vietnam than Vietnam ever was, and we wandered over there just in time to make Russia’s Vietnam our own. We have done what we came for. Osama bin Laden is as dead as Lord Kitchener; the al Qaeda network, at least in Afghanistan, is in a shambles. We do not have the power to enforce a stable government on a country that so manifestly resists the notion, especially when it comes from foreigners. What in hell are we doing over there anymore.
I think that Pierce is a bit optimistic: I think that the American establishment and the Pentagon learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam.
You see, they asked the question, “Why did we lose the war,” and in their infinite wisdom, they concluded that it was because the “lost” the American public, so the answer to the Vietnam debacle was to create an all volunteer force, so middle America’s sons would not be subject to conscription, and to ramp up restrictions and manipulate the media, embedded reporters and the like.
But we didn’t lose the war. We were beaten.
That question, “How were we beaten,” places the onus on that same American establishment and Pentagon, as opposed to scapegoating the public and the media, which is why they don’t ask that question.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey exaggerated when he declared that unforeseen costs to the state were forcing him to cancel the new train tunnel planned to relieve congested routes across the Hudson River, according to a long-awaited report by independent Congressional investigators.
The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.
Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.
Canceling the tunnel, then the largest public works project in the nation, helped shape Mr. Christie’s profile as a rising Republican star, an enforcer of fiscal discipline in a country drunk on debt. But the report is likely to revive criticism that his decision, which he said was about “hard choices” in tough economic times, was more about avoiding the need to raise the state’s gasoline tax, which would have violated a campaign promise. The governor subsequently steered $4 billion earmarked for the tunnel to the state’s near-bankrupt transportation trust fund, traditionally financed by the gasoline tax.
On Tuesday, in a speech at a conference on taxes and the economy in Manhattan, Mr. Christie did not mention the report, but defended his decision to cancel the project, saying, “I refuse to compromise my principles.”
………
Martin E. Robins, the founding director of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University and an early director of the ARC project, criticized the governor. “In hindsight, it’s apparent that he had a highly important political objective: to cannibalize the project so he could find an alternate way of keeping the transportation trust fund program moving, and he went ahead and did it,” he said.
(emphasis mine)
His principles in this case are pandering to “No New Taxes” promises that he made.
The Motion Picture Association of America is squaring off against a coalition of Internet giants and public interest groups over the key question of whether it’s possible to directly infringe copyright by embedding an image or video hosted by a third party.
A federal judge took that position last July, prompting a chorus of criticism. Two briefs—one by Google and Facebook, the other by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge—attacked the decision as contrary to past precedents and potentially disruptive to the Internet economy. They asked the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn it.
Last week, the MPAA joined the fray with a brief in support of Illinois federal judge John F. Grady’s ruling. It urged the Seventh Circuit not to draw a legal distinction between hosting content and embedding it. In the MPAA’s view, both actions should carry the risk of liability for direct copyright infringement.
The case arose from a dispute over Internet pornography. MyVidster is a video bookmarking site that allows users to save links to their favorite videos and share them with others. The site supports embedding, so bookmarked videos can be viewed on a myVidster page surrounded by myVidster ads.
This is technical, but there is primary and secondary infringement, and the burden of proof is lower, and the penalties are higher, for the former.
If you extend primary infringement to embedding, which is practically indistinguishable from hyperlinks, then expect a full assault on hyperlinks, and if they win on this, the internet becomes another corporate walled garden.
Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says that American are turning into couch potatoes,(first WTF) just sitting around waiting on their next check from the government.
Speaking to the Bush Institute Conference on Taxes and Economic Growth (WTF? The F%$#ing Bush Institute Conference on F%$#ing taxes and F%$#ing Economic F%$#ing Growth) in New York City on Tuesday, the first-term governor said that he had “never seen a less optimistic time in my lifetime.”
What major political figure resembles a fat slob sitting on his couch waiting for his check from the Koch Brothers Government?
Seriously, the Koch suckers out there have no sense of irony at all.
The ability of the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey tiltrotor to fly farther, as well as faster, than helicopters has been a key factor in its fight for survival for more than a decade. But now, with both CV-22B and MV-22B versions recently pressed into service on longer-range, self-deployed combat and rescue missions in Libya and Afghanistan, the hunt is on for greater unrefueled performance.
Squeezing more range out of the V-22 is not easy, however. Constrained from birth by the need to fit on the restricted decks of U.S. Navy amphibious assault ships, the tiltrotor was necessarily limited to smaller-than-optimal wing and rotor dimensions leading to an inevitable impact on range. Without the options of increasing wingspan or rotor diameter available to them, designers are taking a leaf out of the Boeing Commercial Airplanes playbook and studying nacelle-mounted “sails” that work on the same principle as winglets.
Although Bell Boeing declines to comment on the development, Naval Air Systems Command (Navair) confirms it is preparing to flight test a modified MV-22 with the upgrade which could boost range by almost 5%. The concept, which was studied by Boeing for the Special Operation Forces CV-22 version as far back as 1994, harnesses the energy from the vertical upwash around the wing and nacelle. In the case of the V-22, Bell Boeing’s research indicates upwash angles of 10-20 deg. around the nacelles at the nominal cruise pitch attitude of 8 deg. The additional upwash velocity produces a propulsive force by tilting the lift vector forward.
I should note that I am not an aerodynamicist, but it looks to me a lot of the gains from these surfaces are from straightening the rotational wash off the props, much in the same way that stators do in a multi-stage turbine.
Because it increases effective wing area, it would have the effect of reducing longitudinal stability, so the flight test regime will target this concern.
They quote Geoffrey Manne, who works for the Hoover institute, Dominick Armentano, whose Independent Institute is funded by the Olins, the Kochs, and served as a “straw buyer” for Microsoft for the purchase of ads regarding that antitrust litigation, and Richard Epstein, who is the godfather of libertarian legal theory.
In the process, they ignore the facts of the case, as Time Magazine (of all people) documents:
So the publishers worked urgently to hatch a scheme to raise e-book prices before $9.99 became an “entrenched consumer expectation,” according to the lawsuit. Publishing executives are said to have plotted, cloak-and-dagger-style, during meetings at upscale Manhattan restaurants, and tried to conceal their communications “to avoid leaving a paper trail.” A favorite meeting spot was the Chef’s Wine Cellar, a private room at Picholene, just off Central Park West. It’s clear from the complaint that the Department of Justice went so far as to obtain the mobile-phone records of major-publishing-house CEOs.
Meanwhile, Apple was debating business models as it planned to storm onto the e-book market with the iPad. At one point, according to the lawsuit, Apple “contemplated illegally dividing the digital content world with Amazon,” with audio-video going to Apple and e-books to Amazon. Instead, Apple, led by content honcho Eddy Cue, reached out to the publishers to propose that the industry shift from a wholesale model, in which retailers set the price, to an agency model, in which the publishers set the price and Apple, as the “agent,” would receive a 30% commission.
Apple’s then CEO Steve Jobs described the talks in a now infamous quote that appeared in Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography: “We told the publishers, ‘We’ll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway.’” Apple played a special role in the plot, according to the government, acting as the “spoke” of a wheel of conspiracy by playing the major publishers off one another to ensure they all participated.
Even if Apple were not engaging in an illegal act on its own, it is engaging in an illegal conspiracy to fix prices, but the draw by crayon libertarian cannot extend his Rolodex beyond the usual suspects.
If the DoJ wanted to go RICO on their asses, it would get really ugly, but if you are a dedicated Randroid, you consult the usual suspects, and create the illusion that there is no “there” there.
Gee, as a result of Bill Clinton’s “Reinventing Governmnent” initiative, basic functions of government were outsourced, things like supervising contractors.
The common sense descrption of this is letting the fox run the henhouse.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration isn’t properly monitoring costs and potential ethical violations in contracts related to improvements in the nation’s air-traffic systems, an audit found.
Practices for selecting and overseeing contracts awarded since 2010 for work related to the so-called NextGen project are “not sufficient,” the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General said in a report released today.
The seven contracts examined, awarded to companies including Boeing Co., CSSI Inc., ITT Corp. and General Dynamics Corp., are valued at as much as $7.3 billion, the largest cumulative award in FAA history, according to the report. The contracts are for technical and professional support of new systems to let the FAA track aircraft using satellite navigation instead of radar.
The agency didn’t verify labor rates charged in five of seven contracts, according to the report. The FAA overestimated the labor hours required, the auditors found.
Basically, if you use contractors, and you don’t watch them like a hawk, they will do whatever they legally can to maximize profits.
The you can call this “capitalism”, or you can call it “maximizing shareholder value”, but it’s what managers are supposed to do.
Homophobes are a group of people who have a negative feeling towards homosexuality, but new research claims that people who express hatred of gays are secretly more likely to be attracted to the same sex.
Researchers from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex and the University of California in Santa Barbara have discovered that homophobes are actually attracted to the same sex but they do not admit it because they grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires. They found this when they conducted a series of psychology studies.
The researchers assert that people who define themselves as straight and who hate homosexuality are often attracted to the same sex. They believe that homosexual people remind them of similar tendencies within themselves.
“Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves,” said Netta Weinstein, a lecturer at the University of Essex, in a statement.
Annie Lowrey of the New York Times looks at the parts of the TARP that were intended to help ordinary homeowners, and it ain’t pretty:
A fund to support homeowners in the communities hit hardest by the collapse of the housing bubble has disbursed just 3 percent of its budget and aided only 30,640 homeowners in the two years since its creation, according to a report released on Thursday by a federal watchdog office.
The Hardest Hit Fund, which was created in the spring of 2010, grants money to state housing finance agencies for efforts to help families that are facing foreclosure. It has “experienced significant delay” because of “a lack of comprehensive planning” by the Treasury Department and limited participation by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the large mortgage servicers, said the report by the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
“TARP wasn’t supposed to be just a bank bailout,” said Christy L. Romero, the special inspector general for TARP, in an interview. “It was specifically designed with the goal of helping homeowners, and our concern is that that goal may not be met.”
As of the end of 2011, the Hardest Hit Fund had spent $217.4 million out of its $7.6 billion budget, the report found. The program is intended to reach homeowners who are unemployed, or living in areas with high unemployment rates or steeply falling home values.
The report is just the latest to criticize the Obama administration’s efforts to relieve homeowners battered by the nationwide drop in housing prices and the broader recession. The office of the special inspector general has repeatedly criticized Treasury’s management of the Home Affordable Modification Program, Washington’s main initiative to prevent foreclosures.
By this point, they were supposed to have helped 2-3 million, so they are low by a factor of almost 100.
Think about it. They had $7.6 billion to spend, without any meaningful oversight, but they couldn’t be bothered to spend it.
This was not just an economic opportunity, it was a political one, because when they saved people, they would most likely get their votes, but it just didn’t matter.
This is going on because the Obama administration in the person of Timothy Geithner, the last man standing of Obama’s original economic team, simply don’t care.
Helping homeowners was in the TARP because they needed it to get the votes, but if it ain’t protecting the big banks and big banking, Geithner/Obama ain’t interested.
I don’t mean that he is personally homophobic, there is no evidence that I know of about that, but that he is is politically homophobic, and so is unwilling to do anything for gay rights unless absolutely forced to.
Writing an executive order mandating that federal contractors don’t discriminate is literally the least that he could do, but for Mr. Hopey Changey, it’s a bridge too far:
A surprising new rift opened between the White House and the gay rights movement after White House officials revealed Wednesday that President Obama would not sign an executive order sought by activists to prohibit federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Community advocates learned of the news during a closed-door meeting with two top Obama aides, Valerie Jarrett and Cecilia Munoz, who told the group that the White House would instead lead a multi-pronged effort to urge companies, federal agencies and others to oppose discrimination.
The Center for American Progress, which is Obama’s bitch among the think tanks called this “Disappointing”, and the HRC, another member of the Obama knee pad set was similarly pissed off.
It appears that Obama does not remember the, “Don’t ask, Don’t Give,” efforts, but my guess is that he will:
And, just to confirm that it’s not going to go away, we got this via press release;
Within hours of the White House announcement, the “We Can’t Wait!” campaign received a $100,000 cash infusion from liberal donor Jonathan Lewis, the son of major Democratic philanthropist Peter Lewis.
Quotes from Jonathan Lewis:
“This isn’t a broken promise President Obama can blame on Congress. He has not been able to provide a single valid reason for why he is now refusing to sign the executive order protecting LGBT workers. It has become increasingly clear that this decision is based on cowardice rather than principled leadership.”
“Over the past several years the LGBT advocacy groups have jumped through hoops for this administration, conducting extensive research and polling — more than has been done for any similar executive order — and now the only impediment is President Obama.”
“This is nothing short of craven election-year politics, a game Obama told us he would not play.”
Jonathan Lewis and his father, Peter, are major contributors to progressive causes. And, by major, I mean they give millions.
Another reason to give to specific candidates, particularly in the primary, as opposed to OFA, the DNC, the DCCC, or the DSCC.
But hey, a wing of the Talibaptists at the Focus on the Family liked that he dissed the LBGT community.
Below, you can see Jay Carney saying that “more study is needed”. I guess that the unspoken assumption here is that gays are just too icky to have equal rights unless we can make bigots feel better about themselves.
Seriously, Andrew Breitbart was better on gay inclusion that Barack Obama is:
Seriously, how about not being a coward on this issue. Not being a coward gets you votes.
And the news is not good, 380K initial claims, up 13K, from last weeks numbers, which were revised up 10K, with the less volatile 4-week moving average rising by 4,250 to 368,500, continuing claims falling 98K to 3.25 m, and emergency claims falling by 20.5K to 2.79m.
We’ve had some pretty good numbers since the beginning of the year, but we’ve also had an unprecedentedly mild winter, which has pushed a lot of “spring time” activities months earlier. See (Anthropogenic Climate Change)
The question now is how much did the good numbers in the first quarter of the year eat the economic activity now.
Well, it looks like the Republican primary is well and truly over, and we are into the general election silly season, case in point, he Ann Romney – Hillary Rosen contretemps:
Now, it’s Republicans pretending there’s a big national fight over a subject that most women basically agree on – the decision to work or stay home. Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen unintentionally set off this fake firestorm when she commented on CNN Wednesday night that Ann Romney – whom Mitt Romney has been referring to as his top adviser on women’s issues – has “never worked a day in her life.” Here’s the full quote:
“What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country, saying, ‘Well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues, and when I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing.’ Guess what? His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing, in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why do we worry about their future.”
The Romney campaign pounced, with Ann Romney putting out her first-ever tweet: “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.”
So, we have Mitt Romney saying that his wife, who’s never had to worry about providing the necessities to her kids, would be his source for insight into women who have to work in this country, versus Hillary Rosen, who used to be chief counsel for the RIAA, where she viciously opposed fair use, and has spent her life selling her skills to the various corporate faces evil as a lobbyist.
To quote Henry Kissinger, “It’s a pity they can’t both lose.”
One of the most ridiculous names — and there will be a lot of them — in the ongoing GOP veepstakes is Florida congressman, tea partier, and crazy person Allen West. Herman Cain, Sarah Palin, and fellow veepstakes participant Nikki Haley have all endorsed West as Romney’s running mate recently. We suspect, though, that none of them sincerely believe West is a viable option, and are simply currying favor with the tea-party wing of the GOP by flattering one of its champions. Because West is, actually, the exact type of person you don’t want as a running mate: A wildly outspoken, unpredictable loose cannon. His appearance at a town hall last night is just the latest example:
The conservative tea party icon also got in shots at Democrats and President Obama, who spoke Tuesday at Florida Atlantic University. West said Obama was “scared” to have a discussion with him. He later said “he’s heard” up to 80 U.S. House Democrats are Communist Party members, but wouldn’t name names.
George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who fatally shot Florida teenager Trayvon Martin 45 days ago, was charged with second-degree murder Wednesday, marking a turning point in a case that has provoked nationwide debate over racial profiling.
Florida special prosecutor Angela B. Corey, who announced the charge in Jacksonville, said that “the search for justice has brought us to this moment.” Zimmerman turned himself in and was brought Wednesday evening to the Seminole County jail.
Criminal justice lawyers said Corey faces an uphill battle in persuading a jury to convict Zimmerman of second-degree murder. Zimmerman told police he was fighting for his life in an altercation with Martin, who was 17 and unarmed, before he fired in self-defense.
Murder in the second degree, under Florida law, refers to a killing carried out without premeditation but with “a depraved mind regardless of human life.” If convicted, Zimmerman faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. His attorney, Mark O’Mara, [a new lawyer, after his old ones could not reach him, and he starting talking to the prosecutor on his own] said Wednesday that Zimmerman will plead not guilty.
My guess that the murder II charge is about trying to get a plea deal and/or presenting to the jury a way to split the difference and still get a conviction.
Then again, I don’t know what he said when he called the DA.
Rick Santorum has suspended his campaign, so it’s Mitt who’s going to be the nominee.
My guess is that he decided that he achieved his goal, which was “The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex,” off the top of the Google list.
You’ve got to remember that it was a Saturday night in New York City. Mike had seen or been tipped off about my scheduled Times piece quoting Radford, made some calls, found Radford’s wife, and somehow persuaded her that she had to give her husband the message to call him immediately at CBS. When Radford did, Wallace interviewed him from the Denver airport. He immediately splashed the interview all over CBS radio. Wallace had scooped me by interviewing Radford while I was flying with him in tow. I was more embarrassed than angry. The Old Man had shown me his moves, and taken my candy away.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Mike Wallace would be more pleased about stories like this than all the puff obituaries I’ve heard today.
This just in, a new study has shown that 
