They are resurfacing my street this week, and if you look in the background, you will garbage truck in the background.
I can’t street park right now, which is kind of a pain, but the temporary eradication of potholes is a good thing.™
Category: Government
The Michigan Fascism Bill Passes, and Heads to the Governor’s Desk
The legislature has now passed the bill, which would give the governor the power to declare any government or school district in the state and take it over, hand it to a crony, and dismiss elected officials he did not like.
Background here.
Yes, This is Fascism
Rachel Maddow and Naomi Klein on the “Emergency Manager” Bill
In Michigan, the governor is pushing a bill through that would grant Governor Rick Snyder the powers of a dictator.
Basically, he can declare a financial emergency for any municipal government or school district, and then he can assign an “Emergency Manager”, who could, without any review cancel any contracts (including labor contracts), dismiss elected officials, disincorporate towns, and dismantle school districts.
What’s more, the Senate version of the bill allows the emergency manager to be assigned to a corporation, like Blackwater (now Xe) or Halliburton.
There is no criteria for such a declaration, but even if there were, they are also gutting local aid, which pretty much means that they are creating fiscal crises anyway.
Basically, any elected official, and any semblance of due process is to be wiped away, in a bill that really does resemble the Emergency Laws that Mubarak used to rule Egypt with an iron fist for all these years.
This is about a corporate takeover of civil society, and the vesting of near absolute power in the executive.
Why Our Real Enemy is England
First, the royal wedding, and now this!“Lie back and think of England,” that’s what the web site says.
Royal wedding commemorative condoms.
Between this and reality TV, the Western civilization does not deserve to exist.
Mubarak Flees Cairo, Soon to Go to R’Lyeh* Riyadh
Well, it looks like something between a popular uprising and a military coup just took place in Egypt, as Hosni Mubarak has resigned as President and left the capital:
Egypt erupted in a joyous celebration of the power of a long repressed people on Friday as President Hosni Mubarak resigned his post and ceded control to the military, ending his nearly 30 years of autocratic rule.
Shouts of “God is Great” competed with fireworks and car horns around Cairo after Mr. Mubarak’s vice president and longtime intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, announced during evening prayers that Mr. Mubarak had passed all authority to a council of military leaders, bowing to a historic popular uprising that has transformed politics in Egypt and around the Arab world.
Protesters hugged and cheered and shouted, “Egypt is free!” and “You’re an Egyptian, lift your head.”
“He’s finally off our throats,” said one protester, Muhammad Insheemy. “Soon, we will bring someone good.”
The departure of the 82-year-old Mr. Mubarak, at least initially to his coastal resort home in Sharm el-Sheik, was a pivotal turn in a nearly three-week revolt that has upended one of the Arab’s world’s most enduring dictatorships. The popular protests — peaceful and resilient despite numerous efforts by Mr. Mubarak’s legendary security apparatus to suppress them — ultimately deposed an ally of the United States who has been instrumental in helping to carry out American policy in the region for decades.
The country is now being run by a “council of military leaders,” but they have made strong assertions that they will return the country to civilian rule, and something resembling a representative democracy, in a timely manner, but, there have been lots of promises throughout the Arab world about reform of governance, and they generally have not panned out.
Time will tell, I guess.
*“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” (In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming) as the fictional “Mad Arab”†, Abdul Alhazred, would say.
†And yes, I appreciate the irony of referring to the “Mad Arab” in the context of the overthrow of an Arab despot.
The Football is Pulled Away Again…
Who knew that Lucy Van Pelt was an 82 Year Old Egyptian President?In a move that stunned observers, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak refused to step down, and instead delegated his powers to his VP, Omar Suleiman, who is also doing duty of the state intelligence services, which, unsurprisingly, does not bode well for the prospects of democratic reform.
Note here that he did not “transfer” his authority, he “delegated” it, which means that he can take the powers back whenever he wants:
President Hosni Mubarak told the Egyptian people on Thursday that he would delegate authority to Vice President Omar Suleiman but that he would not resign, enraging hundreds of thousands gathered to hail his departure and setting in motion a volatile new stage in the three-week uprising.
The declaration by Mr. Mubarak that he would remain president appeared to signal a dangerous escalation in one of the largest popular revolts in Egypt’s history, and some protesters warned that weeks of peaceful rallies might give way to violence as early as Friday.
The 17-minute speech itself underlined a seemingly unbridgeable gap between ruler and ruled in Egypt: Mr. Mubarak, in paternalistic tones, talked in great detail about changes he planned to make to Egypt’s autocratic Constitution, while crowds in Tahrir Square, with bewilderment and anger, demanded that he step down.
Mr. Mubarak seemed oblivious. “It’s not about me,” he said in his address. When he was done, crowds in Cairo waved the bottoms of their shoes in the air, a gesture intended to convey disgust, and shouted, “Leave! Leave!”
This is not going to end well.
Bishop John Shelby Spong Is Right…
He asks the question, “Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?” (See here)
My answer is “yes”, and that you could also add bigotry to that list, as evidenced by the Governor of (where else) Alabama, who, while declaring that he was colorblind, said that, “So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister,” though to be fair, he Robert Bentley has since apologized, though with the classic, “I’m sorry if I offended anyone,” apology, which actually puts the onus on those who object.
There are people who use religion to fulfill a basic spiritual need, but I think that there are a lot more people who find it useful way to feel better than other people.
I Really Hate Fanboi!
And BooMan is definitely a fanboi, or he does not understand that SDNWOTN* when he says, “At this point in his presidency I think it is fair to say that Obama is already in the conversation as best president since Abraham Lincoln.“
Considering his prior record, I do not think that it is sarcasm.
<facepalm>
*Sarcasm Does Not Work On The Net.
And Here’s Another Shocker from Barack Obama
It turns out that his pay freeze proposal will cripple the staffing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said this week that exceptions may have to be made to President Barack Obama’s proposed pay freeze in order to effectively implement the Wall Street reform bill.
………
Frank said on Thursday he would support providing exemptions to the pay freeze if regulatory agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CTFC), can show they are needed to hire the appropriate talent.
………
In July, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro announced that her agency intends to hire 374 new employees in 2011. She also indicated that to meet the requirements set out in the Dodd-Frank bill, the agency will need to hire up to 800 staff in total.
Mr. Frank, you are being naive. The fact that the pay freeze cripples agencies that regulate the big banks is not a bug, it’s a feature.
Surely, after all he has done to protect the big banks, you can’t think that he will allow the regulatory agencies to staff up with competent and motivated people to actually reign them in?
Silly Congressman, don’t you know that laws are for whistle-blowers, not bankers!
Let There Be No Kings……
In 1997, I was reading Usenet,* and my wife rushed in, and told me that Diana, Princess of Wales, was in a serious car wreck, and I paraphrased the words of George Washington† to her, noting that the affairs of the British royal family is really not a proper for Americans to exhibit the level of fascination that it does with the subjects of the crown.
Well, I now learn that Prince William and his long time girl friend Kate Middleton will get married, and so I feel compelled to add both of them to my list of They Who Must Not Be Named.
Unlike many of the other denizens of the list, I do so without malice.
I have no knowledge of any specific wrongdoing from either of them, and I wish the happy couple the best.
I just never want to hear about them.
That being said, in homage to our founding fathers, who thumbed their nose at the British crown, I feel an obligation to engage in a snark before consigning them to the list, and the good folks at The Awl found what is likely the best snark on the internet:
In any event, welcome to the best Internet comment ever, from here: “Her parents can’t be overly happy. She has been largely unemployed since she left school and is now marrying someone who has been on welfare most of his life. With the new government’s promise to cut housing benefit and force those who repeatedly turn down work into manual labour I do worry for them.”
Heh.
In any case I have no interests in toothless constitutional monarchs.
*Yes, remember Usenet? It was a wonderful way for people with common interests to get together, but eventually, the trolls, spammers, and the rest of the tragedy of the commons, drove most of the useful dialogue to other technologies.
†Actually, his response to the suggestion that he be king was far more eloquent and evocative:
To Lewis Nicola
George Washington
Newburgh, May 22, 1782
Sir: With a mixture of great surprise and astonishment I have read with attention the Sentiments you have submitted to my perusal. Be assured Sir, no occurrence in the course of the War, has given me more painful sensations than your information of there being such ideas existing in the Army as you have expressed, and I must view with abhorrence, and reprehend with severety. For the present, the communication of them will rest in my own bosom, unless some further agitation of the matter, shall make a disclosure necessary.
I am much at a loss to conceive what part of my conduct could have given encouragement to an address which to me seems big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my Country. If I am not deceived in the knowledge of myself, you could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable; at the same time in justice to my own feelings I must add, that no Man possesses a more sincere wish to see ample justice done to the Army than I do, and as far as my powers and influence, in a constitutional way extend, they shall be employed to the utmost of my abilities to effect it, should there be any occasion. Let me conjure you then, if you have any regard for your Country, concern for yourself or posterity, or respect for me, to banish these thoughts from your Mind, and never communicate, as from yourself, or any one else, a sentiment of the like Nature. With esteem I am.
The Most Morally Repugnant Industry on the Face of the Earth
It’s the private prison industry, which is lobbying for draconian immigrations laws, like Arizona’s “Papers Please” law, because more people in detention means more money for them:
NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.
The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.
The story leads off with a private prison pitching an immigration detention facility for women and children in Benson, Arizona.
There are certain functions that cannot be fobbed off on the private sector, and this is perhaps the most sterling example.
A Welcome Change in City Planning
In Boston, in a new development, officials are pressuring developers to reduce the number of parking spaces at the complexes that they are building:
……
When Boston development officials recently handed permits to the developers of Waterside Place, they did so despite neighborhood concerns that the developers wanted to build far more apartments than parking spots. On A Street, the Boston Redevelopment Authority is close to green-lighting a 21-story residential tower. The tower’s developer had originally planned to build one parking spot for every two residential units, an abnormally low supply; BRA officials are pushing the developer to push that ratio even lower by replacing a whole floor of parking with innovative workforce housing units.
These permitting decisions are not happening in a vacuum. Government-imposed floors on the number of parking spots required at new developments are falling across the city, and beyond. Somerville, for instance, is increasing zoning density and lowering parking requirements along the route of the planned Green Line extension, with an eye toward spurring new transit-oriented development. But the change is especially pronounced in the Seaport, where developers are working with as close to a blank canvas as you’ll find in any major American city.
City planners are in the middle of an extensive re-thinking of Boston’s zoning codes. As they work, neighborhood by neighborhood, to update the code, they’re flipping the conventional thinking about parking on its head: Instead of mandating that minimum levels of parking accompany new developments, they’re pushing to establish maximum parking caps.
……
If you want a walkable and transit friendly cities, parking spaces are the enemy, because it creates sprawl.
IIRC, there is more ground taken up by parking spaces than is taken up by people in Montgomery County, which is why it is strip mall heck. (and Louden County, where I currently reside 3-4 nights a week, is strip mall hell)
If you make enough parking for people to drive in from the ‘burbs, then you create unacceptable levels of sprawl.
This May be the Future of America
And Ayn Rand is smiling in hell.
You have probably heard the story, a fire department sitting idly by while someone’s house burns, because the homeowner had not bought a subscription.
The story is not quite as straightforward as it first appears, since the fire department is run and funded by the city of South Fulton, while the resident, Gene Cranick, lives in the county, so this is not a case of a governmental unit failing its citizenry, but rather it’s governmental units failing society as a whole.
Most at fault is Obion County’s Republican dominated government, which has steadfastly refused to create some sort of county-wide system because of the $30 or so a year that it would cost households.
It is Republican governance in a nutshell.
There is a Reason that I Declared them “They Who Must Not Be Named”
But that hasn’t stopped the Voice of American from recruiting them to try and pacify angry people in the Middle East:
In what is evidently an attempt to mitigate the damage caused by Koran-burning pastors, the US government will attempt to dissuade outraged citizens of the Middle East from joining al-Qaeda by beaming Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears across the Voice of America’s airwaves.
According to Press Gazette, Splash News and Pictures will provide a half-hour weekly show packed with meaty celebutardiness, aimed at winning the hearts and minds of those still undecided whether Holy War or Hollywood is the way to go.
First, I will note that if VoA is doing this, the Arab world is going to try and beat us to death with their bare hands.
Second, I have not yet put Kim Kardashian on my list of They Who Must Not Be Named, but ………
Wait for it ………
Wait for it ………
Wait for it ………
She is now.
Great googly moogley.
Obama Throws the Environmental Movement Under the Bus
This is a distressingly familiar refrainI’m sure that there are a lot of “eleventy dimensional chess” folks out there, but when you look at Obama’s record, both in terms of his support for coal and for his full throated endorsement of the fiction that is “clean coal,” the fact that the administration filed an brief urging the Supreme Court overrule the appellate court decision does not surprise me one bit:
The Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to toss out an appeals court decision that would allow lawsuits against major emitters for their contributions to global warming, stunning environmentalists who see the case as a powerful prod on climate change.
In the case, AEP v. Connecticut, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a coalition of states, environmental groups and New York City. The decision, handed down last year, said they could proceed with a lawsuit that seeks to force several of the nation’s largest coal-fired utilities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
……
In a brief (pdf) filed yesterday on behalf of the Tennessee Valley Authority, acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal agreed with the defendants, saying that U.S. EPA’s newly finalized regulations on greenhouse gases have displaced that type of common-law claim.
……
Matt Pawa, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the case, said he and his colleagues expected the White House to stay out of the matter. During a meeting with more than 30 administration lawyers at the solicitor general’s office on June 24, it seemed they had “a lot of friends in the room,” he said.
“We feel stabbed in the back,” Pawa said. “This was really a dastardly move by an administration that said it was a friend of the environment. With friends like this, who needs enemies?”
I would also note that the regulations that the Solicitor General is touting, which he says should preempt this suit, only applies to new power plants, and these new plants are not the subject of the nuisance suit.
I suppose that a lot of folks will blame Rahm, who has a history of sucking up to miscreant industries for campaign cash, but remember, Obama knows who and what Rahm is, and hired him. Remember, the Cossacks work for the Czar.
As gay activist Joe Sudbay noted at Americablog:
Welcome to our world.
Now, what these environmentalists don’t understand — yet — is that Team Obama isn’t really on their side. Not in the way they think, anyway. It’s a tough lesson and hard to swallow. The gays learned it early on, between Rick Warren and the DOMA brief.
(Mr. Pawa and Mr. Bookbinder should be prepared. They’ll see a lot of their colleagues in the environmental movement make excuses and apologize for what the Obama administration did.)
If the Obama were serious about carbon emission regulation, then it should see this suit would be a wonderful lever to get Congress to move on comprehensive legislation.
The only two justifications for this brief are that they aren’t serious, or, once again, they are trying to expand the reach of the executive branch.
IP and Protecting the Incumbent Players
Once again, the Obama administration has gone for a maximalist position on IP, and they are looking at making radio stations start paying license fees to performers, aka a “public performance right”:
The recording industry scored a significant victory today with news that the Obama administration will provide its “strong support” for the Performance Rights Act. The bill would force over-the-air radio stations to start coughing up cash for the music they play; right now, the stations pay songwriters, but not the actual recording artists.
I will say that this is a basically fair, since web broadcasters, satellite radio have to pay these fees, and the status of Radio is a historical artifact dating back something like 70 years.
The record distributors love this, and the radio stations (rather unsurprisingly) hate this law.
This, in and of itself, is neither surprising, nor particularly interesting to me.
What is interesting is that the RIAA is trying to cut a Verizon/Google type deal on this:
Music labels and radio broadcasters can’t agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.
The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage. “The backroom scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity,” thundered CEA president Gary Shapiro. Such a move is “not in our national interest.”
This is really pretty absurd. If you have an MP3 player, you can play the song that you want, and not tune into the repetitive crap that comes out of the increasingly conglomerate dominated commercial FM airwaves, though I could see listening to a sporting event.
On a deeper level though, this is profoundly disturbing, because it shows how blatant the incumbents in various segments of our society have become in divvying up the spoils through as privileged participants in the legislative process.
If people really want to change the tenor of Washington, they should start by taking on this sort of corruption head on, and get to Republicans and Democrats calling each other names later.
If There is the Slimmest Possibility of Making the Wrong Decision……
Then you can be certain that soon to be former New York Governor David Paterson will be in favor of it:
Gov. David A. Paterson said Tuesday that he would consider offering state-owned property to the developers of a $100 million Muslim center and mosque if they decided to build it farther from ground zero.
The governor, wading into a fierce national debate over freedom of religion, said “there is no reason why” the center, known as Park51, should not be built as planned, two blocks from the former World Trade Center.
Well, let’s see. We have:
- Appealing to the basest of bigoted demagogues.
- Just how far from ground zero do you have to be?
- Why is it OK for a strip club to be located less than a block away from the mosque sites.
- This a blatantly unconstitutional engagement of religion by the government. It’s both a subsidy, and a ban based on a the religion of those involved.
- OK, I’m a Jew, when does my shul get its free real estate on Manhattan?
Seriously, this guy almost makes McConnell and Boehner look good.
Why Yes, The Obama Administration is Paying to Offshore Your Job
It’s called the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO),and USAID is spending $30 million dollars to train workers in Sri Lanka in order to outsource IT jobs from the United States:
Under director Rajiv Shah [an Obama political appointee], the United States Agency for International Development will partner with private outsourcers in Sri Lanka to teach workers there advanced IT skills like Enterprise Java (Java EE) programming, as well as skills in business process outsourcing and call center support. USAID will also help the trainees brush up on their English language proficiency.
USAID is contributing about $10 million to the effort, while its private partners are investing roughly $26 million.
“To help fill workforce gaps in BPO and IT, USAID is teaming up with leading BPO and IT/English language training companies to establish professional IT and English skills development training centers,” the U.S. Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka, said in a statement posted Friday on its Web site.
“Courses in Business Process Outsourcing, Enterprise Java, and English Language Skills will be offered at no charge to over 3,000 under- and unemployed students who will then participate in on-the-job training schemes with private firms,” the embassy said.
Oh, I forgot to add, they are also doing this in Armenia.
I don’t think that Barack Obama really wants to send your jobs overseas, but I do think that there are people in his administration are “strongly free trade” and they think that being “strongly free trade” means that agencies of the US government have an obligation to move jobs out of the country in this manner, on the theory that one day, eventually, these countries will develop a middle class that will buy the sh%$ that we make.
Still, if this is not on the front page of some right wing blogger in the next 3 days, I would be very surprised.
It betrays a level of political incompetence and arrogance that positively boggles the mind.
I’m going to check and see if it is on Slashdot, and if not, I’ll do some blog whoring with the story.
No Big Surprise
The Annual Report of the Board Of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance And Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds is out and Social Security is just fine, and healthcare reform has improved Medicare’s financial picture.
This is not a surprise. If you follow this at all, and possess the math skills required to engage in basic counting, and are not demagoguing this for political advantage, then you already know this.
Of course, the conditions that I have stated rule out 95% of the reporters, 99% of the pundits, and 101% of the Republicans out there, (someone must be hitting the button twice) so we still get the “youngsters will never see social security” bullsh%$.
Barack Obama Hires Enemy of Healthcare Reform to Manage Implementation
Liz Fowler, who was a former staffer of Max Baucus, who went to work as a lobbyist for Wellpoint (vice president of public policy), and then came back to Baucus to kill the public option, has has been hired by the White House to implement the regulations for healthcare reform.
Yet more of the criminally naive concept of bringing enemies in to run programs that they did their best to destroy.
Additionally, it makes a joke of yet another of Obama’s promises, to shut down the revolving door between government and industry, because if Ms. Fowler were going through the revolving door any faster, it would look like a Cuisinart set to liquefy.