Just want to get this post in before the year runs out.
In 1911, Ernest Rutherford proposed a model for the atom - of electrons in the outer region and a small positive nucleus - that still holds today. There have been several refinements since then, with the Bohr, electron cloud, wave, and energy state models that were more accurate, but Rutherford was the first to point in the right direction. Prior to that atoms were thought to be either hard objects with no structure or a diffuse mixture of positive and negative charges.
Of course, since 1911, a lot more was learned - especially in the subsequent 30 years of nuclear physics. Still, it's easy to forget how not too long ago, our understanding of nature was extremely lacking.
John Walsh of America's Most Wanted speaks out about cuts and taxes:
The man is getting radical. Crooks & Liars reports:
Wow. America's Most Wanted host John Walsh has an earful about cutting the government to spark economic growth this week. He notes letting police and firefighters go is bad for our communities. Flint, MI which laid off two-thirds of its police force, according to Walsh has become a "small city murder capital of the U.S."
But then, Walsh goes full Occupy.
"Who's going to pay for the economic meltdown - the huge debt?" He says, "How about companies? Companies that have made more money than in the whole history of the world and they've done it with less people. Some of the Fortune 500 companies pay no state taxes at all. We all know about GE not paying federal taxes."
And he continues to rail on this conservative cure-all for our economic woes: "It's a quick fix but it's not a good fix. We got to make the corporations pay more money and we can't let these people [police] go. You got to speak up."
Once again, CBS Evening News has - as their leadoff story - a report about how consumers are expected to spend lots of money purchasing things this Monday. No, there are no hard figures, just projections.
"As many as 100 million shoppers could hit the stores this week."
Were the ad hominem diatribes that Hitchens specialized in evidence of his moral integrity and political courage? On the contrary, TV producers and magazine editors love sensational trash talk about media “personalities,” including Jehovah. The philippics of Hitchens were calculated and successful career moves by a gifted publicity hound who spent the last part of his career, appropriately, at Vanity Fair, a magazine best known for models and actors on its covers. (...)
Hitchens was affirming rather than challenging an elite consensus when, on behalf of atheism, he mocked religious believers as not merely mistaken but contemptible and moronic. The religious are despised and dreaded by upscale Americans, and their British court jester could say what they dare not say themselves ...
Here's a story that ran on Tuesday, December 20: (emp add)
LOS ANGELES - Bonnie Ornitz has been out of work for six months.
"All those senses of accomplishment I had from doing my job - they just seem like ancient history now," she told CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy.
Ornitz was laid off by IBM in June, after 30 years in the information technology field.
Ornitz says being out of work is "exponentially more difficult," than she thought it'd be. "Not working is not an option. I come from a family where people worked until they were retired or dead."
Ornitz has applied for 30 jobs near Los Angeles and has had just two interviews. She's collected 24 unemployment checks - $450 each week. She calls the unemployment checks "a godsend."
"It is a lifeline for me and to take that away is going to be devastating," says Ornitz.
Obama to House Republicans: "This is not a game"
If Congress does not extend the unemployment benefits program, Ornitz's checks will stop coming Jan. 7.
House rejects payroll tax cut compromise
Ornitz is frustrated by what she sees in Washington.
"They don't face the things we face. They all want my vote -- but I don't exist to them. They don't want to see it. We're not important to them."
She added: "I don't think they care one bit - on either party."
According to the National Employment Law Project, 1.8 million Americans will lose their federal unemployment benefits in January. As many as six million will lose them during 2012. California would be hardest hit - 714,000 people would be cut off.
"I'm not someone who is looking to take advantage of the system," says Ornitz. "I want to get on with my life and I want to work."
She's now planning to use her life's savings to pay her bills. She may have to sell her house if she can't find work.
Viewers come off with the impression that both parties are uninterested in extending unemployment. The facts are otherwise.
Republicans were never much interested in extending unemployment. This was evident in the negotiations of December 2010 when a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts was traded for continued 99-week unemployment insurance.
But more important is this: The current (Republican) House-passed bill that extends the Social Security cut has a provision that reduces the unemployment from 99 to 79 weeks - and possibly 59 weeks (depending on circumstances).
CBS News will not tell viewers that important aspect of the legislation in their story about the impact of unemployment insurance. CBS News will not let viewers know the House Republican position on this issue.
Paul Ryan. Here's what Time has to say about the guy:
Through a combination of hard work, good timing and possibly suicidal guts, the Wisconsin Republican managed to harness his party to a dramatic plan for dealing with America's rapidly rising public debt.
Then there's this:
The supply-sider from Janesville, Wis., tapped into a deep well of anxiety over trillion-dollar deficits at home and the threat of debt-fueled calamity in Europe.
Two points. First, there was no anxiety over European debt when Ryan came out with his plan in early 2011.
Second point is that this line:
The supply-sider from Janesville ...
should read
The economic crank from Janesville ...
because supply-side is simply wrong. It doesn't do what it claims to accomplish.
FYI, it was David Von Drehle who wrote that crappy article
Remember when the major news outlets were excitedly reporting that holiday sales were up, up, up!
As usual, they uncritically reported numbers from trade associations, like the National Federation of Retailers. Turns out the real figures for November are an increase of 0.2% from the previous year, which is terrible. The previous year, remember, was considered not-too-good because bad weather hampered shopping. This year there was no bad weather.
This is a small example of how the press has abandoned their work of being real reporters instead of parroting whatever a trade group or political party spews.
Posted at 06:00 AM ET, 12/06/2011 Obama administration targeting food stamp fraud as program reaches record highs By Ed O'Keefe
With more Americans relying on the program, the Obama administration on Tuesday plans to announce new steps to crack down on SNAP fraud amid estimates suggesting as much as $753 million in federal food aid is spent fraudulently each year.
Yes, there is fraud that needs to be looked into. But you don't announce a crack-down in the immediate aftermath of a prominent politician spewing nonsense about the program. Why? Because it will validate him.
For three years, Congress and the President have lived in different realms. Obama clearly has little use for his former colleagues in Congress. Indeed, he is making one of his campaign themes opposition to the “do-nothing Congress.” The fact that he doesn’t differentiate between his own party members in Congress and the GOP stalwarts infuriates his fellow Democrats.
Congress believes that Obama makes good speeches, delivers fanciful budgets, and then heads out of town when the rough work becomes necessary.
Both sides are right.
So now, American sees Washington, D.C., divided almost into tribes. Democratic Senators who want to do something, especially something positive that may help them retain control of the Upper Body next November. Democratic House members who just sit back and watch and hope that Republicans will continue to wander around and confront lower and lower approval ratings. Republican House members, split among those who know what a legislature is supposed to do and those who oppose the very notion of a legislature. And, Republican Senators, also split, between those bound by theological opposition to taxes on billionaires and those who would like to at least give an appearance of governing.
It is this kind of tribal behavior, encouraged by the two party’s caucuses in the House and Senate, and the indifference of the President, that now threaten the nation.
It's a mess, for sure. Hard to see how much can get done in these circumstances.
The Murdoch press constantly promotes conspiracy theories. This is no surprise since Murdoch's origins are in the extreme down-market tabloid trash, now elevated in prominence since it's on television.
When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he was 69 at the time. When Bob Dole ran for president in 1996, he was 73 at the time. When John McCain ran for president in 2008, he was 72 at the time.
In each of those instances, the age of the candidate was a topic for discussion.
If Newt Gingrich becomes the Republican candidate in 1012, he will be 69 on election day. Will be there any talk about about him possibly being too old?
And excerpts big chunks. On the failure of institutions:
The Iraq war was a kind of stress test applied to the American body politic. And every major system and organ failed the test: the executive and legislative branches, the military, the intelligence world, the for-profits, the nonprofits, the media. It turned out that we were not in good shape at all — without even realizing it. Americans just hadn’t tried anything this hard in around half a century. It is easy, and completely justified, to blame certain individuals for the Iraq tragedy. But over the years, I’ve become more concerned with failures that went beyond individuals, and beyond Iraq — concerned with the growing arteriosclerosis of American institutions. Iraq was not an exceptional case. It was a vivid symptom of a long-term trend, one that worsens year by year. The same ailments that led to the disastrous occupation were on full display in Washington this past summer, during the debt-ceiling debacle: ideological rigidity bordering on fanaticism, an indifference to facts, an inability to think beyond the short term, the dissolution of national interest into partisan advantage.
We can upgrade our iPhones, but we can’t fix our roads and bridges. We invented broadband, but we can’t extend it to 35 percent of the public. We can get 300 television channels on the iPad, but in the past decade 20 newspapers closed down all their foreign bureaus. We have touch-screen voting machines, but last year just 40 percent of registered voters turned out, and our political system is more polarized, more choked with its own bile, than at any time since the Civil War. There is nothing today like the personal destruction of the McCarthy era or the street fights of the 1960s. But in those periods, institutional forces still existed in politics, business, and the media that could hold the center together. It used to be called the establishment, and it no longer exists. Solving fundamental problems with a can-do practicality — the very thing the world used to associate with America, and that redeemed us from our vulgarity and arrogance — now seems beyond our reach.
On our economic trajectory:
What was that arrangement? It is sometimes called “the mixed economy”; the term I prefer is “middle-class democracy.” It was an unwritten social contract among labor, business, and government — between the elites and the masses. It guaranteed that the benefits of the economic growth following World War II were distributed more widely, and with more shared prosperity, than at any time in human history. In the 1970s, corporate executives earned 40 times as much as their lowest-paid employees. (By 2007, the ratio was over 400 to 1.) Labor law and government policy kept the balance of power between workers and owners on an even keel, leading to a virtuous circle of higher wages and more economic stimulus. The tax code restricted the amount of wealth that could be accumulated in private hands and passed on from one generation to the next, thereby preventing the formation of an inherited plutocracy. The regulatory agencies were strong enough to prevent the kind of speculative bubbles that now occur every five years or so: between the Great Depression and the Reagan era there was not a single systemwide financial crisis, which is why recessions during those decades were far milder than they have since become. Commercial banking was a stable, boring business. (In movies from the 1940s and 1950s, bankers are dull, solid pillars of the community.) Investment banking, cordoned off by the iron wall of the Glass-Steagall Act, was a closed world of private partnerships in which rich men carefully weighed their risks because they were playing with their own money. Partly as a result of this shared prosperity, political participation reached an all-time high during the postwar years (with the exception of those, such as black Americans in the South, who were still denied access to the ballot box).
At the same time, the country’s elites were playing a role that today is almost unrecognizable. They actually saw themselves as custodians of national institutions and interests. The heads of banks, corporations, universities, law firms, foundations, and media companies were neither more nor less venal, meretricious, and greedy than their counterparts today. But they rose to the top in a culture that put a brake on these traits and certainly did not glorify them.
... that archetypal 1978 couple with the AMC Pacer was not voting to see its share of the economic pie drastically reduced over the next 30 years. They were not fed up with how little of the national income went to the top one percent or how unfairly progressive the tax code was. They did not want to dismantle government programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which had brought economic security to the middle class. They were not voting to weaken government itself, as long as it defended their interests. But for the next three decades, the dominant political faction pursued these goals as though they were what most Americans wanted. Organized money and the conservative movement seized that moment back in 1978 to begin a massive, generation-long transfer of wealth to the richest Americans. The transfer continued in good economic times and bad, under Democratic presidents and Republican, when Democrats controlled Congress and when Republicans did.
Packer's essay - and Dreher's commentary - include harping about the change in manners and morals (1960's alert!) that isn't convincing. And the establishment in the past wasn't all that wonderful. But as to the broad outline of what's happened in the last 40 years, Packer is pretty much on target.
"I think we have a good history of providing transparency and control over who can see your information."
Who could disagree with that?
Of interest, the settlement with the FTC over deceptive practices regarding privacy of users includes a hefty fine of $16,000 should Facebook violate provision of the deal. That'll keep them honest.
If its the Monday after Black Friday, then its national hype the fabricated data day!
Every year around this time, we get a series of loose reports coincident with Black Friday and the holiday weekend. Each year, they are wildly optimistic. And like clockwork, the media idiotically repeats these trade organizations spin like its gospel. When the data finally comes in, we learn that the early reports were pure hokum, put out by trade groups to create shopping hype. (Yes, the Media ALWAYS screws the pooch big time on this one, with the occasional exception).
Let’s start with this whopper from an utterly breathless press release from the National Retail Federation:
“U.S. retail sales during Thanksgiving weekend climbed 16 percent to a record as shoppers flocked to stores earlier and spent more, according to the National Retail Federation.
Sales totaled $52.4 billion, and the average shopper spent $398.62 during the holiday weekend, up from $365.34 a year earlier, the Washington-based trade group said in a statement today, citing a survey conducted by BIGresearch. More than a third of that — an average of $150.53 — was spent online.”
No, retail sales did not climb 16%. Surveys where people forecast their own future spending are, as we have seen repeatedly in the past, pretty much worthless.
We actually have no idea just yet as to whether, and exactly how much, sales climbed. The data simply is not in yet. The most you can accurately say is according to some foot traffic measurements, more people appeared to be in stores on Black Friday 2011 than in 2010.
There's more, including a jaundiced view of the 6.6% sales increase (that came from ShopperTrak).
I remember not too long ago there was a report from one of these outfits that retail sales were up 46% from the year ago. That was so transparently absurd that the major press didn't run with it.
I was in a discount retail store at 8:00 PM on Saturday, and it was completely empty of shoppers. That may have been an aberration, but my guess is that retail sales are up 3% from 2010 and not stellar, considering we still have 9% unemployment.
Check out this exchange from yesterday's Fox News Sunday program:
WALLACE: ... economists say there's a real impact if you don't extend payroll tax cuts and employment insurance. And let's put it up on the screen.
They estimate and again both of these run out January 1st, that failure to extend the payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits will cut GDP growth 1 percent to 2 percent next year, and cost more than half million jobs.
You say you question the stimulative affect. But according to these economists, there's a real danger if Congress doesn't extend both of those, put the country back into a recession?
KYL: Chris, I don't know who those economists are. I just read a piece by Art Laffer, who is a respected economist, who say that isn't true.
Laffer is the go-to guy if you need a "scholar" to support your peculiar economic policies. (John Lott does that for gun control. Lord Monckton for global warming.)
A woman who allegedly fired pepper spray at other customers during a Black Friday sale has surrendered to authorities, Los Angeles police said Saturday. Police Sgt. Jose Valle said the woman who allegedly caused minor injuries to 20 shoppers at a Los Angeles-area Walmart turned herself in Friday night. ...
The incident was among those nationwide in which violence marred the traditional kickoff to the holiday shopping season.
In the most serious case, a robber shot a shopper who refused to give up his purchases outside a San Leandro, Calif., Walmart store, leaving the victim hospitalized in critical but stable condition. Police in San Leandro, about 15 miles east of San Francisco, said the victim and his family were walking to their car around 1:45 a.m. Friday when they were confronted by a group of men who demanded their shopping items. When the family refused, a fight broke out, and one of the robbers pulled a gun and shot the man, said Sgt. Mike Sobek.
Meanwhile, police in suburban Phoenix came under fire when a video was posted online showing a 54-year-old grandfather on the floor of a Walmart store with a bloody face, after police said he was subdued Thursday night trying to shoplift during a chaotic rush for discounted video games. ...
In Sacramento, Calif., a man was stabbed outside a mall Friday in an apparent gang-related incident as shoppers were hitting the stores. The victim was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, police said. The stabbing stemmed from a fight between two groups around 3 a.m. in front of a Macy's department store at the Arden Fair Mall.
That is how CNN reports the fact that Romney's campaign took Obama's quoting a McCain staffer and misleadingly presented it as Obama's view. Obama even said "and I quote". But the network is too timid to call foul. Instead, we get treated to the classic "Democrats say", which implies there is no objective judgement to be rendered. (See also Alex Pareene's commentary at Salon.)
Earlier, on the CBS Early Show, they had Jan Crawford report on the Romney ad. She said this:
"as far as conservtives go it's not so controversial, and Romney's courting that vote, and they think it's pretty brilliant"
There was the admission that Obama's words were taken out of context, but that's considered SOP these days, so what's the fuss?
One of the U.C. Davis policemen who pepper sprayed a passive, non-violent bunch of students was John Pike. He's reported to be 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighing 245 pounds.
That's a Body Mass Index of just over 35, which is Obese Class II (BMI between 35 and 40). Something like 5% of the male population are in that category.
In rare cases, like offensive linemen in football, that kind of BMI means not having the strength and agility to deal with any kind of physical confrontation. And that leads to the casual use of power-substitutes, which is what pepper spray is.
The man should have been behind a desk, not in front of a crowd of protesters. It's as simple as that.
Conservatives have been driven to these fevered anxieties as much by their own trauma as by external events. In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief.
The Bush years cannot be repudiated, but the memory of them can be discarded to make way for a new and more radical ideology, assembled from bits of the old GOP platform that were once sublimated by the party elites but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury, and paranoid visions of a Democratic Party controlled by ACORN and the New Black Panthers.
"crank monetary theories" are definitely riding high at the moment.
And this:
Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. ....
But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. (...)
We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.
Best argument for the use of pepper spray against passive people:
A commenter to a Sacramento Bee story about the U.C. Davis event writes:
You have to remember the cops are armed and risk someone jumping on their back, being overpowered by a mob and someone getting their gun; now some one is going to get shot. The same folks who are crying foul about excessive force would be much more outraged if one of the scenarios I mentioned played out.
You see, because the police were armed, they had to use excessive force against unarmed people. Makes total sense.
In the wake of the incredibly stupid pepper-spraying of U.C. Davis students, E.D.Kain writes:
I’d really started to grow a little cold on Occupy Wall Street lately. Protests only go so far. Tent cities eventually wear out their welcome. At some point you need to get up, get online, start trying to elect people. At some point, you have to also play the game in order to win.
But it’s hard not to be supportive of people exercising their democratic rights, their right to dissent, who end up suffering violence for it.
He sure is trying. Some recent statements he made on O'Reilly's show:
“This president’s traveled around the country making excuses for America, apologizing for America, saying that America is not an exemplary country, and then he gets on TV and talks about that Americans are lazy, that they’ve lost their ambition, that they’ve lost their imagination.”
“I think this is a man who really, if he believed that Americans were hardworking, that they were ready to ignite this economy, then we wouldn’t have the tax policy, wouldn’t have the regulatory policies in place that are killing jobs in this country.”
“I think Barack Obama is a socialist.”
Pretty insane stuff. Obama supports a particular tax policy because he thinks American's aren't hardworking. Right.
It's the one where 30% of prospective Republican primary voters said they'd most trust Newt Gingrich with nuclear weapons. Further down the list there was this question (asked of all people):
Let's imagine the Constitution allowed presidents to serve a third term. For whom would you vote if the candidates were: Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton? Clinton 58% Bush 34% (Don’t know) 3% (Would not vote) 5%
WASHINGTON — A state permit to carry a concealed firearm would be valid in almost every other state in the country under legislation the House passed Wednesday.
The first pro-gun bill the House has taken up this year and the first since Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was severely injured in a gun attack in January, it had the National Rifle Association’s backing and passed by a comfortable margin. The vote was 272-154, with only seven Republicans voting against it and 43 Democrats supporting it. ...
Under the House legislation, people with a concealed carry permit in one state could carry a concealed weapon in every other state that gives people the right to carry concealed weapons. While states have various standards for issuing such permits, currently only Illinois and the District of Columbia prohibit the concealed carrying of weapons.
Liberty University enacted a policy allowing visitors, students and staff who have concealed weapons permits to carry guns on campus.
The policy, approved Friday by the Board of Trustees and announced to students Wednesday, replaces a complete ban of firearms on university grounds. ...
Liberty now has the most lenient firearms policy among local colleges and universities. Lynchburg College, Randolph College and Central Virginia Community College do not permit anyone except law enforcement to carry firearms.
It brought the issue of economic misery back into the spotlight, but missed out on an opportunity to generate results. The Occupy movement should have had leadership that would (a) set goals, (b) be good spokespeople for those goals, (c) discipline those elements that threaten the movement's public image.
The goals needn't be specific policy items, like restricting drilling in the Gulf (although Matt Taibbi has a list of five to start with). The problem with our politics today are the result of us having a non-representative government (both R & D). To fix that, you have to get out and vote. The lesson of 2010 is that with a 30% falloff in voting, you get nutcases like Allen West into the House of Representatives.
... there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands with worry that OWS was playing right into the hands of assholes like Krauthammer. Don't give them any ammunition! we counseled. Stay on message! Be specific! ...
... OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.
People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.
People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.
People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.
That is not a formula for success in implementing change. You have to engage the governing elements, and the way to do that is to elect people who represent your interests. But we're not hearing anything like that now. Instead, it's getting darker and more chaotic:
The Occupy movement is drifting towards a resigned fatalism, much like the stoicism that kept the peasants from rising for almost 2,000 years. That is something we do not need, but Occupy is taking us there.
ATLANTA (AP) — Republican Herman Cain said God convinced him to enter the race for president, comparing himself to Moses: "'You've got the wrong man, Lord. Are you sure?'"
The Georgia business executive played up his faith Saturday after battling sexual harassment allegations for two weeks, trying to shift the conversation to religion, an issue vital to conservative Republicans, especially in the South.
In a speech Saturday to a national meeting of young Republicans, Cain said the Lord persuaded him after much prayer.
"That's when I prayed and prayed and prayed. I'm a man of faith — I had to do a lot of praying for this one, more praying than I've ever done before in my life," Cain said. "And when I finally realized that it was God saying that this is what I needed to do, I was like Moses. 'You've got the wrong man, Lord. Are you sure?'"
Once he made the decision, Cain said, he did not look back.
Four women have now accused Cain of sexually harassing them when he ... [etc]
Odd that Cain only waited until today to tell us this explosive news.
The Sun newspaper may be shut down if a new allegation of hacking is true.
Admitted to spying on lawyers representing hacking victims (and one lawyer's 17 year old daughter).
Mr Murdoch also said revelations that his company had used a private detective to spy on lawyers acting for phone hacking victims in 2010 was "appalling" and "unacceptable" and apologised to committee member Mr Watson, who had also been put under surveillance in the past.
Claimed not to know about various goings-on at the paper. (New York magazine)
Via Atrios, we learn that the right wing is in a tizzy over a Christmas tree tax. The story is being promoted by Drudge and the Fox Nation. Other bloggers are chiming in.
The story originated from the Heritage Foundation in a post written by David S. Addington. (Where it has picked up over 1,000 comments from outraged conservatives.)
Does that name sound familiar? It should. David Addington was chief of staff to former Vice President Dick Cheney. Addington was described by U.S. News & World Report as "the most powerful man you've never heard of".
He was one of the biggest supporters of unbridled executive power:
Addington has consistently advocated that under the Constitution, the President has substantial and expansive powers as commander-in-chief during wartime, if need be. He is the legal force behind over 750 signing statements that President George W. Bush issued when signing bills passed by Congress, expanding the practice relative to other Presidents.
And there are various clams that Addington was a major force behind the authorization of torture.
Why there hasn't been more coverage of these stories is a mystery: (emp add)
A private investigator was hired by the now-shuttered News of the World tabloid to perform surveillance on two lawyers representing victims of the Murdoch company phone-hacking scandal. As if that's not grimy enough, the ex-cop investigator says he's snitching now because News International didn't pay him. Derek Webb claims he was hired to follow Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris, along with Lewis's ex-wife and teenage daughter, to uncover information that might stop them from taking on more phone-hacking cases.
"To follow my teenage daughter, my youngest daughter and video her is nothing short of sick," said Lewis. "On another level looking at me, that's not how you litigate, you play the ball you don't play the man … this is Mafia-like."
A spokesperson for the media company said, "News International's enquiries have led the company to believe that Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris were subject to surveillance. While surveillance is not illegal, it was clearly deeply inappropriate in these circumstances. This action was not condoned by any current executive at the company."
The spying is said to have occurred within the last year and a half, while James Murdoch was executive chairman. Murdoch is due in front of Parliament to discuss the phone-hacking matter on Thursday. The questions continue to mount.
Mr. Bowles, speaking for himself and Mr. Simpson, outlined a package that he said could reduce deficits by $2.6 trillion over 10 years. The package includes $800 billion of new revenue, $300 billion in savings from annual appropriations known as discretionary spending, $600 billion from health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid, $300 billion from other entitlement programs and [savings of] $200 billion from use of a less generous formula to calculate cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security and other benefits.
Social Security is not part of the federal budget. It is not going to go into the red in the next 10 years. What's it doing in this package from Simpson and Bowles?
The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.
He prefaces that with his own analysis which asserts that there are two types of inequality: big city Blue Inequality and small town Red Inequality. Of course, no numbers are provided in this analysis (except for a lonesome pair that do not make his case).
This is where Brooks lack of access to data is so important. The wage gap between college grads and non-college grads is really a 90s story and even more an 80s story. In the last decade, workers with only a college degree (i.e. no professional or advanced degree) did not share in the benefits of economic growth. The ratio of the wages of those with just college degrees to those without college degrees has not risen much since the early 90s.
Wages of non-college educated workers did suffer badly in the 80s due to policies such as the over-valuation of the dollar that made many U.S. manufactured goods uncompetitive internationally, the deliberate increase in unemployment during the Volcker years which threw millions of non-college educated workers out of work, and anti-union measures (e.g. the firing of the PATCO strikers and an anti-union National Labor Relations Board). However since the 90s, the wages of workers with high school degrees have not departed much from the wages of workers with just college degrees, the vast majority of the economy's gains have gone to the top 1 percent. It is too bad that David Brooks apparently does not have access to this data.
Brooks is becoming more and more transparently a hack. In his column, he tries to re-slice the pie from 1%/99% to a 30%/60% division by lumping college graduates in with the ultra rich. Nice try.
This comment at Baker's blog is apt:
... again and again in his twice-weekly NYT column, Brooks tosses together a pseudo-sociological mishmash straight from Applebee's non-existent salad bar in an attempt to coin phrases that somehow justify conservative selfishness and shortsightness. Thus "Bobos" of the corporate upper class are highly tolerant of others, "cluster liberals" favor maximum unity, "network liberals" favor coalitions, "creedal conservatives" favor transcendent order, and "dispositional conservatives"are Burkean, tempermental types who prize epistomological modesty. Today (gasp), he provides us with two different kinds of inequality: "blue inequality" between the top 1 per cent and the rest in certain big cities, and "red inequality" between those with and without college degrees in certain smaller cities.
And another:
Brooks supports all this Republican regressiveness. His job is to distract with data free false equivalence arguments that sometimes appear "reasonable" to someone who hasn't checked the facts.
CURIOUS POINT: If Brooks wants to go there - the change in inequality during the 1980's - will he denounce Ronald Reagan for enabling that shift? You know the answer to that.
This comment by Yglesias is on target: “the TNR staff editorial on the subject [of OWS] feels distinctly like an op-ed penned eleven years ago about anti-globalization protestors, put on ice, and then re-animated with a hasty rewrite that fails to consider the actual political and economic circumstances.”
The staff editorial itself is not so important. What’s important is that, once upon a time, there were debates about trade ‘liberalization’ – globalization – that used to divide neoliberals and liberals and progressives. Basically, the neoliberals were gung-ho for trade on the grounds that the alternative was protectionism that amounted to shooting your own foot, and didn’t do any good for the poor in the Third World. And the progressives saw jobs being outsourced, labor unions weakening. Liberals were those caught in the squishy middle, per usual. ...
[Yglesias] considers himself a neoliberal and sees, correctly, I think, that anyone committed to that market-oriented outlook is more or less committed to sympathy for the core grievances expressed by the OWS protesters. Neoliberalism was always in favor of markets as means, not ends. Neoliberalism was never – or was never supposed to be – the view that being in favor of trade liberalizaton means market fundamentalism in everything. Neoliberalism says market liberalization should go hand in hand with progressive taxation and appropriate regulation so the pains that buy the gains are mitigated and borne equitably. Spread the gain, to spread the pain. If liberalization means making the 1% richer and everyone else poorer, you shouldn’t take the deal. Only (some) conservatives and (some) libertarians should be willing to take that deal. ...
About:
"Neoliberalism says market liberalization should go hand in hand with progressive taxation and appropriate regulation so the pains that buy the gains are mitigated and borne equitably."
That never happened. Instead, we got globalization and no relief. This is something neo-liberals still fail to comprehend. What they did do, is orient towards "pity charity" as Freddie deBoer points out: (emp add)
There’s a troubling form of liberalism that is increasingly found in the wonky, think-tank-and-establishment-media blogosphere that is so influential these days. I’ve called it, in the past, globalize/grow/give progressivism. Mike Konczal of Rortybomb has referred to it as pity charity liberalism. ... Whatever you want to call it, this vision of the liberal project defines itself through the social safety net. Its orientation is towards expanding and protecting a redistributive social welfare system. Meanwhile, it is at best uninterested in (and often downright hostile towards) worker organization, unions, regulation, and other attempts to empower workers in relation to capital and poor people in relation to the rich. The idea is that, if you get the economy going well enough, you can redistribute enough money to the poor that they’ll be alright, even while you’ve undermined their ability to collectively bargain, raise the value of their labor, and exercise power. ...
The first problem with pity charity liberalism is that the people advocating it tend to be far more optimistic about getting the social welfare state they want than they should be. I’ve been using the example of health care reform: a decent health care system has to be a part of a minimally fair social welfare system. We had a president with a serious mandate who campaigned explicitly on health care reform, majorities in both houses of congress, a uniquely favorable political moment, and an objective that broad majorities of Americans have supported for years. We just barely got a compromised bill through, and it is under perpetual legal and political threat. If those are the conditions that we’re going to have to defend the welfare state under, I don’t see how anyone can be confident in purely redistributive liberalism.
Contrast that with the history of the American labor movement. Check the record: on every issue of worker rights and protections, workers went first. They didn’t ask politicians to give them safer conditions, cleaner conditions, higher wages, shorter hours, more bargaining power, and a better system to redress their grievances. They demanded those things from the bosses, and they did so with the threat of shutting the whole operation down. Only after they had won those things did they eventually become codified in law. (It’s for this reason that May Day—a joke here, I’m afraid, but celebrated passionately in much of Europe and South America—is specifically a celebration of Haymarket square and American unions.) If we’ve lost those gains since, it’s been because of a very well-funded, coordinated and consistent effort by people in power to undermine unions and refuse to enforce existing labor law.
Even if you could guarantee a certain minimal welfare state, the idea of poor and working people depending on the largesse of the rich and powerful is obscene. Sometimes, people have to live under the charity of others. But nobody wants to in perpetuity, because they then are not in control of their own lives, and because having to do so leaves many feeling robbed of personal dignity. As long as economic security is a gift of those at the top, it can be taken away. And if the last several decades have shown us anything, it’s that for the richest, what they already have will never be enough. No matter how income inequality spirals out of control, no matter how absurd the gap between those on top and everybody else grows, they’ll look to take more. And the more that you make the people on the bottom dependent on charity, the less they’re able to protect their own interests.
The problem is that a system that generates enormous income inequality also generates enormous power inequality — and if corporations and the rich are allowed to amass huge amounts of economic power, they'll always use that power to keep their own tax rates low. It's nearly impossible to create a high-tax/high-service state if your starting point is a near oligarchy where the rich control the levers of political power.
“We will always have people in this country through hardship, through no fault of their own, who won’t be able to afford health care,” Bachmann said. “That’s just the way it is. But usually what we have are charitable organizations or hospitals who have enough left over so that they can pick up the cost for the indigent who can’t afford it.
“But what we have to do is be a profitable nation that’s growing, so that we can pay for those people who can’t afford it through no fault of their own. Once ‘Obamacare’ is gone, this is what we have to do.“
That sentiment was echoed on NBC's Nightly News this Monday with this:
Seven-year-old Timmy “Mini” Tyrrell learned his friend had cancer, and he decided he could help raise money by racing go-karts. Timmy calls it “Mini’s Mission,” and so far he’s raised $7,000 and counting. NBC’s Anne Thompson has the story.
The day before, CBS ended its evening news with a story about how a single mom was in economic trouble (unemployed, etc.) and how a lady befriended her and helped her out.
There could have been stories about how government aid agencies - and the staff - help people. Instead, we are shown problems being solved by private effort. Both take place, of course, but the bias in reporting is to the "feel good" maudlin story that excludes government programs that we have established and paid for.
Popular blogger Yglesias has a post about labor's declining share of national income. He starts out with:
Peter Orszag has a column about the declining labor share of national income that concludes by saying that “We are effectively missing $500 billion a year in wages, and no one has a credible set of ideas that would bring it back.” ...
And then goes on to argue with another blogger about arcane issues about volatility of the statistics.
But Yglesias really should pay attention to what Orszag wrote. This, for example: (emp add)
The two primary drivers are globalization and technological change. From 1980 to 2005, as the world became more integrated, the effective labor supply available on a global basis expanded by 100 percent to 300 percent (depending on how the estimates are done). That increased competition has pushed labor compensation down in the industrialized economies. ...
In a 2007 paper for the International Monetary Fund, Florence Jaumotte and Irina Tytell tried to parse the various causes of the declining labor share. In the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Canada, the economists concluded, labor globalization and technological change played roughly equal roles, and crucial ones at that. In European countries and Japan, technological change was more significant than labor globalization. Other factors --including unions and privatization trends -- have been found to be influential, but labor globalization and technological change loom as the dominant forces.
There is something you can do about globalization. De-globalize, by enacting protectionist legislation.
It's simple, has worked before (U.S. in the nineteenth century). But the elites don't like it because they actually prefer to have labor compete against one another.
The website has recently added to the end of each stiry a poll of what readers thought. Here are the results:
Two-thirds have a positive reaction. Even though the vote total isn't particularly large (36), it is representative of the attitude of this crows as any frequent visitor to Fox Nation can attest.
That's part of our politics today. There is a real desire to hurt - really hurt - those in distress or showing concern for same.
They have no agenda - at least nothing directly targeting legislation pending or proposed. They have no leadership. They are not supporting or challenging particular politicians.
That could change, of course.
So what's Occupy Wall Street all about?
What it, and the other occupy events throughout the country, is doing is filling in a gap. For the last two years the press has largely ignored both the un/underemployed and those with jobs but under siege (foreclosures, health care expenses, college tuition, loans, etc.)
During past downturns, there would be a steady drumbeat of stories about those impacted. There was some of that in late 2008 and early 2009, but not much thereafter. Yet the economy hasn't done a whole lot of recovering, and so there are a lot of people feeling economic pain but feeling invisible.
Occupy Wall Street is something that they hope will change that.
CBS Evening News did a good job of explaining why it is a good thing. Presented to the viewer were cases where exports would grow. A firm that lost to Germany a contract for $100,000 and would have meant three jobs. Increased beef exports. And drilling machinery to Columbia. Those were the examples. To counter, they had Richard Trumka of the AFL/CIO who said he didn't like it and that he disagreed with Obama on the policy.
The vote triggered an essay at Salon by Andrew Leonard. Excerpts: (emp add)
After five years of squabbling, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives finally passed free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama on Wednesday. The Hill described the news as a “win” for President Obama. At first glance, the terminology seems a bit odd. The free trade agreements were originally negotiated by President George Bush, have been a high priority for Republicans ever since, and are considered extremely suspect by many Democrats ...
What’s more, in 2008, Obama campaigned in Ohio and Michigan against free trade agreements like NAFTA, for blatantly political reasons. But now it’s a victory for him to get the biggest free trade deal since NAFTA — the South Korean FTA — through Congress? ...
Whatever one thinks of Korea’s regulatory environment, the deal cut by Obama’s negotiators assuaged the U.S. auto industry’s concerns about the FTA, thus explaining the support from Michigan Democrats. But whether the changes will boost car imports significantly is still highly open to question. A study conducted by U.S. International Trade Council concluded that Korea’s carmakers would end up benefiting more from the deal in the long run than Detroit’s Big 3. ...
... anyone who has ever been to South Korea — or any other East Asian nation — understands immediately that, engine tax or no engine tax, big American cars just don’t make sense in crowded Asian cities where the cost of a gallon of gas is several dollars higher than in the U.S. And there is nothing that a free trade agreement can do to change that basic truth.
So there’s your big win for Obama: a legislative victory that upsets big swaths of his own party, won’t materially improve the fortunes of the domestic auto industry, and is unlikely to make a significant difference in states that are critical to his election.
Of course this will be a loser for those in the bottom half of society, since they will be pitted against even more low-wage workers overseas. Interesting that CBS chose only to present businesses that would gain (including cattle ranchers!) and not any that would lose.
Of interest, ABC World News had a segment on yesterday called "Made in America" where home builders were shown a list of domestic suppliers (e.g. for nails) and many saying that they'd consider it and also that buying locally made products keeps jobs here. In addition, there have been several reports our recently pointing out that the lower half of American workers have taken it on the chin due to 30 years of globalization, which caused their jobs to disappear or their wages to stagnate.
And in the face of that, Congress is continuing to pursue policies that will not help labor, but will help international businesses.
Republicans say the sorry economy is all the government's fault:
Last night during the Republican debate, Gingrich had this to say:
... the first person to fire is Bernanke, who is a disastrous chairman of the Federal Reserve ...
... let's be clear who put the fix in: The fix was put in by the federal government.
I'm going to say one last thing. I want to repeat this. Bernanke has in secret spent hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out one group and not bailing out another group. I don't see anybody in the news media demanding the kind of transparency at the Fed that you would demand of every other aspect of the federal government. And I think it is corrupt and it is wrong for one man to have that kind of secret power.
We are living in a destroyed economy for very learnable reasons -- very discernible reasons, inarguable reasons. It has been years since the evidence was procured. ... Everybody in that town knows what happened. Everybody in that town, including Karen Tumulty, knows what went on. They know it was Fannie and Freddie and they know it was the federal government imposing these rules on the lenders. They know it, and what infuriates me is that they continue with the lie.
And Hannity constantly references the Community Redevelopment Act.
So there you have it. It was the Fed, Fannie and Freddie, and the Community Redevelopment Act that caused the recession. Not the banks.
That will be the message in 2012 (although Romney probably will hedge)
Steve Jobs passing may be as good a date as any to mark ...
the end of the American Century.
Not to get into Apple fanboi stuff, but Jobs life and tenure parallels what may be the last gasp of economic satisfaction and superiority by the United States. First of all, Jobs grew up at a time when the states (especially California) were supportive of higher education. That brought forth the talent that, in Silicon Valley, got the computer revolution started. And then Jobs was part of the drive (by many others as well) that brought us much of the look and feel of so many electronic products that, for a while, were largely the province of American companies.
But that competitive advantage now appears to be over. Students have to pay much of the freight for a college education, a condition that is never good for a nation. The subsequent jobs risk going away to other parts of the world, which makes one wonder why bother with it at all. The rest of the world is catching up and is very hungry, and with unregulated globalization the competitive forces will be ferocious.
So maybe we can mark October 5, 2011 as an arbitrary - but reasonable - point in time when a distinctive American era ended.
In an economy where some folks are very rich and many folks are unemployed, why are there not more personal servants? Why don't Sergey Brin and Bill Gates have hundreds of people on personal retainer?
I pose this question as a way to think about labor markets and macroeconomics. Some possible answers:
1. It's a supply problem. Nobody wants to be a personal servant. They think that their human capital will depreciate less if they remain unemployed.
2. It's a demand problem. The marginal product of personal servants is very, very low. As Don Boudreaux points out, the impersonal servant of the market delivers us much higher quality goods and services than kings were able to obtain from all of their personal servants.
3. It's a recalculation problem. Gates and Brin cannot figure out what they would do with hundreds of personal retainers. They cannot even find a personal retainer who can figure out what they would do with hundreds of personal retainers.
So why haven't personal servants replaced blue collar manufacturing jobs killed by cheap imports and white collar jobs lost to outsourcing? Clearly, when the economy tanks, people will do most anything for a dollar (pace item 1) and be cheap enough so that the marginal value will be positive (pace item 2).
Which really means that it's a problem of imagination. If it's true that "Gates and Brin cannot figure out what they would do with hundreds of personal retainers" then those billionaires need help! What can we suggest for this duo - and their equally rich friends - do with hundreds of personal retainers? And why limit it to hundreds? Didn't the pharaoh have thousands of people toiling away? How about a Giza-sized pyramid for each billionaire? That would get this economy humming again. Let's do it!
It has the additional benefit of reestablishing clear class distinctions which we have sadly abandoned for about a century. A few extremely rich people. Lots of servants. No middle class. Paradise.
U.S. banking giant Citigroup Inc. said this week it would charge $15 per month for checking account holders who kept a balance below $6,000.
The firm's move comes on the heels of Bank of America's announcement this week that it would charge $5 for most debit card holders and sparked at least one desertion, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.
Cheryl Holt of Burbank, Calif., said she was "on my way out the door right now … off to start a new account at my nearest credit union."
"Should have done it years before," she added.
Holt said she received a letter with an "absurd salutation," that said, "Customers like you have told us that what they want from their banks are simple options and great rewards. We heard you and are writing to let you know that we are making some changes to your EZ Checking Package."
That said, the bank dropped the $180 per year bomb.
... “Pan Am” romanticizes the past, whereas “Mad Men,” on AMC, takes pleasure in slyly mocking antiquated mores ...
“Pan Am” takes place in New York, Paris and London, and practically every scene is shot in lush, golden light. The series is a paean to a more prosperous and confident era; even an airline terminal looks like a movie dream sequence about 1960s heaven. [It really does.]
If only for the costumes and ’60s music, “Pan Am” is amusing to see at least once, but if it has any instructive benefit at all, it’s as a mood indicator for these times, not those. There have been plenty of series set in earlier times — “That ’70s Show” was set in the Carter administration, “M*A*S*H” took place during the Korean War. But usually period shows pick through the past to meditate on the present, whether it’s examining generational rites of passage or critiquing the Vietnam War at a safe remove.
“Pan Am” doesn’t say much of anything about the current state of the nation except that our best days are behind us.
Expect that to be a recurring theme this decade (and beyond?).
... world is now a challenge to white-collar workers. They have to compete with a bigger pool of cheap geniuses ...
It is also both a huge challenge and opportunity. It has never been harder to find a job and never been easier — for those prepared for this world — to invent a job or find a customer. ...
What is out and what is in anymore?”
Matt Barrie, is the founder of freelancer.com, which today lists 2.8 million freelancers offering every service you can imagine. “The whole world is connecting up now at an incredibly rapid pace,” says Barrie, and many of these people are coming to freelancer.com to offer their talents. Barrie says he describes this rising global army of freelancers the way he describes his own team: “They all have Ph.D.’s. They are poor, hungry and driven: P.H.D.”
Barrie offered me a few examples on his site right now: Someone is looking for a designer to design “a fully functioning dune buggy.” Forty people are now bidding on the job at an average price of $268.
There's your glorious future, according to Tom Friedman. Global non-pooled labor bidding against itself for tiny wages and no healthcare (at least in the U.S.) or retirement security.
Some conversions in political philosophy are understandable, but others, like Mamet's, are inscrutable. What caused him to make the switch? Not mentioned in the article is that Mamet's conservative rabbi gave him a bunch of books - by conservative hacks - and that material appears to have gotten the playwright to chance his views.
Excerpts from the NYTimes article, Why the Antichrist Matters in Politics by Matthew Avery Sutton
While conservatives are in the driver's seat these days, there was a significant Christian progressive movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it seems to have faded away. It's puzzling why that happened, although it may be related to the decline of mainline churches (Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran).
"Understand this. If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain, when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I'll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States because Americans deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner."
"I expect all of you to march with me and press on. Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying."
They have a story taking the Obama administration to task, and excerpt an MSNBC article:
Obama Administration Set to Ban Asthma Inhalers Over Environmental Concerns 3:00 PM, Sep 23, 2011 • By MARK HEMINGWAY
Remember how Obama recently waived new ozone regulations at the EPA because they were too costly? Well, it seems that the Obama administration would rather make people with Asthma cough up money than let them make a surely inconsequential contribution to depleting the ozone layer:
Asthma patients who rely on over-the-counter inhalers will need to switch to prescription-only alternatives as part of the federal government's latest attempt to protect the Earth's atmosphere.
The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday patients who use the epinephrine inhalers to treat mild asthma will need to switch by Dec. 31 to other types that do not contain chlorofluorocarbons, an aerosol substance once found in a variety of spray products.
The action is part of an agreement signed by the U.S. and other nations to stop using substances that deplete the ozone layer, a region in the atmosphere that helps block harmful ultraviolet rays from the Sun.
But the switch to a greener inhaler will cost consumers more. Epinephrine inhalers are available via online retailers for around $20, whereas the alternatives, which contain the drug albuterol, range from $30 to $60.
The Atlantic's Megan McArdle ...
Here is the next sentence in the MSNBC article: (emp add)
The FDA finalized plans to phase out the products in 2008 and currently only Armstrong Pharmaceutical's Primatene mist is available in the U.S.
This phase out was initiated by the Bush administration, a point the Standard hides from its readers. Typical.
With the party’s frontrunner sagging, Chris Christie is reconsidering pleas from Republican elites and donors to run for president in 2012, two Republican sources told POLITICO.
The New Jersey governor has indicated he is listening to big-money backers and Republican influence-makers, and will let them know in roughly a week whether he has moved off his threat-of-suicide vow to stay on the sidelines of a presidential race that remains amorphous heading into the fall, the two sources said.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s candidacy has failed to clear a basic bar with elites and some donors, and his shoddy debate performance in Orlando has only highlighted the window for someone who Republicans searching for a Mitt Romney alternative can rally around.
Christie’s potential candidacy has been an increasingly fevered fantasy of a certain cadre of some media and business elites — mostly based in New York, with a smattering of California technology and entertainment players — since last summer. That’s when he showed up at a Sun Valley conference hosted by the investment banker Allen and Co. and wowed the crowd, including Rupert Murdoch, with what many in attendance described as a nimble mind and a speaking style that was both articulate and blunt-spoken.
... the conservative elite buzz over a potential Christie candidacy has kicked into overdrive in the past few weeks, including on the pages of the Weekly Standard and Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.
Murdoch controls the Republican party with Fox News which, in addition to its daily propaganda to the faithful, is largely responsible for the Republican Tea Party contingent being what it is today, not to mention the fact that most of the presidential candidates were on the network's payroll.
Earlier this year Christie met with Murdoch's deputy, Rodger Ailes (and Limbaugh!) to talk about the governor's future. That is not the action of a neutral news organization.
Some time ago David Frum said that the Republicans work for Fox News. It would be more appropriate to say that Republicans work for Murdoch, owner of the lawbreaking News of the World, and of News America - the firm that got into legal hot water and paid a competitor half a billion dollars to settle the litigation (nytimes link). About that latter item:
In a statement, the News Corporation’s president and chief operating officer, Chase Carey, said: “It has become evident to our legal advisers from pretrial proceedings over the past couple of weeks that significant risks were developing in presenting this case to a jury. That, coupled with concerns over the venue, led us to believe it was in the best interests of the company and its stockholders to agree to a settlement.”
But wait! There's more:
In a separate case that was settled last year, News America was accused by another competitor, Floorgraphics, of corporate spying. Just as witnesses began testifying in a federal case in New Jersey, News Corporation settled the lawsuit and then days later bought the company outright for an undisclosed sum.
That case centered on the testimony of a former News America Marketing executive who became a whistle-blower. In a court filing, Floorgraphics said that News America had “illegally accessed plaintiff’s computer system and obtained proprietary information from the computer system” and “disseminated false, misleading and malicious information about the plaintiff.”
That's who is running the show with one of the two major political parties in the United States. Don't ever forget it.
I’m not shocked by much any more, but I am shocked by this: the leaders of one of the great parties in Congress calling on the Federal Reserve to tighten money in the throes of the most prolonged downturn since the Great Depression.
One line in the letter caught my eye as summing up the unreality of the Republican leaders’ position:
We have serious concerns that further intervention by the Federal Reserve could exacerbate current problems or further harm the U.S. economy. Such steps may erode the already weakened U.S. dollar or promote more borrowing by overleveraged consumers.
Are they serious? We are living through the most rapid deleveraging of the American consumer since the 1http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif930s. Much of that deleveraging is occurring tragically, through the process of bankruptcy and foreclosure. Some is happening more happily, through the increase in the savings rate from the 0 of the housing boom to about 6% now.
Even if consumers wanted to borrow, credit is just not very available to the typical person right now. Some credit, for example on credit cards, is not cheap. In fact, the average APR on credit cards is scraping a record peak: 14.96%. ...
The markets see deflation and depression, not inflation. Yet ironically this non-existent and much dreaded inflation is exactly the remedy we need to lighten the load of consumer debt.
As is, we’re looking at a continued economic slump, more unemployment, and more deleveraging via continuing catastrophic consumer default on mortgages, car loans, credit cards, and student aid. And now the GOP leadership is urging that the Federal Reserve make the catastrophe worse? To what end?
I know what the detractors will say: to the end of defeating President Obama and replacing him with a Republican president. And if you’ve convinced yourself that Obama is the Second Coming of Malcolm X, Trotsky, and the all-conquering Caliph Omar all in one, then perhaps capsizing the US economy and plunging your fellow-citizens deeper into misery will seem a price worth paying to rid the country of him.
President Barack Obama needs House Speaker John Boehner’s help to muscle a jobs bill through Congress, but he’s betting that Boehner needs the win just as badly.
The White House strategy rests on the risky assumption that Obama can sell Boehner on a new political reality: With voters desperate for jobs, neither leader can afford to do nothing.
... the administration’s belief is fueling the White House game plan on jobs, an all-out effort by Obama, Cabinet officials and the Democratic campaign committees to push Republicans into an untenable political position that forces them to act on more than just minor elements of the president’s plan.
The White House expects the Republican rank and file to fight the president’s plan, but it predicts that Boehner will eventually realize that his party would benefit from a bipartisan deal just as much as Democrats.
Or maybe it's just crazy. Boehner might go for some very small packages to avoid the charge of total obstruction, but there is no way he's going to go big on a bipartisan jobs bill.
Republican state legislators in Pennsylvania are pushing a scheme that, if GOPers in other states follow their lead, could cause President Barack Obama to lose the 2012 election—not because of the vote count, but because of new rules. ...
[Currently] Each state gets to determine how its electoral votes are allocated. Currently, 48 states and DC use a winner-take-all system in which the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all of its electoral votes. Under the Republican plan—which has been endorsed by top Republicans in both houses of the state's legislature, as well as the governor, Tom Corbett—Pennsylvania would change from this system to one where each congressional district gets its own electoral vote. ...
Under the Republican plan, if the GOP presidential nominee carries the GOP-leaning districts but Obama carries the state, the GOP nominee would get 12 electoral votes out of Pennsylvania, but Obama would only get eight—six for winning the blue districts, and two (representing the state's two senators) for carrying the state.
Looks as if the Republicans are inspired by the British rotten boroughs of old. Those gave the Tories disproportionately more power than a consistent nation-wide formula for representation would have done. The rotten boroughs were eliminated in the Reform Act of 1832, widely considered to have "launched the rise of modern democracy in Britain".
In other words, the Republicans are looking to move away from "modern democracy" - which strives for proportional representation - and towards a kind of "crude democracy". Crude, in that it has the outward form of democracy - people voting - but with a representation formula that advantages one party.
Of interest: The British rotten boroughs were eliminated due to, in part, public pressure. I suspect that in this country, public pressure will be lacking due to the miserable job the press does informing people of what's important. Especially since it involves mathematics, where journalists have shown less understanding than that of a high school algebra student. Plus you have Fox News adding to the confusion with their unique form of "journalism".
The only thing working against a Pennsylvania-type plan is that, if implemented, it would bolster the party's power at the national level but diminish the attention the state would get during a presidential campaign. So competitive states might wish to preserve their valued status in this regard. It's interesting that the Republicans would put attaining federal power above preserving the influence of their cherished states (see Tenth Amendment fanaticism, abolishing the Seventeenth Amendment). posted by Quiddity at 9/14/2011 07:29:00 AM
The Obama White House is revising its initial unwillingness to negotiate on the president's job creation plan, saying now that if individual components of the bill came to the president's desk -- as opposed to the bill in its entirety -- he would sign them into law.
The new approach opens up the administration to charges that it no longer views the American Jobs Act as a take-it-or-leave-it bill. But in a briefing with reporters Tuesday, senior administration officials insisted President Obama wasn't backing off his position that he wants the entire bill passed through Congress.
You can settle for pieces, but putting that out at the beginning doesn't seem smart. As to:
Senior administration officials insisted that they had not hurt their standing at the negotiation table, noting that each component of the president's proposal is popular in its own right.
That may be true as far as the public is concerned, but each component isn't popular with the Republicans in the House, and they are the ones that matter when it comes to passing legislation.
It's too early to say what kind of jobs legislation will emerge, but it's beginning to look like it will be a bunch of small steps with limited affect on the economy. Also, a piecemeal approach may blunt charges that the Republicans aren't cooperating or trying to help the economy.
It's weird. Why not play hardball for a couple of weeks to see if that resonates with the electorate (and pundits). Just last week in the speech to Congress Obama was saying "Pass this bill" (17 times). This new White House stance seems so unnecessary at this early stage. What made it happen? Who called the shots? Something peculiar is going on.
