Month: June 2011

This is the Legacy of Arne Duncan

No Comments

You know, the guy who ran the Chicago schools, and was chosen to run the Department of Education, where he has gone full in on bashing teachers supporting the for-profit educational industrial complex.

Well. I’m not sure if he set the tone in the Chicago School district, or was just a product of it, but the fact that the Chicago Public Schools froze teacher salaries while jacking up pay for senior executives:

Though they voted last week to rescind four percent pay raises for teachers and union school workers, the Chicago Board of Education today is expected to approve salaries for the newly installed Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and four other top executives that, by and large, mark substantial increases over their predecessors’ pay.

As the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday, Brizard’s base salary – $250,000 – tops former CPS head Ron Huberman’s salary by $20,000 – and is the highest pay rate for any city executive excluding the city’s new police chief, Garry McCarthy. It is also an annual salary nearly $40,000 higher than the head of New York City’s school system, though less than the public schools chiefs in Los Angeles and other cities.

Salaries for the other four executives are less dramatic, but still more than their Daley administration predecessors. New Chief Education Officer Noemi Donoso, who is slated to rake in $195,000, is making $2,150 more than the former education officer. New Chief of Staff Andrea Saenz, who will be paid $165,000 annually, is making $49,000 more than those who came before. CPS chief administrative officer Tim Cawley and communications officer Becky Carroll are slated to take in $35,833 and $34,617 base salary increases over their Daley counterparts, earning $215,000 and $165,000 salaries respectively.

So their goal is to make American schools more like the banks.

They sh%$ on the workers, and extract as much money as possible out of the enterprise to overpay the incompetent rat-f%$#s in charge.

Some Democrats Just Got a Small Clue

No Comments

Senators Durbin and Schumer have come out and explicitly accused the ‘Phants of deliberately tanking the economy for political gain:

hey’ve made it explicit. Democrats are accusing Republicans of trying to sabotage the recovery — or at least stall it — by blocking all short-term measures to boost the economy, even ones they previously supported.

In a Capitol press conference Wednesday, the Senate’s top Democrats argued that Republicans don’t want to pass measures like a temporary payroll tax holiday for employers because they’ll improve President Obama’s re-election chances.

“Our Republican colleagues in the House and Senate are driven by putting one man out of work: President Obama,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL).

The harshest denunciation came from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the man who crafted the Dems’ new “jobs first” message.

“We are also open to hiring incentives, perhaps in the form of a payroll tax cut for employers that was floated by the administration…. [T]hat might not be our first choice, that shows how willing we are to work with the Republicans to create jobs. It’s pro-business, it’s a tax cut, and many Republicans have been for it in the past. But now all of a sudden they’re coming out against it,” Schumer said.

They should have been saying this 6 months ago.

First, it’s true, second, it’s good politics, and third, it’s true.

The Federal Reserve Speaks

No Comments

And they are saying that the economy sucks, and will continue to suck, but they won’t do anything about it:

The economic recovery is slowing and the outlook for next year has gotten worse, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said Wednesday, backing away from the view that the slowdown of the past few months was merely temporary.

The central bank released new economic projections that showed weaker growth in both 2011 and 2012 than had been forecast just two months ago. Despite the slowdown, the Fed said it will end a program of buying vast sums of Treasury bonds at the end of June as scheduled and gave no sign it is contemplating new action.

We are unbelievably screwed.

Dearie, Have You Considered Ritalin?

No Comments

Yes, the half term governor of Alaska, and Miss it-took-six-colleges-to-get-a-degree-in-journalism, Sarah Palin, has quit her nationwide bus tour about halfway through her schedule:

Amid diminishing media interest, Sarah Palin has quit her high-profile bus tour halfway through and returned to Alaska with her family, according to RealClearPolitics.

The move puts a damper on widespread speculations that Palin’s “One Nation” bus tour, which launched on Memorial Day, was a precursor to a potential White House bid for 2012. Palin never made it to her scheduled stops in the key primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

RealClearPolitics, which originally broke the story about the bus tour, reported Wednesday on Palin’s “extended hiatus.” The remaining legs of her trip, according to Scott Conroy, are “in limbo” as “Palin and her family have reverted to the friendly confines of summertime Alaska.”

Seriously, can this woman finish anything?

Either Sarah Palin is the most pathetic person on the face of the earth, or she is the most inspired performance artist ever.

Senators Want To Put People In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos

No Comments

No, seriously, Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons are proposing to make posting the wrong sort of Youtube videos a felony:

Okay, this is just getting ridiculous. A few weeks back, we noted that Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons had proposed a new bill that was designed to make “streaming” infringing material a felony. At the time, the actual text of the bill wasn’t available, but we assumed, naturally, that it would just extend “public performance” rights to section 506a of the Copyright Act.

Supporters of this bill claim that all it’s really doing is harmonizing US copyright law’s civil and criminal sections. After all, the rights afforded under copyright law in civil cases cover a list of rights: reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works or perform the work. The rules for criminal infringement only cover reproducing and distributing — but not performing. So, supporters claim, all this does is “harmonize” copyright law and bring the criminal side into line with the civil side by adding “performance rights” to the list of things.

If only it were that simple. But, of course, it’s not. First of all, despite claims to the contrary, there’s a damn good reason why Congress did not include performance rights as a criminal/felony issue: because who would have thought that it would be a criminal act to perform a work without permission? It could be infringing, but that can be covered by a fine. When we suddenly criminalize a performance, that raises all sorts of questionable issues.

The problem here is that people do not understand what IP is.

People seem to think that it’s property.  It’s no more property than a liquor license is.

It’s a limited time limited exclusive license created to, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”

It’s not about creating progressively punitive and extortive provisions, largely because the holders of these licenses have lots of money to wave around, and want ways to extort more money.

Where His Campaign Was, There Is Nothing But a Greasy Stain…

No Comments

It’s Newt again. His fundraisers just bailed from his campaign:

Newt Gingrich’s top two fundraising advisers resigned on Tuesday, and officials said the Republican candidate’s hobbling presidential campaign carried more than $1 million in debt.
FILE – In this June 16, 2011 file photo, Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans. Gingrich’s top two fundraising advisers resigned on Tuesday, and officials said the Republican candidate’s hobbling presidential campaign carried more than $1 million in debt.

FILE – In this June 16, 2011 file photo, Republican presidential hopeful, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans. Gingrich’s top two fundraising advisers resigned Tuesday, June 21, 2011, and officials said the Republican candidate’s hobbling presidential campaign carried more than $1 million in debt. The departures were the latest blow for the former House speaker who watched 16 top advisers abandon his campaign en masse earlier in June.

The departures of fundraising director Jody Thomas and fundraising consultant Mary Heitman were the latest blow for the former House speaker who watched 16 top advisers abandon his campaign en masse earlier this month, partly because of what people familiar with the campaign spending described as a dire financial situation.

These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the campaign’s inner workings, said the former Georgia lawmaker racked up massive travel bills but money had only trickled in since he got into the race earlier this spring.

This is incredible.  The

I think that this is getting so pathetic that he might stop getting invitations to the Sunday political talk shows.

This would be a good thing. I hate listening to that self-important fatuous snollygoster moral pygmy on the TV present himself as some sort of intellectual giant.

Paul Krugman has the Pictures on Life Expectancy

1 Comment
Click for full size


So, it’s the former Confederacy…
And Indian Reservations

And it’s an interesting picture.

He notices that most of the counties in question are in the old south, where taxes are low, unions are under seige, and the social safety net is non existent.

He wryly observes that, “geography of the decline speaks for itself.”

I actually noticed something else, in some places, like the red spot in South Dakota, it corresponds to the Pine Ridge and other Indian reservations in that part of the state.

I understand why, if the our healthcare system is beginning to fracture, it makes sense that Indian reservations would where we see the first signs, given the history of the destruction of their culture, the mismanagement of their affairs by the BIA, etc.

Basically, the reservations were structured for a very long time as something like a penal colony and a red-headed step-child, so it’s not surprising that they would be ground zero for many forms of decay.

As to the old Confederacy, I think that it’s more a matter of choice.

Post-reconstruction, there was an embrace of myths and philosophies that serve to keep most of the population down.

This is why the South is beginning to resemble the 3rd world.

Our Society is So Completely F%$#ed Up……

No Comments

That a man just robbed a bank so that he would be thrown in jail and get healthcare:

A 59-year-old man recently walked into a bank in Gastonia, NC, intent on robbing one dollar — no more or less — from the financial institution. Was it because he was aiming low for his first foray into bank robbery? No, he says it was because he needs medical care and the only way he could think to afford it was by going to prison.

“It wasn’t done for the monetary value. It was done for medical reasons,” he tells WCNC-TV in the video interview below. “I went in knowing i was going to jail.”

In fact, the man told the teller he robbed that he was unarmed and that he’d be waiting for the police in a chair near the entrance.

Before going on his wild crime spree, the man, who says he’s got a bad back, sore foot and a growth on his chest, wrote a letter to the Gaston Gazette newspaper explaining his reasons and saying, “I am of sound mind but not so much sound body.”

The man has only been charged with larceny from a person, which carries a lesser penalty than bank robbery. His bail was reduced to $2,000 but he’s obviously refusing to pay it so long as he’s being tended to by doctors.

This is a completely rational reaction to what Republicans call “the best healthcare system in the world”.

Our healthcare system is completely insane.

What Liberal Pushback Should Look Like

7 Comments

Thomas Geoghegan, has just written an OP/ED suggesting that Social Security and taxation should be increased, not decreases:

As a labor lawyer I cringe when Democrats talk of “saving” Social Security. We should not “save” it but raise it. Right now Social Security pays out 39 percent of the average worker’s preretirement earnings. While jaws may drop inside the Beltway, we could raise that to 50 percent. We’d still be near the bottom of the league of the world’s richest countries — but at least it would be a basement with some food and air. We have elderly people living on less than $10,000 a year. Is that what Democrats want to “save”?

“But we can’t afford it!” Oh, come on: We have a federal tax rate equal to nearly 15 percent of our G.D.P. — far below the take in most wealthy countries. Let’s wake up: the biggest crisis we face is that most of us have nothing meaningful saved for retirement. I know. I started my career wanting to be a pension lawyer. In the 1970s, lawyers like me expected there to be big pots of private pensions for hourly workers. By the 1980s, as factories closed, I was filing hopeless lawsuits to claw back bits and pieces of benefits. Now there are even fewer bits and pieces to get.

A recent Harris poll found that 34 percent of Americans have nothing saved for retirement — not even a hundred bucks. In this lost decade, that percentage is sure to go up. At retirement the lucky few with a 401(k) typically have $98,000. As an annuity that’s about $600 a month — not exactly an upper-middle-class lifestyle. It’s too late for Congress to come up with some new savings plan — a new I.R.A. that grows hair, or something. There’s no time. We have to improve the one public pension program in place. Should we means-test it? No. I don’t care if they go out and buy bottles of Jim Beam: let our elderly have an occasional night out at a restaurant.

The most paralyzing half-truth in this country is that people hate taxes. People are willing to pay taxes that they spend on themselves. Two-thirds of those surveyed in a CBS/New York Times poll in January were willing to pay more taxes to save Social Security at its modest level. To “save” it, most of us don’t need to pay. We could lift the cap on high earners, the 6 percent of workers who make over $106,800 a year. If earnings above the cap were subject to the payroll tax with no increase in benefits to high earners, there would be no deficit in the Social Security trust fund in 2037, as projected.

If people are willing to pay more just to “save” Social Security, they should be glad to pay more to raise it.

I cannot imagine a such a full throated defense of basic human decency as government policy from any Democrat on the national stage, and that is a large part of the tragedy that is the Democratic party.

Wanker of the Day

No Comments

David Streitfeld, a reporter for the New York Times just released an article
claiming a 62 year backlog of foreclosures.

The problem is that the story is based on fairly bogus stats, and the source of the stats, and for that matter, the source of pretty much the entire story, is Lender Processing Services (LPS), which is currently the target of multiple lawsuits, for defrauding investors, and (literally!!!!) having a price sheet on the web for forged documents through its DocX subsidiary (some background here)

So, this guy took a press release from what is allegedly one of the most corrupt and criminal organizations involved in the mortgage mess and phoned in an article.

Time for a blogger ethics panel.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Fortas Was Forced to Resign for Less Than Thomas Did

No Comments

Of course, the Nixon justice department was willing to threaten to file a bogus prosecution against his wife to grease the skids, but Clarence Thomas relationship with right wing real-estate developer, who bankrolled his charities and his wife’s lobbying job:

Clarence Thomas was here promoting his memoir a few years ago when he bumped into Algernon Varn, whose grandfather once ran a seafood cannery that employed Justice Thomas’s mother as a crab picker.

Mr. Varn lived at the old cannery site, a collection of crumbling buildings on a salt marsh just down the road from a sign heralding this remote coastal community outside Savannah as Justice Thomas’s birthplace. The justice asked about plans for the property, and Mr. Varn said he hoped it could be preserved.

“And Clarence said, ‘Well, I’ve got a friend I’m going to put you in touch with,’ ” Mr. Varn recalled, adding that he was later told by others not to identify the friend.

The publicity-shy friend turned out to be Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate magnate and a major contributor to conservative causes. Mr. Crow stepped in to finance the multimillion-dollar purchase and restoration of the cannery, featuring a museum about the culture and history of Pin Point that has become a pet project of Justice Thomas’s.

The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas.

So he paid Thomas’ wife’s salary, set up a museum that is an homage to Clarence Thomas, and gave free access to his private jet, as well as gifting him a $19,000 bible, and putting him up at “retreats” (Want some more caviar with your Dom Perignon?) ……… Nothing to see here, move along.

And then there was a $15,000 gift from the American Enterprise Institute, a frequent amicus filer in Supreme Court cases ……… America, what a country.

BTW, some background on comparisons between Clarence Thomas and Abe Fortas here.

BTW, the point person in the House of Representatives on Thomas’ethical lapses was Anthony Weiner ……… Imagine that.

Olbermann’s First Night on His New Network

No Comments

The new Countdown is very similar to the old Countdown, with the only difference that he no longer has to observe the ban that MSNBC instituted against Markos Moulitsas for hurting Joe Scarboro’s feelings about a year and a half ago.

It was not one of his better shows, but it was mostly a reintroduction, and I think that there were still some rough spots.

In the long run, hope that it will be more like Countdown in 2006 than Countdown in 2010.

Too Big to Fail, and Now Too Big to Sue

No Comments

That is what the Supreme Court ruled today. They basically said that despite the fact that Wal-Mart systematically discriminated against women in every one of their stores, the millions of women impacted were too large a group to be certified as a class for a class-action suit:

But Wal-Mart doesn’t have to worry any more.

Justice Scalia expressed the Court’s opinion — which was unanimous — that the class action suit was too large and varied to carry forward.

So the solution to avoid pesky lawsuits for real wrong doing, you just have to be so big that the courts will give you a free pass.

First the banks are above the law, and now the monster that Sam Walton created.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

Finally, Some Legislative Pushback on Patent Trolls

No Comments

You know that it gets weird when the banksters are on the side of the good guys:

For years and much to their frustration, big banks have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to a tiny Texas company to use a patented system for processing digital copies of checks, making Claudio Ballard, the inventor of the system, a wealthy man and the bank industry’s biggest patent foe.

After years of fighting Mr. Ballard at the federal Patent Office, in court and across a negotiating table, the banks went to see one of their best friends in Congress, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who inserted into a patent overhaul bill a provision that appears largely aimed at helping banks rid themselves of the Ballard problem. The Senate passed the bill easily in March.

The proposal would allow banks to get a federal re-examination of certain patents that they have been accused of infringing, specifically limited to “a financial product or service.” The language is now included in a bill that may come to a vote in the House of Representatives as early as Wednesday. While at least two House members have moved to strip the provision from the bill, bank lobbyists have worked hard to defeat previous attempts to remove it.

Mr. Schumer and the Financial Services Roundtable, a business group that pushed the measure, say the provision is not focused on any one company but more broadly at “meritless litigation over patents of dubious quality,” as Steve Bartlett, the president of the Roundtable, said at a House hearing.

The depressing fact is that this is just a lobbying power play, rather than a realization that IP in all forms is about benefiting society, and  not about determining who gets an undeserved payoff that they can use to make campaign donations.

Business patents, gene patents, and software patents, do not serve to encourage innovation, they simply create government sanctioned monopolies, and the profits generated has now seized the political process.

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!!

No Comments

There were no failures last week, and I missed the one that happened on the 3rd, but we are definitely seeing a slowdown, which is a good thing

And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

  1. Atlantic Bank and Trust, Charleston, SC (on June3rd )
  2. McIntosh State Bank, Jackson, GA
  3. First Commercial Bank of Tampa Bay, Tampa, FL

Full FDIC list

So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

More Like George W. Bush Every Day

No Comments

Barack Obama ignored the formal opinions of senior professional legal staff in the Department of Justice on the Libya campaign:

President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.

If there is a defining legacy of the Obama administration, it may be in the formalization of the Nixonian principle that if the President does it, regardless of the settled law, it’s legal.

Perhaps it’s time to dispense with our unique form of government, and move to a parliamentary one, because if there are no constraints on the executive beyond elections, then the political system must be able to force elections at times like this.

Not Friday Cat Blogging, It’s Friday Catty Blogging

No Comments

Germany held a beauty pageant for cows, and much to my surprise, German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not win:

Forget Germany’s Next Top Model and Heidi Klum. This week, the German gaze was trained on the country’s most beautiful cow. “Krista” became the envy of bovine beauty queens across the land when she won the grand prize at the 2011 German Holstein Show, her second time to take the pageant’s top honor.

Krista successfully defended her 2009 title against a field of much heavier competition than that faced by most other beauty contestants. Of some two million hopeful dairy dames, just over 200 were chosen to lock horns over the grand prize, which comes complete with a trophy and cow-sized sash. Eight finalists strutted their stuff for a panel of jurors in the northern German city of Oldenburg on Thursday night. But it was Krista, described by juror Matthias Zens as “a perfect Holstein,” who won over the jury with her professional demeanor and pleasing physique.

“The udder should be wide and the back high,” said Zens on what makes a winner. With her straight back and strong legs, Krista has risen above the rest of the herd to rake in prizes on the bovine pageant circuit. The black and white bovine beauty has it all: a good figure, great legs and taut skin. As with human beauty contests, sagging is frowned upon. Other coveted traits include bright eyes, alertness and a plumb udder.

It’s different, at most beauty pageants, the contestants do not urinate on the runway.

Meow.