Month: May 2012

Obama Supports Gay Marriage

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In an interview with ABC, Barack Obama has announced that he now supports gay marriage:

Before President Obama left the White House on Tuesday morning to fly to an event in Albany, several aides intercepted him in the Oval Office. Within minutes it was decided: the president would endorse same-sex marriage on Wednesday, completing a wrenching personal transformation on the issue.

As described by several aides, that quick decision and his subsequent announcement in a hastily scheduled network television interview were thrust on the White House by 48 hours of frenzied will-he-or-won’t-he speculation after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. all but forced the president’s hand by embracing the idea of same-sex unions in a Sunday talk show interview.

Advisers say now that Mr. Obama had intended since early this year to define his position sometime before Democrats nominate him for re-election in September. Yet many of the president’s allies believed he would not do so, trusting instead in his strong support from gay voters for having ended a ban on openly gay people in the military and disavowing a federal law defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Such caution was understandable, the allies said, given the unpredictable fallout the president would face by taking a clear stand on one of the most contentious and politically charged social issues of the day, before what is likely to be a close election. Mr. Obama’s closest advisers say only the timing was in question. Mr. Biden’s unexpected remarks undoubtedly accelerated the timetable.

Initially Mr. Obama and his aides expected that the moment would be Monday, when the president was scheduled to be on “The View,” the ABC daytime talk show, which is popular with women. Certainly, they thought, he would be asked his position on same-sex marriage by one of the show’s hosts, who include Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg.

Yet the pressure had become too great to wait until then, his aides told him; on Monday, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, was pummeled with questions from skeptical reporters about Mr. Obama’s stance. After the Tuesday morning meeting, Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s communications director, contacted ABC and offered a wide-ranging interview with the president for the following day.

Oh snap. They took a scoop away from the ladies of The View. There will be consequences.

All joking aside, this is an unambiguous good.

BTW, the best comment I’ve heard about this so far was made by Kurt_T (His web site, www.kurttrue.com should be coming on line shortly):

Hahahaha! I really DID want people to marry their pets and climb Mount Rushmore in nipple clamps and buttless chaps! And this makes it all possible!

Suckers!

OK, I’m off to the Kinko’s to print up some recruitment materials for your children.

-kurt_t
President and Supreme Cher Impersonator for Life
Secret Gay Agenda

The timing was disappointing though, it seem to be calculated to avoid any impact on the North Carolina hate amendment vote, for which the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans rightly castigates him, (scroll down) though partisan considerations might have informed his statement.

Another Election Night

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And while the primaries really didn’t matter, as Romney is pretty much it now, but there were other significant results, with Lugar getting destroyed in the India primary, Tom Barret earning a rematch against Scott Walker after the Democratic primary for the Wisconsin Recall, and the citizens of North Carolina voting to enshrine hatred and bigotry into their constitution.

I was amused by Obama’s performance against a federal inmate in the West Virginia primary:

With all his rivals except Rep. Ron Paul now out of the race, Mitt Romney easily won the Indiana, North Carolina, and West Virginia primaries, giving him an estimated 911 of the 1,144 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination. But plenty of GOP voters still saw fit to register their preference for a different candidate: Romney got 65 percent of the vote in Indiana, 66 percent in North Carolina, and 69 percent in West Virginia. By comparison, the 2008 nominee, John McCain, got 70 percent or more in every primary once his last major rival, Mike Huckabee, quit the race. But the protest-vote story of the night was on the other side of the aisle. In West Virginia, Obama was pulling just 62 percent of the vote while Keith Russell Judd, an inmate at a federal prison in Texas who somehow got his name on the primary ballot, was drawing 38 percent.

I’m not sure what it means, though I’m sure that Obama’s political operatives will be dropping a hundred grand or so on polling to figure it all out.

Damn

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Children’s book author Maurice Sendak has died at 83:

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83.

The cause was complications of a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua, his longtime editor. Mr. Sendak, who died at Danbury Hospital, lived nearby in Ridgefield, Conn.

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963.

A Good Essay on Putin

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Stephen Cohen makes some very good points, like the fact that Russia has become less corrupt, journalists and dissidents are less likely to be murdered, his elections are fairer, etc.

Of course, better and more democratic than Yeltsin is not a tough act to follow.

Yeltsin and his cronies looted the country, splitting the proceeds with western banksters, murdered journalists as a fairly brisk clip, impoverished the nation, literally prostituting many of its citizens, and shelled the parliament when they did not do his bidding.

What he misses though is why the west hates Putin so much. It all comes down to the, “Splitting the proceeds with the western banksters,” bit.

One of the rules of the modern neocolonial finance regime is that finance’s masters of the world get to steal other people’s stuff, and those people never get it back.

We Look Like Scared, Fearful, Losers Because We Are Scared, Fearful, Losers.

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I cannot believe that I am quoting Iraq War booster Fareed Zakaria, but his take on the new invasive US state security apparatus:

While we will leave the battlefields of the greater Middle East, we are firmly committed to the war on terror at home. What do I mean by that? Well, look at the expansion of federal bureaucracies to tackle this war.

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is, of course, a war without end.

………

We don’t look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers.

(emphasis mine)

Osama bin Laden did not win, he’s dead, but we lost, and we did it to ourselves.

The 2nd Underoos Bomber is a CIA Double Agent

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So we have another bomb plot “foiled”:

The successful blocking of an ambitious Al Qaeda plot to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner was an international sting operation worthy of Hollywood, with spies tricking terrorists into showing their cards.

Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, working closely with the CIA, used an informant to pose as a would-be suicide bomber. His job was to convince the Al Qaeda franchise in Yemen to give him a new kind of non-metallic bomb that the militants were designing to easily pass through airport security.

But the double agent instead arranged to deliver the explosive device to U.S. and other intelligence authorities waiting in another country, officials said Tuesday. The agent is now safely outside Yemen and is being debriefed.

Experts are analyzing the sophisticated device at the FBI’s bomb laboratory at Quantico, Va., to determine if it really could evade current security measures. It appears an upgraded version of the so-called “underwear bomb” that failed to take down a passenger jet over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.

So, we’ve had four attempts to blow up a US plane:

And now we have  the 2nd underoos bomber.

I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to wonder if the CIA is doing the same thing as the FBI, and finding a bunch of losers, and then build them up, so that they can have a high profile bust.

(on edit)

And yes, those I forgot those folks who were drying those dumb ass liquid bombs which require us to buy overpriced sodas on the airlines.

Jeebus, They Are Claiming that API’s are Copyrightable?

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That appears to be the jury ruling in the Oracle-Google lawsuit:

In what could be a major blow to Android, Google’s mobile operating system, a San Francisco jury issued a verdict today that the company broke copyright laws when it used Java APIs to design the system. The ruling is a partial victory for Oracle, which accused Google of violating copyright law.

But the jury couldn’t reach agreement on a second issue—whether Google had a valid “fair use” defense when it used the APIs. Google has asked for a mistrial based on the incomplete verdict, and that issue will be briefed later this week.

The results aren’t clear going forward. Both sides are going to write briefs arguing how to proceed from here, with Google likely arguing the verdict needs to be thrown out, while Oracle somehow tries to hang on to its win on question 1A, the fundamental question about whether Google infringed copyright.

No one knows the jury’s internal deliberations, so it’s speculative to guess at what led to the partial verdict. But one reason could be the unusual construction of this trial. Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing the case, ruled that the case would be decided by a jury of 12, which is large for a civil case and increases the possibility of having one or more “holdout” jurors. Alsup also ruled that the jury must decide unanimously, a requirement for criminal cases that’s not always imposed on civil juries.

Now let’s be clear here: The judge apparently instructed the jury to assume that APIs are copyrightable, in order for them to make decisions about the facts, but that decision will actually be rendered by the judge later. (Yeah, the law is a bitch)

Speaking as a non-lawyer and non-computer programmer, if this stands, it stands a very good chance to shut down much of the software industry in the United States, because any supplier of a platform, at any time, on the machine that you owe, could ban, or demand usurious licensing fees, for any 3rd party software.

So Microsoft could demand fees from (for example) Open Office in order to run on Windows.

In any case, the substantive ruling is the judge’s and that is clearly subject to appeal, you appeal on the law, not the adjudicated facts, so the final decision will likely be either the court of appeal of SCOTUS.

Yet another example of just how %$#ed up our IP system is.

Buh Bye Sarko (and Greece)

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In what has been forecast in the polls for weeks (months?) Francois Holland defeated president “Bling Bling”:

Socialist Francois Hollande defeated conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy today to become France’s next president, heralding a change in how Europe tackles its debt crisis and how France flexes its military and diplomatic muscle around the world.

Exuberant, diverse crowds filled the Place de la Bastille, the iconic plaza of the French Revolution, to fete Hollande’s victory, waving French, European and labor union flags and climbing its central column. Leftists are overjoyed to have one of their own in power for the first time since Socialist Francois Mitterrand was president from 1981 to 1995.

“Austerity can no longer be inevitable!” Hollande declared in his victory speech Sunday night after a surprising campaign that saw him transform from an unremarkable, mild figure to an increasingly statesmanlike one.

It helps to be standing next Nicolas Sarkozy. Standing next to him, I would look “increasingly statesmanlike.”

I think that the money quote is toward the end:

People of all ages and different ethnicities celebrated Hollande’s victory at the Bastille. Ghylaine Lambrecht, 60, who celebrated the 1981 victory of Mitterrand at the Bastille, was among them.

“I’m so happy. We had to put up with Sarko for 10 years,” she said referring to Sarkozy’s time as interior and finance minister and five years as president. “In the last few years the rich have been getting richer. Now long live France, an open democratic France.”

I think that Sarkozy showed everyone who he really was when he decided pander to bigots when it looked like he was losing.

It’s also a referendum on Angela Merkel, who, in a real breach of the political norms, openly endorsed Sarko in the election.

That being said (I really use that phrase too much, don’t I), if the French rejected the idea of Merkel as ally, the Greeks pretty much firebombed the Reichstag:

Alexis Tsipras became the surprise package of the Greek election by telling Angela Merkel to get lost.

“The people of Europe can no longer be reconciled with the bailouts of barbarism,” Tsipras, 37, said on state-run NET TV late yesterday after his Syriza party unexpectedly came second in the country’s election. “European leaders, and especially Ms. Merkel, should realize that her policies have undergone a crushing defeat.”

Tsipras’s calls to tax the rich, delay debt repayments and cut defense spending struck a chord with voters angry at austerity measures imposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in return for bailouts. As far as euro membership is concerned, Tsipras told voters that a Greek exit would put the currency itself in jeopardy and they shouldn’t feel “blackmailed” into more austerity.

The result put Syriza ahead of the Socialist Pasok party, potentially derailing efforts to implement the terms of the country’s financial lifeline. Syriza, which means Coalition of the Radical Left, won 16 percent of the vote, projections showed. That exceeded the 13 percent won by Pasok, one of the two pillars of the political establishment since 1974. New Democracy, led by Antonis Samaras, topped the poll with 20 percent.

The result, the best since the party was founded in 2004, puts Tsipras in a position to try and form a government should New Democracy fail to put a coalition together in the first round of talks.

BTW, New Democracy has already given up on forming a government, because together they can’t get anyone but the Socialists (Pasok) to agree to continuing austerity.  (Merkel and the EE demanded that both leading parties agree to the terms in order to get the loans, with the predictable result that both together got about ⅓ of the vote.)

It’s pretty complex, because, in order to make a coalition without New Democracy and Pasok, almost all the other parties have to join the coalition, and somehow I don’t think that the Leftist Tsipras, the Communists, and the Neo-Nazi in everything but name Golden Dawn will find common ground.

Pilots Refusing to Fly F-22 “Super Jet”

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In all the discussions of the relative merits of the F-22 Raptor vs. the F-35 Lightning II, one of the assumptions is that the F-22 actually works the way it’s supposed.

It appears that it doesn’t, and it’s bad enough that pilots are refusing to fly it:

While I was unable to attend this (30 April) morning’s briefing at Joint Base Langley-Eustis down in Hampton, Virginia, press reports from the event indicate that the US Air Force is admitting that a “small number” of Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor pilots are refusing to fly the jet.

“Obviously it’s a very sensitive thing because we are trying to ensure that the community fully understands all that we’re doing to try to get to a solution,” says Air Combat Command chief Gen Mike Hostage as quoted by the Associated Press.

The USAF has not found the root cause of 11 hypoxia-like cases since the Raptor fleet returned to flight in September after a near five-month stand-down. The F-22 fleet has flown about 12,000 times since then.

What’s more, there is currently no clear indication as to what is causing the problem: (paid subscription required)

The U.S. Air Force is narrowing its focus on new combinations of factors as it explores hypoxia events that claimed the life of one F-22 pilot and plagued the fleet for more than a year.

Service officials remain frustrated, that a “smoking gun” for the cause is still elusive despite an extraordinary effort to enlist scientists, the medical profession and fighter experts in a quest for answers.

The Lockheed Martin F-22 is the Air Force’s premier, twin-engine, stealthy fighter. It cost more than $200 million per copy to produce, including R&D. It entered service in 2005, and the 188th and final unit was delivered on May 2.

The problem came to light after a November 2010 crash that claimed the life of a pilot. The fleet was grounded for four months last year as officials scrambled to find a cause; flights resumed in September. Since then, Air Combat Command (ACC) officials say there have been 11 hypoxic events. The unknown nature of the incidents has rattled the service. “There is no startling similarity [in the incidents] other than . . . hypoxic-like indications,” says Gen. Mike Hostage, ACC commander.

………

Additionally, pilots are wearing a pulse oximeter to monitor oxygen-saturation levels during flight ; if it dips below 85%, they are required to return to base immediately (the data are downloaded after landing and not dispatched in real time).

Lyon acknowledges an impact on the training hours that pilots can achieve. Hostage adds that the incidents have prompted some pilots to decline flying the Raptor , though he says these incidents are the exception. He notes that any guidance, such as returning to base with a low oxygen-saturation level, can be waived in the event of an operational requirement for F-22 use.

In the meantime, the Air Force acknowledged first to Aviation Week that F-22s have been deployed to the Middle East. The aircraft are operating out of Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates.

So, they don’t know what is causing this, they have to require pilots to wear a blood oxygen sensor, and they are (finally) deploying some of them overseas.

My guess would be that they won’t be deploying to the 65,000 foot ceiling.

What a Surprise

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

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

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

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

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

Probably not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

H5N1 Gene Studies Finally Published

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post 911 security apparatus doing more harm than good.

It’s All About the Racism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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