Year: 2012

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.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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And it’s good news, with initial claims falling by 27K to 365,000, beating estimates, and continuing and extended claims fell as well, though the less volatile 4-week moving average rose.

The real news on the economy though is the fact that Euro zone unemployment  hit a record high:

Rising unemployment and plunging business confidence in the euro area revealed the increasingly fragile state of the region’s economy on Wednesday, as voters in France and Greece prepare to deliver their verdict on austerity in Sunday elections.

Official figures showed that unemployment across the 17-member single currency zone increased by 169,000 in March, for the 11th consecutive month, to hit 17.37m. The unemployment rate was 10.9%, the highest level in its history.

Even in Germany, which has so far largely escaped unscathed from the downturn sweep of the labour market, unemployment began to tick up in March, though it remained at just 5.6% of the workforce.

There was also evidence that businesses are being hit by what many analysts expect to be a eurozone-wide recession. The manufacturing PMI for the zone in April – a measure of confidence among businesses – registered a sharp decline, from 47.7 to 45.9, the lowest since June 2009, and well below the 50 mark which signals growth.

BTW, in the US, consumer confidence to a 2 month low.

To quote Bette Davis, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

The Oatmeal Nails It

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Basically, the artist described his experience attempting to legally rent Game of Thrones.

Here are the first few frames:


link

Read the whole thing.  It shows how the need for control makes the studios sh%$ on their customer, which in turns drives people who want to act in accordance with the exclusive license that the content producers hold to Bit Torrent and the like.

Read the whole thing.

It Looks Like the IRS Crackdown on Foreign Banks is Creating Real Results

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The number of rich expat Americans who are renouncing their citizenship has increased as a result of new banking regulations:

Rich Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship rose sevenfold since UBS AG whistle-blower Bradley Birkenfeld triggered a crackdown on tax evasion four years ago.

About 1,780 expatriates gave up their nationality at U.S. embassies last year, up from 235 in 2008, according to Andy Sundberg, secretary of Geneva’s Overseas American Academy, citing figures from the government’s Federal Register. The embassy in Bern, the Swiss capital, redeployed staff to clear a backlog as Americans queued to relinquish their passports.

The U.S., the only nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes citizens wherever they reside, is searching for tax cheats in offshore centers, including Switzerland, as the government tries to curb the budget deficit. Shunned by Swiss and German banks and facing tougher asset-disclosure rules under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, more of the estimated 6 million Americans living overseas are weighing the cost of holding a U.S. passport.

Good.

If they renounce their citizenship, they cannot make political contributions to buy legislators.

I’m Not the Only One Who Thinks Google’s Upgrades Suck

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John Aravosis of Americablog has seen the new blogger update, and it has him planning to move the whole blog to WordPress:

Welcome to my own personal hell. Welcome to the new Blogger content management system, created by Google, that is incompatible with iPhones or iPads, and whose iphone app is a complete and utter disaster.

They’ve gotten similar responses about their changes to Gmail (here’s a hint, go with the high contrast theme to make it bearable)

I’m beginning to wonder if they are intentionally screwing the pooch.

Nicolas “Petain” Sarkozy

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So, Nicolas Sarkozy is going thoroughly right wing and anti-Muslim:

Nicolas Sarkozy has stepped up his appeal to France’s far-right by lauding national identity, borders and French Christian heritage at a vast open-air rally in the shadow of the Eiffel tower.

………

Sarkozy’s alternative May day Labour rally, which he initially said was a defiant celebration of “real” work versus the traditional trade union marches, had caused a political slanging match in France.

A Communist newspaper and various commentators likened the president to Marshal Pétain, the leader of France’s Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime in the 1940s, for trying to appropriate the “values of work” for the right. His party slammed the parallels as shameful and disgusting.

(emphasis mine)

You have to understand: The French Republics (all of them) have had a tradition of militantly secular, as in, “If you get married in a church, it doesn’t count, do it again at the town hall.”

He doesn’t get why National Front Leader Marine Le Pen got so many votes.  While part of it is the fact that she puts a softer and more sophisticated edge on the right wing xenophobic message, the rest is because both Sarkozy and Hollande were perceived as being too EU friendly, and in particular, they are not fond of German hegemony in the EU.

Sorkozy does not get it:  He won’t get their votes in sufficient quality because he is Merkel’s toady, and Merkel’s frantic attempts to bolster his reelection efforts just makes it more obvious.

Shareholders Revolts Against Executive Compensation is Getting More Common

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This time it’s Barklays, and once again it failed:

Shareholders have demonstrated their mounting anger over runaway boardroom pay, delivering a huge protest against Barclays pay policies – including the £17m package for chief executive Bob Diamond.

Nearly a third of shareholders failed to back the remuneration report at a sometimes hostile annual meeting in the Royal Festival Hall, London, where one shareholder warned of the damage to the bank’s reputation because of its pay deals.

Shareholders also handed a severe rebuke to Alison Carnwath, the non-executive director who sanctioned the pay deals. More than one in five investors failed to support the re-election of Carnwath, a veteran of many boardroom battles, to the board – a huge protest given that directors usually expect near-unanimous support for their positions.

You used to hear about this once a decade.

We’ve had 3 in the past 6 weeks.

Even if they lose, it’s a step in the right direction.

What a Crybaby

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David Prosser is now claiming that the judicial investigation of his choking of a fellow justice is an infringement of his speech rights:

State Supreme Court Justice David Prosser said Monday that the Wisconsin Judicial Commission’s investigation into his alleged ethical violations is itself a violation of his constitutional rights, according to a court filing.

Prosser, the subject of an ethics complaint filed in March with the Supreme Court, said in his response to the complaint Monday that the commission “may not investigate or prosecute protected speech, advocacy and etiquette of Wisconsin Supreme Court justices when they are deliberating in confidential closed conferences.”

The three alleged ethics violations stem from a June 13 incident in which Prosser acknowledges putting his hands around the neck of Justice Ann Walsh Bradley “to protect himself” and a February 2010 incident in which he admits calling Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson “a total bitch.”

First, it wasn’t a closed conference, it was a discussion in Bradley’s office, and he was asked to leave, and he is alleged to have assaulted her.

Beating up on a woman is not, “deliberating in confidential closed conferences.”

As an aside, anyone want to bet that this isn’t the first time that he’s been “alleged” to have assaulted a woman?