Taking a leisurely drive to NYC, and we stopped at the Roebling Museum.
Roebling, as in the company that built the Brooklyn and San Francisco bridges.
History and engineering bliss.
Pix to follow.
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Year: 2013
Btw
I just got carded.
Heading to the bar at the club.
Seriously serious carding.
First time on my life.
At age 50.
I have a dull life.
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Road Trip!
In Philly. Will be heading to the City (NYC) tomorrow.
Currently at a concert with my wife & kids, The Maine and A Rocket to the Moon.
On the way down, we passed the Philadelphia Naval shipyard, and saw a bunch of mothballed ships, including some Aegis class cruisers, including the Ticonderoga (CG-47).
Pix to follow.
Posted via mobile.
It’s Like a Slow Motion Car Wreck
So, the little people will be required to buy health insurance under the PPACA (Obamacare), but the requirement for big employers has been pushed back a year:
Businesses won’t be penalized next year if they fail to provide workers health insurance after the Obama administration decided to delay a key requirement under its signature 2010 health-care law.
The government will postpone enforcement of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, the administration said today. Under the provision, companies with 50 or more workers face a fine of as much as $3,000 per employee if they don’t offer affordable insurance.
The move addresses complaints from employer groups to President Barack Obama’s administration about the burden of the law’s reporting requirements. The decision pushes the issue past the 2014 midterm congressional elections, as Republicans have sought to make the health law a symbol of government overreach.
“In our ongoing discussions with businesses we have heard that you need the time to get this right,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama, said in a White House blog post announcing the decision. “We are listening.”
The move may lead some employers to delay providing coverage to workers. The law’s individual mandate remains in effect, a provision that requires most Americans to carry health insurance.
You knew that this was coming.
When big business talks, they, “Are listening.”
When it’s civil libertarians, , the poor and elderly, advocates for financial reform, the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, etc., it’s, “talk to the hand”.
H/t to my Dad, who sent me a link to a (subscription only) WSJ article.
What the F%$#?
This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it. Authorities, forced down Bolivian President Evo Morales’ plane because he was suspected to be carrying Edward Snowden to Bolivia:
The plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales home from Russia was rerouted to Austria on Tuesday after France and Portugal refused to let it cross their airspace because of suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden was on board, the country’s foreign minister said.
Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca denied that Snowden was on the plane, which landed in Vienna, and said France and Portugal would have to explain why they canceled authorization for the plane.
“We don’t know who invented this lie. We want to denounce to the international community this injustice with the plane of President Evo Morales,” Choquehuanca said from Vienna, where the plane landed.
………
“This is a hostile act by the United States State Department which has used various European governments,” said Bolivian Defense Minister Ruben Saavedra, who was on the flight.
Choquehuanca said in a statement that after France and Portugal canceled authorization for the flight, Spain’s government allowed the plane to be refueled in its territory. From there the Falcon plane flew on to Vienna.
He said the decision by France and Portugal “put at risk the life of the president.”
They f%$#ing interfered with the f%$#ing flight of a f%$#ing diplomatic f%$#ing flight carrying a f%$#ing President of a f%$#ing sovereign f%$#ing nation, almost certainly as the result of a fairly explicit request from the United States.
This is insane. I’m beginning to think that Snowden knows a lot more than just the fact that the NSA spies on Americans and ignores the law and/or uses a completely obedient FISA court as a fig leaf, because this level of pressure is a clear disaster for both the reputation and the foreign policy of the United States.
Seriously. What ……… the ……… f%$#?
When you are making Vladimir Putin, who is saying that Snowden has to stop leaking if he wants asylum in Russia, seem like the only sensible person with an ounce of compassion in this entire affair.
Seriously. Vladimir Putin? What ……… the ……… Oh, never mind.
Light Posting this Week
We have a week long plant shutdown where I work, so we are going on a road trip.
We will hit Philly on Wednesday and catch part of A Rocket to the Moon’s Farewell Tour, and then we head to New York City to catch some museums.
Oh, Crap
Have you heard about MERS?
I don’t mean the fraudulent legal figleaf known as the Mortgage Electronic Registration System that is a plague upon home-owners, I am instead referring an actual plague to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a SARS like infectious disease with a 55% fatality rate centered in Saudi Arabia.
Discussions of this disease have been bouncing around the epidemiology world for a while, there have only been about 80 confirmed cases, but in a couple of months millions of pilgrims will be going to Saudi Arabia as a part of the Hajj:
When the Black Death exploded in Arabia in the 14th century, killing an estimated third of the population, it spread across the Islamic world via infected religious pilgrims. Today, the Middle East is threatened with a new plague, one eponymously if not ominously named the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV, or MERS for short). This novel coronavirus was discovered in Jordan in March 2012, and as of June 26, there have been 77 laboratory-confirmed infections, 62 of which have been in Saudi Arabia; 34 of these Saudi patients have died.
Although the numbers — so far — are small, the disease is raising anxiety throughout the region. But officials in Saudi Arabia are particularly concerned.
This fall, millions of devout Muslims will descend upon Mecca, Medina, and Saudi Arabia’s holy sites in one of the largest annual migrations in human history. In 2012, approximately 6 million pilgrims came through Saudi Arabia to perform the rituals associated with umrah, and this number is predicted to rise in 2013. Umrah literally means “to visit a populated place,” and it’s the very proximity that has health officials so worried. In Mecca alone, millions of pilgrims will fulfill the religious obligation of circling the Kaaba. And having a large group of people together in a single, fairly confined space threatens to turn the holiest site in Islam into a massive petri dish.
The disease is still mysterious. Little is understood about how it is transmitted and even less regarding its origins. But we do know that MERS is deadly, with a mortality rate of about 55 percent — a remarkably higher lethality than that posed by its close cousin, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, which in 2003 terrified travelers across the globe but posed a fatality rate of only 9.6 percent. The MERS coronavirus is new to our species, so mild and asymptomatic infections seem to be rare, but the human immune response to infection is itself so extreme that it can prove deadly in some cases.
All this is going on while a Dutch lab is claiming rights to the species genome, which is crippling research on the disease.
This has all the hallmarks of a public health catastrophe.
An Old Idea Whose Time Has Come Again
The idea that, in addition to having the US Post Office serve our letter carrier needs, that we have them supply basic retail banking services again:
On July 27, 2012, the National Association of Letter Carriers adopted a resolution at their National Convention in Minneapolis to investigate establishing a postal banking system. The resolution noted that expanding postal services and developing new sources of revenue are important to the effort to save the public Post Office and preserve living-wage jobs; that many countries have a successful history of postal banking, including the U.S. itself; and that postal banks could serve the 9 million people who don’t have bank accounts and the 21 million who use usurious check cashers.
The USPS has been self-funded throughout its history, but it has been recently driven to insolvency because in 2006, Congress required it to prefund postal retiree health benefits [3] for 75 years into the future, an onerous burden no other public or private company is required to carry. The USPS has evidently been targeted by a plutocratic Congress bent on destroying the most powerful unions and privatizing all public services, including education. Britain’s 150-year-old postal service is also on the privatization chopping block, and its postal workers have also vowed to fight. Adding banking services is an internationally proven way to maintain post office profitability.
Not only has it been done before, it was done in the United States in my lifetime:
The now-defunct U.S. Postal Savings System was also quite successful in its day. It was set up in 1911 to get money out of hiding, attract the savings of immigrants, provide safe depositories for people who had lost confidence in private banks, and furnish depositories with convenient hours. Deposits ranged from $1 to $2,500, and the postal system paid 2% interest on them. It issued U.S. Postal Savings Bonds that paid annual interest, as well as Postal Savings Certificates and domestic money orders. Postal savings peaked in 1947 at almost $3.4 billion.
The U.S. Postal Savings System was shut down in 1967, not because it was inefficient but because it became unnecessary after its profitability became apparent. Private banks then captured the market, raising their interest rates and offering the same governmental guarantees that the postal savings system had.
This is a good idea for a number of reasons
- It would allow for an alternative to hit the ground running when (not if) the next time that the big banksters crash and burn.
- It would allow for small depositors, who routinely take it up the ass from commercial banks, to have an alternative that is also national in scope.
- It would help the Post Office out of its current Congressionaly generated financial crisis.
In order to take down the banksters, you have to do more than just regulate them: You need to create an effective state owned and operated alternative.
Tweet of the Day
Big Data, n.: the belief that any sufficiently large pile of shit contains a pony with probability approaching 1
— James Grimmelmann (@grimmelm) June 28, 2013
H/t Patrick Durusau.
Oops!
D’oh!
I was looking up some data on Loctite™ thread locking compounds and was perusing an online brochure (PDF).
And then I saw this.
Since the 1950s, Henkel has served the defense market. While taking a leadership role in supporting the U.S. Military’s efforts with dedicated resources, Henkel has developed products and specifications for high performance adhesives, sealants, coatings and surface treatments. Today, thousands of assemblies in military vehicle, ordnance and other device applications use Loctite®, Alodine®, Multan®, Bonderite® and Turco® products.
In isolation, the quote sounds pretty innocuous, until you examine the accompanying picture.
Isn’t that a Russian MiG-29? Why yes, it is!
How does this have anything to do with, “taking a leadership role in supporting the U.S. Military’s efforts?”
Oh ……… Right ……… It doesn’t.
Live in Obedient Fear Citizen
Remember that you are the bankster’s property, and the Bill of Rights never applies:
Jeff Olson, 40, is facing a potential 13-year jail sentence for perhaps the world’s most costly sidewalk art. A former aide to the U.S. Senator from Washington, Olson used water-soluble statements like “Stop big banks,” and “Stop Bank Blight.com” outside Bank of America branches last year to protest the company’s practices. He eventually gave up his protest but prosecutors later brought 13 charges against him. Now a judge has reportedly banned his attorney from “mentioning the First Amendment, free speech, free expression, public forum, expressive conduct, or political speech during the trial.” It appears someone associated with Bank of American could finally go to jail, but it will not by the bank officials in the financial scandal. It is the guy writing slogans in chalk in the sidewalk.
I have long been critical of the degree to which American judges are now barring parties from making defenses and arguments before juries. These rulings often have an outcome determinative impact on trials. In this case, free speech was the motivation of Olson, but he will reportedly have to defend himself as just a guy who walked up and started drawing in front of this bank.
Olson and his partner had been campaigning to get people to take their money out of the bank. This campaign led to a confrontation with Darell Freeman, vice president of Bank of America’s Global Corporate Security, who reportedly demanded action from local prosecutors. Olson stopped when contacted by the San Diego Gang Unit in 2012.
Yet, the bank insisted the chalk caused $6,000 to clean up, a rather suspicious claim. These were slogans written on the sidewalk. Prosecutors hit him with 13 counts of misdemeanor vandalism charges and $13,000 in restitution to the City and to Bank of America.
(emphasis mine)
This has gone viral, and the response of the judge was swift, to put a gag order on all the participants for a f%$#ing misdemeanor:
As reported in a Thursday evening, June 27, BuzzFlash at Truthout update to the chilling San Diego (SD) city attorney prosecution of Jeff Olson, an SD Judge placed an unprecedented gag order on a misdemeanor trial — in particular muzzling Olson. But it also apparently included witnesses, the jury and others.
Judge Howard Shore also chastised the Mayor of San Diego, Bob Filner. Filner apparently in the judge’s eyes had the temerity to call the trial of Olson a waste of time and taxpayer money. According to the San Diego Reader, Filner sent out a memorandum on June 20 that read in part:This young man is being persecuted for thirteen counts of vandalism stemming from an expression of political protest that involved washable children’s chalk on a City sidewalk. It is alleged that he has no previous criminal record. If these assertions are correct, I believe this is a misuse and waste of taxpayer money. It could also be characterized as an abuse of power that infringes on First Amendment particularly when it is arbitrarily applied to some, but not all, similar speech.
Judge Shore, in essence, warned the mayor of San Diego, who happens to be a Democrat in a traditionally conservative city, to keep his comments to himself, and would likely have issued a gag order on the mayor if Judge Shore were able.
(Again emphasis mine)
Silly rabbit, free speech is for Banksters.
Heh
H/t Jill on Facebook .
Cover Story: Bert and Ernie Celebrate Gay Marriage : The New Yorker
The New Yorker gives us another classic cover.
Deep Thought
I was texting my wife today, talking about how to handle our cats flea issue, and I felt the need to add the following:
Attention NSA: I mean a FLEA bomb.
What bothers me the most is that I was not sure if I was joking, or if I was serious.
Adding Chris Hayes to the List
The list of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off, of course.
Here is an essay worthy of Keith Olbermann’s best special comments.
He notes that by any rational standard, the officially sanctioned leaks over the last few days are almost certainly more damaging to national security than anything that Edward Snowden has released to date.
He demonstrates how leaks, even potentially damaging ones, are acceptable, so long as they serve to glorify our state security apparatus:
H/t Digby.
The Daily Show is the Best Financial Journalism Operation on TV
Case in point, their examination of the corruption amongst the ratings agencies:
Time to add John Oliver to my list of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.
H/t Matt Taibbi.
I’ve Never Been a Fan of Tammy Duckworth………
Ever since she made Rahm Emanuel’s carpetbagger favorite for the race to succeed Henry Hyde, and he dropped $1 million on her losing campaign in a Democratic Party wave year.
That being said, this is a righteous take down of a federal contractor who used a high school football injury to get contracting preference as a “disabled vet” is a thing of beauty.
H/t Charlie Pierce
If She is Not Running for Statewide Office Soon, The Texas Democratic Party is Stupid and Worthless
I am referring, of course to Wendy Davis, whose epic filibuster against the radical anti-abortion legislation proposed by the Texas Taliban Republicans was crucial to running out the clock on the special legislative session:
She was a state senator Tuesday morning. By Wednesday, she was a political celebrity known across the nation. But also hoarse, hungry and thirsty.
The leg-numbing filibuster by Wendy Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat — in which she stood and talked for more than 11 hours at the Capitol here, never sitting, eating, drinking or even using the bathroom to help block passage of an anti-abortion bill supported by the state’s top Republicans — was not the longest such marathon, by Texas standards.
But it didn’t matter.
Her feat of stamina and conviction gained thousands of Twitter followers in a matter of hours. Pictures of the sneakers she wore beneath her dress zoomed across computer and television screens. The press corps demanded to know her shoe brand. (Mizuno, it turned out.) Hundreds of men, women and children waited for hours at the Capitol to sit in an upstairs gallery and watch her in action, standing in lines that snaked around the rotunda. Even President Obama noticed, posting a Twitter message on Tuesday that read, “Something special is happening in Austin tonight.”
Ms. Davis, 50, has known long odds and, for Democrats, was the perfect symbol in a fight over what a woman can do. She was a teenager when her first child was born, but managed as a single mother to pull herself from a trailer park to Harvard Law School to a hard-fought seat in the Texas Senate, a rare liberal representing conservative Tarrant County. According to Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston, she had the second-most liberal voting record in the Senate in 2011.
They used some bogus rules of order to shut her down down two hours early, but parliamentary points of order made by Democrats, along with a remarkably raucous gallery, pushed the vote past the midnight deadline for the special section.
Of course, playing by the rules is not how the Republicans play, so they tried to reset the clock, in order to make it appear as if they had made the deadline:
That is evidence that someone changed the official record to backdate the vote, which took place beginning at 12:02 AM on June 26th to before 11:59 PM on June 25th.
That’s stealing the vote. Or cheating. Or being a Republican.
Social media is cruel to cheaters, though. There was a YouTube live stream, there was a paper record with a timestamp of 12:02 AM for the vote, there was this image of the date discrepancy, and there were plenty of reporters who put it together and deduced that hijinks were afoot.
Hundreds of thousands of people watched this online, and knew the time as well, so in the wee hours of the morning, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst fessed up.
Rick Perry, who appears to still think that he can become President, is calling another special session in order to get another bite at the apple.
I think that the Democratic State Senators should leave the state to prevent quorum.
I also think that Wendy Davis should be the Democratic nominee for either Governor or US Senate in the next election, but I rather expect that the Democratic Party insiders will find a way to dismiss her, because, after all, she has the, “the second-most liberal voting record in the Senate in 2011,” and heaven forbid that you nominate someone from the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.
Talk About Irony
Glenn Greenwald lives in Brazil because DOMA does not recognize his partner for the purposes of immigration, and Brazil does.
With DOMA being overturned, it means that if he were to move back to the United States, his partner would get a spouse visa:
Glenn Greenwald has been living in Brazil (where he has a permanent visa*) for the past eight years with his partner, David Michael Miranda. Now that the Defense of Marriage Act has been struck down, Greenwald says they’re considering moving back to the United States.
Here’s how he described his reason for moving in an interview with Out Magazine in 2011:
Brazil recognizes our relationship for immigration purposes, while the government of my supposedly “free,” liberty-loving country enacted a law explicitly barring such recognition.
Does Wednesday’s ruling mean Greenwald will move back? Here’s what he said in an email to Slate senior editor Emily Bazelon today:
It’s certainly something we’ll consider. It’s a huge choice with many complicated factors, and it’s not the kind of thing you seriously evaluate when the option isn’t available to you. We haven’t made up our minds in the 90 minutes or so since the decision was announced!
We’ve lived here together for 8 years and built a life. My partner is finishing school. All of his family is here. So it’s something that will take time to resolve. But it’s definitely something that we both have a desire at some point to do, and will now spend the time figuring out how and when we can do it.
What is also clear is that, at least until Barack Obama leaves office, is that he, and his partner, would be mercilessly targeted by the authorities if they would set foot back in the United States because of their roles in exposing the NSA spying on US citizens.
So now, because he has effectively been declared an enemy of the state, he cannot safely exercise he new rights his partner got today.
Welcome to the United States of Kafka.
I Hope That This is Sincere
It might also just be a realization that it’s political poison to piss off minorities even more.
But in either case, the fact that Eric Cantor is calling for speedy legislation to fix the Supreme Court’s ruling against the Voting Rights Act is a positive development:
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) reacted late Tuesday afternoon to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling that overturned a centerpiece of the Voting Rights Act.
“My experience with John Lewis in Selma earlier this year was a profound experience that demonstrated the fortitude it took to advance civil rights and ensure equal protection for all,” Cantor said in a statement provided to TPM. “I’m hopeful Congress will put politics aside, as we did on that trip, and find a responsible path forward that ensures that the sacred obligation of voting in this country remains protected.”
It should be noted that the proverbial devil is in the details here.
If the teabagger caucus is allowed to get its teeth into this, whatever come out of the house will be deeply ugly.