We are all in Seattle.
We are all in the apartment we rented.
Now all we need is our f%$#ing luggage!!!!
Month: February 2014
United’s Web Was Down, and I Was on Hold for 2 F%$#ing Hours, So ………
This Sh%$ is all F%$#ed Up!
So I drove to the airport to see what could be arranged at the ticket counter.
There are no seats avilable, so we will be playing the wait list tango at BWI starting very early in the morning.
Keep your fingers crossed for me.
Thank you Mr. Anthropogenic Climate Change.
With a bit of luck, we will make it by Friday some time.
I keep expecting Chevy Chase to appear, because it does seem like one of his Vacation movies.
F%$# Me Rae Bradbury
Some context for the title
Flight is cancelled, and I have f%$#ing been on f%$#ing hold for 2 f%$#ing hours.
I’m thinking that it would be faster to drive to BWI (We just got our road plowed*), and a round trip should be less time than I have spent on hold.
*Additionally, I am feeling the need to get a bit plowed myself.
Weather Permitting, My Ass!
Not only our flight, but our trip to the airport this evening are in doubt.
I still expect to make out in time to see Eugenia chant the Haftorah on Saturday, but we might not even be able to leave the house until tomorrow morning.
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Packing
Taking the red eye to Seattle tomorrow for my niece’s bat Mitzvah.
Assuming that the weather permits, which is a substantial assumption.
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It’s a Busy Night for People I Do Not Want to Piss Off
John Oliver, who I added to the list when he subbed for John Stewart, just unloaded a can of whup ass on the Silicon Valley techholes at the “Crunchies” award:
You already have all the money in the world. Why do you need awards after that? It is absolutely ridiculous. You’re no longer the underdogs, it’s very important that you realize that. You’re not the scrappy people that people get behind. It used to be that people who worked in the tech industry were emotional shut-ins who you could root for. Now those days are gone. You’re pissing off an entire city.
He also goes off on Uber, Larry Ellison, the Kristalnacht 1%er, and Uber ……… and Uber.
It’s worth the watch.
Pass the F%$#ing Popcorn
There are now rumors that former Congressman and current MSNBC journalistic impersonater Joe Scarborough is considering a run for President:
This is only slightly less embarrassing than engaging with a rumor about Donald Trump, how do they say, “mulling a presidential bid,” so let’s start with an apology: I’m sorry. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get down to the lowly business of the day. Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s wake-up chat show “Morning Joe,” is “mulling a presidential bid,” according to a couple of anonymous people and Mark McKinnon, who spoke to Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller website. What a world.
Even without the inevitability of some Republican Karl Rove wannabee making an issue of Lori Klausutis, his candidacy would make the Freddie Dalton Thompson clown look like the Obama campaign.
BTW, that rumbling you feel is not an earthquake. It is the writing staff of The Daily Show frantically high fiving each other.
People I Do Not Want to Piss Off
Oh Snap! He got a “Oh, Hell No!” from Samuel L. Jackson
So Entertainment reporter Sam Rubin confused Samuel L. Jackson and Lawrence Fishburne, and Mr. Jackson was not amused.
As I have seen his performance as Jules in Pulp Fiction a number of times, I’m kind of surprised that I had not already put him on the list.
Reconstruction Was Ended Way Too Soon
And now the
Maddow is all over how NC Governor Pat McCrory’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources Department of Environment and Natural Resources is aggressively protecting lawbreaking polluters like Duke Energy, by aggressively preventing private actions against the firm, as opposed to actually enforcing the law:
North Carolina regulators’ penchant for seemingly protecting Gov. Pat McCrory’s (R) former employers from repeated lawsuits over their environmental practices was only stopped following a devastatingly toxic spill, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow reported on Monday.
On two prior occasions, Maddow said, officials at the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) invoked a provision in the federal Clean Water Act allowing them to step in as plaintiffs against Duke Energy when Duke was being sued by environmental activists over the toxic coal ash ponds at its facilities. The state reached settlements worth a collective $99,000 for those incidents.
But Monday night, she explained, a third such settlement was delayed in the wake of a pond spill that produced up to 82,000 tons of coal ash and 27 million gallons of contaminated water — the third-biggest spill of its’ kind in U.S. history.
And despite not making any statement about the Feb. 3 disaster until four days after it happened, McCrory — who worked with the company for 28 years — used the first two DENR settlements to boast that his administration took “legal action” against Duke Energy.
“Right,” Maddow said skeptically. “By stepping in and blocking other peoples’ lawsuits against the company, and then settling with the company for nearly no money, and, importantly, [requiring] no promise from Duke Energy that they would fix what they were doing wrong.”
Talk about a cheap date. Even the Department of Justice requests a lie from the offenders to refrain from future wrongdoing.
Obamacare Is a Subterfuge
When one looks at Obama, and the neoliberal free market mousketeers who surround him, one has to to wonder just how much Obama, who actually taught at the University of Chicago, is in thrall to Chicago School economic theory.
While I do think part of the motivation for putting forward what became the PPACA was an attempt to “fix” the thoroughly dysfunctional healthcare delivery system in the United States, I also think that there has been an unspoken agenda, which is to sever the relationship between employers and their employees insurance.
If you talk to most economists, and all of the conservative “freshwater” economists, they will vehemently maintain that employer provided healthcare is economically unjustified, and so should be abolished.
When you look at the implementation of healthcare reform, it seems that one constant is that the employer mandate has been repeatedly delayed and weakened.
And today, they did it again:
For the second time in a year, the Obama administration is giving certain employers extra time before they must offer health insurance to almost all their full-time workers.
Under new rules announced Monday by Treasury Department officials, employers with 50 to 99 workers will be given until 2016 — two years longer than originally envisioned under the Affordable Care Act — before they risk a federal penalty for not complying.
Companies with 100 workers or more are getting a different kind of one-year grace period. Instead of being required in 2015 to offer coverage to 95 percent of full-time workers, these bigger employers can avoid a fine by offering insurance to 70 percent of them next year.
How the administration would define employer requirements has been one of the biggest remaining questions about the way the 2010 health-care law will work in practice — and has sparked considerable lobbying. By providing the dual phase-ins for employers of different sizes, administration officials have sought to lighten the burden on the small share of affected employers that have not offered insurance in the past.
As word of the delays spread Monday, many across the ideological spectrum viewed them as an effort by the White House to defuse another health-care controversy before the fall midterm elections. The new postponements won over part, but not all, of the business community. And they caught consumer advocates, usually reliable White House allies, by surprise, particularly because administration officials had already announced in July that the employer requirements would be postponed from this year until 2015.
Congressional Republicans seized on the announcement as the latest justification for scrapping the health-care law. In particular, they renewed their opposition to the law’s requirement that most Americans have insurance, saying it is unfair to delay rules for businesses and not for individuals.
Of course it’s unfair.
That’s a feature not a bug.
It is my belief that the goal of these actions is to create a space which will allow the minimization, and eventual elimination, of employer provided healthcare, because ……… freedumb and free markets.
This also explains why Obama has been so eager to cut a “grand bargan” with the ‘phants, and why he is so enthusiastic about trade deals like the TPP where freedumb and free markets trump democracy, labor rights, and environmental protections.
I did Not Expect this From the New York Times
The Times when writing about the debate about raising the minimum wage, calls out a so called “think tank” as being a subsidiary of the hospitality industry:
Just four blocks from the White House is the headquarters of the Employment Policies Institute, a widely quoted economic research center whose academic reports have repeatedly warned that increasing the minimum wage could be harmful, increasing poverty and unemployment.
But something fundamental goes unsaid in the institute’s reports: The nonprofit group is run by a public relations firm that also represents the restaurant industry, as part of a tightly coordinated effort to defeat the minimum wage increase that the White House and Democrats in Congress have pushed for.
“The vast majority of economic research shows there are serious consequences,” Michael Saltsman, the institute’s research director, said in an interview, before he declined to list the restaurant chains that were among its contributors.
The campaign illustrates how groups — conservative and liberal — are again working in opaque ways to shape hot-button political debates, like the one surrounding minimum wage, through organizations with benign-sounding names that can mask the intentions of their deep-pocketed patrons.
Those are the first 4 paragraphs.
Seriously, the New York Times led with the fact that that a lot of the think tanks are little more than whores for their donors.
And then they name the lead pimp:
………
The Employment Policies Institute, founded two decades ago, is led by the advertising and public relations executive Richard B. Berman, who has made millions of dollars in Washington by taking up the causes of corporate America. He has repeatedly created official-sounding nonprofit groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom that have challenged limits like the ban on indoor smoking and the push to restrict calorie counts in fast foods.
………
The sign at the entrance is for Berman and Company, as the Employment Policies Institute has no employees of its own. Mr. Berman’s for-profit advertising firm, instead, “bills” the nonprofit institute for the services his employees provide to the institute. This arrangement effectively means that the nonprofit is a moneymaking venture for Mr. Berman, whose advertising firm was paid $1.1 million by the institute in 2012, according to its tax returns, or 44 percent of its total budget, with most of the rest of the money used to buy advertisements.
Disclosure reports filed by individual foundations show that its donors in recent years have included the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a longtime supporter of conservative causes. Mr. Berman and Mr. Saltsman would not identify other donors, but did say they included the restaurant industry. But its tax return shows that the $2.4 million in listed donations received in 2012 came from only 11 contributors, who wrote checks for as much as $500,000 apiece.
I am not sure why the New York Times has decided to stop channeling Claude Rains, but it is a refreshing change for the “paper of record”.
Normally this sort of “business as usual” is studiously ignored by the Washington press corps(e).
If You Did Not Already Think that the TPP Sucked
The gushing endorsement of the international trade deal by corrupt subprime lendor, union buster, and enthusiastic Obama supporter Commerce Sec. Penny Pritzker should remove all doubt:
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other U.S. trade relationships are outdated and need an “upgrade”, U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said on Tuesday during a trade visit to Mexico.
Attitudes toward labor and the environment as well as e-commerce and new technology have shifted trade concerns since NAFTA was signed, so the U.S. government is focusing on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would establish a free-trade bloc stretching from Vietnam to Chile, she said.
“NAFTA was a groundbreaking agreement 20 years ago and it has served all of the North American countries well,” Pritzker said of the 1994 treaty between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. “But now it’s time to be looking at how can we upgrade our trade relationships.”
In the article, she is described as a, “a businesswoman and heiress to the Hyatt Hotel fortune who has been a prolific fundraiser for U.S. President Barack Obama,” but that is a weak description of their relationship.
She has bankrolled his career from the very start. She was his first patron, and arguably his biggest supporter among the top tenth of the 1%.
She has also been virulently anti-labor in her business and public actions, and she and her family paid themselves big bucks as they drove Superior Bank into the ground.
Between, her, Rahm Emanuel, and Arne Duncan, and the full throated support of all of them from Barack Obama, it is no wonder that I’ve concluded that the President is a corporate tool.
H/t Crooks & Liars.
Just a Reminder: Big Ag is Evil, Not Just Monsanto, and it is US Policy to Subsidize them Through International Agreements
You really need to read this account of a systematic program of harassment and libel against Tyrone Hayes for his research showing that Syngenta’s herbicide atrazine was dangerous:
In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.”
Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. David Wake, a professor in Hayes’s department, said that Hayes “may have had the greatest potential of anyone in the field.” But, when Hayes discovered that atrazine might impede the sexual development of frogs, his dealings with Syngenta became strained, and, in November, 2000, he ended his relationship with the company.
………
[Former student Roger] Liu and several other former students said that they had remained skeptical of Hayes’s accusations until last summer, when an article appeared in Environmental Health News (in partnership with 100Reporters)* that drew on Syngenta’s internal records. Hundreds of Syngenta’s memos, notes, and e-mails have been unsealed following the settlement, in 2012, of two class-action suits brought by twenty-three Midwestern cities and towns that accused Syngenta of “concealing atrazine’s true dangerous nature” and contaminating their drinking water. Stephen Tillery, the lawyer who argued the cases, said, “Tyrone’s work gave us the scientific basis for the lawsuit.”
Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was “discredit Hayes.” In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.” “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,” Ford wrote. She observed that Hayes “grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life.” She wrote, “What’s motivating Hayes?—basic question.”
………
In January, 2001, Syngenta employees and members of the EcoRisk panel travelled to Berkeley to discuss Hayes’s new findings. Syngenta asked to meet with him privately, but Hayes insisted on the presence of his students, a few colleagues, and his wife. He had previously had an amiable relationship with the panel—he had enjoyed taking long runs with the scientist who supervised it—and he began the meeting, in a large room at Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, as if he were hosting an academic conference. He wore a new suit and brought in catered meals.
After lunch, Syngenta introduced a guest speaker, a statistical consultant, who listed numerous errors in Hayes’s report and concluded that the results were not statistically significant. Hayes’s wife, Katherine Kim, said that the consultant seemed to be trying to “make Tyrone look as foolish as possible.” Wake, the biology professor, said that the men on the EcoRisk panel looked increasingly uncomfortable. “They were experienced enough to know that the issues the statistical consultant was raising were routine and ridiculous,” he said. “A couple of glitches were presented as if they were the end of the world. I’ve been a scientist in academic settings for forty years, and I’ve never experienced anything like that. They were after Tyrone.”
………
Michelle Boone, a professor of aquatic ecology at Miami University, who served on the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory panel, said, “We all follow the Tyrone Hayes drama, and some people will say, ‘He should just do the science.’ But the science doesn’t speak for itself. Industry has unlimited resources and bully power. Tyrone is the only one calling them out on what they’re doing.………
The Supreme Court has said that corporations are people in the Citizens United case.
Why isn’t Syngenta being criminally prosecuted for stalking?
From the Department of Double Standards………
I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!The big news in diplomacy recently is the leaking of a conversation between Victoria Nuland,the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and Geoff Pyatt, the Ambassador to the Ukraine, regarding the recent political upheavals in that former Soviet republic.
Diplomatic heads have been exploding over Neuland telling Pyatt, “F%$# the EU.
America’s new top diplomat for Europe seems to have been caught being decidedly undiplomatic about her EU allies in a phone call apparently intercepted and leaked by Russia.
“F%$# the EU,” Victoria Nuland apparently says in a recent phone call with the US ambassador to Kiev, Geoff Pyatt, as they discuss the next moves to try to resolve the crisis in Ukraine amid weeks of pro-democracy protests which have rocked the country. The call appears to have been intercepted and released on YouTube, accompanied by Russian captions of the private and candid conversation.
Although the US state department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, White House spokesman Jay Carney alleged that because it had been “tweeted out by the Russian government, it says something about Russia’s role”.
………
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Nuland “has been in contact with her EU counterparts and of course has apologized for these reported comments”.
She said that if the Russians were responsible for listening to, recording and posting a private diplomatic telephone conversation, it would be “a new low in Russian tradecraft.”
Well, first, I would argue that if a diplomat decides conduct a conversation over unsecured cell phones, they pretty much had it coming, and second, given the very recent history of the NSA targeting the sex lives of domestic political opponents of the Bush administration.
If intercepting an unencrypted call between two people discussing how to intervene in political instability on a nation state bordering your own is “a new low in Russian tradecraft,” then there are simply no words to describe what the NSA has been doing against domestic critics of our government.
Neither the EU’s outrage over the comments about the EU, which is a participant in the conflict, and therefore cannot be a good faith interlocutor on this issue, nor the US’s crocodile tears over being spied upon are justified.
They are simply exercises in self serving hypocrisy.
Saw Some Shakespeare Tonight
A Midsummer Nights Dream put on by Open Space Arts.
Natalie was Moth, Charlie was Starveling.
At the end of the play, Mark, one of the techs, proposed Elora, who played Titania & Hyppolyta.
She said yes.
I gave then my standard advice, which is to elope
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Greenwald to Return to US ……… Stay Out of Private Aircraft
I think that Glenn Greenwald overestimates the moral and political constrains on the behavior of the US state security apparatus and the executive branch.
If he returns to the United States they will attempt to destroy him:
When big-name public figures and Edward Snowden critics first started suggesting Glenn Greenwald and other writers who’d published his surveillance disclosures might be in legal jeopardy, Greenwald assumed that both the clamor and the actual risk to journalists would quickly subside, and eventually disappear.
That was about six months ago. Today, Greenwald believes he miscalculated. In an exclusive interview Wednesday he said that the ominous rhetoric directed at him has actually escalated. It’s discouraged him from visiting the United States, where he still has strong family and professional ties. And though he intends to reenter the country sooner rather than later, he’ll do so despite the fact that he believes he faces a much greater risk of detention than most of the other journalists who have access to some or all of Snowden’s files.
“As the story kind of went on I thought the prospect of something happening to the journalists would dissipate to zero. I actually think that the risk is higher than it’s ever been,” Greenwald told me. “My parents are getting older, my nieces [live there] — none of that is something I’m going to go home for now … I had a foundation that wanted to sponsor and pay for and market aggressively a six-city speaking tour to talk about the NSA story and the revelations. I would have completely loved to have done it … on the assurance that nothing would happen. And because we couldn’t get it from the U.S. government, I had to cancel.”
When we last spoke in August, Greenwald was cognizant of the risks he’d face if he visited the United States, but he was also pointedly defiant. “I take more seriously the Constitution’s guarantee of a free press in the First Amendment,” he said at the time. “So I have every intention of entering the U.S. as soon as my schedule permits and there’s a reason to do so.”
Journalist Gary Webb was driven to suicide for revealing that the Contras were smuggling crack into the United States.
With Padilla, they kept him in solitary for years, and when he needed dental work, they kept him blindfolded through the entire trip.
There are people who want to destroy you, and they have the means, and your only protection would be the good will of one Barack Hussein Obama, which, along with $7.50 will get you a Starbucks latte.
They want to make him dead.
Power Out at Chez Saroff
The result of an ice storm that gave the kids a snow day.
So I, and my blogging, must depend on the kindness of BGE.
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Priorities
The kids have rehearsal right now. We’ve dropped them off, and Sharon and I are having a date night.
We are going to have sushi, but we won’t be getting our Repo Man on.
We will pay for said sushi.
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Hizonner Does Good
New York Mayor Bill De Blasio jas just announced that will not march in the St. Patrick’s day parade because of the organizers anti-gay policies:
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) on Tuesday said that he will not march in the city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade because organizers of the event will not allow participants to carry gay pride signs.
“No, I am not planning on marching in the parade,” de Blasio said at a press conference. “I will be participating in a number of other events to honor the Irish heritage of this city, but I simply disagree with the organizers of that parade.”
Fabulous!
Here’s hoping that the blow-back changes the calculus used the bigots who run the parade to make their decisions.
The Navy Just Tried to Pull Out of the JSF Program
It’s not particularly surprising. The F-35C is the most expensive variant, and it has no potential exports (the only operator of catapult equipped carriers are the US, the French, and the Brazilians), so it is not surprising that the navy requested a “break” from the JSF program:
OSD TOLD THE NAVY: YOU CAN’T TAKE A ‘BREAK’ FROM THE F-35C: According to a congressional source, in its 2015 budget proposal, the Navy asked to take a three-year “break” from its production of the F-35C, its variant of the Joint Strike Fighter. Concerned this was a first step toward walking away from the program permanently, OSD told the Navy: no way.
It’s an open secret that the Navy would prefer to invest more in its F-18 fighters rather than buy the F-35C. But if the Navy pulled out of the program, the unit cost — already under scrutiny — would go up for the Air Force and the Marine Corps.
The Navy did not get their “time out” because Office of the Secretary of Defense understood that a 3 year break constituted a cancellation of that variant, because in 3 years it will cost even more, and the DoD budgets will be under more stress.
This is, to quote Joe Biden, “A big f%$#ing deal.”