Tag: ek Politics

I know you all ♥ your trick little iPhone and Apple is all that stands between you and the evil empire that is Microsoft (for the record I don’t think they’re evil so much as clueless hacks who produce second rate products).

But did you know that your iPhone is storing a record of every place you carry it, whether it is turned on or not?

True enough.  This is why smart criminals won’t have a cellphone at a sit down.  In fact most of them can be set to listen to everything within a 15 foot radius remotely without your even being aware of it.

Here’s what John Aravosis at Americablog thinks-

Holy crap. This is for real. I just ran the software and found the secret file on my laptop, detailing where I’ve been over the past year, including lots of details of where I visited in Vegas last year during the Netroots Nation conference, where I’ve been to in DC, and Chicago. It even shows you, over time, where I’ve been. Watch the video below I made of the data using the software I link to above. It show where I’ve traveled, and when I traveled, and how much. It gets a lot more detailed, in terms of location, I’m showing you the general view.

And it’s actually much worse than the video shows.  The guys who uncovered this, and who made it possible for you to see your own data, have washed the data slightly – it’s FAR more detailed than my video shows below:

A detailed record, second by second, of everywhere you have been over the past year.  And anyone with an iPhone knows that the damn phone knows where you are within a few feet.  It seems they’re only using cell tower data, rather than GPS data, but still, that data is pretty accurate if you’re in a bit city.

For those of you who don’t know how tower triangulation works your cell phone is constantly seeking the best signal.  By recording the strength (which translates to distance for the most part) you can use a compass and three known reference points to locate yourself “within a few feet” just as John says.

I’m still trying to decide if “bit city” is a typo or another piece of jargon I have to memorize so I can appear hip.

So much goes over Beltway Access Bloggers heads that it’s genuinely hard to determine if they are morons or liars (with moron being the more charitable choice).

I find that a fitting introduction to Greg Sargent’s current piece.

New Washington Post/ABC News polling released this morning is unequivocal: There is strong across the board support for Obama’s policy preferences on the deficit.

And yet, in what appears to be an emerging pattern, that support is not matched by general approval of Obama’s handling of fiscal matters.

The poll finds that 72 percent overall, and 68 percent of independents, support hiking taxes on those over $250,000. Even 54 percent of Republicans support this.

Meanwhile, 65 percent say Medicare should remain as it is today and should not be transformed into a voucher program. Only 34 percent favor changing the program.

A solid majority, 59 percent, also supports a mix of tax hikes and spending cuts to reduce the deficit – the Dem approach – versus only 36 percent who support only cuts.

But only 39 percent approve of Obama’s handling of the deficit, versus 58 percent who disapprove. That’s better, but only marginally so, than the GOP’s 33-64 spread on the same question. And more say the GOP is taking a stronger leadership role than Obama, 45-40. This matches yesterday’s McClatchy poll, which found the same disconnect.

Either voters don’t know what Obama’s proposals are; or they do, but the GOP’s success in creating generalized anxiety about Dem overspending continues to dominate; or perhaps all views of Obama are colored by unease about the economy. Whatever the cause, closing this disconnect – translating support for Obama’s policies into confidence in his economic and fiscal leadership – is perhaps Obama’s central political challenge.

Zing!  Obama’s central political challenge is that people know he’s a liar.  He should stop lying.

Update: (h/t Think Progress)

Duh.

Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq

By Paul Bignell, The Independent

Tuesday, 19 April 2011

The minutes of a series of meetings between ministers and senior oil executives are at odds with the public denials of self-interest from oil companies and Western governments at the time.

The documents were not offered as evidence in the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry into the UK’s involvement in the Iraq war. In March 2003, just before Britain went to war, Shell denounced reports that it had held talks with Downing Street about Iraqi oil as “highly inaccurate”. BP denied that it had any “strategic interest” in Iraq, while Tony Blair described “the oil conspiracy theory” as “the most absurd”.

…

The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP’s behalf because the oil giant feared it was being “locked out” of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms.

Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: “Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis.”

The minister then promised to “report back to the companies before Christmas” on her lobbying efforts.

The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq “post regime change”. Its minutes state: “Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity.”

War Crimes–

To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

Accessory After The Fact–

An accessory after the fact is often not considered an accomplice but is treated as a separate offender. Such an offender is one who harbours, protects, or assists a person who has already committed an offense or is charged with committing an offense.

– Encyclopedia Brittanica

(h/t emptywheel)

The DCCC’s Bad Ad Team

By: David Dayen

Tuesday April 19, 2011 12:59 pm

Why would you play this funny? Why give the message that old people are worthy of derision, essentially because they’re old? This looks like a really bad Super Bowl spot when the issue discussed is deadly serious. Republicans are claiming that the ad represents “scare tactics” but no, I could show you scare tactics. A closeup of a senior’s hand as she struggles in the last throes of life and then pulling out to reveal she’s laying on the middle of the sidewalk as white men in suits ignore her, that’s scare tactics. This looks like a GoDaddy ad.

Furthermore, it gets progressively worse. The lemonade stand shot is fine, but then you have the lawnmower riding played for laughs, with the jerk owner of the lawn telling the old man that he missed a spot. Still generally on point, but discordant; why is the focus on basically getting amusement out of the old man’s condition with the walker? And then there’s the strange third segment. When the bachelorettes come to the door, I have no idea what’s going on. The old guy is dressed like a firefighter, and given that the women are all screaming, it’s just as plausible at first glance that he’s moonlighting as a firefighter. Indeed that’s a concern in a world without Medicare; the elderly will extend their working days to keep a hold on their employer-provided health insurance. Only a few seconds later do you figure out that he’s a stripper, and are again told to laugh at the old man’s expense.

…

Even if this ad were funny, which it isn’t, the subject of the comedy is completely misplaced. Would an old person watching this and seeing people their age held up for ridicule have a better opinion of Democrats?

But, you might say, they got the facts out. It says right there that Republicans voted to end Medicare. Who cares? The narrative of the story is generally a light one, where old people have to work demeaning jobs and we derive pleasure from that spectacle.

Obviously, one ad isn’t going to change people’s views on the subject; it isn’t going to change much of anything. But it strikes me as a missed opportunity to clarify the record. An ad that said “Republicans voted to end Medicare” over and over for 30 seconds would do the job better and you wouldn’t have to hire a septuagenarian who’s comfortable in a feather boa. In fact, I know it does, because the DNC ran that ad back in 2009.

So in addition to having contributions go to save the most conservative Blue Dogs in the most conservative districts in their re-election efforts, DCCC donors just paid for this, where the party takes a winning issue and inexplicably lampoons it.

President Obama’s Real Proposal (And Why It’s Risky)

Robert Reich

Thursday, April 14, 2011

The betting in the White House is that by 2014 the recovery will be in full force, and the economy will have grown so much that the ratio of deficit to the GDP will be in the range of 3 to 5 percent anyway. That means any across-the-board cuts wouldn’t have to be very deep.

…

Yet what are the chances of a booming recovery? The economy is now growing at an annualized rate of only 1.5 percent. That’s pitiful. It’s not nearly enough to bring down the rate of unemployment, or remove the danger of a double dip. Real wages continue to drop. Housing prices continue to drop. Food and gas prices are rising. Consumer confidence is still in the basement.

…

The underlying problem isn’t the budget deficit. It’s that so much income and wealth are going to the top that most Americans don’t have the purchasing power to sustain a strong recovery.

Until steps are taken to alter this fundamental imbalance – for example, exempting the first $20K of income from payroll taxes while lifting the cap on income subject to payroll taxes, raising income and capital gains taxes on millionaires and using the revenues to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit up to incomes of $50,000, strengthening labor unions, and so on – a strong recovery may not be possible.

or

How’s that Austerity thing working out for you again?

Pain of British Fiscal Cuts Could Inform U.S. Debate

By LANDON THOMAS Jr., The New York Times

Published: April 14, 2011

(I)n Britain, one year into its own controversial austerity program to plug a gaping fiscal hole, the future is now. And for the moment, the early returns are less than promising.

Retail sales plunged 3.5 percent in March, the sharpest monthly downturn in Britain in 15 years. And a new report by the Center for Economic and Business Research, an independent research group based here, forecasts that real household income will fall by 2 percent this year. That would make Britain’s income squeeze the worst for two consecutive years since the 1930s.

All of which has challenged the view of Britain’s top economic official, George Osborne, that during a time of high deficits and economic weakness, the best approach is to aggressively attack the deficit first, through rapid-fire cuts aimed at the heart of Britain’s welfare state.

…

(T)he big worry now is not tax rates. Instead, the fear is that Mr. Osborne’s emphasis on cuts in social spending – which aim to achieve an approximate budget surplus by 2015 and are likely to result in the loss of more than 300,000 government jobs – might tip the economy back into recession.

Already the government has had to slash its growth estimate to 1.7 percent, from 2.4 percent, for this year, as consumer incomes are under pressure from high inflation, weak wage growth and stagnant economic activity.

“My view is that we are in serious danger of a double-dip recession,” said Richard Portes, an economist at the London Business School. “This is going to be a cautionary tale.”

(note: dday mines some of the same territory.)

Tepco Seeks to Start Reactor Idled in 2007 as Crews Battle Fukushima Leaks

By Tsuyoshi Inajima, Yuji Okada and Michio Nakayama, Bloomberg News

Apr 13, 2011 10:53 PM ET

Tokyo Electric Power Co. plans to seek government approval to start a nuclear reactor shut after a 2007 earthquake to help ease power shortages, while the utility battles radiation leaks from its Fukushima Dai-Ichi station.

…

“This ‘operations first, safety second’ approach and the failure to learn the lessons from the 2007 quake was the cause of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear disaster,” said Philip White, international liaison officer at the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo. “How many more disasters will it take?”

…

Three of seven reactors at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa station are closed while Tepco strengthens structures to improve their resistance to earthquakes. Work can continue at two units, while Unit 3 is restarted, Shimizu said yesterday.

Tepco Said to Plan for Three Months of Cooling at Fukushima

By Jason Clenfield, Bloomberg News

Apr 14, 2011 1:29 AM ET

Tokyo Electric Power Co. estimates the fight to stabilize its crippled Fukushima reactors will last through June, leaving the plant vulnerable to further earthquakes and radiation leaks, according to a person briefed by the utility on its recovery plan.

…

The primary danger at the plant is reactor No. 1, where temperatures and pressure are still high, the person said. Flooding the space between the pressure vessel and a surrounding containment with water would bring temperatures down in days rather than months, the person said.

…

While Tokyo Electric’s plan for ending the crisis says getting exposed fuel rods covered with water again is one measure of stabilization, according to the person briefed on the document, the utility’s data shows pumping efforts have failed to raise the water level more than 20 centimeters in the 35 days since the disaster started.

The Truth About the Confederacy

Tony Wikrent, Corrente

Mon, 04/11/2011 – 10:03pm

The 150th anniversary of the Fort Sumter bombardment that formally began the Civil War is tomorrow, and wrong-wingers throughout the South and the rest of America are fixing a big celebration. There’s going to be a seemingly infinite issuance of blogs, articles, radio interviews, and television appearances that will proffer a prettified picture of a brave and stolid South, courageously defending the “true conservative Constitutional” principles of states rights, individual responsibility, and limited government. If you’re one of the many Americans who don’t really know that much about the Civil War, you have probably been perplexed by the number of wrong-wing Republican politicians who have made open statements of admiration the past year or two for the Confederate ideas of states rights and secession. This very lengthy diary is designed to fully inform you what the Confederacy was really like – a society suffering acutely from class differences; a society ruled by a slave holding oligarchy that was sickeningly arrogant and grasping, as well as racist. A number of myths about have been developed about the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy for over a century, and those myths and lies are probably going to be repeated so often the coming days and weeks that you’re going to want to puke. My intent for this diary is to help shatter those myths and lies.

…

“Plant corn! Plant corn!” the editor of the Macon Telegraph wrote. “We must have large supplies, or poverty and suffering will come upon us like a strong man armed.” The True Democrat in Little Rock, Arkansas demanded that not a single seed of cotton be planted. The Florida Sentinel of Tallahassee bluntly warned that the planters’ addiction to cotton would lead to famine and the fall of the Confederacy.

But, Southern planters generally ignored these laws and pleas, and continued to grow as much cotton as possible. United States Senator from Georgia, First Secretary of State of the Confederacy, and Confederate General Robert Toombs, and a half dozen other planters in the area of his Georgia plantation, were upbraided by the local Citizens’ Committee of Public Safety for planting almost all their acreage in cotton. Toombs responded in the best fashion of today’s libertarians and conservatives: “My property, as long as I live, shall never be subject to the orders of those cowardly miscreants, the Committees of Public Safety . . . . you cannot intimidate me.”

By the fall of 1862, there was so much cotton being harvested that the South’s warehouses could not store it all. As a result of the South oligarchs’ arrogant greed, there was never enough food grown to meet the South’s needs. Thousands of letters from desperate women whose men were in the Confederate Army began to flood the offices of local and state officials. Most of them included pitiable pleas for assistance, or requests that their husbands be allowed to leave their military units and return home, even if only temporarily. One woman wrote directly to Jefferson Davis: “If I and my little children suffer and die while there Father is in Service I invoke God Almighty that our blood rest upon the South.” An open letter to the Savannah Morning News bluntly declared “The crime is with the planters . . . as a class, they have yielded their patriotism, if they ever had any, to covetousness . . . . for the sake of money, they are pursuing a course to destroy and demoralize our army-to starve out the other class dependent on them for provisions.”

These pleas also fell on deaf ears. Rather than responding to the desperation of the majority of the people, in the spring of 1863, the Confederate Congress passed a series of taxes, including a ten percent levy on all agricultural products including livestock, fodder, and food crops such as wheat, corn, potatoes, peas, beans, and peanuts. Soon, many “impressment officers” were taking far more than one tenth of a farm’s goods. Moreover, they were reluctant to “inconvenience” the richest and most powerful, so they stripped poorer farms almost bare, before even considering what the large plantations might offer. This, of course, is not that much different than what conservatives today have achieved with their four decades of tax cuts – the tax rates for the rich have been cut, but the poor actually pay an increased percentage because of local and state retail taxes, and increased FICA taxes. Williams notes that “On the Civil War’s eve, nearly half of the South’s personal income went to just over a thousand families. The region’s poorest half held only five percent of its agricultural wealth.”

…

The slave holder exemption, of course, was based on the slave holders’ fears of a slave revolt – all the prattle about paternalistic love for an inferior race, and that race’s child-like love in return, apparently forgotten. In a number of counties, government officials begged to be released from draft quotas because they feared sending more men off for military service would fatally weaken local slave patrols. C.F. Howell of Jackson County, Mississippi wrote his governor that “now we have to patrol every night to keep them down.” One planter in Alabama ignored the Confederacy’s need for military manpower and openly pleaded with the men of his area to stay at home and save their families “from the horrors of insurrection.”

The slave holder exemption turned out to be a huge mistake, because Confederate soldiers were forced to recognize that the South’s oligarchs had begun the war not so much to fend off supposed Yankee encroachments on their rights, but to preserve slavery and protect the oligarchs’ investment in slave property.

…

Confederate authorities noted over and over again that the Unionists they sought to repress and kill were comprised of the poorest men in their areas. One Confederate official tried to explain to his superiors that the locals “have little understanding and less sympathy for the difficulties of slave holders.” South Carolina planter and former governor James Henry Hammond, who had married expressly to acquire 7,500 acres and 147 slaves from his bride’s family, wrote candidly to a friend that “The poor hate the rich & make war on them everywhere & here especially with universal suffrage. . . The war is based on the principle and fact of the inequality of mankind-for policy we say races, in reality, as all history shows is as the truth is classes.” Hammond was a vocal proponent of the death penalty for advocating abolition.

Ludicrous and Cruel

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: April 7, 2011

(T)he Ryan proposal trumpets the results of an economic projection from the Heritage Foundation, which claims that the plan’s tax cuts would set off a gigantic boom. Indeed, the foundation initially predicted that the G.O.P. plan would bring the unemployment rate down to 2.8 percent – a number we haven’t achieved since the Korean War. After widespread jeering, the unemployment projection vanished from the Heritage Foundation’s Web site, but voodoo still permeates the rest of the analysis.

…

A more sober assessment from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tells a different story. It finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

…

According to the budget office, which analyzed the plan using assumptions dictated by House Republicans, the proposal calls for spending on items other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – but including defense – to fall from 12 percent of G.D.P. last year to 6 percent of G.D.P. in 2022, and just 3.5 percent of G.D.P. in the long run.

That last number is less than we currently spend on defense alone; it’s not much bigger than federal spending when Calvin Coolidge was president, and the United States, among other things, had only a tiny military establishment. How could such a drastic shrinking of government take place without crippling essential public functions? The plan doesn’t say.

…

(P)rivatizing Medicare does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs.

The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it.

…

In the past, Mr. Ryan has talked a good game about taking care of those in need. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, of the $4 trillion in spending cuts he proposes over the next decade, two-thirds involve cutting programs that mainly serve low-income Americans.

…

The G.O.P. budget plan isn’t a good-faith effort to put America’s fiscal house in order; it’s voodoo economics, with an extra dose of fantasy, and a large helping of mean-spiritedness.

A little bit more-

Ryan and Taxes

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

April 8, 2011, 9:48 am

The Ryan plan calls for cutting the top marginal rate to 25 percent – lower than it has been at any time in the past 80 years. That in itself should tell you that this is a deeply unserious proposal: anyone who tells you that we have to face hard truths, that everyone must sacrifice, and by the way, rich people will pay lower taxes than they have at any time since the 1930s, is just engaged in a power grab.

I can’t emphasize enough how fundamentally stupid, greedy, and vain our Versailles Aristocrats are.

Blame Mayor Bloomberg for Cathie Black Fiasco

Dan Collins, Huffington Post

Posted: 04/ 7/11 12:18 PM ET

Cathie Black was Mayor Bloomberg’s disaster – one of a long line he’s perpetrated since being elected to a third term. The fact that the mayor picked someone to run the schools who had no experience in education or, perhaps more critically, New York politics, was astonishing. The mayor is genuinely devoted to the public schools. He built his political career around improving them.

And then, out of some whim we may never really understand, he plopped them in the lap of a publishing executive who was looking for a way to re-start a shaky career, whose only real qualification was that she hung around in the same crowd as the mayor.

I think ‘ordinary people’ understand this kind of narcissistic nepotism quite well.  What qualifications does Luke Russert have?  How about Brian Deschane?

Gov. Walker’s Free Market Approach to Governing

Gen. JC Christian, patriot

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Unfortunately, many working people (or, as we like to call them, “limited cost resources”) are jealous of your $81.5K salary. They’re complaining that you’re not up to the job. Citing your youth, your lack of a college education and any real-world work experience, as well as your aptitude for drunk driving, they’re suggesting that you don’t have the needed experience to serve as one of the state’s chief regulators.

Of course, they ignore your most important qualification: your father’s ability to donate to Gov. Walker’s campaigns. Given your other qualifications, that’s the best $121.7K your dad ever spent. But more important than that, its an example of how free market principles can be applied to government to make your life better–you’re living the new American dream, my friend.

That’s not to say that your other major qualification won’t serve you well. The ability to pass out, face down, on various lawns and bushes should give you an edge as an environmental regulator.

I doubt EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson has ever regained consciousness with a hunk of grass stuck to her eye, a centipede crawling up her nose, and the words “pig fucker” emblazoned across her forehead in indelible ink, nor has she exterminated an invasive beetle species using a 60% alcohol solution suspended in vomit. You certainly have the edge there.