Mar
06

The Devil You Know

The Devil You know

I haven’t been completely disappointed by the GOP primary circus these past several months.

In the fall, things seemed so promising. We had the likes of Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry still in the race–with Sarah Palin not yet totally out of it. But Ms. Palin proved no more than a chimera (go figure), and the other three, along with Mister 999–Herman Cain–each disappeared after one hot minute under the kleig lights of honest-to-goodness fact-checking and reasonably clear-eyed analysis that sometimes infects media coverage in a major political campaign.

So we’ve been left for months with just Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney trying to muster a challenge to Barack Obama from the disparate yearnings of, as Hendrick Hertzberg recently put it in the New Yorker,

[the] excitable, overlapping assortment of Fox News friends, Limbaugh dittoheads, Tea Party animals, war whoopers, nativists, Christianist fundamentalists, à la carte Catholics (anti-abortion, yes; anti-torture, no), anti-Rooseveltians (Franklin and Theodore), global-warming denialists, post-Confederate white Southrons, creationists, birthers, market idolaters, Europe demonizers, and gun fetishists

who make up the Republican “base” today.

Read more…

Jan
18

Congress Ponders Nerve Gas Solution to Gnat Problem

Some would just as soon have us return to Plato's Cave.

Prominent destinations on the Internet–including Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist–went varying shades of “dark” Wednesday in a loosely coordinated effort to raise awareness of two bills currently making their way through the United States’ notorious “Do-Nothing Congress.” SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) are bills being considered in the House of Representatives and Senate (respectively) to address the contagion of copyright infringement apparently fostered by a free and open Internet.

However, as Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute points out in a somewhat exhaustive analysis, the “problem” of copyright infringement seems hardly the kind of thing to rouse somnambulant legislators from a general stupor.

Part of the problem here, as Glenn Greenwald makes evisceratingly clear, is that people like former senator Christopher Dodd–who vowed when he retired from the business of legislating in 2010 to eschew the filthy lucre of the so-called “revolving door” between congress and the world of high-stakes lobbyists–has been elbowing his old pals in Washington in his new role as Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), one of the loudest voices moaning about lost profits and stifled creativity supposedly attributable to Internet piracy.

Read more…

Jan
12

This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Don't believe everything you read.

Arthur S. Brisbane has what one might think of as a pretty good job. He’s the Public Editor (or, what was once known as the “ombudsman”) at The New York Times. According to the job description posted on the Times‘ website, the Public Editor “responds to complaints and comments from the public and monitors the paper’s journalistic practices.” That is, he gets to represent the public interest (my emphasis) in what goes into “the newspaper of record.” Fully independent of the paper’s owners and publishers, the job description goes on to note, “(h)is opinions and conclusions are his own.”

Mr. Brisbane stepped in it Thursday, however, by penning a rumination on “journalistic practices” seeking reader input on the question whether Times reporters should serve as “truth vigilantes.”

That’s right. The ombudsman for the New York Times wonders whether it’s a good idea to require reporters to ascertain the veracity of the “facts” they report as news. Read more…

Jan
01

The Best is Yet to Come

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines. The dark decade of the two thousand aughts is now a full year in the rear-view mirror and for some, the time has never been better to move forward with a foot on the gas. Read more…

Jun
13

Chart of the Day – The Lonesome Death of the American Worker

Labor's shrinking piece of the pie.

The chart above tells you just about everything you need to know about where we’ve been and where we’re going – as far as the U.S. economy is concerned, anyway.

The red line depicts American workers’ share of the national income pie, dating all the way back to 1947. As the boom and bust (or growth and retraction, if you must) nature of our capitalist economy worked its rhythmic gyrations over the years, Labor’s piece of the American Pie grew larger in good times, smaller in bad ones – but for the most part tended to recover to a baseline high of around 109 once the economy was good and cranking.

Read more…

Mar
29

Dazed and Confused: Justice’s Mixed Messages on Medical Marijuana

Pinwheel of star birth

California defendants face new federal charges after state’s illegal search and seizure.

SAN FRANCISCO — When it comes to Celebrity Justice, the name Scott Feil doesn’t have quite the cachet of Barry Bonds or Lindsay Lohan, but anyone interested in learning how justice is served today would do well to follow Mr. Feil’s fortunes along a tortured path in the country that famously promises “liberty and justice for all.”

Mr. Feil was the Executive Director of a southern California medical marijuana dispensary called United Medical Caregivers Clinic (UMCC) when the Los Angeles Police Department raided his business in 2005, using a search warrant that was ultimately determined to have been issued illegally.

Years of legal wrangling resulted in a 2009 ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which found LAPD’s actions in the case unconstitutional and returned to Mr. Feil and UMCC nearly $200,000 that had been seized by the police and turned over to federal prosecutors. Read more…

Jan
03

Facebook Valuation Boggles the Mind

From the What’s It Worth? Department - big news in the world of finance today:  the great minds at Goldman Sachs have conjured up a way for wealthy investors to get a piece of the Facebook action without actually having to take the company public.

Plunking down $450 million of its own money for a share of Facebook common stock which values the Internet equivalent of a high school lunchroom at $50 billion, Goldman won the right to create a “special purpose vehicle” whereby a select list of its own wealthiest clients can pony up an additional $1.5 billion to fund Facebook’s operations and, presumably, reward its founders and directors for being brilliant, savvy players in the post-Crash era.

Hey, well, bully for them all around.  Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em, as the old saying used to go.

Just for kicks, though, I thought I’d poke around and see what $50 billion looks like in today’s world. While it won’t buy what it used to back in the day (ie: the entire gross debt of the United States was about $50 billion in 1940; it is over $1.3 trillion today ), you can still take down some pretty rad gear for that kinda dough. Read more…

Dec
02

WikiLeaks Proves DC Rancor is a Sham

Jayzus H. Christ, I go away from the Internet for a while and all hell breaks loose.  

Having shimmied back down the rabbit hole in the last couple of days, my eyes are now bleeding from reading all the sturm und drang over supposed terrorist/sex criminal Julian Assange and his pariah website, WikiLeaks.

OK, they’re not bleeding but my eyes are tearing up and I wish my head didn’t hurt the way it does from trying to piece together the cognitive disconnect over so many people not caring that the US has been waging multiple illegal wars and torturing innocent people for going on a decade, and now are suddenly turning into a rabid mob over the revelation that many things thinking people have long suspected of modern government S.O.P. turn out to be true. Read more…

Nov
21

Infographic of the Day: Who Owns YOUR Mortgage?

Dan Edstrom gets paid to audit securitization transactions for a company called DTC-Systems, so he might have thought it fun to spend over a year reverse engineering the mortgage on the Edstrom family home into the handy flow chart depicted above.

For those of us with a less erudite sense of how to get our jollies, or who might be among the millions of Americans facing foreclosure and — in some cases — the well-heeled mendacity of the nation’s bankers, this chart is graphic evidence of just how byzantine our financial reality has become.

If it took Dan Edstrom over a year to do this for his own mortgage, how long do you suppose it will take Barney Frank and Eric Holder to sort things out for the nation as a whole?

Nov
18

Bipartisan Brilliance – Everybody’s a Winner!

Couple a young guys in congress, one a Democrat from Oregon, the other a Republican from Massachusetts (say, whaa??) have introduced a bill in the Senate that should help prove — once and for all — who walks the walk and who just talks the smack in Washington.

The “Empowering States to Innovate Act” would allow states to develop their own health-care reform proposals, preempting federal legislation set to take effect in 2014.

The federal plan, highlighted among a long list of the Obama administration’s accomplishments in its first two years, has been simultaneously derided as a socialist plot by those on the right and as a Big Insurance – Big Medicine giveaway by some on the left. Read more…

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