Last Call

As a man much wiser than myself once sang, "You can't always get what you want."

Senate leaders have agreed to a plan that will prevent key policies, including a two percent payroll tax cut for employees, from lapsing on January 1, 2012, according to top aides. But the agreement will only extends the measures for two months, setting Democrats and Republicans up to relitigate this same fight fight early next year. And it comes at a political cost to Democrats who were forced to relent on a provision forcing President Obama to take a public position on the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

The $30 billion package will be paid for by increasing the fees lenders pay to mortgage giants pay to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It includes two month extensions of the existing two percent payroll tax; emergency unemployment benefits; and the “doc fix” which prevents Medicare physicians from experiencing a deep automatic pay cut.

In a political hit for Democrats, Republicans insisted on and secured a provision that requires the Obama administration to either greenlight the Keystone XL oil pipeline or for President Obama to publicly nix it by declaring it not in the national interest. Sources indicate that Obama could deal with this requirement without forgoing a chance to revisit the issue after the election, as the administration originally planned.

Neither side is going to be happy with this deal, which considering what's at stake here, it's as good as it's going to get.   The mess will continue in two months.

Happy holidays, I guess.

Nuked Gingrich, Part 12

So right-wing radio loudmouth Michael Savage offered Newt Gingrich a million bucks to drop out of the race.  We all ought to be much more concerned with the gentleman who just gave Newt twenty million to stay in, a Greg Sargent explains:

Politico weighed in today with a bombshell revelation: Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is set to hand $20 million to a “Super PAC” backing Newt Gingrich. Such a sum could have a major impact on the GOP primary, enabling him to ward off the barrage of negative ads currently pummeling him daily — meaning that one extremely wealthy man could play an extraordinarily outsized role in helping decide the GOP nominee for president.

This prompted a good question from Taegan Goddard: “How on earth is this legal in American politics?” I checked in with David Donnelly of the Public Campaign Action Fund to get an answer.
It turns out there are scenarios under which this might not be legal. If someone who works directly for Gingrich’s campaign solicted this money in any way from Adelson, that would violate Federal laws that prohibit coordination between campaigns and super PACs.

But here’s the interesting twist: The scenario under which this is legal is, at bottom, not significantly different from having Gingrich’s campaign aides directly solicit such contributions.

Thanks to Citizens United and a subsequent court decision, Super PACs can raise unlimited sums, and spend it all advocating directly for or against a candidate, as long as there’s no coordination between the Super PAC and the candidate’s campaign. But this prohibition against coordination doesn’t really have much significance in the real world.

So yes, when the one percent drops $20 million in order to buy a race at a critical time, it's 100% legal because our Supreme Court has said our nation's most important resource when it comes to campaign speech is rich people who have tens of millions of bucks to give to people like Newt Gingrich on an idle Thursday.

Bought and paid for.

Fire Walker Chronicles, Part 5

How terrified is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and the state's GOP about the news that in just 30 days, Wisconsin Dems have already obtained 90% plus of the signatures they need to trigger a recall election?  Why, they're scared enough to actually try to sink the whole proceeding with this pathetic tactic.

Wisconsin Republicans have mounted a new response to the effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker — filing a lawsuit today against the state Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections, alleging that Walker’s 14th Amendment constitutional rights are being violated by the procedures the board uses in verifying, accepting or rejecting petition signatures.

The state GOP’s legal complaint argues that the GAB’s procedures for recall petitions, which involve the incumbent’s campaign challenging duplicate signatures of people who would have signed more than once — place an undue burden on the Walker campaign.

Under the law, the incumbent has a ten-day review period, in which to submit challenges.
“The GAB’s position that it is the responsibility of the Walker campaign to identify and challenge duplicate signatures flies in the face of the idea of a fair electoral process,” the party said in a press release.

Of course let's remember that "the idea of a fair electoral process" to Wisconsin Republicans is one where Wisconsin Democrats are regularly disenfranchised and misinformed of their right to vote at all as the GOP puts up as many roadblocks as possible to curtail voting among the poor and elderly.

The only problem here according to them is the unconstitutional part of Wisconsin's constitution that allows recalls.

Google Obtains Patent For "Driverless" Cars

A US patent for self-driving cars has been awarded to Google.

The intellectual rights relate to a method to switch a vehicle from a human-controlled mode into the state where it takes charge of the wheel.

It explains how the car would know when to take control, where it is located and which direction to drive in.

The search firm suggests the technology could be used to offer tours of tourist locations or to send faulty models to repair shops.

The application for Transitioning a Mixed-mode Vehicle to Autonomous Mode was applied for in May, but had been hidden from public view until this week.

The document describes using two sets of sensors. The first identifies a "landing strip" when the vehicle stops. This then triggers the second set which receives data informing the machine where it is positioned and where it should go.

This has several applications, from parking to sending your car to the mechanic while you are at work. For people who commute to work, their car could truly double as a mobile office while it handles the drive. As an intermediate step, it would be good to set in place while on the phone, eating, or other tasks that lead to accidents.

It's a ways off but not as far as we might think. The article is vague, but just for giggles I'll say in 2015 we will have a car that can handle itself 80% of the time or more. Google makes perfect sense, with their superior mapping they have an edge, and they have set industry standards for this type of technology so they are building on their own foundation.

Artsy Coolness

The captions are a little hokey, I have to admit.  Still, the link to this awesome apartment is worth it.  Acrylic tiles, permanent markers and too much time allowed one man to transform rooms into mind-bending freakishly cool spiffiness.

Click here to check it out.  Below is my favorite one so you can see what I'm talking about.

Getting The Book Thrown At Him

The Justice Department's three-year investigation into countless civil rights violations by Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio has resulted in "the most egregious" examples of racial profiling of Latinos one career civil rights investigator has said he's ever even seen.

The inquiry’s findings paint a picture of a department staffed by poorly trained deputies who target Latino drivers on the roadways and detain innocent Latinos in the community in their searches for illegal immigrants. The mistreatment, the government said, extends to the jails the department oversees, where Latino inmates who do not speak English are mistreated.

“The absence of clear policies and procedures to ensure effective and constitutional policing,” the report said, “along with the deviations from widely accepted policing and correctional practices, and the failure to implement meaningful oversight and accountability structures, have contributed to a chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations.”

The report said Latino drivers were four to nine times more likely to be stopped in the sprawling county, which includes Phoenix and its environs, than non-Latino drivers. The expert who conducted the study called it the most egregious racial profiling he has ever seen in this country, said Mr. Perez, the prosecutor, without naming the expert.

The report said that roughly one-fifth of the traffic-related incident reports generated by the department’s human smuggling unit contained information indicating the stops may have been conducted in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable seizures.

The report also suggested that Sheriff Arpaio’s well-publicized raids aimed at arresting illegal immigrants were sometimes prompted by complaints that described no criminal activity but referred to people with “dark skin” or to Spanish speakers congregating in an area. “The use of these types of bias-infected indicators as a basis for conducting enforcement activity contributes to the high number of stops and detentions lacking in legal justification,” the report said. 

So yes, rampant civil rights violations of Latinos, intimidation, harassment and even incarceration of Arpaio's critics, ridiculously biased racial profiling in routine stops and armed raids based solely on skin color or language.  And guess which Republican presidential candidate immediately backed Arpaio after the announcement?

"He is tough," Perry said, adding that if he's president he won't be suing states such as Arizona for adopting their own immigration laws because "the administration has been an abject failure at securing the border."

Right.  That gives Joe Arpaio and his actual police state in Maricopa County run by actual police all the rights in the world to go after legal immigrants and anyone who might be dark skinned or speak a language that might be Spanish.

This guy needs to go away, preferably to a place where he gets a healthy brick shit-ton of his own medicine daily.

Geoff Davis Bows Out, And Good Riddance

My GOP Congressman and local pain in the ass Geoff Davis is bowing out of re-election.

In a letter to constituents, Kentucky 4th District Congressman, Geoff Davis says in order to spend more time with his family he will not seek re-election.

Davis spoke highly of his staff and of his work as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources. He also thanked his wife and children.

So boom, just like that, gone.  And it's not like redistricting was going to cost Davis his seat, either, even with Dems winning ground in KY and even Dem House Speaker Greg Stumbo's plan wouldn't mess with the 4th much at all.

Under Stumbo’s plan, the 1st, 5th and 6th districts — two of which are represented by Republicans — would become more Democratic, while the 2nd District would become more Republican. There would be little change to the 3rd and 4th districts. The 3rd District is confined to Jefferson County.

So there's got to be another reason why Davis is out.  He's not supposed to have much in the way of a serious challenge at all, but now he's hanging it up.  What's the story here?

I'd like to know.  Joe Sonka doesn't know either, but he has several educated guesses as to who will run for Davis's suddenly wide open seat.  He sees Nathan Smith versus Lewis County Judge and TP favorite Thomas Massie.

And that would be one hell of a race, based on Joe's description of Massie.

I saw this guy speak at a Tea Party rally in Scott County this year, and this is how I would describe him. Rand Paul, only with charisma and without an annoying whine. He spoke without notes for over a half hour and had the People of

Tea in the palm of his hands, talking about how he came into this good ole boy Democratic office and cleaned house. He is some kind of MIT numbers wizard who actually lived off of the grid for years, then decided to run for office and won. That sounds odd, but this guy has the rhetoric down and has talent. Also, KY Tea Party guru David Adams loves him.

I actually called him and spoke to him a few months ago, because I had heard rumors that he was thinking of primarying Mitch McConnell in 2014. He said he wasn’t interested, and might get out of politics after his term is up. The thought of Congress kind of intrigued him, but he was a huge Geoff Davis fan and assumed that he would be serving there for many many years.

But he isn’t. So… now?

Now maybe he's one of those guys that loves his current job too much to gamble on a run.  Maybe he's got skeletons, I don't know.  But man, Joe's not kidding when he says Boone County is TP central.  This is die-hard NOBAMA country, and you risk your vehicle with a Team O bumper sticker round these parts.

The friggin' high school mascot?  The Boone County Rebels.  Yeah, it's like that.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• Both sides say they have reached a deal to prevent another government shutdown tonight that includes extending the payroll tax cut, unemployment benefits, and the Medicare "doc fix".
• Writer and atheist Christopher Hitchens has lost his battle with cancer at age 62 after a career writing for both the right and the left.
• The Obama administration has ordered the Treasury to all but halt minting Presidential dollar coins, with some 1.4 billion coins sitting unused in vaults across the country. 
• Farmville creator Zynga will meet its IPO goal, raising a billion dollars in the country's biggest initial stock offering since Google in 2004.
• A federal judge has thrown out a case of Twitter harassment on first amendment grounds citing the right of criticism of a public, religious figure.

Last Call

It says volumes how easily Ron Paul can trick Sully into thinking that he doesn't despise minorities or especially President Obama.

And I see in Paul none of the resentment that burns in Gingrich or the fakeness that defines Romney or the fascistic strains in Perry's buffoonery. He has yet to show the Obama-derangement of his peers, even though he differs with him. He has now gone through two primary elections without compromising an inch of his character or his philosophy. This kind of rigidity has its flaws, but, in the context of the Newt Romney blur, it is refreshing. He would never take $1.8 million from Freddie Mac. He would never disown Reagan, as Romney once did. He would never speak of lynching Bernanke, as Perry threatened. When he answers a question, you can see that he is genuinely listening to it and responding - rather than searching, Bachmann-like, for the one-liner to rouse the base. He is, in other words, a decent fellow, and that's an adjective I don't use lightly. We need more decency among Republicans.

Let me again remind you of exactly what "decency" Ron Paul would bring to the table.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society. The federal government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society.

Oh yeah, he's a decent guy alright. No racially-motivated Obama Derangement Syndrome stuff at all.

There has been controversy over Ron Paul’s ties to racism for some time now. Many people have pointed to Ron Paul’s Newsletters as proof of his racism. Paul has previously admitted to writing the newsletters and defended the statements in 1996, then blamed them on an unnamed ghostwriter in 2001 and then denied any knowledge of them in 2008. He has given no explanation, for how the racism entered his newsletter. If we are to take Paul at his word, he is guilty of at least promoting racism on a large scale. Paul earned almost a million dollars a year from the racist, conspiracy theorist newsletters.

But you know, the hipsters love him. And so does Sully. Saying he's the best of the Republicans is like picking the most humane way to be tortured because it's not so bad.

Wyden Load Sign Ahead

By enlisting Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon to go along with the latest iteration of his plan to privatize Medicare, Paul Ryan has the Centrist Daleks in an absolute tizzy today.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is teaming up with Paul Ryan, the House’s top budget guy and the author of the GOP’s controversial budget which proposes phasing out traditional Medicare and replacing it with a private plan. The two announced via The Washington Post that they’ll be teaming up on a different version of that Medicare plan — one that closely mimics plans offered by leading GOP presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, and a proposal authored by former Sen. Pete Domenici and former Clinton budget director Alice Rivlin, which loomed large in the Super Committee’s failed negotiations.
 
The move makes Wyden the first elected Democrat to endorse creating a premium-support system to compete with traditional fee-for-service Medicare, and for Ryan represents a de facto admission that his own plan was too radical to ever gain bipartisan support. That’s bound to affect how congressional and presidential candidates approach the issue, which will feature prominently in next year’s elections. But it raises a number of other questions, both about the merits of the policy and of the political calculus behind it.

Two things here:  one, I don't want to hear how President Obama is the one "putting Medicare on the block" anymore with Wyden buying into this cockamamie scheme.  Backing a Paul Ryan plan -- any Paul Ryan plan -- is what the end of Medicare as we know it looks like.

Secondly, the plan is basically turning Medicare into the PPACA.

The policy itself allows insurers to compete with traditional Medicare turning Medicare essentially into a public option on a private insurance exchange. Wyden and Ryan would give patients subsidies that could be applied to either private insurance or fee for service Medicare. It has features of both a “defined contribution” and “defined benefit” program. All plans including Medicare would have to meet a high benefit standard. But if seniors were to choose plans that exceeded a benchmark cost they would be required to pay the difference out of pocket. If Medicare itself were to come in below the benchmark, it would function no differently than Medicare does right now. If Medicare were to exceed the benchmark, though, seniors would have to pay more out of pocket to enroll in it. 

And here's where we get into all kinds of ugly problems:  the odds of a for-profit insurer being able to provide something as good as or better than Medicare's benefit standard for less money is, well, a complete and utter fantasy.  That's going to leave Medicare as the only option to buy into for a huge percentage of seniors.

And it's a moot point anyway:  no Baby Boomer will ever have their Medicare or Social Security benefits touched.  My generation on the other hand, well, let's just say we're going to be told to accept this new plan or something like it or else.  There's not going to be any cost savings for the next twenty years or so out of the Medicare end of things, which means the only serious question is "What will await my generation when I'm supposedly ready to retire in 35 years?"

Most of us are convinced it will be "nothing".  The way the Tea Party is going, government itself will be outlawed by then and we'll all live in anarcho-capitalist city states like 21st century Spartans. 

Pit-kicking will be on Thursdays.

The Holder Doctrine: Register All Eligible Americans To Vote Automatically

And for such a brilliant,elegant, and simple idea, and being the logical endpoint of all the voter ID laws that Republicans are putting into place, they will scream FASCISM at any such efforts to make the following into law as Eric Holder's speech this week in Austin at the LBJ library will be ignored.

All eligible citizens can and should be automatically registered to vote. The ability to vote is a right — it is not a privilege. Under our current system, many voters must follow cumbersome and needlessly complex voter registration rules. And every election season, state and local officials have to manually process a crush of new applications – most of them handwritten – leaving the system riddled with errors, and, too often, creating chaos at the polls.

Fortunately, modern technology provides a straightforward fix for these problems – if we have the political will to bring our election systems into the 21st century. It should be the government’s responsibility to automatically register citizens to vote, by compiling – from databases that already exist – a list of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction. Of course, these lists would be used solely to administer elections – and would protect essential privacy rights.

And so I look forward to the Republican Party, after having spent years saying that only government-issued IDs could possibly prevent fraud and protect the sacred rite of voting in America through databases and strict adherence to them, immediately tell us that the notion of the government collecting this information is part of Obama's police state and that the government has no right to register people to vote.  It'll be great.

17-Year-Old Designs Cancer Breakthrough

Younger than most high school graduates, Angela Zhang has won a $100,000 prize in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology for a breakthrough that has several applications in medicine, but most notably in treatment of cancer.

Her creation is being heralded as a “Swiss army knife of cancer treatment.” Zhang managed to develop a nanoparticle that can be delivered to the site of a tumor through the drug salinomycin. Once there it kills the cancer stem cells. However, Zhang went further and included both gold and iron-oxide components, which allow for non-invasive imaging of the site through MRI and Photoacoustics.

As to why she chose this as her project, Zhang explains that she was surprised when looking at the survival rates of patients receiving cancer treatment. As cancer stem cells are resistant to many forms of cancer treatment, it seemed like an area worth focusing on. Her nanoparticle is award-winning due to the fact it has the potential to overcome cancer resistance while offering up the ability to monitor the effects of the treatment in real-time using existing imaging techniques.

Zhang’s achievement is impressive considering she is only 17 years old, but also due to the level of understanding required to create such a nanoparticle in the first place. She has spent over 1,000 hours since 2009 researching and developing the particle, and wants to go on to study chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, or physics. Her dream job is to be a research professor.

NASA Missing Several Samples

It's a little funny that when NASA finds out they are missing hundreds, if not thousands of samples and materials from space, they don't take the report seriously, including recommendations for better tracking and organization.

NASA spokesman Michael Cabbage said the agency will continue to lend out material to scientists and for educational display but will adopt the specific recommendations the inspector general made to improve its tracking.

"NASA does not consider these national treasure assets to be at high risk," he said.

Yet it was enough of a risk that a sting went down at a Denny's, where NASA shook up a 74-year-old woman so badly she was traumatized.  She was trying to sell a tiny bit of moon rock and heat shield that had been given to her late husband by Neil Armstrong.  NASA's inspector general was all over that one, yet we find out now untold treasures have walked out the door never to be seen again.

Maybe, just maybe, they should listen to those tips on tracking.

All-American Stupid

Travel discount website Kayak.com is the latest advertiser to pull all ads from TLC's All-American Muslim (neatly dodging the OUTRAGE of having Muslims in America on TV at all without the caption "Gitmo Detainee" underneath the video) using the "logic" of A) blaming TLC for having a show about Muslims on TV in the first place and B) the show sucks anyway, so it was a financial decision.

When we decided to give our money to TLC for this program, we deemed the show a worthy topic. When we received angry emails regarding our decision to advertise, I looked into the show more thoroughly.

The first thing I discovered was that TLC was not upfront with us about the nature of this show. As I said, it’s a worthy topic, but any reasonable person would know that this topic is a particular lightning rod. We believe TLC went out of their way to pick a fight on this, and they didn’t let us know their intentions. That’s not a business practice that generally gets repeat business from us. I also believe that it did this subject a grave disservice. Sadly, TLC is now enjoying the attention from this controversy.

Bonus Verbatim Stupid from Kayak's marketing head, Robert Birge:

Lastly, I watched the first two episodes. Mostly, I just thought the show sucked.

And just like that, Kayak gets to have it both ways. It didn't pull ads because they buy Michelle Malkin's idiotic claim that Muslims should all be rounded up and put in camps, the show is just bad, so you can't possibly give us any crap for this, people!  We win!

So by dumping all of this on TLC for "picking a fight" by daring to show Muslims in America being American and not blowing things up, Birge and Kayak show the world their uncommon courage in freely admitting that the company is run by douchebag weasels with the intellectual honesty of Vogon Constructor Fleets.

What a great company.  And by "company" I mean "colossal aggregation of assholes".

Back To The Drawing Board For Plan B, Part 2

Over a dozen Senate Dems have developed enough of a spine to call out HHS Secretary Sebelius's awful Plan B decision and want an explanation.  Now.  Greg Sargent:

This letter — which is signed by Patty Murray, Barbara Boxer, Kirsten Gillilbrand, Maria Cantwell and 10 male senators — is strongly worded stuff, particularly when directed at a Democratic president. It stops just short of accusing the Obama administration of deliberately ignoring science in making this decision. It also puts the administration in an awkward spot. Either it produces a scientific rationale that’s acceptable to these Senators, which will will be extremely difficult at best, or it will face more criticism for failing to justify its policy, reinforcing the sense that this Democratic administration abandoned science and put politics first.

It will also be interesting to see where these Dem Senators take this next. Hearings, anyone?

I don't think it will get that far, but it's pretty clear that a healthy chunk of Senate Dems think that America's women deserve a much better explanation for the Obama administration punting on Plan B than was given.

Unfortunately, there's not a better, more acceptable explanation than the truth:  Making Plan B available without a prescription to kids as young as eleven when the President has eleven and thirteen year old daughters in an election year risked making Sasha and Malia Obama into political lightning rods, and the wingers would have gleefully gone after them.  As K-Drum says in the link there, it was a policy decision.  Admit it, move on.

And yes, it was a lousy decision.  I don't support it.  I can understand why the President did it, but I do not agree with it.  I'm not a father of pre-teen girls, I'm not a woman, my perspective on this is limited as I've said before.  But it's still a policy decision.

I also don't think Dems in the Senate publicly calling out the President is a really smart idea either, but what's done is done.  We'll see what happens.