California Rock Concert

The annual Lyrid meteor shower had some extra kick in it this year as northern California was front and center for one heck of a celestial sound test.

A loud boom similar to the sound of an explosion has been heard over much of northern California apparently as a result of an ongoing meteor shower, The Los Angeles Times reported.

The newspaper, citing Stefanie Henry, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Sacramento, said the sound had been produced by a meteor apparently breaking up above the Earth, sending the sound reverberating across the area.

The National Weather Service received reports of the sound across northern California early on Sunday, and even as far south as Orange County, the report said.

Though the peak of the shower was Saturday evening, beams of light will likely still be visible for several days, The LA Times said.

It appears as if one meteor broke up close enough to the Earth's atmosphere to set off a sonic boom in NorCal, which was heard all the way out in neighboring Nevada.  Heck of a light show too out in the high desert last weekend.

No word if anyone got superpowers from any meteor fragments, though.

The Myth of "In The Tank"

The cries of "The LIE-beral Media is in the tank for Obama!" have been loud and long since 2008, but it seems like every time somebody takes an objective look at it, nothing could be further from the truth.  The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has been keeping a weekly tab on positive, negative, and neutral coverage for the GOP candidates and President Obama since the beginning of the year, and the numbers are pretty grim for POTUS.

With friends like these, who needs negative campaign ads? While a friendly press in the tank for President Obama may fit nicely into the right’s narrative of liberal bias in the press, a new study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that of all the presidential candidates during this election cycle, President Obama has had the least favorable coverage by the news media. Since January, presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney has actually enjoyed twice as much positive coverage as President Obama.

That's kind of a problem.  Now granted, some of the GOP candidates got more negative coverage than the President did.  But every week so far, the President has been last in percentage of positive news he's gotten.  In fact, several weeks out of the year so far the percentage of positive news coverage in the single digits.  Even Howard Kurtz has noticed.

Overall, it was no contest. From Jan. 2 through April 15, Romney’s coverage was 39 percent positive, 32 percent negative, and 29 percent neutral, the researchers found. Obama’s coverage was 18 percent positive, 34 percent negative, and 34 percent neutral. That means Romney’s depiction by the media was more than twice as positive as the president’s. So much for liberal bias.

Funny how that works.  The media is relentlessly blase' about the President's accomplishments if not outright hostile towards him, while they are in love with Mitt Romney.  But please, let's continue to blame the President for not talking up his accomplishments more and not using the bully pulpit, when the media either doesn't care or is openly disdainful of the man.

StupidiNews!

• Five states go to the polls for all but meaningless primaries today as Mitt Romney wraps up his campaign and moves to the general election.
• A number of major media companies are lobbying against an FCC rule that would require media owners to post political ad revenue data on the net.
• President Obama announced yet another round of sanctions against Iran and Syria, this time involving communications and internet technology.
• The Social Security fund will run out in 2035, but the government will continue to draw from general expenditures if Congress fails to do anything.
• Central Mexico's most famous volcano, Mt. Popocatépetl, has seen the most seismic activity in 40 years, venting gases now for nearly two weeks.

Last Call

This may be the most truly misguided if not utterly naive argument I've heard on dealing with the crush of winger nutjob laws at the state level.  Temple University law professor Peter Spiro argues that the Supreme Court, hearing oral arguments on Arizona's "Papers, please" immigration law this week, should let the law stand because the invisible hand of the free market will deal with those states accordingly.

No, really.  That's his argument.

In other words, the problem will largely self-correct. But even to the extent that it doesn’t, the courts should still refrain from overturning such laws. Judicial intervention risks generating its own backlash. If the Supreme Court strikes down S.B. 1070, anti-immigrant constituencies will redouble their efforts to enact tougher laws at the federal level. A cautionary tale here is California’s Proposition 187, a punitive immigration law that was blocked by a federal court in 1994 before it went into effect. Two years later, undaunted supporters helped push through the harshest overhaul of federal immigration policy in decades.

Even if some of these state immigration laws survive political, corporate and consumer opposition on the ground, it’s better to have the scattered imposition of state laws than the blanket coverage of a federal measure. Other states and localities are welcoming immigrants, legal or not. That fact gets lost in the common indictment of state and local immigration measures as a “patchwork.” One of federalism’s core virtues is the possibility of competition among states. Competition in this context is likely to vindicate pro-immigrant policies.

We should hold our noses and hope the Supreme Court lets S.B. 1070 stand, so we can watch it wither away on its own.

If I recall, we tried that for about a century or so at the beginning of the United States of America, and about 1860 or so it got to the point where that whole federalism thing didn't work out really well as a solution to slavery and civil rights.  As a matter of fact, given that Spiro admits Arizona's law is basically odious racial profiling, I'm trying to figure out an example where either a SCOTUS or a federal legislative solution to civil rights issues did not have to be resorted to because of the continuing damage to society that resulted in waiting for the free market to act.

Slavery went on in one form or another in the South for quite a long time mainly because of the economic conditions there.  In a very real sense the only reason that businesses are opposed to Arizona-style immigration nonsense is the loss of cheap, nearly indentured labor driving their costs up.  There's no altruism here.

When you profitize basic services and government duties, the least profitable among us are the ones who are left in the ditch.  What Spiro is suggesting is profitizing basic civil rights.  It's bad enough when laws protecting minority groups are put up for mob rule and subject to the tyranny of the majority.  Subjecting them to the invisible hand of the free market all but guarantees they will be lost.

Rotten Apple

Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe are accused of agreeing not to poach each others staff, therefore holding back career development and suppressing compensation. A federal court in California has ordered seven technology companies in the state including Apple, Intel, Adobe and Google to face a private antitrust suit from five former employees, who alleged that the companies conspired to eliminate competition between them for skilled labor to suppress compensation and mobility of employees.

District Judge Lucy H. Koh of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose division ruled on Wednesday that the plaintiffs’ antitrust claims cannot be dismissed on the basis of implausibility, and that they have adequately pleaded antitrust injury as a result of six agreements among the companies. The case evolves around a comment made by Apple’s  late-CEO Steve Jobs to Palm’s CEO: “We must do whatever we can to stop cold calling each other’s employees and other competitive recruiting efforts between the companies.”

Rightfully so, they are under fire for deplorable business practices that restrict fair pay.  It defeats the principles that support working hard and exceeding expectations.  They found a way to skew the results so that they had all the negotiating power, at the expense of the people who were slaving away to build their empire.

We do need to focus on creating jobs for workers.  We also need to make it a priority to make it so that having a job guarantees certain fair pay regulations and a good faith effort to enforce them.  What is and is not allowed must be declared so that workers know where they stand.  This is dirty pool, but I have good reason to doubt that the courts will favor workers.

It's illegal as hell to do this to workers in general, but it's not illegal to pay a woman less just because she's a woman.  Or to use fire at will loopholes to deprive workers of reasonable breaks and lunches.  Or to allow businesses to adopt any rules that suit them, as long as HR gets a signature on a form.  The job system is broken, let's fix it already.

If I Had A Nickel For Every Time Gas Prices Dropped In 2012...

... I'd have a nickel.

(CNN) -- Average U.S. gasoline prices have dropped more than a nickel over the past two weeks, marking their first dip since December, according to a nationwide survey published Sunday.

A gallon of regular now costs $3.91 on average, the Lundberg Survey found. That's down more than 5 cents from two weeks earlier, when the average was just a few cents below the $4 mark.

"We can thank crude oil for allowing gasoline to do what it has been wanting to do for weeks, which is drop," said publisher Trilby Lundberg.

Gasoline supplies are plentiful, but crude oil prices had been "propping up" gasoline costs, she said. As crude oil prices have stabilized, gasoline prices have fallen.

"We may see another five to 10 cents decline in the next few weeks" if crude oil doesn't rise, she said.

Sounds pretty iffy.

It's time Americans put more money and thought into public transportation that works, and is innovative and efficient.  Right now we have a piss poor system for getting around our nation, and all but a handful of cities are woefully inept at getting people from point A to B.

Finding ways for people to retain independence and have affordable ways to get to work is critical.  If we're giggling over a 5-15 cent drop in gas prices, it's a sign of how overdue it has become.  America can call upon its best and brightest and come up with better than the bloated Amtrak beast or expensive commercial  flights, and design systems that give coverage and availability to cities.

Solve the problem from the end you can control.  It makes sense.  It could fail, but it's worth exploring the idea of investing jobs and money into something that benefits the nation greatly and has the potential to snowball into a new era of energy independence.  We could at least give it a level shot.  It would require a lot of cooperation from every state, which may be enough to fail it right there.  It all starts with a good idea, we can cross the other bridges as we get to them.

I think the time has come to stop complaining and start proactively working towards a solution.  Minimum wage workers can't afford car maintenance and a commute.  It's hard to fault people for finding themselves caught, because individual transportation was common ten years ago.  Now it's a luxury, and more people are finding themselves stranded or scrambling to put enough gas in to last until payday.  Yet public transportation remains largely underused and inefficient, a missed opportunity to lessen the dependence on gas and help people have an affordable and useful alternative.

I hear a lot of attention to job creation, but we can't forget the notion of job sustainability.  A growing number of families have slid slowly into the Not Enough category at a time when financial help is stretched thin.  It makes sense that finding ways to get to work can be another point of stress, when auto maintenance and repair is put off to keep food on the table.  To keep jobs, people have to be able to get to work.  Public transportation is the logical answer to several needs.

Making A Difference: You're Doing It Right

Cracked.com had a great article highlighting six people who made a huge difference in the world.  Everyone dreams of being the hero, few people have the wit and strength to make it happen when the opportunity arises. If being a hero was easy, everyone would do it.  Instead, we honor those who acted quickly and did the right thing.

My personal favorite is #6, a man who dove on top of another man who was suffering a seizure... while a train went over them.  It was the only chance the other fellow had of surviving, and our hero had less than two inches to spare before he was shaved like a deli ham.  Still, he never flinched (if he had, he'd be dead) and another man owes his life to a complete stranger.

That's doing it right, folks.  Please, if you have a moment, read the whole article and remember that any one of us, at any time, could be called on to be a hero.  May we all act so bravely if given a chance.

Cher Shows Support For Chaz

Chaz Bono was in good company at the GLAAD Media Awards on Saturday night. 

His mom Cher showed up to support her son at the event in Los Angeles. 

"So much fun at Glaad awards!" the singer Tweeted. "I really surprised Chaz! HE was adorable,Said wow mom i was so surprised i forgot what i was going 2say!" 

Cher has always loved her daughter while she was her daughter, and is now determined to support her son now that he is her son.   Cher has always drawn a lot of publicity, and struggled openly with figuring out how to go forward when everything changes so much.  To her credit, she never expressed any judgment.  Her openness let other LGBT parents see that acceptance is a process that even the most open-minded and loving have to navigate.  She's an okay singer, and a better actress.  She's also a hell of a mom, who stood by her child no matter what and did what she could to be the best parent possible.

I have nothing but the utmost respect for both of them.

Girls Gone Wild

I've watched two episodes now of HBO's new hipster femme comedy "Girls" about a bunch of twenty-something women in NYC trying to fake it until they make it.  Head writer/creator/actress Lena Dunham has a damn funny show on her hands, almost painfully so.  It's "Sex And The City" on the set of "Freaks And Geeks"...which makes perfect sense since it's an HBO comedy produced by Judd Apatow.

But a lot has been said about the show's lack of diversity.  There's not a person of color to be seen so far in the quartet of main characters or their friends, and this is New York City.  It's a problem, but as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, there's a much larger issue here behind "Girls" and Hollywood in particular:

This selfishness tends to ultimately serve the writer and the audience. I think back to Friends, which for years, was dogged by criticism of its all-white cast. When its creators finally relented they casted two great talents--Aisha Tyler and later Gabriel Union--but didn't even bother to write separate story-lines. They simply recycled the same plot, and plugged in a new black girl.

I thought about that episode after one of the writers on Girls responded to the criticism by tweeting sarcastically, "What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME."  That comment understandably set of a new round of outrage. But it should also set off some reflection. I don't know Dunham or anyone who writes for Girls. Perhaps that was a rogue comment that says nothing about her team. Nevertheless, I think it's only right to ask whether you really want black characters rendered by the same hands that rendered that tweet. Invisibility is problematic. Caricature is worse.

Hollywood's problem with persons of color in general is that in a world where people are often reduced to two-dimensional bits, PoCs are reduced to their race, plain and simple.  It's either an all-white cast, or an all-black one produced by Tyler Perry.

If you've ever seen my family, which looked like ABC's Modern Family long before that show was cool, life doesn't work like that.  Here's what I want to see, Hollywood:  Dad's white, Mom's black, the kids are both, and they all do completely normal things.  They play soccer.  They go to the beach.  The two grandpas watch a football game together.  The two grandmas show off baby pictures at church...and it's the same church, by the way.  I think the fact that they did average family crap would blow everyone's mind.

Maybe that's just me.  Also explains why I'm not a head writer for an HBO series.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

The Republican party in 2012 is about two things:  fleecing the working-class rubes who vote for them, and hating the Kenyan Socialist.  What really makes America great is that you can now combine the two:






If this doesn't perfectly encapsulate Campaign 2012 on the red side (selling overpriced tap water in cheap plastic bottles to people who will drink it because the label says NOBAMA on it in order to make a profit) then nothing else does.

Any questions?

StupidiNews!

• Geroge Zimmerman, the man charged with Trayvon Martin's murder, is out on bail after posting a $150,000 bond.
• Egypt's military government has canceled a long-standing natural gas export agreement to neighboring Israel as tensions mount between the two countries.
• The US Supreme Court will hear arguments on Arizona's controversial "papers, please" immigration law that has inspired state crackdowns across the country.
• The NBA's Miami Heat are teaming up with entertainment company SBE to open a giant sports nightclub in time for next season.
• Iceland has plans to tap the country's geothermal energy and export power to Europe through a nearly 750-mile long cable.

Last Call

Next time you hear "There's no difference between Romney and Obama on LGBT issues!" from someone, recall this story about how the largest anti-gay group in the GOP is vowing to destroy Mitt Romney over having a gay person on his staff.

A leading anti-gay figure in the Republican Party attacked Governor Mitt Romney for hiring an openly gay spokesman, sending a shot from the GOP's socially-conservative base across the nominee's bow.

Bryan Fischer, the director of issue analysis for the Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association, is probably the most straightforwardly anti-gay Republican to appear regularly in the party's mainstream. Presidential candidates including Rick Santorum have appeared on his radio show, and he spoke at the Values Voter Summit in Washington in October.

He responded yesterday to Romney's decision to hire an openly-gay — "out & loud gay," in Fischer's terms — foreign policy spokesman, Richard Grenell by calling it a "message to the pro-family community" of "drop dead."

You have a choice in November if you believe as I do that gay rights are human rights.  Here's a hint: the Republican Party is the wrong one.

This Week In Village Idiocy

Tom "The Mustache Of Understanding" Friedman shows once again how maddeningly clueless he really is.  As usual, he starts out identifying the problem clearly:

DOES America need an Arab Spring? That was the question on my mind when I called Frank Fukuyama, the Stanford professor and author of “The End of History and the Last Man.” Fukuyama has been working on a two-volume opus called “The Origins of Political Order,” and I could detect from his recent writings that his research was leading him to ask a very radical question about America’s political order today, namely: has American gone from a democracy to a “vetocracy” — from a system designed to prevent anyone in government from amassing too much power to a system in which no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all? 

“There is a crisis of authority, and we’re not prepared to think about it in these terms,” said Fukuyama. “When Americans think about the problem of government, it is always about constraining the government and limiting its scope.” That dates back to our founding political culture. The rule of law, regular democratic rotations in power and human rights protections were all put in place to create obstacles to overbearing, overly centralized government. “But we forget,” Fukuyama added, “that government was also created to act and make decisions.”

Now.  There's a distinct difference between the two political parties on this central issue of the role of the federal government.  The Democrats believe there should actually be a federal government, the Republicans don't.  It's that simple, but where does Friedman go with this?  You got it, right into the Hell Of Both Parties Do It.

For starters, we’ve added more checks and balances to make decision-making even more difficult — such as senatorial holds now being used to block any appointments by the executive branch or the Senate filibuster rule, effectively requiring a 60-vote majority to pass any major piece of legislation, rather than 51 votes. Also, our political divisions have become more venomous than ever. As Russ Feingold, the former Democratic senator, once remarked to me: At the rate that polarization is proceeding, partisans will soon be demanding that consumer products reflect their politics: “We’re going to have Republican and Democrat toothpaste.” 

In addition, the Internet, the blogosphere and C-Span’s coverage of the workings of the House and Senate have made every lawmaker more transparent — making back-room deals by lawmakers less possible and public posturing the 24/7 norm. And, finally, the huge expansion of the federal government, and the increasing importance of money in politics, have hugely expanded the number of special-interest lobbies and their ability to influence and clog decision-making. 

Indeed, America today increasingly looks like the society that the political scientist Mancur Olson wrote about in his 1982 classic “The Rise and Decline of Nations.” He warned that when a country amasses too many highly focused special-interest lobbies — which have an inherent advantage over the broad majority, which is fixated on the well-being of the country as a whole — they can, like a multilimbed octopus, choke the life out of a political system, unless the majority truly mobilizes against them. 

Again, everything he describes here describes one party over the last three years especially, but he blames both again and again.  We'll be trapped in this hell, Mustache says, until we get rid of the artificial blockages.

We'll actually be trapped in this hell until we get rid of the lobbyists and the GOP.

Special Place In Hell

Desperate times call for desperate people, or something like that.

The Times said Gomez, 4 feet 7 inches tall and weighing 65 pounds, told classmates at Horizon High School in Horizon City that she had had leukemia as a child and the disease had reappeared -- and that doctors in January 2011 gave her six months to live.

Classmates held fundraisers and Gomez got help in forming the Achieve the Dream Foundation, ostensibly to aid families of children with cancer, according to the report.

But six months later, Horizon City police received a complaint that Gomez did not appear to be ill, and an investigation turned up no sign that Gomez ever had cancer. 

Not only did she piss the money away, but she did damage to every charity that helps people who find themselves in that situation (you know, when it's not a lie).  I cannot even imagine what a slap in the face this is to folks who have lost loved ones to cancer.

The good news is, she'll live long enough to pay for this in full.

Stayin' Alive

Robin Gibb is awake and talking to family members.  The coolest thing of all?  He is showing signs of recovery and responded to family singing to him.

After more than a week in a coma, Bee Gees singer Robin Gibb has woken up and is showing signs of recovery. 

The singer's spokesman says Gibb has been able to communicate with family members who are by his side at a London hospital, reports the BBC. 

Family members say Gibb has responded to music they've played for him, according to the report. 

I wish him well.  He's survived so much that it would be criminal to lose him to pneumonia.