Chart Of The Day

From Ezra Klein, who puts the austerity hysteria to rest:





The yellow line is America.  The red line, the UK, has been stagnant since David Cameron's government game to power in 2010 and appears now to be permanently stuck at 2006 levels.  the entire Eurozone too appears to be heading into stagnation if not outright recession.  Both economies said austerity was the answer.  Both economies are now stuck below their January 2008 peaks where the US and its stimulus package has -- surprise!  Gotten us ahead of the curve and now above where we were in 2008. 

If we had listerend to the GOP and cut spending massively like they demand we do, we would be in the same recessionary boat as Europe.  Period.  If they get into power in 2012, they will do to our economy what conservatives in the UK and the Eurozone did to theirs.  As it is, please note that our economy did stagnate in late '10/early '11 for a couple months there as the new GOP House took power and we ended stimulus spending programs rather than continue them (which was politically impossible).  The President then turned to other methods to boost the economy and you see the curve upwards during the end of last year as things resumed improving despite the GOP trying to sink the economy.

Any questions?

This Is Personal

President Obama wrapped up his two-day tour of college campuses today at the University of Iowa, again calling on Congress to extend a low interest program for student loans.

"This is personal," Obama said while discussing the value of a college education. "This is the heart of who we are."

The president, who said he and wife Michelle just paid off their own student loans a mere eight years ago, also told a friendly crowd of students that "we've got to make college more affordable for more people."

Obama is working hard to bring young people on board.  He wants them to know that an education should be attainable, and not just for the top 10% of whatever dividing line that might prevent higher education.  It's not about money, it's about investing time and energy into being better people, and better citizens.  More education leads to better ideas, better worker, enlightened minds that hatch brilliant ideas.

He is also bringing a new generation into politics.  Young adults are impressionable, and by lending a sense of urgency that is relevant to them, Obama is bringing in young people who will likely take more of an interest in their country.  He isn't promising all of our dreams will come true, just that we should be able to access the tools to make them a reality.

And on the other side we have... Mitt Romney.  The rich boy who thinks it's snobbery for Obama to want education accessible to everyone who wants it.  The guy who thinks women are breeders whose medical choices are up for legislation.  The guy who says he's hip to women's needs because his wife says so.

Talk about no contest.

Saving Truman

This is one instance in which sad puppy eyes really come in handy. A four-year-old Golden Retriever, "Truman," was rescued by Los Angeles Sheriff Department's (LASD) volunteer deputies Sunday. The dog was suffering from dehydration and cut paws while hiking Switzer Falls with his owner, according to the station's press release.

The Crescenta Valley Sheriff’s Station received a call at about 6:30 p.m. Sunday and assigned reserve deputies from the LASD Montrose Search and Rescue Team to the mission.

Rescuers hiked deep into the Angeles National Forest, placed Truman on a gurney and wheeled the poor guy all the way to his owner’s vehicle.

It just made me smile when I read this.  I've gone through incredible lengths (and more than one bribe) to help animals who are in pain.  Though they don't tell just how his paws became injured, whether it was from the terrain or one specific thing, but the response and the caring shows that good folks do good things.

Thanks, guys.  I needed that.

Cleaning Up A Very Old Mess

Spencer Ackerman over at Wired's Danger Room reports on the Pentagon cleaning house on how it trains our armed forces to deal with Islam.  It's no longer the enemy and treating all Muslims as potential terrorists was never going to work.  Some ten years on in our Endless War, we finally get that fact.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Tuesday ordered the entire U.S. military to scour its training material to ensure it doesn’t contain anti-Islamic content, Danger Room has learned. The order came after the Pentagon suspended a course for senior officers that was found to contain derogatory material about Islam.

The extraordinary order by General Martin Dempsey, the highest-ranking military officer in the U.S. armed forces, was prompted by content in a course titled “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism” that was presented as an elective at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. The course instructed captains, commanders, lieutenant colonels and colonels from across all four armed services that “Islam had already declared war on the West,” said Lt. Gen. George Flynn, Dempsey’s deputy for training and education.

“It was inflammatory,” Flynn told Danger Room on Tuesday. “We said, ‘Wait a second, that’s really not what we’re talking about.’ That is not how we view this problem or the challenges we have in the world today.”

The strong response by the Pentagon brass illustrates growing sensitivity around the issue since Danger Room’s investigation of anti-Islam material in the FBI’s counterterrorism training last September. That story sparked strong condemnation of the training material from the U.S. Attorney General on down, and prompted the White House to order a review of U.S. counterterrorism training last October.

Despite that White House order, the “Perspectives” course, taught since 2004, not only evaded review, but had defenders in the Joint Forces Staff College that taught it.

I may not agree with everything Ackerman believes about the Obama administration's domestic policy, but he's been the most solid foreign policy, military, and national security beat reporter out there for some time, so when he delivers an article of this magnitude, it's worth your time to go read the whole thing.

As far as the Pentagon goes?  About damned time.  Reversing a decade of "raghead sunzabitches" as DoD policy always had to be a vital step towards our evolution in dealing with the Middle East.  Good for General Dempsey.  That's a strong message, and one that needs to be reinforced at every opportunity.

Home, Home I'm Deranged, Part 29

The bottom in the housing market has been called for later this year by Zillow.  Don't believe it for a second.

Online real estate marketplace Zillow said home values rose 0.5 percent in March from February, the largest monthly increase since May 2006 when the housing recession began.

Zillow’s report describing the first quarter follows two other reports about the housing market released on Tuesday.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home-price index showed average home prices tumbled to their lowest level in nearly a decade, after prices dropped in February from January in 16 of the 20 cities it tracks.

A separate report from the Commerce Department indicated new home sales fell last month by the most in more than a year to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 328,000 units.  That followed a 7.3 percent increase in February.

“I think the variety of data points of housing market we’re getting this week all point to a slowly healing housing market,” Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist, said. “We think of it as a bottoming process, as opposed to the bottom being a discrete point in time.”

Humphries said the “bottoming process is well under way and is made up of new home sales that have reached bottom and are starting to rebound a bit.”

The Zillow Home Value Forecast shows that national home values will fall 0.4 percent over the next 12 months, suggesting that U.S. home values could reach bottom in late 2012.

Bullshit.

What nobody is factoring in (because it's an election year) is, as I've been saying for three years plus now, that the logjam of foreclosures still has to break before the housing market can hit bottom.  Foreclosure numbers are the only things that matter right now.  And those foreclosures are back on the rise.

Rising foreclosures are weighing on the U.S. housing market, reducing prices and keeping new-home sales weak.

Foreclosed homes are usually sold at steep discounts, thereby lowering average prices. And by expanding the supply of low-priced previously occupied homes, foreclosures tend to limit demand for new homes.

Some economists expect foreclosures to keep prices under pressure this year, even though they think sales of previously occupied homes will rise.

Banks are stepping up foreclosures in about half the states. The increase comes after state officials settled a dispute in February with five of the biggest mortgage lenders over foreclosure abuses.

"Foreclosures, excess supply and weak demand will drive home prices ... down at least another 5 percent," said Patrick Newport, an economist at IHS Global Insight.

Five percent?  More like 10% or 15%.  We still have a long way to go on housing prices, folks.  We'll see prices fall more sharply as those foreclosures stalled from last year's Foreclosuregate mess start to be processed en masse and they're free and clear to do so now that the settlement is done.  Expect the banks to rapidly pick up the pace of foreclosures this summer and fall.  Housing prices?  Look out below!

StupidiNews!

• Half the US Marines contingent in Okinawa, some 9,000 troops and their families, will be transferred to other bases as the Pentagon moves to lower tensions in Japan.
• The office of Texas's Attorney General accidentally turned over millions of Social Security numbers in a voter ID case, drawing sharp criticism from both parties.
• The Senate has renewed the Violence Against Women Act for another five years despite dozens of male Republican senators voting against it, but it faces a far tougher road in the GOP House.
• Amazon beat market estimates with 1st quarter earnings on the strength of Kindle fire sales and e-books.
• The GOP-led House has passed a controversial cybersecurity bill that Democrats and the White House strongly oppose, which could lead to a veto.

Last Call

News Corp. mogul and FOX head honcho Rupert Murdoch is making friends all over the place back home in Blighty as he takes the stand to answer for the company's ugly little phone hacking and bribery scandal.

During a media ethics inquiry on Wednesday, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch described David Cameron’s disabled son as “retarded” while trying to praise the British Prime Minister as a family man.

In the wake of a hacking scandal at News Corp.’s now-defunct News of the World, Lord Justice Brian Leveson asked Murdoch to testify under oath about his bid to take over British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC.

Only a day earlier, documents released by Murdoch’s son, James Murdoch, suggested that a Cameron ally had smoothed the way for News Corp. to take control of the lucrative satellite broadcaster.

Leveson inquiry lawyer Robert Jay asked the older Murdoch on Wednesday if he recalled first meeting Cameron.

“I first met him once, maybe even twice, at family picnics at weekends at my daughter’s house in the grounds of Blenheim Castle (Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire) where he came with his family,” Murdoch explained. “We were overrun with children, there were no politics.”

“But I was extremely impressed at the kindness and feeling he showed to the children, particularly to his retarded son,” the News Corp. chairman added. “And I came away talking about this — what a good family man.”

And if that statement doesn't perfectly encapsulate just how much of a complete and utter douchecanoe Rupert Murdoch is, nothing ever will come close.

I hope they invent new books to throw at him.

The Man Looks Back, Looks Forward

Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone interview with President Obama is up on the magazine's web site, and it's a pretty good piece.  The President gives some interesting and frank answers on a number of subjects:  Occupy Wall Street, LGBT equality, the Middle East, the GOP, the war on drugs.  The section on race relations in the country however caught my eye the most:

Do you think racial politics and race relations in America are any different now than when you first took office?

Look, race has been one of the fault lines in American culture and American politics from the start. I never bought into the notion that by electing me, somehow we were entering into a post-racial period. On the other hand, I've seen in my own lifetime how racial attitudes have changed and improved, and anybody who suggests that they haven't isn't paying attention or is trying to make a rhetorical point. Because we all see it every day, and me being in this Oval Office is a testimony to changes that have been taking place.

When I travel around the country, a lot of people remark on how inspiring seeing an African-American president or an African-American first lady must be to black boys and girls, how it must raise their sense of what's possible in their own lives. That's hugely important – but you shouldn't also underestimate the fact that there are a whole bunch of little white girls and white boys all across the country who just take it for granted that there's an African-American president. That's the president they're growing up with, and that's changing attitudes.

My view on race has always been that it's complicated. It's not just a matter of head – it's a matter of heart. It's about interactions. What happens in the workplace, in schools, on sports fields, and through music and culture shapes racial attitudes as much as any legislation that's passed. I do believe that we're making slow and steady progress. When I talk to Malia and Sasha, the world they're growing up with, with their friends, is just very different from the world that you and I grew up with.

In many ways he's right:  even in just five years race relations have improved in some ways.  But in other ways, particularly among the white supremacist movement, things have gotten far worse. The country has gotten far more polarized, and those polarizations are far, far more evident now in polite company.

Let's not forget the Tea Party was a ginned up reaction to Obama's election that nearly wrecked this country in 2010 and badly damaged it.  We've got a lot of work ahead of us, but only if Obama gets a second term.

If it's President Romney, we're done.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

And the ni-CLANG clock gets a little closer to The Blackest Hour.

During a Tuesday segment on American Family Association’s AFA Today radio program, Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council — a hate group, according the the Southern Poverty Law Center — encouraged listeners to read an article by conservative columnist Sandy Rios which suggests the president is weakening the U.S. so that communists in Russia can “reclaim power.”

“I would encourage you to read the article,” Perkins said. “In society today, we throw around labels a lot and I think we’ve become desensitized and what we’re looking here and what’s Sandy’s bringing up here is not labels. We’re not calling somebody a Marxist, a socialist. … We’re looking at facts.”

“What the media has done — going back to our earlier discussion about the media — is they have attempted to marginalize anyone who challenges this administration on those principles and that driving ideology.”

He added: “You know, it goes back to what they did to those that, you know, questioned the issue of his birth certificate. Look, I don’t know about all that, but I will tell you this: It’s a legitimate issue from the standpoint of what the Constitution says.”

If you still think the President's birth certificate is a "legitimate issue" at this point, there really isn't any other category for you except for "Hard-core racist asshole trying to cover that fact up."   I'm tired of it.  It's complete willful ignorance based on unapologetic hatred of the man.

Revoke this asshole's non-profit status, please.

WTH: Bully In The Classroom Is The Teacher?

(Reuters) - A New Jersey school district has fired at least two educators for verbally abusing autistic children after a father sent his 10-year-old autistic son to school wearing a hidden microphone upon suspecting he was being mistreated by staff.

The audio recordings, made public in a 17-minute video later posted on YouTube, capture educators speaking in harsh tones to the autistic children, including one in which a woman tells the young boy what sounds like "You are a bastard."

"That night my life changed forever," father Stuart Chaifetz said of the first time he heard the recording. "What I heard on that audio was so disgusting, so vile."

The father demands an apology, saying it is about reclaiming his son's dignity.  For six months, he had meetings with the school in response to complaints that his autistic son was acting out of character.  The man was worried about his son's development and taped the events that led to the firing of at least two school employees.

The thing is, while it's great that uploading the video to YouTube had the right results, I'm really worried about the lack of teacher supervision in schools, especially for the most vulnerable students.  In the day of remote monitoring and other technology, I really expected schools to be proactive in recording and watching classrooms, if for no other reason than to deter lawsuits and allegations.

Mistreating autistic children should mean never working with kids again.  However, it likely won't, something that should concern other parents.  Hell, I don't even have kids and I'm worried about it.

Google Drive Off To A Good Start

 It's Google, so of course some people are going to be immediately supportive or dismissive of Google Drive.  I spent a decade with Yahoo and moved last year, and so far I've been impressed.  Google Drive is pretty spiffy, so far.  As I play with it I'm sure I will find bugs and quirks, but it works just like intended, and my Google documents were waiting for me when I logged in.  It works beautifully between my Windows desktop, Linux laptop and Android phone.  I can view my writing, move songs or whatever else I like between devices, and always have my most updated copy.

There are a few problems, but nothing new.  The scheme is obnoxious and the color combinations can be unfriendly.  If you are going to insist on a snow white background, high yellow never practically comes into play.  The lack of customization is the same across all Google products (except Gmail, bless its digital little heart for having a night scheme).  Google Drive has all the goodness you've come to expect, the same issues overall, but no new aggravations, earning it a B+ in my book.  Give me customization in how it appears and we're talking a solid A.  I have written one more "WTF, why can't we have THEMES" review in their request for feedback, so maybe someday they will listen to all of us and implement color choices.  Until then, I have no complaints about the performance or glitches in quality for my documents.  For a writer, that's a big deal, and it beats any sharing system I've used, including Ubuntu One.

Google's integration makes them the leader.  I'm not personally biased and am in fact normally suspicious of the giants.  But if you just look at them in terms of what works, they have them all beat.  The moved into the business market, with more small and medium businesses using Google Docs and Gmail services, and now they will be instrumental into weaning the public away from Microsoft Office.  Once they improve account linking and GIVE THE PEOPLE SOME DAMNED VISUAL OPTIONS they will be the go-to for online storage and activity.

The Barack Ness Monster Drops The Mic On 'Em

With President Obama slow jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon yesterday, he deftly ensures that his stance on keeping student loan interest rates low will be completely opposed by the GOP in a self-destructive orgy of Obama Derangement Syndrome that will go the way of the payroll tax cut fight as Greg Sargent points out:

Consider the parallels. Just as in the payroll tax cut battle, there’s a looming deadline: On July 1st, interest rates on federally funded student loans is set to double. Barack Obama and Democrats, confident that the politics are on their side, are signaling that they intend to remain on offense on the issue.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney and other Republican leaders, apparently sensing that this a losing issue for them, have voiced varying degrees of support for extending the low rates. And just as in the payroll tax fight, they insist their only issue is about how to pay for the extension. Yet they won’t say what spending cuts they would favor to offset it.

This well-worn ground look familiar?  It should.

Meanwhile, House conservatives — just as during the payroll battle — are beginning to signal that they oppose the extension, period, full stop. Check out this quote from GOP Rep. Todd Akin, who is running in a GOP primary for the right to take on Dem Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri:

Akin said the government should be out of the student loan market altogether. “America has got the equivalent of the stage three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in,” he said. 

For Akin, federal help with student loan debt is an ideological nonstarter. If we start seeing more of this kind of thing from House conservatives, it could limit the maneuvering room GOP leaders need to reach a deal with Dems on how to pay for the extension they say they favor, in order to resolve this issue and put it behind them.

And this college tour and Fallon performance all but seal the deal on this.  The dopes, they are getting their ropes completely a-doped by POTUS once again.  They can't help themselves and have to mash on the A NEW POUTRAGE HAS APPEARED! button like a guinea pig getting a crack pellet.  If this plays out like the payroll tax cut issue (and there's every indication that it will so far) then the GOP will shoot themselves in the foot with yet another group of voters who will learn there's no percentage in voting GOP unless you're the one percent.

Miner 2049er

Zandardad flags down this Space.com article on Planetary Resources, Inc., a new startup with one out-of-this-world business plan and star-powered backers like Titanic and Avatar director James Cameron.

A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers — including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page — is set to announce plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as precious metals and water.

Planetary Resources, Inc. intends to sell these materials, generating a healthy profit for itself. But it also aims to advance humanity's exploration and exploitation of space, with resource extraction serving as an anchor industry that helps our species spread throughout the solar system.

"If you look at space resources, the logical next step is to go to the near-Earth asteroids," Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman Eric Anderson told SPACE.com. "They're just so valuable, and so easy to reach energetically. Near-Earth asteroids really are the low-hanging fruit of the solar system."

Turns out there's a lot of hard money in space rocks, folks.

Platinum-group metals — ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum — are found in low concentrations on Earth and can be tough to access, which is why they're so expensive. In fact, Anderson said, they don't occur naturally in Earth's crust, having been deposited on our planet over the eons by asteroid impacts.

"We're going to go to the source," Anderson said. "The platinum-group metals are many orders of magnitude easier to access in the high-concentration platinum asteroids than they are in the Earth's crust."

And there are a lot of precious metals up there waiting to be mined. A single platinum-rich space rock 1,650 feet (500 meters) wide contains the equivalent of all the platinum-group metals ever mined throughout human history, company officials said.

Telescope prospecting could begin in a few years and extraction could begin in as soon as 12-15 years by some estimates.  It's easiest to grab the low-hanging fruit first and drag near-Earth asteroids into a stable orbit around the Moon.  There, unmanned spacecraft could mine the space rocks for tasty metals.  Entirely possible to see this stuff get underway in my lifetime.

And some of these space rocks are worth tons of water, too.  Considering population growth on the planet and a growing shortage of potable water as the decades advance, good ol' aqua celestia from giant orbital ice cubes could be a valuable resource in the near-future.

Besides, if sci-fi writers are to be believed, you kinda want to invest in the ground floor of a venture like this.  Weyland-Yutani Corporation, anyone?

StupidiNews!

• In a 62-37 vote, the Senate elected to save the US Postal Service, but House Republicans are already vowing that the measure, and Saturday mail service, will die in the lower chamber.
• A new report from the British Royal Society states the planet could face a century of scare resources, disasters, and even war unless population and consumption is curbed.
• California Democrats want to link the state's minimum wage to the consumer price index, with business lobbyists lining up to oppose the measure as a "guaranteed job-killer".
• Evidence continues to mount that first quarter 2012 was finally the bottom of the housing market, but critics point to a massive new wave of backed-up foreclosures coming.
• Google's cloud file storing service is here but your Drive files could end up in Google's ads unless you opt out.

Last Call

The conservatives at SCOTUS -- and more than a few of the liberals -- had some rough questions for the Solicitor General today regarding oral arguments on Arizona's "Papers, Please!" immigration law today.  Does Arizona have the power to enforce its own immigration laws that go above and beyond federal limits?

"If, in fact, somebody who does not belong in this country is in Arizona, Arizona has no power?" asked Justice Antonin Scalia. "What does sovereignty mean if it does not include the ability to defend your borders?"

Even liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor told the federal governments' lawyer that key parts of his arguments were "not selling very well."

Federal courts had blocked four elements of the state's Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, known as SB 1070.

While intense oral arguments took place among the justices, outside there were competing demonstrations on the courthouse plaza, with the law's opponents saying it promotes discrimination and racial profiling. Backers say illegal immigration has created public safety and economic crises.

At issue is whether states have any authority to step in to enforce immigration matters or whether that is the exclusive role of the federal government. In dry legal terms, this constitutional question is known as pre-emption.

Paul Clement, lawyer for Arizona, told the high court the federal government has long failed to control the problem, and that states have discretion to assist in enforcing immigration laws.

But the Obama administration's solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, strongly countered that assertion, saying immigration matters are under the federal government's exclusive authority and state "interference" would only make matters worse.

The Obama administration exclusively argued this as a Supremacy Clause case, with the Constitution spelling out that the federal government has jurisdiction over all matters regarding federal borders.  It appears SCOTUS has more than a few problems with this.  There's also the major issue that Justice Kagan recused herself in this case, setting up a 4-4 tie as a very possible scenario (meaning that the lower court ruling would stand in Arizona, but that other states would be able to cite the SCOTUS decision to make their own laws.)  Lyle Denniston:

If the Court is to permit Arizona to put into effect at least some of the challenged parts of S.B. 1070, there would have to be five votes to do so because only eight Justices are taking part (Justice Elena Kagan is out of the case), and a 4-4 split would mean that a lower court’s bar to enforcing those provisions would be upheld without a written opinion.   It did not take long for Justice Antonin Scalia to side with Arizona, and it was not much later that Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., showed that he, too, was inclined that way.   Justice Clarence Thomas, who said nothing during the argument, is known to be totally opposed to the kind of technical legal challenge that the government has mounted against S.B. 1070.

That left Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito, Jr., as the ones that might be thought most likely to help make a majority for Arizona.  Their questioning, less pointed, made them somewhat less predictable.  However, they did show some sympathy for the notion that a border state like Arizona might have good reasons for trying to deal with what Kennedy called the “social and economic disruption” resulting from illegal immigration.

The Court’s three more liberal Justices — Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor — offered what appeared to be a less than enthusiastic support for the federal government’s challenge, although they definitely were troubled that S.B. 1070 might, in practice, lead to long detentions of immigrants.  They wanted assurances on the point, and they were offered some by Arizona’s lawyer, Washington attorney Paul D. Clement.

 We'll see how this falls out, but I'm thinking that this may get very messy if the court sides with Arizona here.  Depending on how broad the written opinion is, things could get out of control fast if it goes against the US here.