Valley Of The Jolly Tech Giants

If you want a big clue as to why the JOBS bill passed so easily in the House, the Senate, and was signed into law in relative record speed, you can look towards Silicon Valley's new lobbyist clout.  Republicans certainly are, and they're making the pitch to multi-billion dollar tech giants like Google and Apple that Silicon Valley could join Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big Ag in the DC money game...for the right price.

The software developers and smartphone designers may not agree with their guests on gay marriage or abortion, but they’re anxious to protect their businesses from new taxes and regulations. Republicans say it’s a natural fit: They’re younger than their Democratic counterparts in Congress, and they’re making better use of these companies’ platforms in the political sphere. Best of all, they don’t have to tailor their business message to appeal to Silicon Valley — they oppose new government regulations across the industrial landscape.

“There is a growing realization on the part of the players in Silicon Valley, in the venture [capital] community as well as the startup community, that the Republicans in Congress, and in the House, really do represent the next generation in terms of wanting to move the country forward in innovation,” Cantor told POLITICO in an interview.

In essence, Republicans are packaging themselves as the next great innovation for Silicon Valley: a plugged-in protection force pledged to defend private enterprise. It’s part of a sustained GOP effort to position itself as the party of the future, both for the industry and for the voters who use its products.
“A lot of us came out of a small-business world and are naturally sympathetic to startup companies, to capitalism, to free enterprise, to innovation,” said Walden, who chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.

At the same time, the tech companies have been undergoing a political maturation process in which they are, for the first time, looking at Washington as a major battlefront, and stocking D.C. offices with new lobbyists — many of them Republicans — in hopes of staving off taxes and regulations.

Republicans may never turn a traditionally Democratic constituency into a Republican bastion, but there are signs that Silicon Valley is a little less blue today than it was just a couple of years ago.

Considering the billions at stake in the tech industry right now, and the burning issue of small donor funding for startups for Silicon Valley in general, Dems really didn't have too much of a choice in order to keep these guys happy.  Republicans know this, which is why they worked so many deregulation points into the JOBS act.  In return, the Dems and President Obama are leaving the final say of these new rules up to the oversight agencies in the Executive.  Republicans figure that when they get the White House back someday, they'll just eliminate that oversight altogether.

Unfortunately, that's how the game works these days.  President Obama has to play in order to try to win.  I'm certainly not happy about the JOBS act weakening critical small investor oversight, but I'm hoping other options in the Executive branch are available.  And you certainly can't blame Silicon Valley for wanting in on getting the green.

We'll see how it works out.

Remembering The Classics

Of course I love my LolCats.  I'm always making my own captions and even contributing here and there. But while organizing my files and archives, I found The Best One Ever.  This was the one that I had in every office since 2005.

My friends, today I share the saga of Karl.

Happy Caturday!

Science Awesomeness

This was one of those times when I just had to share the awesomeness I stumbled across. This is a caterpillar who will take petals from the flower it is on, and attach it to its back with silk. No matter where it may be, this little guy will be safe, and then come out as a beautiful, pale green wonder.

I love Mental Floss.  They are constantly filling my well of useless information.  This one surprised me, and answered something I had wondered about off and on for my entire life.  I learned that the reason your nose gets stuffy one nostril at a time is because your nostrils switch off and on.  You have a primary and a secondary, and through involuntary muscle regulation, they take turns.

I hope you enjoyed this bite-sized bit of science.  Now get out there and have a good weekend!

At The Chart Of The Matter

Steve Benen kindly presents compelling evidence to squish "the stimulus failed, this President failed" nonsense on jobs and unemployment:

Despite last week's annual revisions, the same metrics still apply: when jobless claims fall below the 400,000 threshold, it's considered evidence of an improving jobs landscape, and when the number drops below 370,000, it suggests jobs are actually being created rather quickly.

And with that, here's the chart -- which reflects the revised, seasonably-adjusted data -- showing weekly, initial unemployment claims going back to the beginning of 2007. (Remember, unlike the monthly jobs chart, a lower number is good news.) For context, I've added an arrow to show the point at which President Obama's Recovery Act began spending money.

Stimulus happens, unemployment claims go down, and they've been decreasing steadily now for 3 years.  The problem is it took Bush roughly one year to cause the damage, and the expectation that President Obama could fix it by any means in that short of a time frame was ridiculous.  But even by November 2010 things were remarkably better by comparison.  Would have been nice if he and the Democrats in Congress who passed the stimulus had gotten a little credit then from the voters.

Would be even better if the voters gave them credit this November, yes?

Well Now Here's Your Problem

President Obama gave a speech this week to assembled Associated Press editors (among other news professionals) and cited obnoxious Both Sides Do It(tm) false equivalence in political media narratives as a contributing factor to the problems in fixing our broken government.  As Tim Murphy of MoJo points out, the inevitable AP fact check of President Obama's speech is rife with...yeah, you see where this is going, right?

President Obama delivered a fiery (as we journalists like to call such things) speech to a gathering of newspapers editors in Washington on Tuesday, chiding Mitt Romney for using words like "marvelous" and knocking GOP Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan as "social darwinism." It was, by most accounts, a sign of what's to come from the campaign over the next seven months. Let's hope this fact-check of the speech from the Associated Press isn't also a harbinger of the future. ("It's not even 10 A.M. and we already have a 'worst of the day' winner," tweets Pema Levy.) The problem with the piece, by the normally solid Calvin Woodward, is that it doesn't really check any facts (inflated jobs figures, spending increases, that kind of thing). Instead, it suffers from a massive glut of false equivalence.

It's like the AP did this on purpose or something.  I give it Five Pinocchios On Fire!

As a candidate, Obama campaigned on a public option. Progressives were devastated when it was nixed from the Affordable Care Act—to the extent that some refused to support the final bill. Instead, Obama went with the market-driven approach favored by the Republican governor of Massachusetts. Why? Well, in part because Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley suggested there would be "broad bi-partisan support" for such a solution. Can you really knock someone for moving to the left when they started off on the left and ended up where the center used to be?

The fact-check goes on to rebuke Obama for accusing Republicans of wanting to toss out lots of economic regulations (something Republicans want to do) by pointing out that Romney himself doesn't want to literally eliminate every federal regulation—only a lot of them, including the Dodd–Frank Wall Street reform package, which was designed to prevent a repeat of the practices that led to the 2008 crash. But Obama didn't actually say Romney wanted to eliminate all federal regulations—only a lot of them.

A sense of nuance is helpful when writing about Washington politics—and nuance, incidentally, is something campaign speeches generally lack. But fact-checks are for objective facts, not subjective arguments about what does and doesn't constitute excessive deregulation. Pieces like this sort of defeat the point.

No, pieces like this have always been the point of "fact-checking".  PolitiFact and the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler do it all the time.  The entire point of stuff like this is to conflate objective fact checking and subjective refereeing and leveraging the credibility of the former to justify making calls on the latter.  Hence, we get "Even PolitiFact says X is wrong about Y!" when X is a subjective judgement call and not an objective fact check.  That is a cottage industry in DC, if not your raison d'être of being a Villager.  PolitiFact and Kessler are far from alone in this respect.

It's how we end up with "Lie of the Year!" and such.  There's danger in conflation like that, as anyone who might, say, want to ever see the tax dollars they paid into the Medicare system again would tell you.

StupidiNews!

• The nation's smallest town, Buford, Wyoming, has been sold lock, stock, and barrel for $900,000 to a pair of Vietnamese real estate developers.
• Corporations like Kraft, Coca-Cola and Pepsi have pulled out of supporting conservative legislative group ALEC after protests from voter rights groups.
• With short-term funding for the nation's highways on hold since March 31, Congress will return from Easter recess with a major fight on its hands.
• Economists predict the US created 205,000 jobs in March, keeping the unemployment rate even at 8.3%.
• The MPAA is reportedly making another effort to revive the reviled SOPA anti-piracy act, according to movie industry chief  and former Dem Senator turned lobbyist, Chris Dodd.

Last Call

I bet you didn't know President Obama's greatest feat of Kenyan Socialist Witch Doctor voodoo so far this campaign season was mind-controlling the WaPo's Chris Cillizza to write this.

In what was a defining speech of his 2012 reelection campaign, Obama repeatedly called out Ryan and Republicans for their “laughable” approach to deficit reduction, describing the budget plan put forward by the Wisconsin Republican as a “Trojan horse”. Added Obama: “Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism.”

Them’s fighting words. And, they make clear that a major part of Obama’s strategy heading toward November is to make Ryan — and the budget plans he has proposed in each of the last two years — famous or, more accurately, infamous. (Make sure to read Ezra Klein’s smart piece on Obama’s efforts to elevate Ryan.)

Knowing now that Obama is going to go all-out on the Ryan plan, it makes an increasing amount of sense for Romney to not only fully embrace the plan (as he has done) but to fully embrace the man too.

It’s not hard to imagine this thought in Romney headquarters this morning: You want to make the Ryan plan the centerpiece of this campaign? Fine. Game on. That’s a fight we want.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

OK, let me start again, I should really take the idea of a Romney/Paul ticket seri--BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Do it, Mittens.  Forever make this about the bland CEO who made a killing firing American workers and cashing in their companies out from under them and team him up with the bland government wonk who wants to makes a killing adding a profit margin to Grandma's health care plan and tossing millions off of food stamps and Medicaid.  Do it now, for all the Reasons.

Obama would win by 20 points.  Republicans cannot be this stupid.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Scary black guy is scary.

Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) on Tuesday accused President Obama of "threatening" the Supreme Court as it prepares a ruling on the constitutionality of the healthcare reform law.

Speaking a day after Obama warned against "unelected" judges overturning the law, Johanns said Obama crossed the line with his remarks.

"What President Obama is doing here isn't right," Johanns said Tuesday in an interview with local Nebraska radio station KLIN. "It is threatening, it is intimidating."

Seven more months of "But he's The Uppity Kenyan Colonialist Gangsta Thug!  Hide your nubile daughters!" is going to be awesome like a migraine surrounded by smaller autonomous migraines.  Then again, it's not like Republicans can run on issues or anything, so the full court press on BLOOGITY BLOO HE'S BLACK is pretty much their entire hand at this point.

I for one think people would remember 15 months of this in 2007-2008 not working, but it really hasn't stopped these guys from regularly visiting the dog whistle factory, ordering crates of dog whistles, melting them down into slag and then using the slag to paint HE'S BLACK in 50 foot tall letters on the side of every skyscraper in America as a stimulus project.

I swear if the President ever gave anyone the side-eye, there would be Articles of Banishment to the Phantom Zone before the end of the day.

Greek Fire, Part 54

After burning low for most of March, April has seen the Greek Fire explode to become The Pain In Spain as Spanish bond spreads are rapidly approaching record numbers on crippling unemployment and a hollowed-out bank sector.

Spanish 10-year yields were 12 basis points higher at 5.84 percent, after rising around 30 bps on Wednesday. The yield differential over Bunds, at 411 bps, was its widest since late November, before the European Central Bank flooded the banking system with a trillion euros of three-year cash.

"There's been a lot of negative news on Spain over a sustained period of time but market sentiment was being buoyed by strong auction results until yesterday," said Rabobank rate strategist Lyn Graham-Taylor.

"It's quite a dangerous time and if the market starts to panic then the sky's the limit (for borrowing costs), although you may see some policy action come into play."

The Spanish/German yield spread was around 475 bps in November, even with the ECB buying bonds in the secondary market, a programme that has been mostly dormant this year.

ECB President Mario Draghi said on Wednesday that any talk of a withdrawal of the exceptional crisis-fighting measures would be premature.

Equivalent Italian yields, which are being dragged higher in tandem with Spain, were up 13 basis points at 5.52 percent. Shorter-dated paper in both countries underperformed.

"It looked like we were over the worst of it with the three-year (ECB funding operation) and Greece (debt restructuring) out of the way ... but now with the focus on Spain and Portugal we're looking at a different kettle of fish," a trader said.

Same kettle.  Same fish.  Only they stink worse now.  The Greek Fire just burns and burns, and while you might put it out temporarily in one EU country, it simply pops up and reignites in another one of the PIIGS countries like flaming whack-a-mole.  The hope that Europe had settled down and gotten things under control was just that: hope.

I said six weeks ago agreeing with Felix Salmon that the EU had bought itself several months.  It looks like the EU won't even get two months at this rate before having to intervene in Spain, Italy, and Portugal.  Only this time, there won't be any money to do it with.

European debt crisis?  Never went away, folks.  It's still the biggest economic story of 2012 and the economy here depends entirely on what happens in the EU over the next few weeks.

Strap in.  Gonna get ugly.

Oprah Smokes Pot?

Of course she has.  Despite what we're told, there are precious few people who never have and never will smoke pot.  Still, the TMZ video is pretty fun.


I especially like the old trick of repeating back a question while thinking furiously about what words to use. She was actually pretty graceful and in the only way she could be honest, honest.

Endorsing Execution Of Gays Is A Exciting New Low For Bachmann

Rachel Maddow took musician Bradlee Dead to task for the following quote:

"The Muslims are calling for the execution of homosexuals in America. They themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible of of Judeo-Christian God. But they seem to be more moral than even the American Christians do, because these people are livid about enforcing their laws. They know homosexuality is an abomination. If Americans won’t enforce the laws, God will raise a foreign enemy to do just that."

When pressed recently, he refused to answer with a yes or no, but said his quote was taken out of context.  I'm wondering what context could have possibly made that not sound batshit crazy.  I mean, now that women, gays, poor people and slutty girls are under the gun means the mask can come off, right?  Let's just be out with it and call to kill the people who don't live the way you think they should, is that it?  Is that really it?

According to Michele Bachmann, it is. "This ministry, 'You Can Run But You Cannot Hide,' they are not sidetracked, they're on course," Bachmann intoned. "They're way on course. Because they get it. They get what this is all about."

So do we, toots.  According to idiots like Bachmann, if you act up by exercising freedom of religion or freedom in general, you don't deserve your government's service.  In fact, you should just be shot.  Message received, oh discreet one.

A Peek Inside The Echo Chamber

The wingers are having a collective breakdown over the President's comments this week, first on the gravity of the Supreme Court's ruling on health care reform on Monday, and second his remarks on the GOP's House budget on Tuesday.  His critics are in nothing short of complete apoplexy right now, barely able to type without collapsing into inchoate rage.

"Barack Obama, Constitutional Ignoramus" declares Power Line's Steven Hayward as he accuses the President of "extreme constitutional ignorance".  Commentary Magazine's John Steele Gordon says there's "simply no lie President Obama will not tell in pursuit of his agenda."  Allahpundit at Hot Air notes that in retaliation for "moronic" speech that a Fifth Circuit Reagan appointee went after a DOJ lawyer, demanding that she explain "her boss's" comments to him in written form before the court.
 This is all over the President daring to say that the Supreme Court should practice the conservative tenet of judicial restraint.  For this, he is a liar, an ignoramus, and a moron.  Projection much, gentlemen?

Oh, and it gets worse.  Yesterday's remarks on the GOP budget were treated with similar outright hatred.  the President pointed out that the Ryan plan was cynical, and that it represented a failure on the part of the myth of trickle-down prosperity.  The words clearly hit home.  Yuval Levin at National Review sputtered that his speech "was basically just a long, dishonest way of saying the same astonishingly irresponsible thing."  Townhall's Guy Benson declared it "Obama's worst speech yet" and thundered that it was "what very well may have been the most dishonest, demagogic, and bitterly partisan speech of his presidency."  Allahpundit (again) remarked "Do we actually have to start a Godwin watch for this campaign?"

Just because these leading lights of the wingnutosphere say it, doesn't make it the truth.  But at this point any speech that President Obama makes from now on will be treated as if he took a steaming dump on the Constitution and then lit it on fire.  And it's only April.  The projection here of these guys is extraordinary, and yet any rational observer should have expected this the moment it looked like the GOP primary was in its endgame.  That's what has happened this week, and the response is clearly a harbinger of far more terrible things to come.

I keep having to believe that the goal here is to just treat everything the President does with such unremitting rancor that America simply walks away from the entire political process and leaves it to the fanatics.  It worked well enough in 2010.  We have our work cut out for us in 2012, which is one of the main reasons I'm here.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Work

It appears that Iowa Republican Steve King is strongly suggesting that if you're sexual preference is anything other than straight, you should not inform your boss or co-workers or clients at all in order to spare the job creators of the awful, intolerable hell of having to deal with laws that protect employees from being fired solely for sexual preference.

Here's his conversation on sexual orientation at the workplace with Think Progress's Scott Keyes:

KEYES: Would that encompass, for instance, the government being able to tell businesses who they can hire and fire?

KING: Yeah, they shouldn’t be able to do that [to] a private business.

KEYES: Even if those were to be regulations say on a matter of sexual orientation or gender or other stuff like that?

KING: How do you know someone’s sexual orientation? I don’t know how you discriminate against someone because of their sexual orientation. That’s their business.

KEYES: I guess if it became public knowledge that an employee were lesbian or gay.

KING: You have private sector businesses here and they need to have freedom to operate. In the first place, I would think that unless someone makes their sexuality public, it’s not anybody’s business, so neither is it our business to tell an employer who to hire. He won’t know who to discriminate against in the first place.

Video:



So yes,  apparently the solution for LGBT equality in the workplace is for everyone to go back into the closet and institute Don't Ask, Don't Tell because if employers don't know you're gay, then nobody can fired for being gay, so we don't need laws protecting gays.  Problem solved!

If gay people didn't exist, in other words, there would be no need for the government to protect them.  Awesome.  And this is a member of Congress saying this, ladies and gentlemen, who is on the House Judiciary Committee and the Judiciary's Subcommittee on the Constitution who is making this argument.

So frankly, I don't want to hear a word about how President Obama is an "ignoramus" or a "moron" when it comes to legal affairs (or anything else for that matter) when the Republican alternative includes people making laws who believe actually ignorant things like this about how the laws they craft should work.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell for your workplace?  Yes, let's put everyone back in the closet.  While we're at it, let's all go to work in giant featureless hermetically sealed sacks so that we don't have to tell anyone if we're black, Asian, Latino, female, tall, short, or whatever too.  What King really wants is for the LGBT community to simply stop existing so that he doesn't have to deal with it.

Pretty sure that's not going to happen.

StupidiNews!

• After talks have reportedly fallen apart, the Department of Justice is reportedly ready to sue Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio over violating the civil rights of Latinos.
• Minnesota becomes the latest state to put GOP-sponsored Voter ID laws on the ballot this fall with a measure that would require all voters to show a state ID.
• A new study shows that non-education public sector jobs have been slashed to their lowest number since 1986.
• German luxury firearms manufacturer Merkel is having a banner year selling rifles to Russian and especially US buyers, with hand-crafted pieces going for as much as a quarter of a million.
• Google's "Project Glass" augmented reality glasses are far from reality, but the search engine giant does admit the project is on the drawing board.

Last Call

How much do the wingers hate this President?  This much, via Kevin Drum:

This is beyond bizarre. A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court is hearing a challenge to Obamacare, but when a Justice Department lawyer began arguments this morning she was stopped short:

Appeals Court Judge Jerry Smith immediately interrupted, asking if DOJ agreed that the judiciary could strike down an unconstitutional law. The DOJ lawyer, Dana Lydia Kaersvang, answered yes — and mentioned Marbury v. Madison, the landmark case that firmly established the principle of judicial review more than 200 years ago, according to the lawyer in the courtroom. 

Smith then became "very stern," the source said, telling the lawyers arguing the case it was not clear to "many of us" whether the president believes such a right exists....Smith, a Reagan appointee, went on to say that comments from the president and others in the Executive Branch indicate they believe judges don't have the power to review laws and strike those that are unconstitutional, specifically referencing Mr. Obama's comments yesterday about judges being an "unelected group of people."

Despite the fact that Kaersvang immediately acknowledged that courts can indeed strike down laws, the panel ordered her to "submit a three-page, single-spaced letter by noon Thursday addressing whether the Executive Branch believes courts have such power."

To recap, a federal judge is handing out a book report on judicial overreach and why overturning Congress and the President happens all the damn time apparently in order to put "that one" in his place in a petty display of tyranny on the bench.  Because Jerry Smith here will be damned if that uppity sumbitch is gonna run his mouth on his watch.

And yes, at this point we have Federal Appeals Court Judges acting like GOP House backbenchers.

We are so screwed if these guys get back in power.  They will goddamn go to war with us.