To hell with the Simpsons

Joe had a post up about the Simpsons, but the Simpsons' show just had one of my YouTube videos deleted. Why? Because they claimed that a 36 second clip that I took of my television set in my hotel in Rome last year, where the Simpsons were speaking in Italian, was a "copyright violation." As a lawyer, let me just say that it is patently absurd that a 36 second clip of a 22 minute show, when the clip is a picture of my Italian television, substantially infringes on the Simpsons in a way that would make you no longer need to watch that episode, since you already saw my poor quality 36 second clip in Italian (that is the test, whether I've used so much of the original that you no longer would need to go to the original). There is no fair use exception to copyright law any more. The Internet killed it. As for the Simpsons, they can kiss our links and coverage goodbye. Read More......

Arizona State refuses Obama honorary degree. Says he hasn't accomplished enough in life.

Arizona State University invited President Obama to speak at their commencement, but they've notified the leader of the free world that he won't be getting an honorary degree because, well, you know, it's great that he's the first black president and everything (yes, they noted that he's black), but maybe he could come back after he finishes his term, and if he's accomplished anything significant by then, the president of the Harvard of the desert will be happy to reconsider whether the President of the United States of America has accomplished anything significant in his life.

Now, before anyone thinks this is about racism or anything, it should be noted that Arizona State is happy to bestow honorary degrees on other people of color (or at least non-white color) who have accomplished great things in their lives, like the vice minister of education of communist China. Who I'm sure is a very nice woman, when she's not pimping for a dictatorship that oppresses fifteen percent of the world's entire population. Read More......

Why is Bush permitted to kiss a man, but Obama can't bow to one?

Yes, this is the latest fabricated GOP controversy. Obama may, or may not, have bowed to the Saudi leader. This is a big deal, according to conservatives, especially according to former Bush White House officials. Apparently, Obama is somehow belittling America by bowing in courtesy to a foreign leader (and even though it's unspoken, I suspect it's a problem because the leader is an A-rab). Well, then how is it not belittling to America to have our president practically playing tonsil hockey with a foreign leader, and then walking around the garden, hand in hand, like they just exchanged school rings?

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against men in love, and in fact, it brings a tear to my eye that George Bush was willing to openly embrace his inner Lindsey. I just think that conservatives have some real chutzpah complaining about Obama bowing to the Saudis, when what Bush was letting the Saudis do to him wouldn't even qualify as safe sex. Read More......

Mark Sanford and Son

South Carolina Republican governor Mark Sanford has been trying to peddle a load of junk lately. He thinks South Carolina's kids should give up getting better schools because it would be wrong to, uh, build better schools in South Carolina. Or it would be wrong for a kid's education to stand in the way of Mark Sanford's presidential aspirations. So here is Mark Sanford, junk dealer, trying to explain, while standing in his big rich mansion, why the sons and daughters of South Carolina should tighten their belts in order to help him do his next video out of an even bigger house.

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AP is now threatening to sue people who embed AP's YouTube videos that, of course, have their own embed code that AP declined to turn off

This is perhaps a bit wonky to those of you who don't understand how YouTube works. To those who do understand how YouTube works, this is not just bizarre, it's moronic.

In a nutshell, AP, like millions of people all over the world, created their own account on YouTube. What YouTube does is, it lets you upload any video you want, for free, and then people from all over the globe can come to YouTube and watch your video for free. That's not just the way YouTube works, it's its central purpose. To let you show your videos for free to other people.

Now, there's a second component to YouTube. In addition to someone visiting my YouTube page and looking, for free, at the videos I've posted there, you, the visitor, can also publish those videos, for free, on your own Web site. Again, it's the reason YouTube exists, to permit people to grab your video and show it on their sites for free. For anyone who doesn't want their videos being shown on other Web sites, but who would rather people come to their own YouTube page in order to see their videos, you can simply turn this feature off. Once you turn it off, no one can take any of your videos and show them on their Web pages.

Well. AP has refused to turn off the feature that permits you to take their YouTube videos and embed them on your own Web site. But at the same time, AP is now threatening to sue anyone who uses that feature that AP expressly decided to enable on its own YouTube videos.

Again, if you don't know YouTube, this might be a bit confusing. If you do know YouTube, what AP is alleging is absolutely idiotic. I'm trying to find a comparison, and I'm flummoxed. AP is publishing their videos on a Web site whose sole purpose is to show those videos for free, and then AP is enabling a feature that permits - nay, a feature whose only purpose is to have you post their videos on your own Web site - and then AP is threatening to sue anyone who does what AP has affirmatively invited you to do.

Of course, AP is now threatening to sue anyone who hyperlinks to an AP story, so this kind of hyper-litigious goofiness is starting to become par for the course. Read More......

Wells Fargo reports profit for first quarter earnings

Whew! This will considered excellent news today because not only is it a profit, but it's a very significant profit. Wells Fargo still has plenty of loans out there that are causing some concern but on the surface this is the kind of news that many are desperate to hear.

Wells Fargo surprised investors by saying it expects to report record earnings of $3 billion for the first quarter, easily surpassing analysts' estimates.

The San Francisco-based bank, which has received billions of dollars in government funds, said it expects to earn 55 cents a share for the quarter ended March 31. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, on average, forecast earnings of 23 cents per share.

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Mom kills son, then self at shooting range

If only everyone had guns, this could have been prevented.

A central Florida woman who fatally shot her son then killed herself at a shooting range wrote in suicide notes to her boyfriend that she was trying to save her son.

"I'm so sorry," Marie Moore wrote several times. "I had to send my son to heaven and myself to Hell."

Oh my God, there are photos. Apparently from the security cam at the shooting range. They're not gory. But they're still just horrifying to watch. Someone did a YouTube of them. I just can't post it, but you can go here to see it if you want.

I mean, this isn't really news. She's obviously just some nut. But still. There's something about stories like this that feel like they're about something bigger. Not just guns, though it is partly about that (there is no excuse for a nut like this woman being permitted to touch a gun, absolutely absurd). But also about society today. I know she's just one example. And with 300+ million citizens, we're going to have some screwballs. But still, I find it hard to read and watch something like this and not feel a tinge of despair for our country. Read More......

Follow up to yesterday's post about the top liberal blogs getting annoyed at progressive groups not supporting the Netroots

I wrote yesterday about a story from Greg Sargent over at the Plum Line about how Jane Hamsher, Markos, John Amato and I are all a bit miffed that the progressive leaders, from the big nonprofits to the Democratic party to the administration, do very little to help the Netroots (in terms of advertising, but other ways as well), yet are always asking us for help.

Some conservative bloggers, not surprisingly, were very upset that we would talk about "money." As you probably have noticed, we at AMERICAblog don't tend to cover the tit-for-tat of the liberal blogs vs. conservative blogs feud. Bigger fish to fry. But, there were some interesting posts on a few conservative blogs, and some posts on traditional media blogs, regarding this issue, and I think they're worth sharing.

First, this post from RightWingNews is really the seminal piece - he quotes a number of other conservative blogs writing about the very same topic as it applies to conservative blogs not getting support from the right.

There are loads of deep pocketed donors in the GOP who toss around millions of dollars to fund huge ad budgets -- but, how many of them spend money on blogs? Not many....

In fact, we've even gotten to the point now where organizations will pay thousands of dollars on consultants, to hit blogs up for links, instead of just buying ads on the blogs. That's great for the consultants (and I can tell you that from personal experience), but it sucks for the bloggers who get nothing but link requests out of it while some consultant pockets a fat check just for writing a few emails that generally don't produce any results.

Joe or I could have written those two paragraphs. Many of the big non-profits will hire a $50,000 a month PR firm to hit us up for free, rather than pay probably half that and advertise on most of the top liberal blogs, and then some. Not realizing, of course, that most of us immediately incinerate any email coming from a PR firm or a consultant.

RedState:

One area where the left has done a much better job than the right online is investing in blogs as a component of left-wing activism.

On the right, Heritage has its blog. Club for Growth has its blog. MRC has its blog. The GOP has its blog. The list goes on and on and on. When the right wants to get online, each organization does its own thing. That's just the way its done.

To be sure, on the left, there's a bit of the same thing going on, but then you've got groups like Media Matters that function more or less to subsidize left-wing bloggers. Oh sure, they say they are more important than that, but they aren't really.

More importantly, though, is the advertising component. What is the online advertising budget for Heritage? What about for AEI? What about for Americans for Tax Reform? Family Research Council? Leadership Institute? NFIB? NTU? National Right to Work? Club for Growth? The list goes on.

In the past few years, SEIU, AFL-CIO, NEA, DCCC, and a host of other left-wing organizations have been buying ads on left of center blogs keeping those blogs going -- allowing the bloggers on the left some financial incentive to keep blogging for the left.

In addition to all of that, you've got the Soros gang and SEIU engaging in a host of left-wing activities online that recruit and fund online writers -- bloggers, journalists, etc.

I found it fascinating that they, like we, think the other side's blogs are all being subsidized. Not true on our side. Media Matters may subsidize a blogger, but they certainly don't subsidize bloggerS, plural, nor do they exist to help the Netroots grow. Nor does any organization that we know of. As for the list of leftwing groups who routinely buy ads on the liberal blogs, the only group that routinely does that is SEIU. I can't think of any other group that has routinely supported us and worked with us, other than the ACLU, but their blog outreach pretty much stopped the middle of last year. Still, it's fascinating to see the same complaint, and misconception, coming from the right side of the aisle.

As for George Soros helping the blogs... George who?

Volokh

I wonder whether it's quite right for authors who publish their own opinion and news commentary to demand a "two way street" in which the authors get advertising money from the people they praise....

But if an ostensibly independent blogger has a general pattern of demanding advertising — even indirectly, rather than in some personal communication — from institutions in exchange for publicizing the institutions' work, that sort of relationship strike me as harder to disclose in any transparent way. And my sense is that historically this sort of deal has been seen as not entirely kosher in the newspaper business, or for that matter in the opinion magazine business.

A valid, and expected, argument. Except that we're not authors, or newspapers, or magazines. We're party activists. We're political organizations. We're talking heads on TV. We are political operatives. And sometimes - only sometimes - we are journalists too. (Or perhaps we're always journalists, but we're a new kind of - or a very old kind of - activist journalist that hasn't been seen in decades.) The old rules simply don't apply because we are not the Washington Post, and we aren't even the Nation.

Sistertoldjah

In other words, they’re kissing Obama’s ass as much as a human being possibly can, yet they’re not even getting so much as a moist towelette to wipe themselves off with. And then they have the gall to go public and complain about it! Talk about prostituting yourself.

So now we know what makes these left-wing blogs tick: money. They’ll say and do anything you want them to say, all you have to do is meet their price.

Cute. But they do raise a valid, though obvious, concern. Are we simply saying we're available to the highest bidder? No. We don't publish things on the blog that we don't think are newsworthy and/or don't help the progressive movement in some way. But we do sometimes help our friends. I've posted things that a large organization, another blog, someone on the Hill, or even someone in the administration has asked me to post. I do it because we're Democrats. We're progressives. We help our family and friends. But when someone only calls you because they want something, and never offer to help you in return, they're not your family or your friend. You know the kind of person I mean. They only check in when they need something. It doesn't make you greedy to finally get fed up with being used.

JulesCrittenden

Call me a rube but I’m a little surprised these people allowed themselves to be shamelessly used in the first place. Partisanship all around, but whatever happened to just saying what you think? I vaguely recall being approached a few times by flacks and hacks who wondered whether I wanted their talking points, but I prefer to shill for what I give a damn about all on my own, thanks.* I haven’t noticed the kind of bucket-toting the lefties just admitted to elsewhere on the right half of the blogosphere, either. Love to know how Kos and FDL readers will feel knowing their stars are tools, but I’d guess it won’t be much of an issue.

(Sorry, lost the link for this character, but since he's being a dick, I don't plan on Googling him to find it.)

Cute. I work 12 hours a day on the blog. Literally. I get up at 930, start blogging immediately, and end my day around 10 at night (often later), then watch Stargate SG-1 until around 1am, go to bed, and start the next day all over again. It's unrealistic, and a bit naive, to suggest that I, or any blogger spending this kind of time to make a top blog a top blog, should be doing it for free, to hell with the money. 12 hour days don't leave you much room to earn income on the side. It's a simple fact that producing a good blog takes time and effort. If we, as a movement, as a party, believe that the Netroots is something valuable, then we should foster it.

The second point, that you're all tools, is basically a conservative blogger jumping into that "conservative blogs versus liberal blogs" thing that I like to stay away from. I've been running the blog full time for four years now. I think you'd notice if we were simply posting things because someone bought us off. Everyone in this town, everyone in this world, gets paid to do their job. And most do it without compromising their principles. We simply expect the same.

Oh, and you are a rube.

DailyMail blog (not the newspaper from England)

Welcome to a little place I like to call Reality.

Why should a group pay her to say what she was going to say anyway?

She complained about Americans United for Change and American Association of Retired Persons.

I’ve seen ads for Americans United for Change and AARP on Fox News. Those groups know that they have to pay to get their messages to Fox News viewers unfiltered.

Why should they pay Hamsher to do what she was going to do anyway for free?

Excellent points. And that's why you'll notice that on AMERICAblog, at least, we barely ever publish anything that a big group asks us to. But not because we won't give them the milk for free. Rather, because they only think of how we can help them, not how they can help us. And I simply find that rude. I help friends, and the occasional stranger in need. I don't help the stranger with a million bucks who only comes knocking when he needs something.

PoliticalByline

I will agree with AllahPundit here; We Conservatives are in the same boat man. I don’t get any magical fund from some rich Conservative here, at all.

And finally, Ben Smith posted this today, as a follow-up to this story. I love Ben, but his post is just categorically wrong. First his post:

An online media executive pointed out to me that yesterday's suggestions from liberal bloggers that their allies should advertise — something between a plea for help and an extortion attempt — comes in part because the first quarter has been terrible for blogs' ad revenues across the board.

The recession and the end of the election season appear to have meant seriously lean times for bloggers on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Though a few political groups, like SEIU, are still buying BlogAds — the most popular online ad seller for blogs — there are also a lot of empty ad strips on the left and the right.

Yesterday's story had some effect — Americans United for Change promised to throw some ads the blogs' way — but the whole situation is a mark that even rich, successful elements of the new media that are widely viewed as models still aren't making it financially.

This issue isn't coming up because times are lean. Joe and I have been privately complaining about this state of affairs for years. Long before we were blogging. The left does not support its own. We don't nurture genius. We don't nurture success. We don't nurture the possible. We don't look for those shining gems out there, the unknown activists who are kicking ass far out of proportion to who they are, and find ways to keep those activists afloat, to help them grow ten and a hundred times larger and more effective. We don't think long-term. We usually don't think beyond the current day.

It's not just the blogs. Joe and I have tried for years to get a variety of gay rights proposals funded. To nought. I happen to have kind of a kick-ass record on the whole gay rights thing. If I couldn't get a gay rights project funded, then something is seriously wrong. But it's not just the gays. It's across the entire left. We don't necessarily eat our own, but we don't suckle them either. And when we finally - finally - develop our own echo chamber, our own left-wing noise machine, our own answer to Rush Limbaugh and Talk Radio and FOX News and the religious right, what do we do?

Milk it for all its worth, while doing nothing to sustain it.

This has nothing to do with the economy being lean. And everything to do with something I've been harping on since the early 90s. The left does not invest in the future. And it doesn't respect success, or innovation. It may even fear it. Until that changes, we will continue to harp on this issue, during times of famine and feast.

UPDATE: Perhaps the, oddly, bitchiest response to our comments yesterday came from Gawker, which is generally a rather liberal site. Here's what Gawker had to say:

The leading lights of the liberal blogosphere are up in arms because the lefty organizations whose agendas they promote—Americans United for Change, the Democratic campaign committees, etc.—aren't coughing up ad dollars. So they're threatening them!

The implicit threat—maybe we'll stop promoting your stuff!—is nothing short of a shakedown. Why does Americans United for Change make big media buys? To reach swing voters and independents on as large a scale as is economically feasible in order to bring political pressure to bear in support of their goals...

Unless Hamsher, Moulitsas, et. al. start attracting enormous numbers of readers who aren't already politically engaged and don't already agree with Americans United for Exchange, then the group would be wasting its money on their sites. The point is to persuade and rally the actual country, not the liberal echo chamber. The only reason for the left-wing establishment to divert more ad dollars to the blogs than it already is would be to keep them happy, well-fed, and useful. We wonder if the ploy will work. Oh wait, it did!

Markos gets far more traffic than Gawker gets, so the argument Gawker is making, that liberal blogs don't get enough traffic, is simply flawed. And second, if we haven't proven our value, then why do these very same groups email us, on practically a daily basis, asking us to pimp their stuff on our insignificant blogs? Read More......

Norm Coleman cannot win. Now, he's just helping Republican Senate leaders screw over Minnesota

Today's New York Times has an article on Minnesota's one Senator: Amy Klobuchar. For the past six months, she's been doing the work of two. With the economic crisis, it's not easy carrying the whole load, although Klobuchar and her staff have risen to the occasion:

In a way, the time for a state to have a lone senator could not be worse, political experts said.

Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, a former senator from Minnesota, said the nation’s economic woes and the growing needs of constituents increased the already overwhelming demands facing a senator. “Doing that all by yourself?” Mr. Mondale said. “It’s a big burden, really daunting.”

A political scientist at the University of Minnesota, Lawrence R. Jacobs, said that given the deluge of requests for help from those losing jobs, homes, everything, Ms. Klobuchar was “a little like the Dutch boy trying to plug the dike.”

The situation is clearly hurting the people of Minnesota. But, that shouldn't be the case. Norm Coleman lost.

Norm's own lawsuit to get more votes counted backfired on him. After the additional votes were counted, he's down by an even wider margin:

The ballots counted Tuesday were ones that the three judges had concluded were wrongly rejected. State Elections Director Gary Poser went through them one by one in court, calling 198 votes for DFLer Franken, 111 for Republican Coleman and 42 for the Independence Party's Dean Barkley or others.

The tally increased Franken's narrow lead from 225 votes to 312, out of 2.9 million votes cast in the November election.

In this race, a lead of 312 votes is a landslide.

It's time long past time for Norm to give it up. But, he won't because Norm doesn't care about Minnesotans. Coleman's loyalties lie with the leaders of the Republican Senate back in D.C. :

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a statement that the court failed to address "the main issue," that the judges had disenfranchised more than 4,000 Minnesotans by failing to count their ballots. "That's why it's so critical for this process to move forward before the Minnesota Supreme Court and why Senate Republicans fully support Senator Coleman's efforts," he said.

That's just BS. The "main issue" is that Coleman can't win, but the Republicans really, really don't want the Democrats to have their 59th vote in the Senate. The Republican Senators are disenfranchising the people of Minnesota.

Franken's lawyer summed up the situation:

"The problem former Senator Coleman has is he lost fair and square," Elias said. "No amount of lawyering or sophisticated legal arguments is going to change that."

But GOP money is going to keep dragging this out. That has to end. And, the Senate Democrats need to get much more aggressive about it. Read More......

Teabaggers Unite

You might have heard that conservatives are holding teabag parties across the country, and calling on their supporters to send teabags to Washington, to protest Obama's stimulus spending. Well, as Andy Cobb points out in this not-safe-for-work PG-17 video, the conservatives may have bitten off more than they can chew with their new, unfortunate, metaphor.

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A question to our readers (okay, several questions)

One of the things that happens when you write a blog - well, when you write, period - is that you often don't get a sense of how happy your readers are with what you're doing. What do you like about what we do, what could we do better? Sure, we get emails from folks, and they give you some idea, but they're a self-selected group of readers, and the several hundred who write us are not necessarily representative of the 300,000 or so unique visitors who visit us every month.

So, I'd be interested in asking you folks a few questions. And if the spirit moves you, weigh in with your answers in the comments. It's very easy, just click the button that says "comments" at the bottom of the post, and it should take you to a page where you'll find a comment box right below the post. Just enter your comments and publish (you don't need to register, though you may need to enter some kind of pseudonym). I'm simply curious what works, what doesn't, and what we can do to make the site even more useful and interesting.

So here are a few questions:

1. What do you like about AMERICAblog, what keeps you visiting?

2. What don't you like about AMERICAblog?

3. Are our posts too short, too long, or just right? Should we have a mix of posts, short and long - more long posts, more short posts? Or what?

4. Frequency of posting. Do we post too often, or not often enough? This is an interesting question, because I honestly don't know if you guys want more posts an hour or less. Do you want more posts in the morning and fewer in the afternoon and evening? Or do you want them evenly spread out throughout the day? How often would you like to see a new post on the blog?

5. What topics should we be covering? Is our coverage just right? Would you like to see more of something, less of something? In that vein, I've noticed something interesting. Sometimes Joe and I will write about things that have nothing to do with politics, like Joe writing about his dog or me writing about the terrible moving company I had, and the post will get 200 comments. Often Joe and I think we're going "off topic" by writing personal things on the blog, but then suddenly it's a topic you guys are totally into. Why do those off-topic topics work, and which ones work? Is it that you guys need a break occasionally from the negative political stories, or what? And, are our stories too negative?

6. How many posts should have keep on the home page, before archiving? We usually keep the last 20 posts on the home page, then they go into the archives. I figure that some people only visit the site every few days, so having the last 20 posts helps. But maybe people don't read beyond the first few posts, so we're slowing down the page loading time by having all those extra posts on the home page. How many posts do you think we should keep on the home page at any one time?

7. What do you think of the design (well, the new redesign)? Are there elements of the design you like, don't like? For example, a lot of people felt the font was too small, so I made it bigger and more legible (by picking a different font). People also didn't like that the white background behind the text in the main column loaded last - so we fixed that too. Do you have other suggestions?

8. The widgets. These are the nifty tools that Blogger (aka Google) let's us put on the site, in addition to the main blog posts (such as the news and blog updates, the RSS feeds, the site archives, and the new map widget that shows you the location on a map of the most recent 100 visitors). What do you think of them? The news updates and blog updates - do you read them? Do you like them? Are there enough of them, too few, too many? Are there sites we aren't including that we should include? Are there topics, issue areas, that we don't have that we should have?

9. Is there something you see on other blogs that you like, that we don't have or do? It could be a way of writing, a functionality, the frequency of posts, the design, anything. I'm just looking for something you've seen elsewhere that you like, that we might want to emulate.

There are lots of additional possible questions, and don't feel beholden to just these, or these at all. Any feedback is appreciated, and welcome. Thanks, JOHN Read More......

Catholic priests don't want Obama to speak at Notre Dome. No word on whether they're as concerned about pedophiles and Nazi sympathizers among them.

In honor of Joe, and his never-ending ire about his own faith's leadership, here's a little ditty about a bunch of Catholic priests at Holy Cross who are very upset that President Obama is speaking at Notre Dame. This is part of the Catholic Church's ongoing effort to become a holy-owned subsidiary of the Republican party. Well, that is when they're not enabling pedophiles and coddling Nazi-sympathizers. Perhaps it's time someone asked those priests what their position is on the Holocaust, and whether they'd let a Holocaust denier speak. (It'd be also great to get their position on pedophilia.) Until we hear what we should be hearing on those topics, these priests are nothing more than Republicans in drag. Read More......

Thursday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

I've been in Sedona, Arizona for a couple days. (No invitation to the McCain ranch, yet anyway.) Beautiful country. It's red. All red. The rocks are red. My shoes and socks are now red. Also, saw the Grand Canyon yesterday. Wow. It truly is awesome. There were lots of signs for elk crossing -- and I did see two.

Arizona is three hours behind my usual time zone and I still haven't quite adjusted.

Last night, South Park repeated the classic Easter Bunny episode featuring the vile, racist homophobe, Bill Donohue. It's a holiday classic. In the spirit of the holiday, I won't include the segment where Donohue is sliced in half (for which he called the South Park creators "whores and cowards"), but this clip captures the flavor:


Trying to catch up on the news and what happened while I've been away. Having fun, but I really miss Petey.

What is the news? Read More......

Brace yourself for this news, but paying lobbyists pays off

Now why am I first thinking of Lawrence Summers and Phil Gramm? Anyway, this research confirms what many already believed. The system as it stands today remains much too susceptible to the influence deep pockets and the highest bidder. This report is not the most comforting news for democracy. Business can't afford not to have lobbyists but democracy can't afford to have them in this form. There's nothing inherently wrong with lobbyists though lobbyists on steroids in our current system which requires massive amounts of cash to win elections is the problem.

The study zeros in on 93 firms that spent as much as $282.7 million lobbying on the issue during that period, and ultimately saved a total of $62.5 billion through the tax change. Researchers used publicly available lobbying disclosures filed with Congress and financial statements submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission to compare the amount each company saved with its lobbying expenditures.

"It calls into question what Congress did in 2004," said Stephen Mazza, who conducted the study with Raquel Alexander and Susan Scholz. "It clearly is a very lucrative field for lobbyists. Congress wanted to create jobs, and what they probably did was create jobs for the lobbyists."

The results reflect one reason that lobbying — always a major industry in Washington — has experienced explosive growth in recent years. Companies and interest groups spent $3.42 billion lobbying Congress and the federal government in 2008, the last year for which such figures are available, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That's a 14 percent jump from the previous year.

If Obama wants to cut into this system, as he says he does, he knows who has to go first. Why he even hired Summers in the first place is annoying. Read More......

CNBC: How to play the housing rebound

There's a housing rebound? Look, everyone wants to believe that this has turned a corner and that housing as well as the economy is improving. It's possible, though highly unlikely. After leading the cheerleaders march into the economic abyss one would hope that CNBC might exercise some restraint this time. They've repeatedly called false starts "recoveries" and encouraged people to buy, buy, buy or whatever Wall Street is requesting. This time it's no different than before and just because there are a few positive signs it's risky to encourage people to buy into this market.

As many good signs as we are seeing, it's easy enough to see as many negative signs. Many firmly believe that the real estate market could drop considerably more before a bottom is found. Even more believe that once the bottom is found and tested (and I don't think whatever this is has been tested much), the recovery will be slow with minimal gains for quite some time. There will not be a fast-growing bubble in US real estate any time soon, but don't tell that to CNBC who are as eager as ever to create more problems or Americans while churning out whatever trash Wall Street wants. Read More......

Witness: Ian Tomlinson obeyed police orders, walking home

It appears as though just as the G-20 protesters weren't the only ones with crazed and violent members. The story of Ian Tomlinson is highly disturbing because he was a newspaper seller who only wanted to go home after work. The Guardian has a map and time line of his path courtesy of the CCTV cameras in the area along with footage of his final minutes before Metropolitan police struck him and sent him to the ground. Tomlinson died of a massive heart attack minutes later.

What a way to treat someone who went to work and was trying to mind his own business.

Alan Edwards, 34, from Derbyshire said he rushed to Mr Tomlinson's aid because he was worried the officers would continue the violent attack. "I didn't know what they were going to do to him," he said. "I couldn't just leave him there."

Edwards said he had been trapped inside police cordons around Cornhill, near the Bank of England, for about six hours when he first saw Mr Tomlinson. "I was stood on the corner, and basically they'd pushed [Tomlinson] around. He was saying: 'I want to go home. I live down there. I'm trying to get home.'" Mr Tomlinson was obeying police orders to move up the street, Edwards said.

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This video just made me terribly happy before bedtime

This is in the central station of Antwerpen, Belgium.

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