Video: Everything counts (done by a dad and kids)

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Brazil to charge Chevron and Transocean in oil spill

Whether they will pay is another thing. We watched Big Oil drag out financial responsibility for the Exxon Valdez disaster and are currently watching Chevron fight responsibility for their convicted crimes in Ecuador. This is an industry that is convinced it's above the law but as long as you have politicians who make excuses for them and apologize, this is what happens.

A Brazilian prosecutor plans to file criminal charges against Chevron Corp and some of its local managers within weeks, adding the threat of prison sentences to an $11 billion civil lawsuit as punishment for a November offshore oil spill. The filing in federal court in Campos, Brazil, will likely include a request for criminal indictment of George Buck, chief executive of Chevron's Brazil unit, as well as other staff, three Brazilian government officials involved in the case told Reuters. Transocean Ltd, whose rig was used in the operation, and some of its employees in Brazil are also expected to be charged, according to the officials, who requested anonymity because the case has not been presented to a judge. It is up to a judge to determine whether to accept the charges and proceed with indictments.

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Diana Krall: "Fly Me To The Moon"

Shamelessly "borrowed" from Paul Krugman (but I promised to return it when you folks are done). In honor, of course, of Newt "the Moonbase" Gingrich.

This is a very good song and an excellent version. Modern, but true to its jazz-lounge roots. Perfect for singers who, like Ms. Krall, have an ear for which off-beats to come in on.

Note those big ten-finger chords at the start of her solo. Reminds me of Brubeck in his prime (Dave's solo starts at 2:42).

Enjoy!



In other words, please be true. One can only hope.

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Ron Paul’s racism is the racism of the GOP

It was always obvious that Ron Paul knew the content of the newsletters that went out in his name. Like the fact that Romney pays less than 15% tax and the fact George W. Bush and his cabinet were lying about WMD in Iraq, it was one of those obvious facts that the establishment media refused to discuss while the Republican involved protested their innocence.

But don't expect the confirmation of the obvious fact that Ron Paul wrote and approved the racist bile printed under his name to hurt him in the nomination race, the reason his opponents haven't mentioned the issue is that they know their party too well: The modern GOP is built on racism. Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' was courting the votes of white supremacists upset by the end of segregation.

Like the Iraqi WMD fable, Paul's alibi is even more damning than what he is trying to cover up [Post]:

Mark Elam, a longtime Paul associate whose company printed the newsletters, said Paul “was a busy man” at the time. “He was in demand as a speaker; he was traveling around the country,’’ Elam said in an interview coordinated by Paul’s campaign. “I just do not believe he was either writing or regularly editing this stuff.’’

So what Paul admits to is that he was lying to the people who had paid their money for a newsletter that would give them the benefit of his inside Washington knowledge. But now he claims to have defrauded them: not only wasn't he writing it, he wasn't even bothering to read it either.

The story the secretary tells is much more believable: Like every politician I have ever known, Ron Paul was deeply involved in every aspect of the communications that went out under his name. He didn't engage in casual racism; the racism was calculated to connect with his readers.

We are now down to the final four and the remaining candidates are a racist gold-bug conspiracy monger, an adulterer, a sex-freak and a 0.01%-er who pays 14% tax and mistreated his dog. In their different ways they each represent a different aspect of the GOP base. What the media has all wrong is that these are not 'weaknesses', they are the real core values of the GOP. The median GOP voter is a white male chicken hawk who pays next to nothing in taxes, hates black people, latinos and 'immigrants' and professes a deep belief in the importance of family values despite the fact he is cheating on both his wife and his mistress.

Like all the other commentators, we have it all wrong, what the GOP is looking for is not 'none of the above', it is all of the above. Read the rest of this post...

Can a Tweet really violate the DMCA? Twitter’s international censorship policy

I have to thank @MettaFilms via Twitter for pointing this out. This policy (and policy area) is so new to me that I don't know how to begin to think about it. But it obviously exists, so I thought I'd do what my Twitter friend did for me — point it out.

Twitter has a country-specific censorship policy. Who knew?

Here's the main part (my emphasis):

Country Withheld Content

Why Might Content Be Withheld?

If you have encountered a Tweet or an account that has been marked as withheld, you may be wondering what that means and why that may have happened. With hundreds of millions of Tweets posted every day around the world, our goal is to respect our users' expression, while also taking into consideration applicable local laws.

Many countries, including the United States, have laws that may apply to Tweets and/or Twitter account content. In our continuing effort to make our services available to users everywhere, if we receive a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity, it may be necessary to reactively withhold access to certain content in a particular country from time to time.

We have found that transparency is vital to freedom of expression. Upon receipt of requests to withhold content we will promptly notify affected users, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so, and clearly indicate to viewers when content has been withheld. We have also expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to include the publication of requests to withhold content in addition to the DMCA notifications that we already transmit.

The page goes on to talk about how they love transparency and free expression. Of course.

So I clicked on Chilling Effects and saw their current list of "take down this Tweet" complaints. At the time I looked, all were DMCA-related (there's a SOPA and PIPA element to this; DMCA is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act).

This is from a random complaint. A law firm writes:

The tweet references sheet music of copyrighted compositions written by our clients Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and alerts Twitter users of a pirate site distributing the sheet music without authorization.

So three points:

1. I have no idea how long this policy has been in effect. Weeks? Years? Most of my mayfly Twitter life? Dunno.

2. It's apparently "illegal" to distribute links; not pirated material, just links.

Is it really illegal? I seriously doubt it, since the link is just a pointer to something, not the thing itself. But the Feds are acting like it is. (More from an earlier pre–Super Bowl instance here.)

Regardless, Twitter is acting as though every lawyer with a suit and an IP complaint can put the kabosh on ... tweets. Guess there's money at stake, and even at Twitter, CEOs must have needs.

3. While this looks like it's just a greedy property-rights squeeze ("My client wants the last dime off the last table in the last room his song is being played") — there's an obvious political angle.

Do the Saudis censor tweets related to, oh, solar power? Anti-Wahhabi teachings? Comments unfriendly to a certain widespread kingly family?

And what are our take-down practices, here in the land of freedom? Twitter again:

Upon receipt of requests to withhold content we will promptly notify affected users, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so...

Wasn't it part of the (delightfully named) PATRIOT Act that when the Feds do stuff to you, you can't be told about it? I lose track of how much freedom I've lost; it changes day by day. Maybe that was in another country, where rule of law's not dead.

This implications of this policy clearly need more investigation, but the policy itself is not in dispute. So here's my due diligence to you — be aware.

By the way, if you'd like to risk your own Internet freedom and follow me on Twitter, I'd be glad to share the risk with you.

Yours in 140 [grayed out] characters,

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Ron Paul allegedly signed off on racist newsletters

Wash Post:

[P]eople close to Paul’s operations said he was deeply involved in the company that produced the newsletters, Ron Paul & Associates, and closely monitored its operations, signing off on articles and speaking to staff members virtually every day.

“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it,’’ said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul’s company and a supporter of the Texas congressman.

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3% GDP growth last quarter

That's very good.  But there still are concerns that the slowdown in Europe may bring us back down. Read the rest of this post...

Goldman Sachs and their partnership with Romney

While it's not surprising that a high earner like Romney has deep personal links to Goldman, it's still a concern and something to watch out for in the future. He has a lot to personally gain - blind trust or not - by making life easy for Goldman Sachs. NY Times:

DealBook perked up when it saw that many of the assets described in Mr. Romney’s returns were held in blind trusts managed by Goldman Sachs. As beneficiaries of a blind trust, Mr. Romney and his wife, Ann, would not have picked the individual stocks contained in their trusts’ portfolios. But by examining the trusts’ 2010 returns, a picture emerges of how the Romneys have benefited from – and been hurt by – Goldman’s investment decisions. In that year, two Romney trusts – the Ann and Mitt Romney 1995 Family Trust and the W. Mitt Romney Blind Trust – made nearly $2.8 million in combined capital gains from their Goldman investments, according to the trusts’ filings. Almost all of those gains, nearly $2.7 million, were long-term gains made by selling securities that the trusts had owned for more than a year.

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Newt's Contract "scam"—How Contract with America co-opted Perot voters into advancing the MoveCon project

Rick Perlstein has started writing columns again, this time for Rolling Stone, and the results have been excellent. His most recent piece is on Newt Gingrich and the Contract for America "scam." It makes fascinating reading.

He starts (my emphasis & paragraphing; we have narrower columns here at the casa):

Newton Leroy Gingrich is one wily mothertrucker. He's calling his presidential platform this year a "21st Century Contract With America."

It's a wingnutpalooza, naturally, endorsing such “timeless American values” as seeking to "establish English as the official language of government," and reducing the corporate tax rate to 12.5 percent and the capital gains rate to zero; and featuring such "Day One Executive Orders" as the cancellation of all "immigration-related lawsuits against states" and a renewal of "President Ronald Reagan's policy ... to stop taxpayer dollars from being used to fund or promote abortions in foreign country." . . .

The title, of course, refers to the Contract With America, which 367 Republican congressional candidates signed on the Capitol steps in September of 1994. When, two months later, the GOP took over Congress for the first time since 1952, making its architect, Newt Gingtrich, the Speaker of the House, all the world proclaimed that the electorate had just delivered a historic mandate for conservatism.

Well, not really. The Contract With America was a hustle from start to finish. It never really was about conservatism at all – practically the opposite.

Perlstein walks through the process that Gingrich used to focus-group, co-opt, and strip clean all the Perot-voter-issues he could use, in order to repackage himself and his posse as their next-gen faux-non-partisan saviors.

And it worked. Remember, Perot got 16% of the popular vote in 1992. That's a huge pile of voters; rube-ify them and they're yours. The article shows, in laser-like fashion, how he did just that.

The piece is a well-told tale, a nice cohesive story, so I'll add just one more morsel, the part where the rug got pulled (again, my reparagraphing):

An extraordinary but obscure political science monograph by Ronald Rapoport and Walter Stone, Three's a Crowd: The Dynamics of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence, reconstructed through interviews, surveys, and documents how Gingrich devised a document micro-tailored to turn at least 70 percent of Perot voters, however fleetingly, into Republicans in time for November of 1994.

"Republicans knew," Stone and Rapoport write, "that the traditional Republican congressional campaign" – which is to say, conservatism – "would be insufficient to get this support." This realization was the genesis of the Contract for America. ... The final product comprised 44 percent "reform" issues, almost identical to the 41 percent in Perot United We Stand checklist (they had made up only 14 percent of the 1992 Republican platform).

Then, Contract in hand, the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee got to work identifying Perot voters in districts where he had done well in 1992, blitzing them with direct mail, phone calls, and door-knocking.

Once Newt gained office, the carefully worded outsider "reformist" document was rebranded the Republican Contract With America ...

... as a straight-up electoral endorsement of conservatism – "the third leg of the conservative revolution in post-World War II America" that began with Barry Goldwater and the Heritage Foundation, which had been in on the planning all along.

I guess that makes us all rubes — the nation's been buying the Republican co-option of Perotian dissent ever since. (Most of us, in fact, have forgotten Perot — wasn't he from Argentina or something?)

A personal note — I called this the MoveCon (Movement Conservative) "project" in the headline, but it's really the Movement Conservative coup, isn't it.

It starts, in modern times, with people like journalist Edith Efron, Justice Lewis Powell, and Nixon Treasury secretary William Simon; plus documents like the Lewis Powell memo (same link; search on "Powell's contribution"). You may remember Powell. He was one of the Yes votes on Buckley v Valeo, which Midas-like turned money into speech.

There's a straight line from Nixon's rise and fall, through the mislabeled Reagan "revolution" (actually counter-revolution) to Bush II and his dream of permanent Republican rule.

The "Movement Conservative project" — power they never give up. Wonder if the national Republicans are watching the Republican War in the States ... or that cute little coup in Hungary.

Perlstein now writes regularly for Rolling Stone. Well worth checking out.

As for you, Newt — your place is secure.

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Romney falsely claimed he didn’t know he profited from mortgage crisis

Romney claimed against at last night's debate that he had no idea his "blind trust" had invested in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and made a tidy sum of money from the mortgage lenders as they were foreclosing on Americans across the country. In other words, Romney profited from the mortgage crisis. National Journal did the fact check, and found out Romney wasn't telling the truth.  I won't quote it because it's not very long, go read it for yourself.  Bottom line: Romney claimed the investments were in a blind trust (something he's criticized before) and they weren't. Read the rest of this post...

Unemployment in Spain hits 15 year high at 22.9%

And yes, it will get worse in Spain.

Spain’s unemployment rate rose to 22.9 percent, the highest in 15 years, increasing pressure on Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to change labor rules and deliver on his election pledge to create jobs in a shrinking economy. The unemployment rate rose in the fourth quarter from 21.5 percent in the previous three months, the National Statistics Institute in Madrid said today. That’s more than twice the euro- region average and exceeds the median estimate of 22.2 percent in a Bloomberg survey of seven analysts. Spain is home to a third of the euro region’s unemployed, according to the European Union’s statistics office, which estimates that half of young Spaniards are out of work. The People’s Party government, which won the Nov. 20 election after a campaign focused on jobs, has promised to overhaul labor and wage rules in the next two weeks to prompt companies to hire.

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Newt’s SuperPAC launches another video going after Romney titled "Blood Money"

Blood money!  Get the popcorn.

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