Video: Puppies love their toilet paper

I still come home and occasionally find the toilet paper unfurled. I'm not exactly sure what the dog does with it, or why it's only sometimes. I love the woman's laugh in this video, puts a smile on my face.

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Lloyds bank announces $5.5 billion loss, massive job cuts

The British taxpayers must be happy about their 43% ownership of the bank. The bank only cut bonuses 30% yet their earnings have crashed. The bank's outlook for 2012 is not very good, which is why they're chopping another 15,000 jobs in addition to the 30,000 already cut. Keep in mind that this ugliness happened even with quantitative easing, so it could have been even worse. How can they justify the nearly $600 million in bonuses with a record like this? The Guardian:

Lloyds Banking Group has painted a subdued outlook for the UK economy as the bailed-out bank revealed it had plunged to a £3.5bn loss in 2011 and would pay out £375m in bonuses. The chief executive, António Horta-Osório, reiterated the prolonged low interest rate environment would mean some key targets would not be met on time, but the bank would benefit from a faster than expected reduction in impairment charges during 2012. At 35.6p the shares were among the biggest fallers in the FTSE 100, down 2.4%. The drop has left the taxpayer with a £10bn loss on the 41% stake in the bank amid concerns about its forecasts this year for profitability, measured by so-called net interest margin.

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GOP prez candidate plans would increase debt

Surprised? Neither am I. The GOP candidates have nothing constructive to offer beyond the same old tax cut plans that they've been preaching about for decades. Where are the new jobs that they claim happen with tax cuts? It's not like this idea is new, so we have plenty of recent history to examine and none of it points to jobs growth. Romney himself has been living off of his investments for a long time and he's not starting any new business other than the business of putting himself in the White House. What's outrageous about the GOP plans is that they have no issue with dumping tax dollars into the military for fighting more wars. Ron Paul at least wants to end the foreign military adventures but he also wants those troops to be active on the US border so it's not obvious how the military budget would improve much.

Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have presented policies that would all push debt beyond current projections, largely because their proposed tax cuts would outweigh the benefits of slashing budgets on the spending side of the ledger. Only Ron Paul's proposals begin to dramatically curve debt downward, according to a report Thursday from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The sober analysis shows how difficult it will be for any new inhabitant in the White House to shift the nation's debt trajectory, and the need for long-term and bipartisan efforts to gain revenues and curb spending -- particularly at a time of rising Medicare costs for the aging population, the budget watchdog group said. "I don't think cutting revenues further is the responsible thing to do – and they all do it," said Alice Rivlin, the founding director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and now a director of the budget watchdog group that released Thursday's report.

And remind me again who racked up the debt on foreign wars and tax cuts for the rich that the US couldn't afford? Read the rest of this post...

Video: More freaky Russian cats

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The freedom to impose religion on others

I have to disagree with the people who claim that the GOP is somehow winning from their current jihad against contraception. Even if the GOP was trying to 'move the Overton window' as Gaius suggests, the GOP is still left discussing a social issue that most people imagine was settled some time in the 1930s. The main reason that the Griswold decision came so late (1965) was that the law was not being enforced.

Rank stupidity can look a lot like ingenuity if clever people spend a lot of time trying to find the hidden strategy and refuse to accept stupidity as the explanation. According to the Overton window theory the GOP can now spend their time talking about other restrictions on contraception without appearing to be complete reactionary fools. Well bring it on, it is still an issue where their position is supported by less than 10% of the population.

What the GOP is really attempting is a return to the pilgrim fathers new of religious freedom: the right to impose their view of religion on others.

My church has a particular view on this. We have four martyrs buried here in in Boston, executed by the state for their belief that an omnipotent God has no need of priests to act as intermediaries in his communications. My biblical knowledge may be incomplete but I cannot recall one passage where God says 'I need to talk to you, hang on, I'll just get a priest'.

October 27th is International Religious Freedom Day in memory of Marmaduke Stephenson who was executed for refusing the religion imposed on him by the colony. Charles II agreed with the martyrs and in 1661 sent a missive forbidding the execution of Quakers for their faith. The colony was later put under a royal governor and administered under English law.

The idea that freedom of religion is freedom from religion and in particular freedom from the religion imposed by priests or the state is older than the republic.

The GOP has got itself into a position where their base is shrunk to a narrow clique of theocrats. They have to expand the Overton window so they can pander to that base during the primary season without appearing to be too extreme. But that still leaves them pandering on an issue that will be poisonous to their election prospects in November.

Raising birth control has proved to be a win-win-win proposition for Obama. In the short term it has allowed Santorum to surge and deny Romney a quick victory. In the medium term it has reminded women voters that they probably don't want to see a Mormon bishop as President. In the longer term it has reminded independent voters that they really don't want a GOP theocracy. Read the rest of this post...

GOP Gov. Christie: I have the same position on gay marriage as Pres. Obama

Kind of hard to argue with the guy. Joe has been arguing for a while now that the Republicans are increasingly hiding for cover on this issue behind President Obama, and it's going to cause increasing problems for the President. The "I'm evolving" line starts getting old when years pass and your position hasn't changed (other than to de-evolve from where you were in the 1990s, i.e., in favor of marriage equality).  Joe looks at the election dynamics:

The Republicans are comparing themselves to Obama for a reason. Imagine what will happen during a debate this fall when the GOP candidate says that he has the same position on marriage as Obama. That's not going to be very inspiring. And, that's probably their intent. Let's be realistic, marriage is not going to be the decisive issue for most voters. The people who are going to vote against Obama because of gay issues already think he supports marriage. He's already lost them -- and probably never had them.

But, the President can gain enthusiasm from one of the key voting groups that campaign manager Jim Messina keeps saying he's targeting: young people. Yesterday, PPP released a poll from Washington State that found "Young voters support gay marriage 63/32." Last May, the Washington Post reported that is poll in swing state of Virginia "shows that nearly three-quarters of those ages 18 to 29 say gays should be able to legally wed." In DC, the conventional wisdom is that supporting marriage will hurt a candidate. That's not true anymore, but it takes DC a long time to catch up with reality.

As an aside, Chris Christie is a rhetorical bully. I'm really surprised.  I kept hearing about how he's a different kind of Republican, and the preferred presidential candidate.  He looks and acts like he popped out of an episode of Jersey Shore (very tough guy/regular guy NY, with more than a bit of dumb thrown in). The man is also going to have to reel in his inner Sean Hannity if he seriously wants to run for national office. You can't just run over people who are trying to ask you a simple question, and hope the clock runs out before anyone catches on. It's very Newt Gingrich (though dumbed down a couple dozen IQ points), and it doesn't go over well. Read the rest of this post...

Amazon stops sale of whale meat

Yes, they were selling whale meat products in Japan where it's allowed, but Amazon should have known this would be a PR disaster. At least they came around, eventually.

Amazon was accused of hypocrisy by the UK-based environmental investigation agency (EIA) after investigators found 147 whale products for sale on the site, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Seattle-based company. The products contravened the firm's policy of refusing to advertise unlicensed or illegal wildlife products, including endangered species. Some of the items came from whale species listed as endangered, according to Amazon.com's Unpalatable Profits, a report by the EIA and the Humane Society International.

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Assassination is state terrorism

CNN reports that Iran is suspected of being behind a recent plot to bomb the Israeli embassy in Bangkok:

The video, shot by a bystander, is horrific. A man lies on a Bangkok street, his legs severed below the knee. He is Saeid Moradi, a 28-year old Iranian, injured on February 14 as he tried to throw a device at police.

Minutes earlier, an explosion had rocked the house rented by Moradi and two other Iranians in the Sukhumvit Road area of the Thai capital. (Watch one of the suspects take Thai police to the scene of the explosion)

The circumstantial evidence pointing to Iran is strong, as strong as the circumstantial evidence linking Israel to an earlier assassination in Dubai.

This type of behavior should be condemned for what it is: State acts of terrorism. It is terrorism when Iran commits these atrocities and it is terrorism when Israel does.

Terrorism was a favorite tactic of various communist countries during the 1970s. It was much cheaper than conventional warfare and the difficulty of attribution gave the activities plausible deniability. Reagan funded right wing death squads in Latin America and East Germany funded the Red Army Faction (aka the Baader-Meinhof gang).

The main reason terrorism came to a halt was the collapse of the Soviet system and the end of the cold war. But even during the 1970s it was clear that it was a game both (or rather all) sides could play.

The CIA and KGB stopped targeting each other's operatives for assassination sometime back in the 1950s when it became clear that both sides were prepared to respond in kind. Hopefully the Israeli and Iranian groups will work this out at some point.

Unless of course it turns out that these turn out to be false flag operations.

In August 1980, the train station in Bologna was bombed, killing 85 people. At first the attack was attributed to leftist splinter groups but the investigation soon led to a neo-fascist group with connections to the Italian secret service. The generally accepted theory today is that this was in fact a false flag operation intended to provide the pretext for a fascist takeover, possibly as part of a series of attacks. Read the rest of this post...

Marco Rubio’s faith journey from Catholic to Mormon to Catholic to Baptist to Catholic to Baptist to Catholic

I'm not so sure a lot of Christians are going to be so accepting of Marco Rubio's "faith journey."  It's the new phrase Rubio is using to explain why his life has left a trail of flitting back and forth between multiple religions. First he was Catholic, then Mormon, then Catholic, then Southern Baptist and Catholic, then Catholic, then Baptist, then Catholic again. Oh and he still refuses to totally cut off his ties to the Mormons, who likely still list him as a member as a result.

Let me walk you through that again:

Catholic
Mormon
Catholic
Southern Baptist & Catholic
Catholic
Baptist
Catholic
And still technically Mormon.

I'm a Christian, this is flighty.

And don't forget that a lot of Baptists don't even consider Catholics Christians. Rick Perry's favorite Baptist preacher Robert Jeffress comes to mind. He thinks Satan is behind the Catholic church's existence. Then there was John McCain's buddy, Pastor John Hagee, who famously referred to the Catholic church as "the great whore." You have to wonder how Rubio managed to flit back and forth between these two religions.

Also note the part about how he gave $50,000 to the local Baptist church when he didn't have that much money - some will call it a courageous show of faith.  Yeah, a $50,000 show of faith to a church he then left, then came back to, then left again.

From the Miami Herald:

The family left the Mormon church by the time Rubio was 12, according to Rubio’s office, and he received First Communion in the Catholic Church a year later. After returning to Miami, Rubio was confirmed, and he was married in the church.

But as he got older, Rubio started to attend Christ Fellowship in Miami, a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. Though he had substantial debt, due to mortgages and student loans, Rubio gave about $50,000 to the church over a period of years last decade. He also gave to the Catholic Church, his office said.

In the 2000 Florida House Clerk’s Manual, Rubio described himself as Catholic. Two years later he listed himself as Baptist, then two years after that, he identified himself as Catholic.

“Around 2005 Marco began to return to his Catholic roots,” according to a time line provided by the senator’s office, which added, “He enjoys the sermons and the excellent children’s ministry at Christ Fellowship, and still attends often.”

Marco Rubio: Emphatically flighty. Read the rest of this post...

Google hires former GOP Rep. Susan Molinari to run its DC office

Eew.  I guess they got over that "Don't be evil" thing.

A sign that the GOP House has gotten under Google's skin?  And a sign that Google is worried about this coming November?  I'm sure someone told them that Democrats won't care if Molinari runs the office, but Republicans would really care if a Dem got the job.

Yeah, talk to Susan G. Komen for the Cure about what happens you hire Republican lobbyists.  I sure hope Google keeps an eye on Molinari.  She was a pit bull in the 90s.  Gingrich with a happy face.  If that's the direction Google is heading, God help them, and us.

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A stimulus the GOP can finally support: Let’s build a Death Star

Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum has determined that building a Star Wars Death Star would be a steal at only $5bn a year per country per planet, assuming there are 10,000 planets in the empire (it gets a little tricky). That's the equivalent of $852 quadrillion, or 13,000 times the world's GDP.  It's a fun analysis.

Kevin also links to a fun Death Star PR page, written as though it's a pitch from a defense contractor in favor of the Death Star, and why it's good for America:

TOTALLY WORTH IT.

Here’s why:

It pays for itself.
“But that astronomically large figure doesn’t even factor in energy and labour costs, to name but a few. How could something that expensive possibly pay for itself?” we hear you ask. EASILY, that’s how, imaginary question-asker. Once you’ve built yourself a Death Star, you travel around the galaxy and point your $852 quadrillion megalaser at other people’s planets. You’ll be surprised how quickly and COMPLETELY OF THEIR OWN FREE WILL they offer to help cover your costs.

It’s cool.
Is there a cooler, more bad ass, more famous super weapon in the entire universe? No. Can you really put a price on cool? Yes, probably. But for the purposes of our argument? NO. Absolutely not. Unless the price you’re talking about is $852 quadrillion dollars. Plus, you get to say, “We blow up planets now. Blowing up planets is cool.”

Everybody else is doing it.
As the caring utterly merciless totalitarian space dictatorship that we are, it would be quite remiss of us if we didn’t give you Earthlings some perspective: it’s all giant planet-destroying doomsday weapons out here in space. It’s Science Fact that literally every alien race ever has one and THEY WANT TO KILL YOU WITH IT. Daleks? Reality bomb. Romulans? Black hole-generating mining vessel. Vogons? Constructor Fleet. Why? Who knows? Maybe it’s for Earth’s natural resources. Or MAYBE it’s to prevent Nickelback from making more albums. Okay, it’s almost definitely the Nickelback thing.

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Unions return to Democratic fold for 2012 election (plus thoughts on the future of Labor)

First the news, then my very mixed feelings.

From the LA Times (my emphasis):

Last May, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka stood a few blocks from the White House and issued a stern warning: Union members could not be counted on as the Democrats' foot soldiers anymore.

"If leaders aren't blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families' interests, then working people will not support them," he said in a speech at the National Press Club.

Flash forward to today: Labor appears squarely back in the Democrats' corner for the 2012 election — pushed there in large part by Republican attacks on collective bargaining rights for public employees.

This despite the following:

Per Channel 14 News in Charlotte NC (h/t commenter ezpz; my emphasis):

Thirteen unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO voted to sit out [the 2012 Democratic Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina] because the members objected to selecting a right-to-work state as a host.

Note that the battle is not between the "unions" and the Democratic party — it's between 13 individual unions and the AFL-CIO. As we noted here, the AFL-CIO is the original sinner in endorsing (in effect) Ronald Reagan's history-making union-busting PATCO strike in 1981.

I haven't written about the 2012 election lately; I'm planning a series of posts staking out the viable positions, some of which conflict. I want to help avoid the 2008 PUMA Wars the left savaged itself with last time.

(This year's version will be called the Obot Wars, by the way, and they've already started. We'll have to be careful not to kill our coalition-hopes with them — as surprising as it is for us ex-grad school types to believe, not everyone who disagrees with us is evil. A lot depends on the reasoning. Word to the wise.)

That said, as a 2012 strategy, there's a logic to the unions taking this stand.

On the seriously other hand, though, if unions aren't thinking long-term about (not) supporting the Democratic party — in order to wrest control of it from the labor-hating NeoLibs who run it (yes, Bill Clinton, I'm looking right at you) — then unions are looking at the end of unionism in the U.S.

It's just that simple. Obama made the Employee Free Choice Act a high-priority promise in his 2008 campaign, then told Rahm Emanuel to tell unions to wait until health care "reform" was done. By then it was too late. Here's Jane Hamsher, who covered it closely at the time:

The fate of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) over the course of the past year and a half [2008–2010] has been largely determined by the White House. Rahm Emanuel would not let it come up for a vote until after health care was passed, and by that time the Democrats no longer had 60 votes in the Senate....

Richard Trumka: The President/and Emanuel have both said they dont intend to bring Employee Free Choice Act up until Health Insurance Reform is done. Which gives us an additional reason to do Health Insurance Reform now!

Bottom line — Obama got his hamburger today, thanks to Trumka, but it's never going to be Tuesday at Democratic party headquarters. Unions and progressives are playing the same loser game; they ask and wait. And wait.

That's not a 2012 problem, it's a long-term survival problem. If unions and progressives don't get off their Dem-serving kiesters and force concessions from the NeoLibs (yes, Mr. Obama, I'm looking straight at you), the only union members will be found in museums — next to your civil rights.

I said I'd be writing about the election shortly. I'll also be writing about what an effective Progressive Coalition looks like.

Effective — you know, one that plays to win. (Unions used to do that I hear, back in the day.)

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How Larry Summers sold President Obama too small a stimulus

From Noam Scheiber at the New Republic:

What happened? When Romer showed Summers her $1.7-to-$1.8 trillion figure late the week before the memo was due, he dismissed it as impractical. So Romer spent the next day or two coming up with a reasonable compromise: $1.2 trillion. In a revised document that she sent Summers over the weekend, she included the $1.2 trillion figure, along with two more limited options: about $600 billion and about $850 billion.

The final version of the memo had framed the debate around two basic choices—roughly $600 billion and roughly $850 billion—and these were the focus of the conversation.“

Neither the memo nor the meeting would have given Obama reason to suspect this amount was arguably $1 trillion too small.

In the end, the significance of the fateful document has as much to do with what wasn’t in it as what was. Though Obama was never going to propose a $1.8 trillion stimulus, and Congress certainly wasn’t going to pass one, the president may well have felt a greater sense of urgency had he better understood how far he was from the ideal.

One quibble. Scheiber has no idea whether or not Congress would have passed a larger stimulus because no one tried. Remember, this was back in the days when the administration tended to cave first and ask questions later. Never in a million years did it occur to them that they held the upper hand coming off a landslide election, an opposition party in ruins, and a public fearful for their economic lives. Had the President told the American people what was needed and why, and run a scorched earth policy against any Republican who challenged him, rather than trying to be the GOP's bff, we may have gotten the stimulus we needed.

Then there was the need to defend the stimulus after it passed. I know the administration thinks they did defend it. But I would argue, and have, that at that point in the game the President wasn't truly willing to fight for much of anything wholeheartedly (because it would require being "mean"), and his advisers either didn't understand political PR, or the President was so holding them back, that whatever they did do wasn't good enough. Either way, it wasn't inevitable that they'd lose the debate.

They've gotten better at the game now. But don't confuse the inability to fight with an inability to win. Read the rest of this post...

Neutrinos not faster than light after all

It is not yet a fully confirmed result, but the faster than light neutrino anomaly appears to have been explained. The culprit? A loose cable. [Science Insider]:

Physicists had detected neutrinos travelling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory near L'Aquila that appeared to make the trip in about 60 nanoseconds less than light speed. Many other physicists suspected that the result was due to some kind of error, given that it seems at odds with Einstein's special theory of relativity, which says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That theory has been vindicated by many experiments over the decades.

According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis

It was always more likely than not that the result would be due to some sort of experimental error. Other measurements showed neutrinos moving at sub-light speeds. Back in the day such measurements were the basis of experiments to determine if neutrinos have mass.

Experimental physics is hard, often in ways that nobody could expect. One small detail can compromise an experiment people have spent a decade working on. Read the rest of this post...