A lot of Marines are plenty ticked off about Scott Olson being shot in the head by the police

It's interesting to read the reactions from Marines to the news of a fellow Marine, Scott Olson, being critically injured by a police attack during the OccupyWallStreet protests in Oakland, CA.  Most are not pleased.  A few, clearly Republicans, feel the need to pile on. Read the rest of this post...

St Paul’s Cathedral and City of London file suit to block Occupy protesters

There's nothing quite like the church siding (again) on the wrong side of history. That the City of London (home of the UK banksters) is suing is predictable but the Church of England should be ashamed.

Democracy and protest is fine, as long as it is limited to boot licking for the elite.

Hundreds of people, including some protesters, were allowed into the cathedral to attend a service to mark its reopening at 12:30 BST, although the dome and galleries remained closed to the public.

Michael Welbank, who chaired the Corporation planning committee meeting, said: "Protest is an essential right in a democracy but camping on the highway is not and we believe we will have a strong highways case because an encampment on a busy thoroughfare clearly impacts the rights of others."

Earlier Prime Minister David Cameron said: "I don't quite see why the freedom to demonstrate has to include the freedom to pitch a tent almost anywhere you want to in London."

And what about the freedom to ripoff a country and then send the middle class the bill? How is that freedom? What a complete putz, as usual. Read the rest of this post...

Americans moving less during economic downturn

As someone who moved around a bit over the years, I always tend to view the US as a place where it's easier to move than many other countries in the world. In Europe we do have some movement, but it tends to be from smaller cities to the primary city in a specific country. Shifting from one country to the other is much less common for many reasons. Americans on the other hand are much more comfortable packing up and moving to another state or part of the country.

That trend is now on hold, though it may be temporary. When the economy does finally settle and people are more comfortable with their jobs, will they still move to the sunny states? The housing may be cheap but where will the jobs be?

Using this and other data from the I.R.S. that many researchers consider even more comprehensive, they found that migration into formerly booming states like Arizona, Florida and Nevada began to slow as soon as the recession hit and continued to shrink even into 2010, when many demographers expected it to level off. At the same time, Massachusetts, New York and California, which had been hemorrhaging people for years, and continued to do so in the three years before the financial collapse, suddenly saw the domestic migration loss shrink by as much as 90 percent.

Mobility always tends to slow in times of economic hardship, and there has been a gradual decline in American mobility for decades. But census numbers released earlier this year showed that domestic migration in 2010 had plummeted substantially since the recession began and reached the lowest level since the government began tracking it in the 1940s.

“When times get really hard it gets really hard for people to up and move,” said Kenneth M. Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute, who conducted the analysis. “People who might have left New York for North Carolina are staying put. But that is a very recent change, so that places that had been growing rapidly suddenly aren’t, and the outflow has really slowed down.”

Read the rest of this post...

Bank of America tries to backtrack on $5 debit card fee

Do you think they now realize how angry they made customers? It's possible that they pushed things too far, too many times and they've lost customers for good. One can only hope that's the case.

Bank of America Corp, after receiving heavy public criticism for a planned $5 per-month debit card fee, is likely to give customers more ways to avoid the fee, a person familiar with the bank's plans said Friday.

The second largest U.S. bank is likely to allow many customers to avoid the fee by taking measures such as maintaining minimum balances, having paychecks direct deposited, or using Bank of America credit cards, the person said.

Under earlier plans, customers might have needed balances totaling $20,000 across all their Bank of America accounts to avoid the fee.

Read the rest of this post...

Bugs for a snack, anyone?

I'm fairly open to eating a lot of things but admit this one is a tough hurdle for me. I watched others eat mopane worms in Zimbabwe but took a pass at trying it myself, even though some said "it tastes like coconut cream." I took their word on that one.

In Malawi, my dinners had what I thought was lots of cracked pepper until I realized a few meals later that my pepper was moving. It was not possible to brush off all of the ants (errr, black pepper) so my wife and I started to turn off our head lamps while eating and pretended that it really was pepper. But that was really my limit.

It may be the year of the bugs, but I still may take a pass this year.

“This year bug eating has become a trendy thing. The momentum is building,” says David George Gordon, who’s working on an update of his classic “Eat-a-bug Cookbook: 33 ways to cook grasshoppers, ants, water bugs, spiders, centipedes, and their kin.”

He cites an article published last year by two Dutch researchers who argued that insects are nutritious, low-fat and eco-smart, using far less water and food than warm-blooded livestock.

Insects are traditional fare in much of Africa, Asia and Latin America. In Thailand’s open-air markets, for example, you can pick out what you’d like to try and have it cooked up right there — fast food to go. Ancient Romans considered beetle larvae a treat.

Note from John: My two run-ins with bug gourmet were in the Brazilian Amazon and Oaxaca, Mexico. In the Amazon the locals tried to get me to eat squirming grubs the size of your thumb. I demurred.  I searched on YouTube and these look exactly like the squirming yellow villains. The local monkeys really liked the grubs, as did our tour guide.

 Then there was Oaxaca, where my new Mexican friend insisted I try the chapulines, aka grasshoppers, that were omnipresent at the local markets. They eat them fried, and covered in various spices (salt, garlic, or a local hot spice, among others). There was no way in hell I was going to eat a grasshopper, fried or otherwise. You can watch the preparation of fried Oaxacan chapulines here.  Let's just say that that was a word I wasn't going to quickly forget. Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: The confidence fairy is dead

Paul Krugman in the NYT:

The doctrine in question amounts to the assertion that, in the aftermath of a financial crisis, banks must be bailed out but the general public must pay the price. So a crisis brought on by deregulation becomes a reason to move even further to the right; a time of mass unemployment, instead of spurring public efforts to create jobs, becomes an era of austerity, in which government spending and social programs are slashed.

This doctrine was sold both with claims that there was no alternative — that both bailouts and spending cuts were necessary to satisfy financial markets — and with claims that fiscal austerity would actually create jobs. The idea was that spending cuts would make consumers and businesses more confident. And this confidence would supposedly stimulate private spending, more than offsetting the depressing effects of government cutbacks.

[T]he results are in, and the picture isn’t pretty. Greece has been pushed by its austerity measures into an ever-deepening slump — and that slump, not lack of effort on the part of the Greek government, was the reason a classified report to European leaders concluded last week that the existing program there was unworkable. Britain’s economy has stalled under the impact of austerity, and confidence from both businesses and consumers has slumped, not soared.

Read the rest of this post...

Iraq vet Scott Olsen’s condition improves

Fortunately Olsen is doing better following being shot in the head with a projectile by the Oakland police department. He's not out of the woods yet but the early signs are positive. Why is this not being investigated by the Department of Justice?

Olsen "responded with a very large smile'' to a visit from his parents, Highland General Hospital spokesman Warren Lyons said at a late-afternoon press conference on Thursday.

"He's able to understand what's going on. He's able to write and hear, but has a little difficulty with his speech,'' Lyons said. He said doctors had not operated on Olsen yet and were waiting to see if swelling in his brain eased.

Olsen's aunt, Kathy Pacconi, told Reuters in an email that her nephew was showing signs of improvement.

Read the rest of this post...

TSA fires baggage handler for joking about vibrator in woman’s luggage

I'm not sure there was any alternative.  As much as the TSA baggage inspector was "just joking," it's inappropriate to leave joke notes inside people's luggage, let alone sexual jokes. And the larger issue here is the concern for privacy we've all had going through TSA checkpoints.  The person who left the note stepped into a larger issue that pretty much required them being fired, if only to send a message to others.  More on the story here.  And our previous reporting on this issue here:

"Just unpacked my suitcase and found this note from TSA," tweets writer and attorney Jill Filipovic of Feministe. "Guess they discovered a 'personal item' in my bag. Wow."

It was a standard-issue we got all up in your baggagebusiness Transportation Security Administration Notice of Inspection (NOI), but with these handwritten words in pen, overlaid: "GET YOUR FREAK ON GIRL."

What do you think, did the TSA baggage inspector deserve to be fired? Read the rest of this post...

GOP now claiming that "they" are the ones defending the social safety net

That's priceless.  The party that took the lead in trying to dismantle  Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and welfare - the party that held unemployment benefits hostage last Christmas - is now trying to claim that they're the ones who care about America's poor?

I think we have a different definition of poverty in the Democratic party.  To the Republicans you're "poor" if your bonus this year is only "$50,000" instead of the usual "$100,000."  Check out this fundraising appeal from GOP budget cutter Paul Ryan, the guy who authored the plan to dismantle Medicare.  "The safety net for the poor is coming apart at the seams and no one in Washington seems to care," says the guy who is the lead architect of the most recent GOP plans to gut the social safety net.

You've got to admire their hubris, they are fearless.  As Greg Sargent explains, it's clear that the GOP is a tad worried about all the new polls showing the public thinks they're the part of the rich.  And they should be worried.  As much as the public isn't thrilled with the Democrats, poll after poll shows that they like the Republicans even less. Read the rest of this post...

Obama fundraising 2012: Truth versus accuracy

During the recent Washington Post versus New York Times battle, over whether Barack Obama's reelection campaign did or did not raise more money from Wall Street than Mitt Romney and the other GOP candidates, the Obama campaign and its defenders arrived at a position which while technically true was not accurate.

While the legal entity that is the Obama campaign had raised less money from Wall Street than Mitt Romney, the campaign plus the DNC raised more Wall Street money than all Republican presidential candidates combined. Obama supporters positioned this as very important, since by the letter of the law it was true that Romney had outraised Obama on Wall Street. Of course, given that the DNC's job in 2012 is to help President Obama win re-election, ignoring the money they raise from Wall Street as not being connected to Obama is rather disingenuous.

It seems the New York Times has found another area in which the Obama campaign is technically correct in their messaging, but functionally inaccurate.

Despite a pledge not to take money from lobbyists, President Obama has relied on prominent supporters who are active in the lobbying industry to raise millions of dollars for his re-election bid.

At least 15 of Mr. Obama’s “bundlers” — supporters who contribute their own money to his campaign and solicit it from others — are involved in lobbying for Washington consulting shops or private companies. They have raised more than $5 million so far for the campaign.

Because the bundlers are not registered as lobbyists with the Senate, the Obama campaign has managed to avoid running afoul of its self-imposed ban on taking money from lobbyists.

The Obama campaign has a self-imposed ban on taking money from lobbyists. There is absolutely nothing illegal about taking political contributions from lobbyists. Even the ethics of taking money from lobbyists are debatable - for example, I would have no problem if the Obama campaign took money from people who lobby on behalf of unionized teachers, nurses, firefighters, and janitors. The point is that there is nothing within the job description of a lobbyist which makes them inherently evil. To put it differently, most political campaigns will vet large donations to make sure that the person who wrote them a check wasn't, say, recently indicted for a felony crime. The reason campaigns do this is that they don't like the optics of taking money from crooks. The Obama campaign has somewhat arbitrarily decided that lobbyists are like crooks and their money is bad, except in cases where the lobbyists don't meet the legal standard of lobbyist, as we see here:

Take Sally Susman. An executive at the drug-maker Pfizer, she has raised more than $500,000 for the president’s re-election and helped organize a $35,800-a-ticket dinner that Mr. Obama attended in Manhattan in June. At the same time, she leads Pfizer’s powerful lobbying shop, and she has visited the White House four times since 2009 — twice on export issues.

So this individual was meeting with the President while the healthcare bill was being written and some of those meetings were about exporting US-made drugs. Yet by the letter of the law, Susman is not a lobbyist and therefore her money is good!

Oh and those $35,800-a-ticket dinners that Susman put together? Yeah, that money goes to the DNC.

The Obama campaign has a statement responding to the Times story. The basic thrust of it is that the Times is skewering them for letting "the perfect be the enemy of the good, punishing efforts to promote reform." That may be the case and the Obama campaign is right to point out that all Republican candidates make no bones about taking cash from lobbyists and letting lobbyists bundle cash for them.

At the same time, the Obama campaign is trying to convince us that the influence of someone whose job is as a lobbyist giving $5,000 (the legal limit for primary and general election contributions in 2012) is greater than a lobbyist who bundles 100 times that amount. And that is pure bunk.

What's more upsetting is the completely cynical analysis by the Obama campaign which defines the quality of their actions by the letter of the law or the letter of their pledges, while ignoring the larger context within which they occur. They take less money from Wall Street than Romney, but only if you ignore the DNC. They don't take donations from lobbyists, but only if you ignore their bundlers who lobby. And if those bundlers who lobby as executives of major pharmaceutical companies find ways to avoid the rather high threshold to be counted as a lobbyist, well then since they do not meet the definition of lobbyist, the campaign can't be criticized for taking their money.

These two stories, happening a week apart, show that the Obama re-election campaign is committed to a very cynical ploy to be true, while not being accurate, in their descriptions of their fundraising. The danger of this is that the energy of hope and change that fueled the campaign in 2008 will be completely non-existent in 2012. The remedy for that could be providing voters with genuine, honest reform. Or it could be taking more corporate or Wall Street cash. Seeing which course the campaign chooses will be easy enough, so I shall avoid any speculation as to what they will do. Read the rest of this post...

State and local budget cuts have hurt overall GDP

From the Washington Post:

One drag on growth, however, was government. Steep budget cuts by municipalities around the country led spending by state and local governments to fall at a 1.3 percent annual rate. State and local governments have subtracted from overall economic activity in 10 of the past 12 quarters.

That's interesting, since the Republicans have been telling us that cutting back government spending, at both the state/local and federal levels, is just what the doctor ordered.  It seems they were referring to Dr. Kevorkian.

Oh, and why is it that state and local governments are being forced to cut back?  Why, in part because the stimulus is running out.  Yes, the stimulus not only helped state and local governments, it helped the over economy grow.  Fancy that.

The expiration of federal stimulus funding for Medicaid has dealt a blow to states still struggling to recover from the economic downturn, according to figures released Thursday.

To compensate for the loss of extra federal Medicaid dollars this June, states have increased their spending on the program by an average of 29 percent in the current fiscal year.

A number of GOP governors even turned down federal stimulus monies for things ranging from transportation to unemployment benefits.  And what did it get us?  Lower economic growth.  Imagine that, the  Republicans' prescription for the economy was wrong again. Read the rest of this post...

AP profiles Scott Olsen, Iraq war vet shot in head by Oakland police

AP:

A video posted on YouTube showed Olsen being carried by other protesters through the tear gas, his face bloodied. People shout at him: "What's your name? What's your name?" Olsen just stares back.

Shepherd said it's a cruel irony that Olsen is fighting an injury in the country that he fought to protect.

People at OPSWAT, the San Francisco security software company where Olsen works, were devastated after learning of his injuries. They described him as a humble, quiet man.

Olsen was awarded seven medals while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, which he left as a lance corporal in November 2009 after serving for four years. One of them was the Navy-Marine Corps Achievement Medal.

Read the rest of this post...

Video of Apple’s memorial service to Steve Jobs

Over on Apple's site. Read the rest of this post...

Florida corporate giveaways has not produced promised jobs

Surprise, surprise. Corporate welfare doesn't live up to the Republican (and Democratic) hype. What's so hard about admitting that these programs don't work and trying something else?

But even Wal-Mart, Publix, Kraft Foods and other corporate giants have had trouble meeting job goals.

New data shows Florida has signed contracts worth $1.7 billion since 1995 in return for promises of 225,000 new jobs. But only about one-third of those jobs have been filled while the state has paid out 43 percent of the contracts.

That averages out to $10,237 per job.

Read the rest of this post...