Assorted black and white photos

I've been going through my old photos, in order to find a few to enlarge. Here are a few b/w that I really liked.



A rose in the Loire Valley, France - I think.



Cliché, but beautiful - the Louvre.



Flamingos at the Paris zoo.



A beautiful beach, somewhere southwest of Rome.



A really neat gorilla at the National Zoo in Washington, DC Read the rest of this post...

German economic minister has a short memory

Considering Germany's own history last century of starting wars, killing millions of innocent people and stealing from countries around Europe, you would think they might be a bit more understanding. Disagreeing is fine but they're to the point of being nasty about this problem. Even after all of that they received the Marshall Plan money and decades of US investments to combat the Soviet Union presence next door, yet they remain so arrogant. Why bother having a united Europe when you have countries such as Germany behaving like this? Greece needs to sort out its finances but blaming the current problems on this government is completely unfair.

"The German government does not intend to give a cent," Bruederle said at an event in Berlin, adding each EU state was responsible for its own affairs and that the Greek government had to implement its austerity plan effectively.

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FDA orders food recalls

This new FDA is serious. The problems are going to take time to correct after years of letting the factory food industry do whatever they like (and pushing expensive health care costs to consumers) but the change in attitude is impressive. Until Democrats in Congress started to change the rules, there were no recalls unless the company decided to recall a product. This tended to occur after serious problems including death, so getting ahead of the problem makes a lot of sense.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a recall of a common flavor enhancer that could be contaminated with salmonella bacteria.

The product, called hydrolyzed vegetable protein or HVP, is potentially in thousands of food products, including soups, sauces, chilis, stews, hot dogs, gravies, seasoned snack foods, dips and dressings. HVP is manufactured by a Las Vegas company.

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'Promesa Por Cumplir'

From a community organizer colleague of President Obama, writing in the Washington Post:

In its first year, the Obama administration was on track to deport some 400,000 immigrants -- far more than during George W. Bush's last year in office. On the anniversary of Obama's inauguration, Hoy, the Spanish-language newspaper in Chicago, ran a full-page picture of the president on its cover under the headline "Promesa Por Cumplir" ("Unkept Promise"). The sense of betrayal among Latinos -- especially immigrants -- is palpable, just as it was after Obama's 2006 vote on the border fence.

As president, Obama has followed the cerebral strategy that increased enforcement will win support for immigration reform. But if there is no serious progress on the issue, many disillusioned Latinos will stay home in November. Others will decide that because Democrats can't deliver on immigration reform, they might as well vote Republican on the values issues. Depressed Latino turnout in Illinois may well cost the Democrats the Senate seat that Obama once held.

And if the Democrats are cowardly on immigration when they have large majorities in the House and Senate, how will they feel after taking some losses in November? What will Obama's 2012 campaign promise to Latinos be? "Trust me on immigration reform. This time I really mean it"? He might as well say adios to those electoral college votes.

It's the same story on every issue, affecting every major constituency. And it's not entirely clearly that the White House, or the DNC, even realize the damage that's been done. You can jerk people around while you're in office, but the one time they get to jerk back is election time. Hubris stops at the ballot box. Read the rest of this post...

Firing teachers is 'accountability' in action? What about Wall Street?

Notice how easy it is to scrap contracts when it's teachers, yet on Wall Street the thought never crossed anyone's mind. Sure Wall Street cost the country a trillion or so, but who's counting? Strange priorities these days and very odd examples of accountability. Teachers working in the toughest conditions are scapegoated yet the most pampered bunch in America gets the royal treatment for problems they created. If only the teachers had caused the social conditions and poverty in their environment and then dragged the economy into a recession, they would have received fat bonuses. Sure, that sounds fair.

When all the teachers were fired from Central Falls High School last week in a sweeping effort at school reform, their superintendent gave them a taste of the accountability President Barack Obama says is necessary.

It is a strategy that has been used elsewhere, such as in Chicago and Los Angeles. But while there have been some improvements in test scores, schools where most teachers have been replaced still grapple with problems of poverty and discipline. Even advocates of the approach say firing a teaching staff is just one of several crucial steps that must be taken to turn around a school.

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GOP attacks Dem candidate Carnahan support for stimulus, claims it didn't benefit Missouri 2 weeks after GOP Rep. Blunt touted $1m MO stimulus project

Democratic Senate candidate Robin Carnahan is apparently a vewy vewy bad person.

You see, she supports the stimulus, which CBO says has created up to 2.1m jobs. And even worse, her brother Tom apparently tried to bring some of that money to Missouri by following the legal process to apply for stimulus monies.

Well, the Republicans won't have any of that - Missourians trying to bring their tax dollars back to Missouri. So the Republican party attack dog operation targeted Carnahan's support today, claiming, among other things, that the stimulus didn't benefit Missouri. Well, that will come as a surprise to Robin's opponent, GOP Rep. Roy Blunt, who only two weeks ago visited a million dollar stimulus project in... Missouri!

Blunt, a southwest Missouri congressman, voted against the stimulus legislation last year but has been criticized as hypocritical by Democrats for publicly supporting local projects that received federal stimulus money.

On Wednesday, Blunt toured several Springfield-area projects funded through the Brownfield redevelopment program for contaminated sites. The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded about $1.1 million in stimulus grants for Springfield-area Brownfield projects.

Last July, Blunt attended a groundbreaking ceremony for a new visitors' center at a Neosho fish hatchery run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The facility received $1 million in stimulus funds to make it energy-efficient, including $100,000 for a solar water-heating system for pallid sturgeon.

With that in mind, check out the GOP now claiming that the stimulus didn't help Missouri:

National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) Press Secretary Amber Marchand issued the following statement in response to these developments:

"It looks like the stimulus that Robin Carnahan supported may benefit her brother Tom, but it will not necessarily benefit the people of Missouri.

We already know that's a lie. But just for fun, here's even more money (and jobs) that the stimulus brought to Missouri:

In Plattsburg, Mo., a $1 million stimulus grant is paired with a $4.3 million low-interest loan to help build a water treatment plant. “Those two things you can’t be upset about,” said City Manager D.J. Gehrt.

In St. Joseph, the stimulus program directed more than $31 million to recipients like the school district, Missouri Western State University, the Department of Transportation and Community Action Partnership.

Gerald McCush, community development manager for the city of St. Joseph, oversees about $4 million aimed at increasing jobs through Downtown renovation and stabilizing housing situations for struggling residents.

And just today, we found out that because of the stimulus Missouri is getting some of those nifty new, and very expensive, full body scanners for its airport. I'd call stopping terrorists a benefit for Missouri. I guess the Republicans don't.

But just as important, Robin Carnahan didn't vote on the stimulus, she couldn't - she's not yet a member of Congress. But someone who is a member of Congress, and who did use his vote to help enrich a member of his own family - that is, if you call the woman you're secretly screwing behind the back of your longtime wife "family" - is Congressman Roy Blunt:

In 2002, Blunt attempted to insert a provision in support of tobacco corporations into the legislation that created the Department of Homeland Security. According to the Washington Post, "The provision would have made it harder to sell tobacco products over the Internet and would have cracked down on the sale of contraband cigarettes, two practices that cut into Philip Morris's profits." Blunt said that he pushed for the provision after speaking with John F. Scruggs, vice president of government affairs for Altria. At the time, Blunt was dating Altria (the parent group that owns Philip Morris) lobbyist Abigail Perlman, whom he later married. His son, Andrew, also works as a lobbyist for Philip Morris in Missouri. In contrast to House tradition, the rider had not been cleared by the House leadership. It was removed from the final bill by an anonymous Republican member.

Roy Blunt for Missouri: Bringing new meaning to the word pork. Read the rest of this post...

Conservatives blast (Liz) Cheney as new McCarthy

Oh, she'll need to get in line if she's the new conservative McCarthy. She's got an entire wing of her party in front of her. Still, it's commendable that several lead conservative voices, including Paul Mirengoff at PoweLine, have challenged Cheney:

The backlash is growing against Liz Cheney after she demonized Department of Justice attorneys as terrorist sympathizers for their past legal work defending Gitmo detainees -- and now it's coming from within deeply conservative legal circles.

On Friday, the conservative blog Power Line put up a post titled, "An Attack That Goes Too Far." Author Paul Mirengoff, called Cheney's effort to brand DoJ officials the "Al Qaeda 7," "vicious" and "unfounded" even if it was right to criticize defense lawyers for voluntarily doing work on behalf of Gitmo detainees.

Reached on the phone, Mirengoff offered an even sharper rebuke, declaring that what Cheney was doing was comparable if not potentially worse than the notorious anti-communist crusades launched by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

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Report: No natural phenomenon can explain warming

The climate change movement may be in disarray but the problem still remains. The Independent:

It is only when the warming effect of emitting millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from human activity is considered that it is possible to explain why global average temperatures have risen so significantly since the middle of the 20th century.

The study updates a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has discovered several new elements of the global climate which have been influenced by humans, such as an increasing amount of water vapour evaporating from the warmer oceans into the atmosphere and a corresponding increase in the saltiness of the sea.

"There is an increasingly remote possibility that climate change is dominated by natural rather than anthropogenic [man-made] factors," the scientists concluded in their study, published in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews of Climate Change.

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When GOP uses reconciliation, to the tune of $2 trillion, that's ok

(Via Rachel Maddow's blog) Read the rest of this post...

Obama administration getting ready to cave on terror trials

From Matt Yglesias:

Big win for the Cheney family:

President Obama’s advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s plan to try him in civilian court in New York City.

I’m not going to attempt to defend this. I’ll merely note that it’s hard enough to have any kind of civil liberties in this country when the opposition party is pushing for them. When what you have is an opposition that’s pressuring incumbent officials to seize more power for themselves the incentive structure is nuts and the constitution is going to be shredded.

As recently as the 1990s, Congressional Republicans liked to stand up for civil liberties against some of the (tame, by post-9/11 standards) power-grabs by the Clinton-era Justice Department. But the dynamics of the Obama Era are toxic, especially because Democrats are so used to losing on national security that they can’t tell when they’re winning. It’s a depressing situation all around. And anyone in the White House who thinks the right-wing can’t just gin up some new “soft on terror” talking point is living in a dream world.

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Who the hell wants to see a nature show hosted by Sarah Palin?

On FOX, perhaps. But the woman is considered a laughing stock, and a rather hateful one at that, by much of the country. Why would ABC, CBS, NBC or anyone else want a "non-political" show hosted by some right-wing nut who is clearly only trying to get publicity so she can run for president? I'm not sure it's entirely appropriate for any of the networks, FOX included, to be hiring GOP presidential candidates.

As for Palin being a ratings draw, duh. She's a train wreck. Even I enjoy watching her, just to see how many grammatical mistakes one person can make in a single sentence. That doesn't mean I'm going to tune into a serious TV show hosted by the woman. Puhleez. The first time she calls the President a socialist, you're going to see every every advertiser flee.

From AP:

Producer Mark Burnett said Thursday he is pitching a series to television networks that would be about Alaska seen through the eyes of its most famous resident, Sarah Palin.

Palin and Burnett have been meeting this week to talk about the idea with executives at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, according to three broadcast executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the networks don't publicly discuss story pitches.

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Unemployment rates holds at 9.7%

Some good news on the economic front. The unemployment rate didn't increase, which had been expected:

U.S. employers cut a smaller than expected 36,000 jobs in February, leaving the unemployment rate unchanged at 9.7 percent, according to a government report on Friday which said it was unclear how severe weather had impacted payrolls.

The Labor Department said job losses for December and January had been revised to show 35,000 fewer jobs lost than previously reported.

Analysts polled by Reuters had expected non-farm payrolls to drop 50,000 last month and the unemployment rate to edge up to 9.8 percent. The median forecast from the 20 most accurate forecasters also saw payrolls falling by 50,000, while the 10 most accurate economists predicted a 70,000 decline.

So, the forecasters were wrong. Of course, this is good news in the "it could have been worse" sense. There are still millions unemployed and underemployed. That, of course, was not a concern of Senator Bunning and his GOP colleagues. They played political games with these people. Read the rest of this post...

Friday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Well, the mad scramble is underway to find the votes needed to pass the health care bill in the House. And, I think it's important to reiterate that the comprehensive bill won't be passed using reconciliation. The House is going to pass the Senate bill -- or trying to pass the Senate bill. Remember, that Senate bill got 60 votes right before Christmas. . Reconciliation will be used for the "sidecar" bill with the additional fixes. Republicans, abetted by the traditional media, are just lying about this process.

And, it's been two days since D.C. started letting same-sex couples apply for marriage licenses. The city is still standing. The institution of marriage hasn't been destroyed. I'll continue to monitor the situation. The first actual weddings start next week.

Let's get threading... Read the rest of this post...

Greece told to sell islands and art by German politicians

How do you say "go Cheney yourself" in Greek? For some strange reason, German politicians love to attack Greece and pretend as though the financial situation there is radically different from elsewhere in Europe. Maybe they (and a large majority of German voters) somehow believe that Europe revolves around Germany. It doesn't so get over it. Important, yes, but not the center of the universe. The German economic heyday was a few decades ago no matter how much bashing they deliver.

Two senior German MPs have demanded that Greece sell off some of its islands, historic buildings and art works as a condition of receiving a financial lifeline from the EU.

The call for a Big Fat Greek Auction – which would also include ancient artefacts and stakes in state-owned companies – to repay some of the country's debt mountain came on the eve of crucial talks between the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, in Berlin tomorrow and takes the mudslinging between the two countries to a new level.

Frank Schaeffler, an economics specialist and member of Germany's Free Democrats, said Athens should sell stakes in companies and "assets, such as uninhabited islands". Marco Wanderwitz – a member of Merkel's conservative CDU party – went even further: "If the European Union, and therefore Germany, helps out Greece economically, it will need to give something in exchange … some islands, for example, might be a solution.''

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US endorses plan to ban sale of Atlantic bluefin tuna

This is a very big deal. Until now, the Monaco-proposed plan had been looking for international support. Now they have it and the EU will be under much more pressure to support the ban. While there have been plenty of disappointments with this administration, moves such as this are to be applauded.

The U.S. government will announce Wednesday that it supports prohibiting international trade of Atlantic bluefin tuna, according to sources familiar with the decision. The move that could lead to the most sweeping trade restrictions ever imposed on the highly prized fish.

Sushi aficionados in Japan and elsewhere have consumed bluefin for decades, a demand that has caused the fish's population to plummet. In less than two weeks, representatives from 175 countries will convene in Doha, Qatar, to determine whether to restrict the trade of bluefin tuna-- valued for its rich, buttery taste -- and an array of other imperiled species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

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