DOJ eyes Apple for price fixing of e-books

No, no, no. The price of books (or music or video) just happens to all be the same because like minds think alike. Everyone knows that Apple loves consumers so would never, ever do anything to mistreat them or anyone else.

The Justice Department is investigating whether deals Apple cut two years ago with the quintet of major publishers - when the consumer electronics maker launched its iPad tablet computer - were done with the intent of propping up prices for digital books, sources have said.

As part of those agreements, publishers shifted to a model that allowed them to set the price of e-books and give Apple a 30 percent cut of sales, the sources have said.

Talks between the Justice Department and some publishers had been proceeding, with settlements expected as soon as this week, one of the two sources familiar with the matter said on condition of anonymity, because the discussions were not public.

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Driving a car is a bit deadlier around tax day

Well, for most at least. Mitt Romney is probably driving comfortably with his less than 14% tax rate, if he even drives. The guy has elevators for his cars so he may not even drive himself. CNNMoney:

The odds of getting into a fatal crash increase by 6% on tax filing day, according to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"Tax days are associated with an increase in fatal crash risk, which is similar in magnitude to the increase in crashes on Super Bowl Sunday," wrote study authors Dr. Donald Redelmeier and Christopher Yarnell of the University of Toronto.

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Santorum proves 'Weakness is Strength'

Steve Benen's obituary for the Santorum campaign is worth a read. A key graf:

But in a strange sort of way, I consider the Santorum campaign one of the most impressive things I've seen in presidential politics in quite a while.

Putting aside his ideas, vision, values, policy positions, and agenda, much of which I find abhorrent and offensive, Santorum has done something I honestly didn't think was possible. Just six years ago, he ran for re-election in his home state and lost by 18 points, one of the most humiliating defeats for an incumbent senator in American history. When Santorum launched his presidential bid last year, it was derided as a pointless vanity exercise by, among others, me.

So why did Santorum's campaign catch fire? There are many theories but I think the reason is that Santorum's weakness was his strength. That 18 point defeat meant that Santorum went into the fight dead last and nobody felt much need to pay attention to him in the early stages. Santorum was anti-Romney of last resort, his campaign only caught fire after every other alternative to Romney had been tried and found wanting.

Santorum only ever looked like having any chance of being nominee on the days when Romney said something particularly stupid. At one point it looked as if Santorum might possibly manage to force a brokered convention and allow the party to choose a 'viable' candidate. Read the rest of this post...

AP: Zimmerman is in custody and faces 2nd degree murder charge in Trayvon Martin killing

More "this just in" from the AP:

Neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman has been arrested and faces a charge of second-degree murder in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press Wednesday.

The official with knowledge of the case says that the charge against George Zimmerman will be announced at a news conference by special prosecutor Angela Corey at 6 p.m. Wednesday. The official says the 28-year-old Sanford man is in custody in Florida but wouldn't say where.

Let's see how this goes; everyone gets a day in court, and this man should definitely have his.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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Special prosecutor to charge Zimmerman in Trayvon Martin killing

This just in, from the Washington Post:

Florida special prosecutor Angela Corey plans to announce as early as Wednesday afternoon that she is charging neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, according to a law enforcement official close to the investigation.

It was not immediately clear what charge Zimmerman will face.

Martin, 17 and unarmed, was shot and killed Feb. 26 by Zimmerman, who said he was acting in self-defense. Police in Sanford, Fla., where the shooting took place, did not charge Zimmerman, citing the state’s “stand your ground” law.

Corey told reporters Tuesday night that she would hold a news conference about the case within 72 hours. A news release from her office said the event will be held in Sanford or Jacksonville, Fla.

The Post has more, though no news on whether the hoodie would charged as well.

By the way, you really want to click through and scroll down for the "where is George Zimmerman?" part. Just saying.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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Is it fair for activists to protest outside bank exec’s house?

While it can't be pleasant for the executives or their families, it's no more pleasant for everyone who has been run over by the corporate giants. In another age, it does seem like it would be going too far but when money is so overpowering and controlling in politics, there aren't many great options for regular people to be heard. The playing field has not be this unbalanced in decades and something needs to change.

Neighbors are upset calling this unethical, but that has hardly been a one way street. Ruining the lives of millions of families was also a considerably unethical. Fair or too far?

Locally, the group targeted the far-less-known Wells Fargo board member Enrique Hernandez.

"The only way we can normally get up here is to do domestic work for them," said Peggy Mears, an ACCE community organizer, as she stood outside Hernandez's gated driveway Tuesday on a stately street in Pasadena. "Now we're going to name you and shame you."

About two dozen demonstrators wearing bright yellow ACCE T-shirts gathered outside Hernandez's home, barely visible behind a tall brick wall and high shrubbery. The group gave speeches and chanted: "Hey, Wells Fargo, you can't hide. We see your greedy side."

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Charles Manson parole decision due today

Charles Manson's 12th parole hearing is due take place today. It is hard not to feel sympathy for the lawyer assigned to represent one of the most notorious mass murderers in US history. His client refuses to see him or attend the hearing.

Manson is a uniquely dangerous man. Unlike the usual serial killer who acts alone or with an accomplice, Manson had a house full of personal followers. Manson is still a threat to society at 77 and he will remain a threat until his dying breath. No matter how sick or incapacitated he may be personally, there will always remain the risk that he could order one of his followers to kill.

So the outcome of the parole board hearing should be a foregone conclusion: Manson will remain in the secure mental institution where he clearly belongs. Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Manson is not in a mental hospital, he is in a regular prison. His lawyer is arguing that he should be paroled so that he can get treatment.

This situation makes no sense. While there isn't much chance that Manson will escape, he has managed to acquire a cell phone twice in recent years. If Manson is insane then he should be getting treatment and this should have no bearing on whether he gets out of jail or not.

Update: The parole board denied the request, Manson is next eligible for parole in 15 years when he will be 92. Read the rest of this post...

Condi Rice: "I don't know when immigrants became the enemy"

Nick Wing at Huffington Post:

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke on a variety of topics in front of a crowd at Duke University Tuesday night, offering a particular criticism of the nation's stance on immigration.

"That immigrant culture that has renewed us ... has been at the core of our strength," she said, according to the The Raleigh News & Observer. "I don't know when immigrants became the enemy."

I do. About the time a lot of immigrants stopped being white enough for the GOP. Read the rest of this post...

Prominent psychiatrist retracts study saying "ex-gay" therapy works

For three and a half years, I underwent therapy to change my sexual orientation, from gay to straight, with Joseph Nicolosi, co-founder and former president of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). I've written a piece for The American Prospect magazine that tells the story of the ex-gay movement over the last 20 years, as well as recounting my own experiences in therapy (spoiler alert: it failed miserably). I encourage AMERICAblog readers to check it out, but there is one key piece of information I wanted to share.

Robert Spitzer—the guy who led the charge to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973—published a controversial study in 2001 saying that some gay people could change their sexual orientation. The study continues to be cited by proponents of "ex-gay therapy" (the notion that you can pray away the gay) as the chief piece of evidence that such therapy works; the fact that he is not a flack for the ex-gay movement and is an atheist made it hard to say he was biased. But when I met Spitzer in March, he asked me to retract the study:

Spitzer was drawn to the topic of ex-gay therapy because it was controversial—“I was always attracted to controversy”—but was troubled by how the study was received. He did not want to suggest that gay people should pursue ex-gay therapy. His goal was to determine whether the counterfactual—the claim that no one had ever changed his or her sexual orientation through therapy—was true.

I asked about the criticisms leveled at him. “In retrospect, I have to admit I think the critiques are largely correct,” he said. “The findings can be considered evidence for what those who have undergone ex-gay therapy say about it, but nothing more.” He said he spoke with the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior about writing a retraction, but the editor declined. (Repeated attempts to contact the journal went unanswered.) …

Spitzer was growing tired and asked how many more questions I had. Nothing, I responded, unless you have something to add.

He did. Would I print a retraction of his 2001 study, “so I don’t have to worry about it anymore”?

It's quite a stunning reversal, and I got the sense that this had troubled Spitzer for some years.

While I share the criticisms many psychiatrists and gay-rights supporters levied at the 2001 study, it strikes me that Spitzer's decision to pursue it evinces an admirable characteristic.  When we spoke, Spitzer told me it's important to question "whether everything you've been taught is wrong." In the early '70s, there was a near consensus in the psychiatric community that homosexuality was a mental disorder—and a pretty bad one at that. Interactions with gay-rights activists made Spitzer doubt the conventional wisdom in the same way that encounters with ex-gay activists made him question whether change therapy worked (and led him to pursue the 2001 study). In the latter case, the result was more harmful than good, but the drive to think independently—even when there is enormous social pressure to hew to the party line—seems the defining mark of a true intellectual. Of course every strength is also a weakness, but were it not for Spitzer's capacity for self-doubt, my husband and I might be sitting in a psychiatric ward instead of happily married.

On a broader note, this has been a story I've wanted to tell since I first became a writer. The experience of researching and writing it, however, was difficult. It's one thing, to paraphrase Joan Didion, for a writer to sell other people out; it's another to give away embarrassing details about yourself and your past (which, in the service of truth, I had to). Reaching into my painful adolescence was a bit dislocating. It cut loose a lot of memories from therapy, of being an insecure teenager—a time I'm sure many would prefer to forget.

But, at the risk of being aggrandizing, I think the way my story ends is edifying. I'm convinced that we never really "get over" traumatic experiences—whether it's a parent or spouse's death, a car accident, or childhood abuse; they remain part of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

I'm an atheist, but whenever I think about trauma, I'm reminded of a passage in one of Christian writer C.S. Lewis' books (I can't remember which). He compares the human condition to a symphony; the fall of Adam and Eve, he says, is like a wrong note that threatens to spoil the entire composition. But the divine composer comes to the rescue by turning the errant note into the start of a new melody.

With trauma, one must indeed turn the errant note into the start of a new and better symphony. Read the rest of this post...

Gates Foundation drops ALEC (but why was Bill Gates funding it?)

The good news is that, thanks to a campaign run by Color of Change and Progressive Change Campaign Committee, companies are startng to drop their membership in ALEC, the Hard Right coordinating organization for pushing pre-written bad laws out into the states.

A perfect example of an ALEC-authored law is "Stand and Fire" (aka "Stand Your Ground"), the law that got Trayvon Martin killed in Florida. The Arizona "Imprison the Browns for Profit" law a year or two back is another.

Both were ALEC-written, both at the urging of the industries they would benefit. In the first case, the beneficiary was small-arms manufacturers (fronted by the NRA). In the second case, the beneficiary was a major for-profit prison corp named CCA.

To fully "get" the ALEC operation, read our backgrounder. ALEC is "command-and-control" for the right-wing war in the states.

Here's a list of companies that were ALEC-affiliated until recently. Notice Coca-Cola, Intuit, and Kraft Foods on the corporate board. Pepsi, Coke's competitor, is on the corp-support list.

No longer. Those four have or will cancel their ALEC memberships (meaning, their funding of ALEC operations).

That was as of April 6. On April 9 we learn that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will also cancel their ALEC funding, after their current funding runs out (my emphasis and some reparagraphing throughout):

Following Kraft, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Intuit, another influential sponsor of ALEC has withdrawn its support from the right-wing corporate front group. ... Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Color of Change, among others, had targeted the Gates Foundation for giving more than $375,000 to ALEC over the past two years.

Well that's nice (sorta — their grant still has 17 months to go).

But wait ... the Gates Foundation was funding ALEC? Why? Aren't they half-way between that wonderful Steve Jobs (blessings be upon him) and that even more wonderful Warren Buffett (likewise)?

In a word, No. There's a right-wing war to destroy public education, and the Gates Foundation is in the thick of it. Again, ALEC writes the laws that bought-off state legislators get passed. With that in mind, here's the Gates spokesman explaining their involvement:

“We have made a single grant, narrowly and specifically focused on providing information to ALEC-affiliated state legislators on teacher effectiveness and school finance,” said Chris Williams, the spokesman[.]

And here's the same thing unpackaged:

The stated purpose of the Gates Foundation grant to ALEC is “to educate and engage its membership on more efficient state budget approaches to drive greater student outcomes, as well as educate them on beneficial ways to recruit, retain, evaluate and compensate effective teaching based upon merit and achievement.”

On the face of it, this pales in comparison to ALEC’s other education work, which promotes large-scale voucher and privatization schemes that would destroy, not improve, the public education system.

Interestingly, Lee Fang recently reported in The Nation on the various ways that the Gates Foundation and ALEC are working – independently – to promote for-profit distance learning.

These programs typically undermine public schools while benefiting technology and software companies, including Microsoft. The educational value of such programs is also highly contested.

"Efficient state budgets," "greater student outcomes" and "merit-based teacher evaluation" — sounds like "starve the beast," "teach to the test" and "no more teacher's unions" to me.

But maybe Gates just wanted to give Microsoft a piece of that education-destroying "online learning" business:

If the national movement to “reform” public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of “virtual schools”—charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet—as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits. ...

Patricia Levesque, a top adviser to former Governor Jeb Bush, spoke to fellow reformers at a retreat in October 2010. Levesque noted that reform efforts had failed because the opposition had time to organize. Next year, Levesque advised, reformers should “spread” the unions thin “by playing offense” with decoy legislation. ...

Levesque wasn’t delivering her hardball advice to her lobbying clients. She was giving it to a group of education philanthropists at a conference sponsored by notable charities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. Indeed, Levesque serves at the helm of two education charities, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a national organization, and the Foundation for Florida’s Future, a state-specific nonprofit, both of which are chaired by Jeb Bush. ...

“We think that’s so important because every student, regardless of what they do after high school, they’ll be learning online,” said Tom Vander Ark, a prominent online education advocate, on a recently distributed video urging the adoption of online course requirements. Vander Ark, a former executive director of education at the influential Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, now lobbies all over the country for the online course requirement. Like Moe, he keeps one foot in the philanthropic world and another in business.

Hard to tell. Maybe it's just his love of money, that Mr. Gates, or maybe he's got a right-wing soul as well. We don't know for sure, but he's definitely running with the right-wing heavies.

UPDATE: The comment thread to this post is excellent! It's not long, and very well informed. I can personally verify how Microsoft does business, and always has. Thanks, all!

GP

To follow on Twitter or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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A few photos from the White House Easter Egg Roll

The Easter Egg Roll

I was lucky enough to get a few tickets to the White House Easter Egg Roll on Monday, which of course now means that I'll never question anything the President says or does ever again, and I no longer want my civil rights.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way....

The ever-popular Elmo

I went with my neighbor and her son, who is one year's old, and who surprisingly had a really good time.  I was concerned that a one year old would be a tad too young to appreciate the festivities, but even a one year old gets Elmo, and can have fun dyeing an Easter Egg (though from his perspective, we were playing a really fun game with colored plastic pieces you squeeze and throw around the table).

Now, we weren't permitted to cover the event - no media.  They didn't even want us tweeting from the event.  I think the idea was to make it a day about kids, not about getting press coverage. And that's totally cool.  It was a day about kids, 35,000 of them, not stampeding journalists looking for the best shot or interview.

Fortunately we were broken down into group and each group got tickets for a different two hour time slot throughout the day.  I was given permission to post a few of my photos, so long as I didn't really "cover" the event, so you're only getting four photos that I actually took for myself and my friend, and one of those photos is of a plant.  And I'm not going to walk you through the day and the event, which I would have liked to.

Wisteria going up the steps to the Oval Office patio.

It was a nice time. Lots of different things for the kids to do, lots of cartoon characters to get their photos with. And lots of volunteers to take photos of you and the family all together, with the White House behind you, which was really a brilliant and thoughtful addition.

The only thing they could do better is to indicate on the White House Web site exactly what you can bring to the event.

They tell you that you can't bring open food or water, or knapsacks (my friend wasn't sure if she could bring diapers, and where to put them if she couldn't bring a bag). We weren't sure what any of it meant - can we we not bring any water or food at all? Can my friend bring Cheerios for the kid to snack on? How about his milk? We were going to be there at lunch time How is a one year old going to make it through five to six hours, from the time we left home to the time we got back home, without food and water? Would they have food and water there? No one could tell us. Could we bring the baby stroller? No idea, and when we called, again no one knew. There was ample bottled water, which was great and well done (though they should tell people there will be beverages), but only a piece of fruit per child, none for the adults. I started to have a low blood sugar attack at around 2pm (which figures, since I hadn't eaten since 10am, and didn't bring my usual snacks to make it through without an attack since I was told not to bring food) and had to literally beg for one of the kids' apples, which was kind of embarrassing. The woman doling them out begrudgingly gave me one.

The view from the Easter Egg dyeing table.
(click image for larger version)

Other than that, it was an incredibly well planned event, not surprising for something at the White House. All the staff were absurdly nice and friendly, as was the security from the Secret Service and the Park Service (both were really nice and friendly).  Definitely one of those rare Washington moments that remind you that it can be cool living in this God-forsaken town.  If only the other 364 days weren't so lousy. Read the rest of this post...

French youth supporting far right party in upcoming election

It's about as strange as American youth supporting Ron Paul though whereas the Paul supporters are mostly just annoying, the Le Pen supporters are barking mad. (What is it that makes young Paul supporters so completely unlikable?) With high unemployment now and in the future, it's understandable enough that the youth are supporting an extremist candidate, but Le Pen?

It's never good when the youth are so supportive of racist politicians but this is also what happens when a country fails to address its problems of addressing race. The US still has a serious race problem, but compared to Europe, the US is a few decades ahead. The Guardian:

The leader of the Front National has the support of 26% of voters aged 18 to 24, according to a survey for Le Monde, with the Socialist Francois Hollande on 25%, Nicolas Sarkozy on 17% and the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon on 16%.

Le Pen has led a fierce public relations drive to style herself as more palatable, modern figure than her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was recently convicted of contesting crimes against humanity for saying the Nazi occupation was not "particularly inhumane".

Capitalising on the working-class and protest vote, she has risen in popularity among young people – mainly those from poorer backgrounds – partly because of France's crippling youth unemployment problem, which has fuelled suggestions that what scarce jobs exist should be for the French first, not immigrants. In the 1990s, her father scored well among young people who felt they had no prospects.

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