Random Act of Culture in Philadelphia

This fun event takes me back to memories of a neighbor when I was a kid living in Philly. She used to play this spectacular organ at the old Wanamakers decades ago and loved it. Also of note in Philadelphia these days is the new "museum without walls." It's a shame that a city that has so much potential is full of Philadelphians, as I again rediscovered last week. It must be something in the water that makes them so unfriendly. Read the rest of this post...

Executives at for-profit colleges raking in big bucks

If you can stomach it, read the entire article that details the numbers for many of the top for-profit schools in the US. I used to think nonprofit school executives were highly paid but this makes them look like paupers. Bloomberg also compares their compensation to executives working at similar sized public businesses and even there, many of the school executives fair very well. Shouldn't the students get more for their money or would that also be socialism?

Strayer Education Inc., a chain of for-profit colleges that receives three-quarters of its revenue from U.S. taxpayers, paid Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert Silberman $41.9 million last year. That’s 26 times the compensation of the highest-paid president of a traditional university.

Top executives at the 15 U.S. publicly traded for-profit colleges, led by Apollo Group Inc. and Education Management Corp., also received $2 billion during the last seven years from the proceeds of selling company stock, Securities and Exchange Commission filings show. At the same time, the industry registered the worst loan-default and four-year-college dropout rates in U.S. higher education. Since 2003, nine for-profit college insiders sold more than $45 million of stock apiece. Peter Sperling, vice chairman of Apollo’s University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit college, collected $574.3 million.

Education corporations, which receive as much as 90 percent of their revenue from federal financial-aid programs, are “private enterprise that’s almost entirely publicly funded,” Henry Levin, director of Columbia University’s National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, said in a telephone interview.

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Hateful Cindy McCain reverses self, now for DADT 24 hours after doing video linking DADT to gay youth suicide

She's a hateful woman just like her hateful husband. Read the rest of this post...

Night Music

Open Thread, the Pure edition.

Eva Cassidy, Imagine

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Catholic church seeking more exorcists in US

And to think some find the church completely out of touch with the modern world. I can't even begin to figure out why my family ran away from this institution decades ago. It's equally hard to imagine why church attendance hovers around 7% here in Paris.

Citing a shortage of priests who can perform the rite, the nation's Roman Catholic bishops are sponsoring a conference on how to conduct exorcisms.

The two-day training, starting Friday in Baltimore, is to outline the scriptural basis of evil, instruct clergy on evaluating whether a person is truly possessed, and review the prayers and rituals that comprise an exorcism. Among the speakers will be Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston, Texas, and a priest-assistant to New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan.

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Cats suck

Literally. It's apparently how they drink. Someone did research on it. Sounds a bit of a waste, until you watch this, then it's actually kind of cool.

The cat curls the tip of its tongue underneath itself and then lightly touches the liquid with the tongue's surface. It then jerks its tongue up, snapping a column of water up along with it. The cat drinks the stream before gravity has a chance to pull it back down—a process it can perform four times a second.

(Hat tip, HuffPost Hill) Read the rest of this post...

Chicago to sell naming rights for train and bus stations

Nobody doubts the financial challenges in running a modern transport system, but this is an especially bad idea. How long before it's the United States of America by Goldman Sachs and Pfizer? In many ways we're already there, but this trend has to stop.

CTA President Richard Rodriguez announced Wednesday that the perennially underfunded transit agency will go out for bids soon to sell naming rights to just about anything it owns and for which others are willing to pay big money in exchange for the public exposure.

That includes rail lines and stations, bus routes, retail concessions, and special events. Even the venerable CTA logo will be on the auction block, Rodriguez said.

The transit agency expects to award corporate sponsorships by next spring, officials said. Rodriguez said the CTA will go out for bids next week to hire a corporate adviser who will help package the sponsorship opportunities.

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Bush's Texas may have executed the wrong person

Science can be such a bummer when it comes to state sanctioned bloodlust.

A DNA test on a single hair has cast doubt on the guilt of a Texas man who was put to death 10 years ago for a liquor-store murder — an execution that went forward after then-Gov. George W. Bush's staff failed to tell him the condemned man was asking for genetic analysis of the strand.

The hair had been the only piece of physical evidence linking Claude Jones to the crime scene. But the recently completed DNA analysis found it did not belong to Jones and instead may have come from the murder victim.

Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, a New York legal center that uses DNA to exonerate inmates and worked on Jones' case, acknowledged that the hair doesn't prove an innocent man was put to death. But he said the findings mean the evidence was insufficient under Texas law to convict Jones.

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Deficit Commission proposal: 'A major transfer of income to a small minority of wealthy Americans'

The title is the story. Obama's Deficit Commission — you may as well own it, sir — Obama's voluntarily created Deficit Commission proposal:

"clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans."

That's Paul Krugman, who goes on to ask, "And what does any of this have to do with deficit reduction?"

Or, as we put it when the proposal first came out: "From your pocket to mine, sucker."

You should memorize this — the "Deficit" Commission proposal represents a major transfer of wealth to wealthy Americans. Who wrote the report? (Wealthy Americans.) Who will vote on it? (Wealthy Americans.) Done and done.

The detail, for those who want to see the ugly, from the New York Times initial report:

The proposed simplification of the tax code would repeal or modify a number of popular tax breaks — including the deductibility of mortgage interest payments — so that income tax rates could be reduced across the board. Under the plan, individual income tax rates would decline to ... 23 percent on the highest bracket (now 35 percent). The corporate tax rate, now 35 percent, would also be reduced, to as low as 26 percent.

Reagan only managed to lower the top marginal rate to 28%. We're being robbed in front of our eyes — according to Krugman the money will come from the middle class (natch) by:

eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans — the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest — and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate.

But what about the actual deficit, you ask? Oh, that:

It’s true that the PowerPoint contains nice-looking charts showing deficits falling and debt levels stabilizing. But it becomes clear, once you spend a little time trying to figure out what’s going on, that the main driver of those pretty charts is the assumption that the rate of growth in health-care costs will slow dramatically. And how is this to be achieved? By “establishing a process to regularly evaluate cost growth” and taking “additional steps as needed.” What does that mean? I have no idea.

His closing:

It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda ... tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net.

And that doesn't begin to touch what Dave Dayen calls the "killer app" in the proposal —"Cap revenue at or below 21% of G.D.P." That would kill progressive government, one that "promotes the general welfare," forever. A revolutionary force at work, implacable and relentless.

Clearly this firestorm will cause the proposal to shift. But this is now one pole of the tent, the de facto starting point for discussion. I'm willing to bet a year's supply of perfumed cat litter that Obama will look for a "middle ground" on which to surrender.

What you can do. Democrats were not put in office to do this. Perhaps they should be made to know that.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Pelosi signals No on Bush tax cuts for the wealthy

Via TPM, we find Nancy Pelosi reaffirming in an NPR interview her rejection of any tax cut compromise that would extend them for the wealthy. This is good news:

[O]ur position in the House has been we support the tax cuts for the middle — for everyone, but not an additional tax cut at the high end.

It’s too costly. It’s $700 billion. One year would be around $70 billion. That’s a lot of money to give a tax cut at the high end. And I remind you that those tax cuts have been in effect for a very long time, they did not create jobs.

So far, so good; that last point is especially effective. Now let's see if it holds. There's still a lot of kabuki in Washington.

GP Read the rest of this post...

How is Pres. Obama not caving on the tax cuts?

I'm having a difficult time with President Obama's new comments about the tax cuts.  Let me review how the "negotiation" has gone so far.

Republicans: Our position is that we want all the tax cuts made permanent.

Obama: My position is that I want the middle class tax cuts made permanent, but no extension of the tax cuts for the rich.

Republicans: No.

Obama: Okay, how about making the middle class tax cuts permanent, and we can extend the tax cuts for the rich temporarily?

Republicans: No.

Obama: I'm willing to negotiate.

Obama's comments today don't seem to contradict Sam Stein's reporting yesterday, namely, that the White House is planning to cave on the tax cuts.  Even the President, today, said that his main concern is guaranteeing that the middle class tax cuts are made permanent.  Well, the Republicans' initial proposal, to make all the tax cuts permanent, does that.

Where is the negotiation in all of this? All we see is that the GOP and Obama both staked out a position, and the President is publicly negotiating with himself while the GOP continues to say "no."  How is this a change from the President's pattern to date, in which he caves repeatedly while the other side just sits back and watches? Read the rest of this post...

Obama insists that he's not caving on tax cuts for the rich

If true, this will be great news. If he caves, he better hope to win over enough Republican voter support to fill the gaps from Democrats who take a pass on him. So far, that "bi-partisan" effort hasn't yielded many results.

President Barack Obama declared Friday that his "number one priority" is preserving tax cuts for the middle class, and sharply denied that comments by his senior adviser David Axelrod suggest that his administration is about to cave in to Republicans who also want to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

"That is the wrong interpretation because I haven't had a conversation with Democratic and Republican leaders," Obama said of a Huffington Post article suggesting that in advance of negotiations with lawmakers next week, the White House has calculated that giving in on tax cuts for the rich is the only way to get the middle class cuts extended too.

"Here's the right interpretation -- I want to make sure that taxes don't go up for middle class families starting on January 1st," Obama said at a news conference at the conclusion of the G-20 Summit here. "That is my number one priority for those families and for our economy. I also believe that it would be fiscally irresponsible for us to permanently extend the high income tax cuts. I think that would be a mistake, particularly when we've got our Republican friends saying that their number 1 priority is making sure that we are dealing with our debt and our deficit."

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Did Krugman just call Obama a wimp?

This rates up there as one of the most intense posts I've seen from Paul Krugman -- it's titled "Mush from the Wimp" and is just two sentences:

A bit of old history keeps running through my head these days. Maybe things like this and this explain it.

Have talked to several people, and everyone thinks Krugman is calling Obama a wimp. Read the rest of this post...

Move Bush's Book Where It Belongs - to the crime section

The trend that started with the release of Tony Blair's book continues.

Inspired by a British campaign which saw Tony Blair's autobiography, A Journey, appearing under crime, horror and even fantasy in UK bookshops, the protest blog Waging Nonviolence is urging its supporters to "Move Bush's Book Where It Belongs", and post pictures of the autobiography in its new location on a campaign Facebook page.

According to the campaign organiser Jasmine Faustino, Bush's memoir "defends several of the criminal policies that he implemented during his time in office, including the invasion of Iraq and the use of waterboarding". She calls on readers to "reshelve the book to where it really belongs", and "take a picture of your 'mission accomplished'".

Lyndsey German of UK anti-war group Stop the War Coalition was delighted to hear the campaign had spread to the US.

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Eugene Robinson: Democratic base asks 'Why don't they fight back?'

This is exactly what I had mentioned yesterday. What's even worse is that I heard the same complaint from people who tended to side with Democrats but would not be considered to be the base of the party. The Democrats would be lucky if the problem was only limited to the base, but it's much more widespread than that. It's clear that the Republicans can smell the fear of a fight as well and are taking advantage of the weakness. Who wants to support leaders or a party who are afraid of standing up and fighting back? Certainly not me and I suspect I'm not alone.

More from Eugene Robinson.

That's the question I've been hearing from the Democratic Party's stunned and dispirited base. For the past month, I've been on a book tour that has taken me to Asheville, N.C., Terre Haute, Ind., Austin and elsewhere. Everywhere I go, supporters of President Obama and his agenda ask me why so many Democrats in Washington don't stand up for what they say they believe.

I confess that I don't have a good answer. What I can say with confidence, however, is that the White House and Democrats in Congress ignore these grumblings at their peril. Call it polarization, call it conviction, call it whatever you like: These are not wishy-washy times. If you don't stand for something, you get run over.

We saw this principle in action last week. Anomie among the Democratic base was not the main reason the party suffered what Obama called a "shellacking" in the midterms, but clearly it was a factor. Elements of the party's traditional coalition - minorities, women, young people - voted in much smaller numbers than they did in 2008. The "enthusiasm gap" turned out to be real, and it had real consequences.

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Friday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

The President is now in Japan, which is the final stop on his swing around the world.

On Monday, Congress will return to DC to begin the lame-duck session. All eyes are on the Senate. The Majority Leader, Harry Reid, will give us an indication of what legislation he intends to pursue.

Here's an important message for Senators: Stay until you finish your work. We're going to hear a lot of excuses about how hard it will be to finish the Defense bill, which includes the Don't Ask, Don't Tell provision. Senators will say they won't have enough time. That's BS. Last year, the Senate stayed in session until December 24th to finish health care reform. Surely, funding our troops warrants the same attention. Most Americans have to work right up until Christmas -- and don't have the luxury of shutting down on December 10th because they're tired.

So, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer, here's the deal: Don't go home til the Defense bill is passed -- with the DADT language intact. Would be great to hear Obama send that same message (I know, wishful thinking. That's not their "style" at the White House.)

Okay, what else? Read the rest of this post...

Suu Kyi may be released soon in Myanmar

Now that the sham elections are over, this may finally become a reality. Great news, if it happens.

Seven years after the jailed democracy leader was last made a prisoner in her own home, Ms Suu Kyi's supporters were cautiously optimistic that tomorrow she may be finally released from house arrest. Some believe she could even be freed later this evening and that one of her sons may be there to greet her.

The military authorities who oversaw last weekend's controversial election have given no formal indication the 65-year-old will be released when her current term of detention formally expires tomorrow. Yet members of her National League for Democracy (NLD) have been cleaning their offices in anticipation and foreign diplomats are readying themselves for the opportunity to meet her. In Rangoon, said one Western diplomat, there was a "mood of hope, and yet expectation."

"I believe she will released on the evening of 13 November," said her lawyer, Nyan Win. "We have no plans for a celebration, but it will be a very happy occasion for our beloved Lady."

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Gerhard Schröder: Bush 'not telling the truth'

For some reason, this doesn't come as a surprise.

On Tuesday, the day that Bush's own presidential memoirs, "Decision Points," finally hit the shelves, Schröder went even further. "The former American president is not telling the truth," he said on Tuesday in Berlin.

Schröder was referring to a passage in Bush's memoirs in which the former president described a meeting that took place between the two leaders in the White House on Jan. 31, 2002. Bush writes that, when he told Schröder that he would pursue diplomacy against Iraq but would use military force should the need arise, the German leader responded, "'What is true of Afghanistan is true of Iraq. Nations that sponsor terror must face consequences. If you make it fast and make it decisive, I will be with you.'"

Bush continued: "I took that as a statement of support. But when the German election arrived later that year, Schröder had a different take. He denounced the possibility of force against Iraq."

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Whales get sunburn too

Go figure.

Ms Martinez-Levasseur and her colleagues from the marine research centre CICMAR, in Mexico, studied blue whales, sperm whales and fin whales over a period of three years.

They examined high resolution photographs of the whales' skin and took skin samples from areas that appeared to be blistered.

Examining the samples under the microscope revealed that the blisters were caused by sunburn.

The scientists also found that signs of sun damage were more severe in the paler-skinned blue whales, compared with the darker-skinned fin whales.

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