Video: Cat vs vacuum cleaner

I laughed just reading the title.

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Fox News: Gingrich’s multiple marital infidelity mean he’ll be a great president

Seriously. It's pretty sick.

I want to be coldly analytical, not moralize, here. I want to tell you what Mr. Gingrich’s behavior could mean for the country, not for the future of his current marriage. So, here’s what one interested in making America stronger can reasonably conclude—psychologically—from Mr. Gingrich’s behavior during his three marriages:

1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.

2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married.

3 ) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible.

Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.

4) Two women—Mr. Gingrich’s first two wives—have sat down with him while he delivered to them incredibly painful truths: that he no longer loved them as he did before, that he had fallen in love with other women and that he needed to follow his heart, despite the great price he would pay financially and the risk he would be taking with his reputation.

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Judge orders Murdoch's newspaper to have computers searched

Tough day in court for Rupert Murdoch.

But Vos said that if he had "acceded to [NGN] suggestions back in early 2011 that disclosure was not necessary because admissions had been made, the phone-hacking history might be very different". He said the material that might be found on the three laptops belonging to an unidentified senior employee of NGN "may well, on the evidence of the emails I have already been shown, contain documents or even emails which may bear on the policy of deletion. "It seems to be a distinct possibility [that information on the laptops] could contain information relevant to the deliberate deletion of email and go beyond just 'colour' but indicate precisely what the deletion was taking place for, which may go far beyond scope of present admissions by NGN," he said. "I'm entirely satisfied that these laptops should be searched for purpose of relevant disclosure."

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A major Julian Assange–WikiLeaks interview in Rolling Stone

I wanted to point you to this, in case you haven't seen it yet. The estimable Michael Hastings has a major interview with Julian Assange in Rolling Stone, and it's a great read.

It's also long; abstracting and commenting on its twists and angles would make a very complicated post. So maybe it's best just to bring it to your attention and let you have at. I may come back to it later, picking at the bits.

Here's the start, a terrific piece of writing in its own right. Note the visuals, note the conclusion (sorry, my asterisk):

It's a few days before Christmas, and Julian Assange has just finished moving to a new hide-out deep in the English countryside. The two-bedroom house, on loan from a WikiLeaks supporter, is comfortable enough, with a big stone fireplace and a porch out back, but it's not as grand as the country estate where he spent the past 363 days under house arrest, waiting for a British court to decide whether he will be extradited to Sweden to face allegations that he sexually molested two women he was briefly involved with in August 2010.

Assange sits on a tattered couch, wearing a wool sweater, dark pants and an electronic manacle around his right ankle, visible only when he crosses his legs. At 40, the WikiLeaks founder comes across more like an embattled rebel commander than a hacker or journalist. He's become better at handling the media – more willing to answer questions than he used to be, less likely to storm off during interviews – but the protracted legal battle has left him isolated, broke and vulnerable. Assange recently spoke to someone he calls a Western "intelligence source," and he asked the official about his fate. Will he ever be a free man again, allowed to return to his native Australia, to come and go as he pleases? "He told me I was f*cked," Assange says.

I've been calling Assange a classic case of "stain on the pavement" material. But maybe they've gotten more sophisticated — death-by-miserable-life, a fate Assange may well share with Bradley Manning. After all, it saves on all that "pressure-washing the concrete" money, and it's more fun for the torturer if the victim lingers, broken.

Anyway, please go read. It's engrossing and thought-provoking. This fight will not get less messy — it's widening as we speak.

GP Read the rest of this post...

The story behind SOPA–PIPA is campaign money and lots of it

The story behind the SOPA–PIPA story is Money, lots and lots of it.

Digby linked to this article earlier this week, but I wanted to dig into one of the side pockets of this reporting.

We know that lobbying involves money; we lose track of just how much. And when the amount is really really large, so is the effect. The SOPA–PIPA story gives us a window into just how much movie & recording industry money is involved, and what that money actually buys.

Digby pulled out this quote from the article (my emphasis):

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), the chair of the powerful House budget committee announced on January 9 that he would oppose the bill (after taking nearly $300,000 from pro-SOPA donors).

I may be wrong, but $300,000 seems a very large amount for a House candidate, who only has to carpet-bomb his district (not the whole state) in case of a challenge. OpenSecrets:

The cost of winning a seat in Congress [is] more than $1 million in the House[.]

For example, the most money raised so far in this year's Oregon races is $1 million by Republican Greg Walden, who has a literally no-money challenger. (Sounds like "walking around money" to my cynical ear). The heated race to replace David Wu (OR-1) has Bonamici and Cornilles each raising about $500,000 to date. Paul Ryan raised two-thirds of that amount from one industry — entertainment & digital property-rights barons.

Back to the Mother Jones article. It starts (again, my emphasis and some reparagraphing):

Only two American industries have ever had the clout in Washington to force Congress to ban Wall Street from trading futures on their products. The first was onions—futures trading in no one's favorite root vegetable was banned in the 1950s[.] ...

The other ban is more recent: In 2010, at the urging of the Motion Picture Association of America [MPAA], one of Capitol Hill's most powerful lobbies, Congress banned movie futures as part of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill. The big studios took on Wall Street—which isn't known for losing lobbying fights—and won.

So this month, when all the big entertainment companies joined forces with Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform and the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation's foremost big business lobby, to fight for sweeping anti-piracy legislation, it was almost a foregone conclusion that they would get what they wanted.

Think for a minute about Paul Ryan's $300,000 (one House district, though Ryan's a favorite with Thank You Street), then consider how much "walking around money" got spread around the whole of Congress by just these three:

        ■ MPAA, representing all Hollywood
        ■ Norquist's main anti-tax shop
        ■ The "U.S." Chamber of Commerce

About just the MPAA:

Movies, music, and publications are among America's most valuable exports—more than $30 billion in 2007—and the industry has a lot of pull in Congress.

"A lot of pull" means a lot of bought votes. The MPAA could give $1 million to each member of Congress and not break 2% of that $30 billion yearly total.

More (again, much reparagraphing):

Nearly half the Senate, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), signed on to the Senate version. In the House, 32 representatives from both parties—including Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), the fourth-ranking House Democrat, and Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the chairman of the powerful judiciary committee—backed the entertainment industry's proposal.

(You can see supporters and opponents of the bills over at ProPublica's website.)

Maplight.org found that since the beginning of the 2010 election cycle, SOPA's 32 sponsors took in nearly four times as much in campaign contributions from the entertainment industry than from the software and Internet industries (nearly $2 million versus a little over $500,000).

That "supporters and opponents" link is an eye-opener. The article also implies that "Silicon Valley" (code for high tech generally) is about to up its "sell".

As the rest of the article shows, this is not about the open Internet vs. property principles. This is about two high-dollar top-of-food-chain predators, dueling industries — "Silicon Valley" & "Hollywood" — duking it out to protect their big-river revenue streams. Issues-shmissues, just show them the bucks.

(Doubt me? An experiment: Forget what business Google is in, then ask yourself — Would Google protect the Internet if destroying it — just a little — would double its profit?)

I'll leave you with one thought. There are two ways to see Al Franken's cosponsorship of PIPA. One is that he's ex-Hollywood, so by supporting PIPA he's just loyally voting his roots; all that MPAA money is just a happy by-product.

The other is this — all that PIPA money is necessary for a Senate candidate who has to fund a state-wide re-election fight; and this "Hollywood roots" stuff is just the cover story — the smoke screen that confuses his base, one that might otherwise think he's selling out his supposed "progressive principles" to harvest the bucks.

In the first scenario, Franken's an innocent; Stuart Smalley perhaps. In the second, he's very very smart, and willing to risk the Internet if he thinks his progressive base won't notice.

Which is it? You could call him and ask — 202-224-5641 or 651-221-1016. But whichever explanation is true, I'll bet you hear the same song and dance.

On the other hand, by calling, you could remind him that he's putting his precious Son-of-Wellstone branding at risk. If he loses that, he'll have to get all his funding from his Hollywood friends. Not a good outcome for Mr. Franken, and something to bargain with when his PIPA vote is next up for ... "lobbying."

(I'll save talking about Obama and the White House Dems for another time. Let's just say they're listening to the song of big dollars as well.)

GP Read the rest of this post...

Reuters discovers that Attorney General Holder deeply linked to big banks

Surprise, surprise. Who would have guessed that top Justice Department honchos would show such little interest in prosecuting Wall Street after working for them for years?  It's a lot easier to chase side shows like insider trading cases or chasing file sharing sites. Sure they don't address the real problems of the day, but Washington insiders are too concerned with their own future career paths to really care.

The never-ending, cross-party revolving door in Washington has to stop. They're fleecing America, and care more about themselves than they do the country. Reuters:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department's criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who's Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows. The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington's biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for. Both the Justice Department and Covington declined to say if either official had personally worked on matters for the big mortgage industry clients. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said Holder and Breuer had complied fully with conflict of interest regulations, but she declined to say if they had recused themselves from any matters related to the former clients.

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Romney on the ropes

Not the the kind of headline Romney wants to see:

Then there's this:

Gallup Editor-In-Chief: Romney Support 'Collapsing' Nationally

Gallup’s Editor-in-chief Frank Newport appeared on MSNBC to talk about the polling organization’s national tracking poll of the GOP primary race, which is changing rapidly in the last few days of the campaign for South Carolina. Newport said when their new data comes out at 1 pm eastern, “…we’ll see this gap closing more. Romney was up 23 points over Newt Gingrich. Now it will be down about ten points, so clearly things are collapsing.” (TPM)

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Megaupload didn’t ruin the economy, Wall Street did. One gets shut down, other gets bonuses.

Putting aside whether Megaupload is truly dangerous and a pirate haven or not, it didn't cause the global economic collapse.  Yet it was shut down yesterday, while the barons of Wall Street remain unscathed.

Megaupload had nothing to do with the ugly unemployment numbers that are likely to stick around for years. It had nothing to do with families being thrown out of their homes. It had nothing to do with retirement accounts being slashed in half. It had nothing to do with the rapidly increasing divide between the middle class and the super-rich. It had nothing to do a lousy economy that is going to hang around for many more years. How is it possible that the feds can organize a global program to hunt down the owners of a Web site and shut it down (protecting the 1%) when they can't even be bothered to prosecute Wall Street for ruining the economy (again protecting the 1%)?

Outside of the movie and music industry, few give a damn about Megaupload - but everyone still cares a lot about the crisis that Wall Street brought down on our heads and pocketbooks. We also continue to be upset that Wall Street bonuses - even though they are being reduced - will still be considerably more than most Americans can expect to get for years to come. Even people working in industries with similar experience and backgrounds don't make the crazy money that is still being offered on Wall Street.

How about some real justice for a known problem rather than this side show to make the movie and music industry happy. Read the rest of this post...

How the Iowa GOP continues to help Romney

Any doubt that the fix was in should have vanished when the Iowa GOP which had previously declared a 'victory' for Romney changed its mind yesterday and called a 'split decision' when the count turned up more votes for Santorum. The Santorum camp is not accepting that of course, and has now forced the GOP chair to recognize Santorum as the winner.

Santorum might well have done better in New Hampshire if he had been recognized as the winner in Iowa. The 'mistake' by the state party cost him momentum. The delay in acknowledging the actual count, long after the discrepancy was discovered, allowed Romney to spend the past week collecting contributions on the basis that he is the 'inevitable' nominee being the first GOP candidate to win both Iowa and New Hampshire.

The actual result is still in doubt as the votes from eight precincts have disappeared altogether. That could prove very significant later in the year. Whether or not a fraud is proven, the irregularities are suspicious enough to provide Paul with a pretext for bolting the GOP. Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: The current capital gains tax rate is "a Bush-era innovation"

People talk about the low capital gains tax rate as necessary to "jobs," which blows past (or deliberately obscures) the actual history of that low rate.

The dirty little secret — it wasn't always low, and we did just fine, thanks.

Paul Krugman produces this handy chart from data available from the Tax Policy Center.


Krugman then comments (my emphasis):

The current very low rates didn’t happen until 2003; in fact, long-term capital gains were taxed at close to 30 percent from 1986 through 1997, when Clinton cut a deal with Republicans to get an expanded earned-income tax credit. And dividend income also only started receiving privileged status in 2003.

About that Clinton trade, do you think he got taken?

Krugman closes with the comment in the headline: "It’s not a time-honored principle; it’s a Bush-era innovation". Nothing magic about that 15% rate; the magic is in the bribery (lobbying money) that bought it.

(Arguments for and against preferential tax treatment of capital gains can be found here.)

I'd like to add one more point. Click through to the table this chart comes from. Now take a look at the data itself, especially Part 1, the second column ("Total Realized Capital Gains"). This is the amount, in millions, declared as capital gains on tax returns starting in 1954. The first figure is a little over $7 billion dollars.

Now scan down that column. As you would expect, the numbers increase; this is the big post-war boom after all. Pause at tax year 1986; there's a huge upward spike, then back down. I understand why 1987 would be lower than 1985; I just don't know why 1986 spiked so high.

Keep scanning down, and pause at 1995–1997. Two big jumps, this time permanent. It starts before Clinton brought the rates down (see Column 6 for those rates), but clearly reflects the conversion of much of the income of the very wealthy (the top 0.1%) to capital gains.

Finally, stop at 2007, the year before the 2008 crash. If I read that number right, the total capital gains declared is just shy of $1 trillion. A stunning amount of money, when you consider in how few hands this income is concentrated.

(By the way, note that the effective rate on capital gains in Column 4 is always lower than the maximum rate in Column 6. What the effective rate would be on Romney's entire return is anyone's guess, but I'd start the bidding pretty low, perhaps at zero.)

Offered for your amusement,

GP Read the rest of this post...

Health care costs are eating your pay raise

A fascinating new analysis from RAND Research Highlights, via The Conversable Economist.  Health care costs have increased over the past decade about as much as your pay raises, pretty much eating any increase in income you've had over the years.

"To paint an accurate picture of how health care cost growth is affecting the finances of a typical American family, RAND Health researchers combined data from multiple sources to depict the effects of rising health care costs on a median income married couple with two children covered by employer-sponsored insurance. The analysis compared the family’s health care cost burden in 1999 with that incurred in 2009. The take-away message: Although family income grew throughout the decade, the financial benefits that the family might have realized were largely consumed by health care cost growth, leaving them with only $95 more per month than in 1999. Had health care costs tracked the rise in the Consumer Price Index, rather than outpacing it, an average American family would have had an additional $450 per month—more than $5,000 per year—to spend on other priorities."

Anyone who tells you we have the best health care in the world is lying. We do excel in some things, such as cancer survival rates.  But then again, good luck getting your cancer treatments paid for with an American health care plan that may very well have a lifetime cap that shuts you off if your cancer lasts too long (i.e., if you live too long). Talk about your death panels.

If you have a cadillac plan that covers everything forever, then you're in fine shape. If you're like the rest of us, you're fine if you're healthy, but if you get really sick, and need thousands of dollars a month in medication, for example, good luck.  Oh, the medication is there - best in the world! - you just won't be able to afford it, and your plan won't cover it.  Hell, my insurance only covers $1500 a year in prescriptions - that's $125 a month. And anyone who has to take any prescriptions knows it's pretty easy to chalk up $125 a month and not be very sick at all.

America does have some of the best health care in the world, if you can get it.  And for a lot of us, it's a crap shoot.  So long as we don't get "too" sick, our insurance is fine.  But good luck when your kid has an emergency appendectomy and, like what happened to Joe a few years ago, the hospital charges you $25,000 for what you thought was pretty run of the mill surgery nowadays.  What's your copay: 20%, 40%?  At 20%, you'd owe $5000.  At 40%, you'd owe $10,000.  Do people really have that kind of money nowadays to spend on an unexpected expense?

Best health care in the world.  Unless you get sick.  Then, not so much. Read the rest of this post...

IMF warns on austerity and social consequences

On the heels of Joseph Stiglitz's warning, Christine Lagarde's IMF is now raising similar concerns.

Expressing concern about the weakness of economic activity and rising unemployment, the IMF's Christine Lagarde, the World Bank's Robert Zoellick and the WTO's Pascal Lamy joined the heads of eight other multilateral and regional institutions in calling for policies to create jobs, tackle inequality and green the global economy. "The world faces significant and urgent challenges that weigh heavily on prospects for future growth and on the cohesion of our societies," said the statement by the global issues group of the World Economic Forum. It was published ahead of the forum's annual meeting in Davos next week, amid concerns that 2012 will see the global economy flirt with recession as a result of the eurozone crisis. "Our shared objective is the strengthening of growth, employment and the quality of life in every part of the world," said the statement. "But entering 2012, we worry about: decelerating global growth and rising uncertainty; high unemployment, especially youth unemployment, with all its negative economic and social consequences; potential resort to inward-looking protectionist policies."

Youth unemployment is a major problem during this recession, as some countries (Spain comes to mind immediately) are easily looking at a lost generation. A lot more needs to be done but with social programs being cut to the bone, there's little room for assistance. Read the rest of this post...

UK NHS wait times skyrocket under Conservative rule

Delays have often been one of the criticisms of the British health care system and now they're worse. A lot worse. It's typical lip service by the political class who no doubt don't have any waiting time issues for themselves. It's really the same old problem where the haves continue life without an issue and the others are left to deal with the problems. Yesterday it was reported that the banking elite that was previously require to report earnings at the top, will now get a free pass. Most people can accept differences but when it gets to be so excessive, there's a problem. That's where many of us are today. The Guardian:

Department of Health data confirmed a large increase in the number of patients who have been denied the right to be treated within 18 weeks, which is enshrined in the NHS constitution. In May 2010, the month the government came to power, 20,662 of the patients who received NHS-funded treatment in England had waited more than 18 weeks. In November 2011 that number reached 29,508 – a jump of 42.8%. A rise of 13.9% was recorded in the last year alone, from 25,903 in November 2010 to 29,508 in November 2011. The increases are disclosed in the latest monthly data covering the NHS's Referral to Treatment stipulation that patients should have treatment, which is often surgery, within 18 weeks of being referred by their GP.

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Kodak files for bankruptcy

After missing the digital transition, it's not surprising but still. As someone who grew up with Kodak film, this is a big deal. Everyone that I ever met who worked there loved working there, which is not something you hear every day. It's been a sad decline for a once great company that was greatly mismanaged into irrelevance.

Eastman Kodak Co, which invented the hand-held camera and helped bring the world the first pictures from the moon, has filed for bankruptcy protection, capping a prolonged plunge for one of America's best-known companies. The more than 130-year-old photographic film pioneer, which had tried to restructure to become a seller of consumer products like cameras, said it had also obtained a $950 million, 18-month credit facility from Citigroup to keep it going. The loan and bankruptcy protection from U.S. trade creditors may give Kodak the time it needs to find buyers for some of its 1,100 digital patents, the key to its remaining value, and to reshape its business while continuing to pay its 17,000 workers.

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