ADP predicts 206,000 private sector jobs in October

If the numbers are in this range in the official report, it will be encouraging news. Not fantastic, but not bad either.

Private employers added 206,000 jobs in November, according to a new report released Wednesday from payrolls processor ADP.

The monthly number was better than expected. Analysts had expected a smaller gain in November. October’s monthly gain in private-sector hiring was revised up to 130,000 from a previously reported gain of 110,000.

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Vigilante Gardener, the story of an illegal garden in Brooklyn

Wonderfully adorable story of a guy in Brooklyn who decides to create a garden in front of someone else's parking lot.  He does two videos, watch them both - they're short, and just wonderful.  They're also really well done.  Go over and watch them now, trust me, you won't be sorry. Read the rest of this post...

Texas 'medical clinic' tries to intimidate schoolboy, loses

The Guardian reports that a Texas clinic peddling a 'cancer treatment' has still not got the hang of this Internet PR thing. The intimidation tactics they used against a schoolboy, who wrote bad things about them on his blog, included legal threats, threats to contact his school and sending him a picture of his house.

Rhys Morgan, a 17 year-old Welsh schoolboy published a damning blog post on the Burzynski Clinic in August, pointing out that the 'treatment' offered by the clinic had been in clinical trials since the 1990s and, he said, had not been shown to be effective. A 1994 court judgement against Dr Burzynski linked in the post had found that he had defrauded a health insurer by failing to disclose that his treatment had previously been found to be unlawful.

The attempts stopped when Morgan published the full correspondence on his blog. Burzynski now claims that the emails were sent by an outside Web consultant, though they clearly purport to be an official communication from the firm.

How not to handle your own bad PR. Read the rest of this post...

Foreclosure fraud whistleblower found dead

Jeez. I saw the headline and thought, "Gotta stop taking those private planes."

MSNBC (my emphasis):

A notary public who signed tens of thousands of false documents in a massive foreclosure scam before blowing the whistle on the scandal has been found dead in her Las Vegas home.

NBC station KSNV of Las Vegas reported that the woman, Tracy Lawrence, 43, was scheduled to be sentenced Monday morning after she pleaded guilty this month to notarizing the signature of an individual not in her presence. She failed to show up for her hearing, and police found her body at her home later in the day.

It could not immediately be determined whether Lawrence, who faced up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,000, died of suicide or of natural causes, KSNV reported. Detectives said they had ruled out homicide.

You don't know until you know. But I spend part of my day with fictional characters, and this sounds like one of them, the one who's a stain on the pavement in Chapter 2. Because as a cause of suicide, one year in jail and a $2000 fine makes my personal Poirot say, "Hmm."

Here's what the whistleblower did. She:

blew the whistle on the operation, in which title officers Gary Trafford, 49, of Irvine, Calif., and Geraldine Sheppard, 62, of Santa Ana, Calif. — who worked for a Florida processing company used by most major banks to process repossessions — allegedly forged signatures on tens of thousands of default notices from 2005 to 2008 ... Trafford and Sheppard were charged two weeks ago with 606 counts [emphasis added].

Nevada is ground zero for prosecutions like this, thanks to AG Catherine Masto. Convictions there push precedent forward and make it harder for other states to ignore prosecutable crimes, especially the face of public (and Occupy) pressure. As Matt Stoller wrote, robo-signing is "criminal theft of private property by mortgage servicers".

Did I mention 606 counts? Two people? One case? It's a "target-rich environment" as us former would-be Marines used to say.

Unless, of course, someone finds a way to make other whistleblowers think twice. Hmm.

I can't begin to wait to see how this plays out.

GP Read the rest of this post...

The changing Republican primary landscape

Over at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right's Field, I have a post looking at the shifting narrative in the Republican presidential primary race. Mitt Romney has been running on a platform of inevitability, but he hasn't exceeded the 20s in the polls. We've seen a few different Not Mitt candidates surge, but now Gingrich is in the lead. With the Newt surge coming so close to the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, will Romney be able to hold on when the biggest argument his campaign is using is that he's the guy to beat? Read the rest of this post...

Republicans sign on to payroll tax cut extension, or so it seems

Let's wait and see what their proposal is for funding the extension, then we'll talk about how they've seen the light.  I will say that this is one more sign of the GOP starting to get worried about next year's election, and their sinking image in the polls. Read the rest of this post...

Video: Table resonates, makes pretty colored sand

This is very cool.  Take a break, check it out. Read the rest of this post...

NBC Universal threatens suppliers to support SOPA/PIPA, or else

I love the smell of fake grassroots movements burning in the morning. Microsoft has done the right thing and is backing away from SOPA/PIPA and hopefully some of the other big players out there will do the same. It might come as a surprise to the 1%, but the world doesn't exist for them alone. TechDirt:

Either way, it seemed somewhat amusing to discover that some of the top execs at NBC Universal have been threatening all NBC Universal suppliers to sign the letter that CreativeAmerica put together or NBC might no longer be able to do business with them:

We are writing to ask you for help on an issue that is one our top business priorities – content theft on the Internet, which is a major threat to the strength of our business. Our major guilds and unions are joining us in the fight to keep our businesses strong so that the tidal wave of content theft does not kill jobs. But if the current trend continues, it’s not too strong to say that this threat could adversely affect our business relationship with you.

Read the rest of this post...

Should extreme Photoshopping be exposed?

So many advertising photos these days are beyond belief fake it's not even funny. How is it that a 60 year old person has the face of a 20 year old, with not a wrinkle to be found? The entire practice is no more fair than it is realistic. Touching up photos is one thing, but creating impossible perfection is another. Thanks to come cool new software, the lies are about to be exposed.

...Computer image specialists Hany Farid and Eric Kee at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, US, have come up with a technique that measures how much a digital picture has been manipulated. It ignores trivial tweaks that improve the picture quality and focuses on changes that most alter a person's appearance.

The list of changes that are commonly made to photos in magazines and adverts is long. Picture editors airbrush out the darkness under people's eyes, the crow's feet, the wrinkles on the forehead, sagging skin on the neck, freckles, blemishes, and unsightly hairs. They remove folds of skin and body fat, elongate the neck and enlarge the eyes, or even move them slightly.

"Retouching is becoming more extreme," says Farid. "They are no longer making perfect skin, they are making impossible human beings. They are moving us, slowly and surely, in the direction of an over-idealised notion of beauty."

Click through here for a few before/after examples. Read the rest of this post...

PIPA, the kill-the-Internet bill, is close to a vote in the House & Senate

There are two immediate legislative threats, one coming this week, the other soon afterward.

The first is the provision that freedom-loving militarists put into the National Defense Authorization act that allows the military to detain anyone, even U.S. citizens, for indefinite periods, no matter where they are found. The Udall Amendment, removing that provision, went down to defeat as I write. (I'll have more on that later.)

The second legislative threat is the Protect IP Act (called "PIPA" by its friends, who are legion; and "kill-the-Internet," also by its friends, but way behind your back).

Here's no less than Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos founder, on PIPA:

Congress is close to destroying the internet (no hyperbole)

Big Pharma and the recording and movie industries are on the verge of passing a bill that could very well destroy the social web, including Daily Kos.

This is no hyperbole. Watch the video ... [PIPA] is literally an existentialist threat for Daily Kos and any other site with user-generated content, from Facebook, to Reddit, to tumblr, Sound Cloud or YouTube.

This is the holy grail of the entertainment industry—to destroy the internet, and thus, destroy the biggest danger to their business.

And here's the video that Markos referred to.

(Note: SOPA is the House version of the bill. They're not identical; the House version makes the Senate version look almost reasonable — by design I suspect, since the same greedy billionaires are financing both.)



Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is a hero in this fight. He seems to know that as a senator, he actually has power, and is using it (emphasis mainly mine):

Democratic Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy is inexplicably leading the charge in the Senate with the Protect IP Act [PIPA]. Republican Texas Rep. Lamar Smith is leading the companion bill in the House with the Stop Online Piracy Act [SOPA]. This bill would've been rushed through with no debate through both chambers had it not been for the singular efforts of Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a true hero of grassroots media and the social web.

Wyden has put a hold on the bill in the Senate, and has promised a full filibuster. Currently, there appear to be 60 votes to overcome that filibuster, but the delaying tactics would tie up the Senate for a full week. And if it doesn't pass this year, supporters have to start from scratch all over again next year—this time under the full glare of a spotlight.

Wyden is now being joined with Sens. Maria Cantwell of Washington, Jerry Moran of Kansas (he's a senator that exists) and Rand Paul of Kentucky (even a stopped clock ...).

As if this weren't a shock enough, here's a list of PIPA's co-sponsors. John McCain and Joe Lieberman are joined by these supposed friends of freedom:

Sen Brown, Sherrod [OH] - (202) 224-2315 [corrected]
Sen Franken, Al [D-MN] - (202) 224-5641
Sen Gillibrand, Kirsten E. [D-NY] - (202) 224-4451
Sen Klobuchar, Amy [D-MN] - (202) 224-3244
Sen Whitehouse, Sheldon [D-RI] - (202) 224-2921

Those are sponsors! Your "liberal" Democrats in action. (At what point are you tempted never to vote for a Democrat again? Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves.)

ACTION OPPORTUNITY — Call your senators and ask them to support Ron Wyden's filibuster of PIPA, the kill-the-Internet act.

If you've given money to people like Al Franken, be sure to let him know your thoughts (polite but direct; remember, money talks louder than swear words with some people).

You can say Thanks to Sen. Wyden here: (202) 224-5244 or (503) 326-7525.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Police investigating whether Murdoch’s newspaper spied on UK government ministers, intelligence agents

UK Guardian:

The former Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain has been told by the Metropolitan police that they are investigating evidence that his computer, and those of senior Northern Ireland civil servants and intelligence agents, may have been hacked by private detectives working for News International.

If true, would this not count as espionage?

NOTE FROM JOHN: If all of these allegations are true, we're talking espionage on a massive scale.  It would be difficult to believe that the top brass at the paper did not know that this was going on - someone must have been coordinating this extensive a spy network (again, if these charges prove true).  I'm still amazed that the US press isn't covering this story more attentively, as this has tentacles potentially reaching Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, both Murdoch properties. Read the rest of this post...

Pew: Tea Party seriously not liked, even in Tea Party run congressional districts

This is interesting news, and could be a bell-wether for the next election. From Pew:

Since the 2010 midterm elections, the Tea Party has not only lost support nationwide, but also in the congressional districts represented by members of the House Tea Party Caucus. And this year, the image of the Republican Party has declined even more sharply in these GOP-controlled districts than across the country at large.

In the latest Pew Research Center survey, conducted Nov. 9-14, more Americans say they disagree (27%) than agree (20%) with the Tea Party movement. A year ago, in the wake of the sweeping GOP gains in the midterm elections, the balance of opinion was just the opposite: 27% agreed and 22% disagreed with the Tea Party. At both points, more than half offered no opinion.

Throughout the 2010 election cycle, agreement with the Tea Party far outweighed disagreement in the 60 House districts represented by members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus. But as is the case nationwide, support has decreased significantly over the past year; now about as many people living in Tea Party districts disagree (23%) as agree (25%) with the Tea Party.

Check out the rest of the polling. The Republicans are plummeting nationally, while Dems are holding their own. Even in Tea Party districts, voters now rate Ds and Rs equally in terms of favorability. No wonder Boehner and Cantor pretty much shut up two months ago, you never hear from them anymore. They must have seen similar numbers privately, and realized that if they kept doing what they were doing, the end was nigh. Read the rest of this post...

EU eyes IMF assistance

Not good, but there aren't many (if any) good options left at this point. The EU's attempt to fund the mega-bailout was less well received than expected and it's not like the US can do more than the billions already lent out to EU banks during the US bailout.

Euro zone ministers agreed to ramp up the firepower of their rescue fund, but couldn't say by how much, and may turn to the IMF for more help as a stunning leap in Italy's borrowing costs pushed the region closer to financial disaster.

Two years into Europe's sovereign debt crisis, investors are fleeing the euro zone bond market, European banks are dumping government debt, south European banks are bleeding deposits and a recession looms, fuelling doubts about the survival of the single currency.

"The situation in Europe and the world has significantly worsened over the past few weeks. Market stress has intensified," said Christian Noyer, France's central bank governor and a governing council member of the European Central Bank.

It would be interesting to hear what the architects of the current EU think about their plan now. The entire process always struck me as rushed, with too many corners being cut. The political class of a certain generation always wanted as their crowning achievement, facts be damned. So far they've all received a free pass but it's about time they're held accountable for this mess. Read the rest of this post...

Tories go full Teabagger on public sector

Surprise, surprise. Guess who is going to be blamed and pay the price for the Conservative mismanagement of the British economy? Funny how this is only now emerging after most economists ripped the austerity plan from the beginning. At least this kind of stupidity has triggered voter backlash in the US, so we can only hope for the same in the UK. The Guardian:

George Osborne has told public sector workers and the low paid that they will be the ones to pick up the bill for his attempts to kickstart Britain's stagnant economy, and warned that weaker growth and higher borrowing would force the country to endure a record breaking six years of austerity.

On the eve of tomorrow's planned strike action over pensions, the chancellor imposed a fresh public-sector pay freeze and cut financial help to the lowest paid workers in order to pay for extra spending on schools, youth unemployment, house building and infrastructure spending.

Osborne travelled to Brussels for emergency talks tonight with fellow European finance ministers immediately after delivering his autumn statement and admitted that failure to resolve the crisis in the eurozone would tip an already fragile UK economy into a double-dip recession.

One would hope that the Republicans in the US would see how poorly austerity has worked in the UK, but of course, since they don't read or bother to pay attention to anything beyond their little world, they probably won't get it. Read the rest of this post...

Cops reportedly moving in on OccupyPhilly and OccupyLA at this moment

Per Twitter, the police are moving in on OccupyPhilly at this moment. A dispersal order has been given, which is usually what precedes an over the top unnecessarily violent response from the police, if history is any judge.

According to Reuters, a police raid in OccupyLA is imminent as well.

In related news, there was a protest of sorts against NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's talk he gave at Mayor Dinkins class at Columbia. Apparently the Columbia students sided with Kelly, good little 1% aspirants that they apparently are. Sad. Read the rest of this post...