Rocket fuel in baby formula?

Houston we have a problem. There are so many problems with the food source today after years of industry self regulation. Industry never regulated or if they did, they never thought it was important enough to tell anyone except after it was much too late. Profits (in the short run) were always more important than human safety. Food safety is not a Democratic or Republican issue, but a human issue. When rocket fuel chemicals are finding their way into baby formula it impacts everyone.

Traces of a chemical used in rocket fuel were found in samples of powdered baby formula, and could exceed what's considered a safe dose for adults if mixed with water also contaminated with the ingredient, a government study has found.

The study by scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked for the chemical, perchlorate, in different brands of powdered baby formula. It was published last month, but the Environmental Working Group issued a press release Thursday drawing attention to it.

The chemical has turned up in several cities' drinking water supplies. It can occur naturally, but most perchlorate contamination has been tied to defense and aerospace sites.

The scientists involved in the study go on to say that the purpose of the study was not to determine the health issues of perchlorate, though it's not considered to be healthy for humans. Read the rest of this post...

Just watched snippets of Obama at the town hall in Strasbourg...

Amazing. Not simply because he's intelligent and coherent, unlike Bush. But he was actually interesting and engaging. He also had the European crowd eating out of his hand. For all the mockery the Republicans made of the fact that the world loves Obama, he's now our president, and his celebrity status is one hell of an asset on the world stage. America is back. Read the rest of this post...

Unfavorable view of Bush and Cheney still pervasive -- as it should be

Yep, most Americans still can't stand them:

Neither George W. Bush's deliberate silence about the Obama administration nor Dick Cheney's ready criticism of it appear to have altered U.S. public perceptions about either man. The former president and former vice president are each viewed unfavorably by 63% of Americans, very similar to where they stood with the public in their final White House years.

Considering how much damage those two did to America, it's amazing that anyone still likes them. But, big surprise, it's the Republicans who are still on board. According to Gallup, 72 percent of Republicans still have a favorable view of Bush while 64% still support Cheney. Idiots.
Read the rest of this post...

Interesting interview with our new UN ambassador, Susan Rice

Just read Ben's piece, it's really interesting. She sounds like quite the character. Strong. No bull.

On walking and chewing gum at the same time:

"The whole point is we need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. We don't have the luxury of viewing every issue, every country, every challenge in black and white terms. That was, in my opinion, part of the fallacy of the Bush Administration," she said. "But there are ways and means of accomplishing that. It's not always in every instance most productive to do it on a huge stage beating a drum - sometimes it is."

On Bolton:

Rice said she's setting into the Ambassador's traditional routine of high-gloss - but also very practical - dinners at the residences of other Security Council members and dignitaries. The Ambassador is sometimes a bit of a New York society figure, and Rice places herself somewhere between former Ambassadors Richard Holbrooke, a prince of the dinner party circuit, and the U.N. critic John Bolton, who turned in early and spent as little time as possible in New York.

"On the glitz glam spectrum, I'm not at the Holbrooke end," she said, "and I don't put myself on anything with John Bolton."

On UN reform and the Bush administration:

Rice also said she would continue to work on a favored Bush Administration cause, improving the function of the United Nations, though perhaps in a different spirit.

"They didn't invent U.N. reform - they gave it a bad name, but they didn't invent it," Rice said of her predecessors. "This is an institution that, despite its evident flaws, we are much better off having function effectively."

Love. Her. Read the rest of this post...

Overreacting

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Another GOPer disses Limbaugh

They love him, they hate him. Actually, they love him - but they realize that everyone else hates him, so they're pretending he's not the intellectual leader of the entire party. Even though he is.

From Plum Line:

Uh oh — looks like another Republican may be forced to go on the Limbaugh Death March.

In comments that passed unnoticed, Rep Zach Wamp of Tennessee, who’s running for Governor, blasted Rush Limbaugh twice on CNN as a mere “entertainer,” and suggested that rather than listen to Rush, we should listen to “serious” people on how solve our economic crisis.

RNC chair Michael Steele, you’ll recall, was forced to offer an abject apology for similar comments.

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Robert Reich: It's a Depression, and we need more stimulus money

In case Krugman wasn't depressing enough... From Reich's blog:

All this means that the real economy will need a larger stimulus than the $787 billion already enacted. To be sure, only a small fraction of the $787 billion has been turned into new jobs so far. The money is still moving out the door. But today's bleak jobs report shows that the economy is so far below its productive capacity that much more money will be needed.

This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government spending on a very large scale. We should stop worrying about Wall Street. Worry about American workers. Use money to build up Main Street, and the future capacities of our workforce.

Energy independence and a non-carbon economy should be the equivalent of a war mobilization. Hire Americans to weatherize and insulate homes across the land. Don't encourage General Motors or any other auto company to shrink. Use the auto makers' spare capacity to make busses, new wind turbines, and electric cars (why let the Chinese best us on this?). Enlarge public transit systems.

Meanwhile, extend our educational infrastructure. So many young people are out of work that they should be using this time to improve their skills and capacities. Expand community colleges. Enlarge Pell Grants. Extend job-training opportunities to the unemployed, so they can learn new skills while they're collecting unemployment benefits.

Finally, accelerate universal health care.

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Someone needs to stop this

Let them stay or let them go but enough with these retention bonuses for failed businesses who are living on government handouts.

Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac expect to pay about $210 million in retention bonuses to 7,600 employees over a year and a half, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The top retention bonus for any individual executive under the plan will total $1.5 million during the 18 months ending in early 2010, according to the report, which cited a letter from the mortgage firms' regulator.

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Joint statement from the Iowa legislative leadership on today's same-gender marriage decision

Wow. Apparently all Dems are NOT spineless wonders.

News Release
For Immediate Release: April 3, 2008
Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal
House Speaker Pat Murphy

Iowa continues to be a leader in guaranteeing civil rights

This is a joint statement from Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal and Iowa House Speaker Pat Murphy on today's Supreme Court decision:

"Thanks to today's decision, Iowa continues to be a leader in guaranteeing all of our citizens' equal rights.

"The court has ruled today that when two Iowans promise to share their lives together, state law will respect that commitment, regardless of whether the couple is gay or straight.

"When all is said and done, we believe the only lasting question about today's events will be why it took us so long. It is a tough question to answer because treating everyone fairly is really a matter of Iowa common sense and Iowa common decency.

"Today, the Iowa Supreme Court has reaffirmed those Iowa values by ruling that gay and lesbian Iowans have all the same rights and responsibilities of citizenship as any other Iowan.

"Iowa has always been a leader in the area of civil rights.

"In 1839, the Iowa Supreme Court rejected slavery in a decision that found that a slave named Ralph became free when he stepped on Iowa soil, 26 years before the end of the Civil War decided the issue.

"In 1868, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated "separate but equal" schools had no place in Iowa, 85 years before the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same decision.

"In 1873, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled against racial discrimination in public accommodations, 91 years before the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same decision.

"In 1869, Iowa became the first state in the union to admit women to the practice of law.

"In the case of recognizing loving relationships between two adults, the Iowa Supreme Court is once again taking a leadership position on civil rights.

"Today, we congratulate the thousands of Iowans who now can express their love for each other and have it recognized by our laws."

Read the rest of this post...

FLASHBACK: When Bush massaged Merkel

As a follow-up to my post below, remembering the summit where Bush gave German Chancellor Merkel a rather unwelcome neck massage, a reader reminded me of this archival footage of Merkel's reaction.

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Good summary of Iowa same-gender marriage court decision

Law Dork has a great summary of the unanimous decision, for those who may not wish to read the entire 69 page decision. Read the rest of this post...

Gingrich threatens 3rd party to breakaway from GOP, criticizes Bush & GOP congressional leadership

Politico:

“If the Republicans can’t break out of being the right wing party of big government, then I think you would see a third party movement in 2012,” Gingrich said Wednesday during a speech at the College of the Ozarks in Missouri, the local television station KY3 reported....

“Remember, everything Obama's doing, Bush started last year,” Gingrich said. “If you're going to talk about big spending, the mistakes of the Bush administration last year are fully as bad as the mistakes of Obama's first two, three months.”

Mind you, Obama's "mistake" was passing a stimulus package intended to save the country from an impending depression. Gingrich is as bad, if not worse, than the rest of the Republicans. He is so mired in his own ideological view of the world that facts don't phase him. He probably agrees with the rest of his party, with his ideological leader Rush Limbaugh, with Limbaugh's acolyte Eric Cantor, with John McCain's economic adviser Phil Gramm, that anyone concerned about the economy is just overreacting.

They simply have no new ideas. The reason they talk about Ronald Reagan so much is that the Republican party never moved beyond the 1980s. They have no notion of what it is to be an American in 2009. Nor, seemingly, do they care. Read the rest of this post...

Sarkozy takes slap at Bush

"It feels really good to work with a US president who wants to change the world and who understands the world." - French President Nicolas Sarkozy today. (And you know Merkel is thinking, finally a president who won't have his greasy paws all over me.)

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Obama just said his middle name, Hussein, in Europe

Before a large audience, he just called himself Barack Hussein Obama. Very interesting. He did it while talking about how the change of government, from Bush to Obama, wasn't going to change the fact that we still face a threat from Al Qaeda. I think he did it in order to say that even though we now have a president who even has a muslim middle name, that doesn't mean that the world is going to love us and terrorism will stop. (He also did it, I think, to make the opposite point, more subtly - i.e., my middle name is Hussein, I AM different from the guy who had the job before me.) Very interesting indeed, since the GOP, and the McCain campaign, tried to use Obama's middle name last year to imply that he was a terrorist, a Muslim, or something dark, nefarious and un/anti-American. Read the rest of this post...

Unemployment and education

CNN just posted some fascinating statistics from the Dept of Labor about how the unemployment rate correlates to what education you have. Here are the current unemployment levels for each category of education level achieved:

Some high school: 13.3%
HIgh school grad: 9.0%
Some college 7.2%
Bachelor's degree: 4.3%

Now, statistics are funny things. It's possible that education level is also related to race, or gender, or socio-economic class, and perhaps THAT is the factor affecting employment most. For example, there was an earlier segment on CNN showing that minorities were facing more unemployment than whites.

Asians 6.4%
Whites 7.9%
Hispanics 11.4%
Blacks 13.3%

It's possible that minorities are losing their jobs, or not getting jobs, more often than whites because of prejudice. It's also possible that minorities, on average, have completed less college than whites (because of lots of factors). That means that while the Labor Dept figure appears to suggest you need an education to get or keep your job in today's economy, what it might really be saying is that you need to be white in order to avoid prejudice in the workplace in today's economy (and whites just happen to have gone to more school). I'm not saying this is the case. I'm just saying that we don't really know that the education level is the determining factor in employment figures. But I suspect it certainly has a role.

NB Interestingly, CNN notes that while black unemployment is at 13.3% today, it was over 17% in November of 1983. Read the rest of this post...

Iowa Supreme Court rules in favor of same-sex marriages. Unanimous decision.

Breaking news from Iowa. A huge win for marriage equality:

The Iowa Supreme Court this morning unanimously upheld gays’ right to marry.

“The Iowa statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution,” the justices said in a summary of their decision.

The court affirmed a Polk County District Court decision that would allow six gay couples to marry.

The ruling is viewed as a victory for the gay rights movement in Iowa and elsewhere, and a setback for social conservatives who wanted to protect traditional families.

The decision makes Iowa the first Midwestern state, and the fourth nationwide, to allow same-sex marriages. Lawyers for Lambda Legal, a gay rights group that financed the court battle and represented the couples, had hoped to use a court victory to demonstrate acceptance of same-sex marriage in heartland America.

That noise you hear in the background is heads exploding at Mormon headquarters and the American Family Association. The Mormons are probably already trying to figure out how to overturn it -- and how much it will cost. But, the times are changing -- and changing fast. More and more Americans support marriage equality and it's only going to increase. The haters know that and it's driving them crazy.

Today, in Iowa, equality means equality. Read the rest of this post...

Jobs report - 663,000 losses last month. Unemployment at 8.5%.

This is very close to the forecasted 658,000. Not great, obviously, but not far off what was expected. Before any recovery it's important that the economy becomes more predictable. Reuters:

Employers slashed 663,000 jobs in March, lifting the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent, the highest since 1983, official data showed on Friday in a report underscoring the growing distress in the labor market.

The Labor Department also revised January data to show job losses of 741,000 that month, the biggest decline since October 1949, as the economy battles a recession that has entered its 16th month.

Read the rest of this post...

Friday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Both the House and Senate passed their versions of the budget yesterday. I'll have more on that later. Of course, not one Republican in either body voted for Obama's budget. See, Republicans don't really think we're in a crisis. The GOP is happy with the status quo.

Yesterday, cable news anchors were breathlessly reporting a potential scandal. OMG. Michelle Obama might have touched Mrs. Windsor without permission. Apparently, there's a rule in England about touching their queen. Royals, who are very high paid public servants, don't like to be touched by commoners. I think the penalty involves being strung up in London Tower. This was the one of the biggest non-stories EVER. I had CNN on and watching Wolf Blitzer talk about it was embarrassing. Given all the world's crises, that any reporter put any time into this issue is really an affront. (Even the Washington Post has an article about it today. Idiotic.) The real story is that Michelle is an international sensation. The Brits actually seemed to love her, but how could they not?

Thread the news, please... Read the rest of this post...

CEO pay fell 8.5% last year

Well, fair's fair. They tried really hard, you know. Just because they ushered in a global recession and walked away with riches for years regardless of performance doesn't mean we should ask anything more from them. If we do, they too will probably ask everyone to stop the "public flogging", as we see from RBS. Can't we all just get along?

Median cash salaries and bonuses for chief executives of 200 big U.S. companies fell 8.5 percent in 2008 to $2.24 million, the Wall Street Journal said, citing an analysis prepared for it by Hay Group, a management consulting firm.

Including the value of stock, stock options and other long-term incentives, total direct compensation for the CEOs dropped 3.4 percent to a median of $7.56 million, the paper said.

The decline in total direct compensation was the first in seven years and only the second drop since the Journal began tracking CEO pay in 1989.

And how much did business drop off last year? Read the rest of this post...

Former AIG CEO blames everyone except himself

His media splash is really getting old and he obviously thinks that everyone in the world are fools. Former CEO Hank Greenberg is piling on the blame for the AIG problems to both the management team that took over when he was being charged for criminal activity (the civil cases remain active) as well as the government who he says blew it. Fortunately not everyone in Congress is buying this rubbish and they called him out. Please, please, please send in a competent auditing team to see what kind of deals were done during his tenure and shut him down once and for all. Saying "I don't know" about the tough questions like involvement in Credit Default Swaps is predictable but not going to cut it.

California Rep. Darrell Issa, the committee’s senior Republican, said he doubted Greenberg’s truthfulness given his involvement in numerous lawsuits related to AIG’s failure. And longtime AIG critic Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., rejected Greenberg’s finger-pointing.

“I’m convinced that the systemic problems at AIG go far deeper than mistakes made in the four years since you left the company,” Cummings said.

Still, Greenberg spent much of his testimony criticizing the government’s plan to prop up AIG, calling it “highly controversial and downright puzzling.”

The only thing puzzling is that Congress did not use this as an opportunity to immediately start an investigation into what specifically happened during Greenbergs days at AIG. Anyone who believes AIGs problems only started in the last four years is a fool. Read the rest of this post...

Is Murdoch regretting his $5 billion purchase of the WSJ?

Sounds like it. He initially went into the deal talking about making the WSJ online free but those days are long gone. He continues to charge and now thinks others should charge as well for online news. Somebody sounds a bit nervous about their empire that is struggling thanks to the right wing economics that he helped usher in.

Murdoch, who bought The Wall Street Journal and its parent company Dow Jones & Co in 2007, said online advertising, which most U.S. publishers hope will offset ad revenue declines at their print divisions, will not cover their costs.

"People reading news for free on the Web, that's got to change," said Murdoch speaking at The Cable Show, an annual cable television industry event, in Washington, D.C.

Murdoch pointed to the Journal's main rival in the United States, The New York Times, as an example. The Times has one of the most popular U.S. newspaper websites, but still cannot cover its costs with online ads, he said.

Surely this is a problem for the media everywhere though this will remain a very tough sell. At least Murdoch is thinking about the future and has plans to invest in a portable device for readers to read their online newspapers. There's an idea that will save him and the industry. Read the rest of this post...

House Dems vote to stop “unreasonable or excessive” compensation in taxpayer assisted companies. House GOP votes against corporate accountability.

UPDATE: Senate just passed Obama's budget as well.

This fits in with the ongoing theme that the Republicans just don't get it. They're acting like we're not really in a crisis.

Legislation requiring accountability from taxpayer-supported corporations passed in the House today on a pretty much party line vote. H.R. 1664, the Pay For Performance Act of 2009, is sponsored by two Democratic freshmen, Alan Grayson and Jim Himes. Grayson explained that legislation was based on two simple concepts:

One, no one has the right to get rich off taxpayer money. And, two, no one should get rich off abject failure.

Makes sense. But, apparently, not enough to garner GOP votes. I don't care what excuses Republicans use for voting against this bill. It was their chance to show whose side they are on. Now we know for sure.

More from The Gavel:

By a vote of 247-171, the House passed the Pay for Performance Act this afternoon. This legislation amends the executive compensation provisions of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 to prohibit unreasonable and excessive compensation and compensation not based on performance standards at companies that receive capital infusions from the Treasury. While such a capital investment is outstanding, and regardless of when a compensation payment arrangement was entered into, recipients of a direct capital investment from the Treasury would be prohibited from:

Paying any executive or employee any compensation that is “unreasonable or excessive”

Paying any bonus or other supplemental payment that is not directly based on performance-based standards

Entering into new contracts for compensation that are “unreasonable or excessive or not performance-based

And Republicans couldn't support that? They really do want to give a blank check to their corporate cronies. In GOP world, it's okay to get rich on taxpayer dollars and to profit from failure.

Grayson on the House floor:
Read the rest of this post...