In a bizarre move, EPA approves even more ethanol

For starters, it's time the corporate farmers start to become acquainted with capitalism instead of living the good life off of government handouts. Ethanol is a disaster for the environment since it requires more fuel to generate than it produces. Also, looking at the skyrocketing cost of food, this is an even more wasteful way to spend money. The ongoing trend with the Obama administration is to throw a bone here and there to the left and then push the larger pro-corporatist policies. This cynical policy may end up translating into a 2012 victory, but it doesn't change the fact that it's bad policy for the general population.

Nearly two-thirds of cars on the road could have more corn-based ethanol in their fuel tanks under an Environmental Protection Agency decision Friday.

The agency said that 15 percent ethanol blended with gasoline is safe for cars and light-duty trucks manufactured between 2001 and 2006, expanding an October decision that the higher blend is safe for cars built since 2007. The maximum gasoline blend has been 10 percent ethanol.

The fuel is popular in farm country because most ethanol comes from corn and other grains. It faces strong opposition, however, from the auto industry, environmentalists, cattle ranchers, food companies and others. Those groups say that using corn to make ethanol makes animal feed more expensive, raises prices at the grocery store and tears up the land. There have already been several lawsuits filed against the EPA — including one filed by automakers, boat manufacturers and outdoor power equipment manufacturers — since the agency decided to allow the higher blends for newer cars in October.

Read the rest of this post...

Boeing scraps 900 workers in US the day after signing a new deal in China

This is precisely the type of job creation that we have come to expect from corporate America. It's also precisely why these so-called business leaders can't be trusted with any jobs creation in the US. There are too many financial incentives to move jobs offshore so until that issue is resolved we should expect a lot more stories like this.

Boeing just laid off 1000 workers in Southern California, according to the Orange County Register.

The move comes just a day after Boeing agreed to a $19 billion deal with China to produce 200 airplanes for the country.

The layoffs affect workers in the company's Long Beach, Anaheim, and Huntington Beach facilities. The bulk of the layoffs will occur in Long Beach, where 900 will lose their jobs.

Read the rest of this post...

Olbermann: 'I am sure I will be back on the air very soon'

Keith Olbermann, via his Facebook page:

I am sure I will be back on the air very soon, but as I am sure you all have heard by now tonight was my last "Countdown" show.

One hopes. However, given the way these negotiated "going separate ways" agreements are usually written, there's often a non-compete clause in effect for several months at least. So we'll see.

In the meantime, you can sign AMERICAblog's petition "I stand with Keith."

You can also join the Facebook page "Bring Keith Olbermann Back!" which Keith has created.

GP Read the rest of this post...

College professor receives death threats after being attacked relentlessly Glenn Beck

She's the enemy of the Constitution and planning to bring about the collapse of our entire nation, but please don't anyone try to hurt her. Message received.

On his daily radio and television shows, Glenn Beck has elevated once-obscure conservative thinkers onto best-seller lists. Recently, he has elevated a 78-year-old liberal academic to celebrity of a different sort, in a way that some say is endangering her life.

Frances Fox Piven, a City University of New York professor, has been a primary character in Mr. Beck’s warnings about a progressive take-down of America. Ms. Piven, Mr. Beck says, is responsible for a plan to “intentionally collapse our economic system.”

Her name has become a kind of shorthand for “enemy” on Mr. Beck’s Fox News Channel program, which is watched by more than 2 million people, and on one of his Web sites, The Blaze. This week, Mr. Beck suggested on television that she was an enemy of the Constitution.

Never mind that Ms. Piven’s radical plan to help poor people was published 45 years ago, when Mr. Beck was a toddler. Anonymous visitors to his Web site have called for her death, and some, she said, have contacted her directly via e-mail.

Read the rest of this post...

A couple of comments on Keith Olbermann

I've spent the morning assembling takes on the sudden exit of Keith Olbermann from his signature Countdown show, and Lawrence O'Donnell's coincident ascendancy (I said he was "the future of MSNBC"; sorry to be right).

Click here to see Keith's farewell, and here to sign AMERICAblog's petition "standing with Keith."

There are obvious congruences — Comcast moves in (takes over) on Monday; Olbermann is gone the Friday before. But we need to be careful; this is clearly a negotiated deal and not a firing. So I've collected a few comments from just a few sources, to illustrate and tease out these disparate threads.

First, from a Daily Kos diarist who says he practices plaintiff-side employment law in California.

Keith Olbermann was not "axed." (You can say that of Countdown, though.) His departure from MSNBC was apparently negotiated this week. His attorneys and NBC's attorneys negotiated a settlement agreement, probably a buyout of his contract. That doesn't mean that Keith wanted it; it does mean that he reconciled himself to it. If NBC wanted to breach his contract and fire him without cause, they would owe him a bundle. Instead, they negotiated an end to it -- and probably they paid dearly for aspects of it. We should respect that. I strongly suspect that, unless they have pictures of him committing horrifying acts with a goat, Keith considers the deal to have been worth it.

Here's what happens: a company has a contract with someone and they no longer want that person. They can't fire him for cause. So, instead, they negotiate a payoff -- one for which his attorneys will presumably get a cut, so it may be that much higher. They also make it dependent on certain agreements. Those agreements may make it hard for us to get the truth -- and may make it impossible for Keith to tell us the truth, so there's no point in pressuring him to do so.

These agreements will often have clauses involving "trade secrets," "non-disparagement," "waivers," and "confidentiality," among many others. (In California, a non-compete agreement would be unenforceable as against public policy, although I'm not an entertainment industry lawyer and I don't doubt that they might have figured out some workaround. I am ... a member of the New York bar, but didn't practice employment law there, so I don't know what the relevant law would be.) [Update: but ademfladem apparently does know.]

He then discusses the implications of those four parameters — trade secrets, non-disparagement, waivers, and confidentiality — in a case like Olbermann's. The whole thread contains interesting additions, and the link to diarist "fladem" at the end of the above quote contains additional information regarding New York.

It appears that Keith most likely negotiated his exit at the highest price he could extract, knowing that he'd have to give up (1) revealing trade secrets (for example, what he might know as an insider about the Comcast deal); (2) disparagement, meaning neither side can say bad things about the other; and (3) the terms or circumstances of the deal they struck (all the goodies the supermarket tabloids would love to get their hands on).

It may just be that we'll never know if the obvious is also true.

I also want to excerpt Juan Cole's take, since he says best what most are, or should be, thinking:

Whether Comcast is the villain of the piece directly, things like the Comcast merger with MSNBC are responsible for there being very few voices on American television (and despite the proliferation of channels) like Olbermann’s. And for there being relatively little news on the “news” programs. Time Warner, General Electric and Comcast (partners in NBC), Viacom, Disney, and Ruper[t] Murdoch’s Newscorp own almost all television news. In other words, six big corporations determine what you will hear about the world if you get your news from television. There are fewer and fewer t.v. news outlets that do not belong to one of these six, a process called media consolidation [pdf].

For reasons of profit-seeking, when Disney acquired ABC, it looted the company’s news divisions. Profits are not to be had in hard news, but rather in tabloid news. It used to be that human interest stories would be ‘des[s]ert,’ but they have become the main meal.

Ironically, former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw was one of Olbermann’s biggest critics, afraid that the latter’s flamboyant and polarizing style would tarnish the reputation of regular NBC newsmen for objectivity.

What Brokaw seems not to have noticed is that NBC and MSNBC did, like most television news, a miserable job of covering the Iraq issue in 2002-2003–mainly buying White House propaganda. The powerful bias toward the point of view of the rich and powerful and well-connected in Washington demonstrated by all the major tv news outlets in 2002-2003 makes Olbermann look like a staid centrist. ... We’ll miss Keith. But it isn’t about him. It is about the ever-narrowing character of public comment in the US, about the few having most of everything. It is about media consolidation.

And a semi-final note from me: it feels like the lights are going out, all over the world (so to speak).

My final note? I think we need to take a very close look at, and an exegesis if you will, of the Thurber story Keith read as his last MSNBC act. Its title — "The Scotty Who Knew Too Much".

All for now.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Paris cabbie returns lost bag to traveler from Oregon

You don't hear stories like this every day. For travelers, it's not a bad idea to include a locked photo with contact details inside the camera or phone.

First, Lucas picked up the bag from the cab driver's daughter. Lucas then traveled to her parents' home in Pace, a small town in eastern France, and handed the bundle off to an American friend, Molly Bloom, whom she had met while attending Lincoln Elementary School in 1991. Bloom was in town for the holidays to visit her brother John, who teaches in a school near Pace. The Bloom family stopped by to visit with the Lucas family.

Agreeing to shepherd the bag back to the states, Bloom tucked it into her luggage and returned to her home in Petaluma, Calif., where she mailed the bag to the Smileys. The package arrived on Jan. 10 as the Smileys were getting ready to watch Oregon play Auburn in the national championship game.

The contents were intact. Richard inspected the camera and noticed that someone had switched the camera's digital language function to French. And there was a surprise.

"There was an extra photo. It showed the taxi driver, Althony LaLanne, in the living room of his home in Paris," Richard said. "What joy. But, even greater is the honesty and extraordinary effort that was taken to return these belongings to us."

Read the rest of this post...

Duvalier: I'm here to help

Uh huh. Because he was always so generous and helpful in the past.

Former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier ended his silence, telling Haitians he returned after 25 years in exile because he wanted to participate in the reconstruction of the earthquake-shattered country.

The 59-year-old ex-strongman, speaking in a faint voice in his first public comments since arriving in Haiti on Sunday, told Haitians and reporters that he was ready to face "persecution" and had timed his return to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake.

"When I made the decision to come back to Haiti to commemorate this sad anniversary with you, in our country, I was ready for any kind of persecution," Duvalier said Friday. "But I believe that the desire to participate by your side in this collaboration for the national reconstruction far outweighs any harassment I could face."

Read the rest of this post...

Coltrane - Giant Steps

After weeks of unusually warm weather, it's cooled down a bit over here but only to the the usual January temperatures. As I look at the weather in the northeastern US, I see that it can always get worse. Much worse.

We're hosting a dinner this evening to celebrate the 87th birthday of a neighbor. A bunch of friends from the building plus friends from Halifax, Canada will be here. The Canadians bought lobsters for the dinner and we have our friends wine from the Mâconnais. Eating lobster is not very typical over here because Brittany lobster is outrageously expensive. The Canadian or Maine lobsters are pricey but not that bad, but they're still relatively new to the market so they're not much of a tradition. Of course, growing up in Maryland and Pennsylvania, lobsters weren't much of a tradition either. I don't think I ever tasted lobster until I was in university and working at a restaurant. Read the rest of this post...

Not all political prisoners released in Tunisia

Despite the earlier claims by the government, it has not yet happened. A new report claims there are hundreds of prisoners, including some who may have been subjected to torture. The Guardian:

The new Tunisian government is still holding between 500 and 1,000 prisoners accused of often vaguely worded terrorism offences, despite a promise to release all political detainees.

While hundreds of prisoners of conscience have already been released since the fall of the government of the dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali last week, concern is mounting over the uncertain fate of a second group convicted under draconian anti-terror laws.

According to those familiar with their cases many were tried under deeply flawed legal procedures or had confessions tortured out of them, often after being targeted for their religious beliefs.

Read the rest of this post...