Unemployment rate up in Germany, Italy and EU

The tough times continue in the eurozone, including in the pro-austerity Germany. Italy and Spain are back in recession (along with the UK, who is outside of the eurozone) and the overall unemployment rate is increasing in the eurozone. In addition, Spanish youth unemployment has now crossed over 51%. More on the faltering economies of Europe via the BBC:

For all 17 nations in the eurozone, the jobless rate rose again to 10.9%, from 10.8%, Eurostat said.

And the jobless rate in Germany - the largest and strongest economy in Europe - unexpectedly also increased.

Germany's jobless rate rose to 6.8% in March, official figures showed, having been expected to stay at the previous month's 6.7% after six months of declines.

Read the rest of this post...

UK Border patrol tries to cover up three hour delays at Heathrow

One of the things that used to always irritate me coming into the US was the ridiculous wait to clear immigration before I received a green card. My wife (a US citizen) almost always clears UK customs before our baggage is on the luggage belt.

Seems like things have changed, as the Guardian reports angry travelers waiting hours to pass immigration in the UK:

Passengers flying into the airport at the weekend reported having to wait for up to three hours before clearing passport control. But after leaflets apologising for the problem were handed out by BAA, which owns Heathrow, the UKBA warned that they were "inappropriate" and that ministers would take "a very dim view".

The airport operator was also told to prevent passengers taking pictures in the arrivals hall, according to the Daily Telegraph, which obtained correspondence from Marc Owen, director of UKBA operations at Heathrow. Pictures of lengthy queues have been posted on Twitter by frustrated travelers.

Owen said: "The leaflet … is both inflammatory and likely to increase tensions in arrivals halls especially in the current atmosphere. It is inappropriate in that it is not for you to display how to complain on our behalf. Please refrain from handing out [the leaflets] or I will escalate [the matter] with ministers who are likely to take a very dim view. I know there are copies in the hall and your troops are ready with them."

Owen also requested that BAA stop passengers from taking pictures of the queues and posting them to Twitter. How typical, faced with a problem the response is to try to hide it. What does Owen want BAA to do, post notices telling passengers not to take pictures of the long queues and upload them to Twitter or Facebook?

The minister that Owen believes will take a 'dim view' is Damien Green, in charge of immigration. In 2008 Green was arrested on suspicion of "conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office" after a civil servant in the Home Office leaked some rather trivial government secrets to him. Green was arrested and his office and home searched by counter-terrorism officers. The resulting scandal was far more damaging to the government than any of the official secrets that leaked.

There are many reasons that people go into politics. Covering up for incompetent civil servants after a crisis has become a scandal is not one of them. I suspect that in a very short time we will be hearing that the queues at Heathrow are no longer a problem and Mr Owen is seeking employment elsewhere. Now if only something similar could happen in the US to shame the TSA. Read the rest of this post...

Video: Cute Rube Goldberg device in two suitcase

An odd, and very cute, video.

Read the rest of this post...

Growing brouhaha over departure of Romney's gay foreign policy spokesman

Yesterday we learned that Mitt Romney's openly-gay foreign policy spokesman, Ric Grenell, was stepping down in the face of withering criticism from the religious right.  We also learned that Romney had, oddly, refused to let the spokesman do any work for a good two weeks while the scandal brewed.  Nor did Romney do anything during that time to help shore up his embattled employee who was being attacked simply for his sexual orientation.

Today, former Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer spoke out, publicly questioned why Mitt Romney seemed to have benched his own spokesman in the face of the anti-gay criticism.

I have to give a number of people credit for this story. First off, Greg Sargent at the Washington Post who did a great job getting Fleischer's input, which is important.  Second, Greg's conservative counterpart at the Post, Jennifer Rubin, who also did a great job breaking this story yesterday, and confirming that Romney seemed to be the one caving to the anti-gay pressure.  It's nice to see straight, and/or conservative, bloggers dogging a story important to our community.  (And I even have to give Fleischer credit for taking on the GOP candidate over an apparent anti-gay slight.) Read the rest of this post...

Gingrich campaign $4 million in debt due to bad management

Oh those fiscal conservatives. It's impressive how they know so much about balancing budgets while lecturing others about their crazy spending habits.

Newt Gingrich ends his White House dream today with his political committee facing a mountain of debts -- owing about $4 million to scores of businesses and campaign workers around the country who fear they will never get paid.

Campaign watchdogs said the size of Gingrich's debt is extraordinary -- and could have been avoided if the candidate and his team had been more disciplined.

"He was reckless in running up these bills, especially in the last month or so of the campaign when it was quite clear that Mitt Romney would be the nominee," said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the watchdog group Citizen Union.

This reminds me of an annoying 20-something American traveler that I overheard last week telling someone that she's "um, like a fiscal conservative." Can someone please tell me what that means and who might have ever fit such a description. I always hear that type boast about it but have yet to see it in the real world. After all, the guy who spent the US into recession with his reckless tax cuts and wars was supposed to be a fiscal conservative. Read the rest of this post...

Did the Republicans even want Bin Laden dead?

The current campaign spat over whether Romney would have ordered the raid that killed Bin Laden is based on a series of assumptions that can never be tested. The only facts we can be sure of is that Obama ordered the Pentagon to launch the strike that finally killed bin Laden, his predecessor did not, and Romney said back in 2007 that he would not.

Romney is currently trying to claim that any US President, 'even' Jimmy Carter would have ordered the bin Laden strike (that would be the same President Carter who ordered a risky rescue mission of the embassy hostages in Iran). But here the evidence is against Romney. We have no way of knowing how Romney would have acted in the same circumstances, but we do have Romney's own words in 2007, when he said he criticized then candidate Obama for saying that he would launch a raid into Pakistan to catch bin Laden - Romney said he would not.

John's analysis of the spat seems perfectly fair to me: It is clear that judged by the standards Republicans set for Democrats, Obama deserves the credit for eliminating Bin Laden, who would still be alive if Romney had been president, as Romney made it explicit that he would not go into Pakistan for bin Laden, and that's exactly what Obama did. That is probably the strongest conclusion we will ever be able to draw on the particular question of Bin Laden. But that still leaves open the larger, rather more important question of whether conservatives really want the likes of bin Laden to be eliminated at all, or if they find it rather useful to have a convenient bogeyman around to help buttress their various 'war on terror' proposals.

That Bush and co found Bin Laden useful is beyond dispute. Without 9/11 there could never have been the PATRIOT act, the warrant-less wiretapping, the Gitmo gulag, the torture or the invasion of Iraq. Continuing and extending those policies would only be possible as long as Bin Laden was alive. Whether or not they intended to let Bin Laden escape the Tora Bora it was certainly very, very convenient for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

We don't yet have the evidence to decide whether letting Bin Laden go was intentional but we do now have proof of an earlier and more significant act of conservative treachery and one that shows the true workings of the conservative mind.

In the fall of 2009 the Gorbachev archives accidentally released details of a conversation between Gorbachev and Thatcher that took place two months before the Berlin wall fell. While the provenance of the documents could be debated, the Margret Thatcher Foundation established to burnish her image for posterity is sufficiently convinced of their authenticity to publish them on her Web site

MT: I would like to raise the issue of the situation in the countries of Eastern Europe. I was very impressed by the courage and patriotism of General Jaruzelski in Poland. Of course, for you, the future of Poland and its alliance with you have a big significance. I noted that you calmly accepted the results of the elections in Poland, and, in general, the processes in that country and in other Eastern Europe countries. I understand your position in the following way: you are in favour of each country choosing its own road of development so long as the Warsaw Treaty is intact. I perfectly understand this position.


Now I would like to say something in a very confidential manner, and I would ask you not to record this part of the conversation.


Gorbachev: As you would like.


[The following part of the conversation is recorded from recollections.]


MT:
We are very concerned with the processes that are underway in East Germany. It is on the verge of big changes, which are caused by the situation in the society and to some extent by Erich Honecker's illness. The thousands of people escape from the GDR to the FRG are the primary example. All that is the external side things, and it is important for us, but another issue is even more important.

Britain and Western Europe are not interested in the unification of Germany. The words written in the NATO communique may sound different, but disregard them. We do not want the unification of Germany. It would lead to changes in the post-war borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the entire international situation, and could lead to threats to our security.

We are not interested in the destabilization of Eastern Europe or the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact either. Of course, the internal changes are ripe in all the countries of Eastern Europe, but in some countries they are more pronounced, in some countries not yet. However, we are in favour of those processes remaining strictly internal, we will not interfere in them and spur the decommunization [sic] of Eastern Europe. I can tell you that this is also the position of the US President. He sent a telegram to me in Tokyo, in which he asked me to tell you that the United States would not undertake anything that could threaten the security interests of the Soviet Union, or that could be perceived by the Soviet society as a threat. I am fulfilling his request

Note that Thatcher expressly claims to be speaking for President Bush. It is hard to see how she would make such a claim if it was not true since Gorbachev would almost certainly have had a followup conversation with Bush. The language is diplomatic but at minimum Thatcher is stating that the NATO powers would have no problem with the Soviet Union sending in the tanks to crush the 1989 protests that brought democracy to Eastern Europe. It can even be argued that Thatcher is asking for this to happen.

So why would Margaret Thatcher, the stalwart opponent of communism beg Gorbachev to send in the tanks? I think it is because the true Conservative mind is timid, weak and scared. The love of militarism, the tanks the guns, the planes is driven by fear, not strength. Above all conservatives are afraid of change, any change. They want the status quo to continue in perpetuity whether it is good one or a bad one. Without the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe it would be much harder for Western governments to justify cold war levels of military spending and the risk of nuclear Armageddon.

I suspect but cannot prove that a similar fear drove the conservative opposition to the Arab Spring and drives Israeli support for the regimes in Syria and Saudi Arabia. This mindset would also explain the otherwise inexplicable US policy towards Cuba: The reason conservatives insist on continuing the failed and counterproductive embargo is that they want the regime to continue.

And this is the real reason that Romney is not fit to be President. While he tries to project the appearance of resolution and strength he is really a weak, insecure, timid little man who was happy for other people to fight the wars that he supported because the idea of change was too frightening to him. Read the rest of this post...

The ongoing disaster that is the new Blogger interface

Order of the same posts in new Blogger CMS (left)
versus new blogger iphone app (right)
(Click image to see larger version)

Welcome to my own personal hell.  Welcome to the new Blogger content management system, created by Google, that is incompatible with iPhones or iPads, and whose iphone app is a complete and utter disaster.

I've written before about Google's attempt to update the Blogger content management system, and the disaster they've made of it.  But I wanted to, now that I have some time, walk you through how badly Google's engineers botched the new CMS.  This has huge implications for anyone who blogs on the Blogger platform, but it also doesn't speak well to what kind of a company Google has become if it signs off on this kind of garbage, and it really is just that - garbage.

First off, have a look at the image above (you can click the image in order to see a readable version, but you don't really need to).  What I did was place the new Blogger Web interface (left) up against the new Blogger iPhone app (right).  Both images were taken within two seconds of each other.  Both images show completely different posts.

First, note the order of the posts.  I've connected the posts on the left to the posts on the right, using different colors. Note how the posts on Blogger's Web page are in a different order than the posts on the iPhone app - and some posts from each simply don't show up at all.  Let's say we number the posts on the left 1 to 8, in chronological order, and then see which posts they correspond to on the right.  So for example "1-5" means post 1 on the Blogger's Web interface is the same as post 5 on Blogger's iPhone app.

Web vs iPhone
1 - 5
2 - 1
3 - 4
4 - 11
5 - 3
6 - 2
7 - 15
8 - 6

Kind of nonsensical.  Oh but there's more.

A few weeks ago, we were forced to switch over to the new interface.  The new Web interface, as I mentioned, doesn't work on iPhones (it freezes) or iPads (it auto-deletes your posts' content then saves them empty - neat trick).  Here's an example of a post on the iPad that Blogger simply opened up empty of content and then auto-saved the empty content immediately, thus deleting the lengthy post that was there previously.  I was ticked, so I took a photo of it.

A post on iPad that Blogger simply deleted, then saved empty.

Now first off, who designs a Web page in 2012 that can't work on an iPad's, let alone an iPhone's, Web browser?  When I asked Blogger about this months ago, I was told that you're supposed to use their mobile app when using the iPhone or iPad (nice of them to make that decision for us).  But of course, the iPhone app doesn't work either.  In addition to screwing up the order of the posts, the iPhone app first didn't label which posts were published, which were draft, and which were scheduled to be published.  So there was no way to edit them, not knowing what their status was.  In fact, up until a week or two ago the iPhone app didn't even show scheduled posts at all, they were just missing entirely from the list of posts.

Mind you, Google had months to fix these problems, this app has been out there live forever.

Then they fixed the "draft" problem, but the iPhone app  still didn't show scheduled posts at all - the posts were simply missing from the app all together, thus you have no idea if you have a post queued up to go, and whether you need to write something or not this afternoon.

Now, scheduled posts do show up in the app, but they're still not marked scheduled.  They're instead marked the same way as published posts, so you don't know if a post has been published or scheduled. But at least you can now tell if a post is in draft.

Then there's the time stamp.  You can't see the time stamp on the Web image above, but I have it on my computer.  Take the post I published at 8am this morning, about the DEA abandoning a college student in a cell for 5 days with no food and water.  I scheduled that post to publish at 8am Eastern.  And the Web page indicated that clearly.  On the iPhone app the post is time stamped 11:05am.  I have no idea what that even means.  I think that's the time I actually scheduled the post - not the time I scheduled the post for, but rather the time in Paris (11:05am) when I sat down and pushed the "publish" button to schedule the post to be published this morning in the US.  Why the different times on the same post - who knows?  So now, even though the app shows posts, it not only combines scheduled posts and published posts, but for scheduled posts the time stamp on the iPhone doesn't tell you when the post is scheduled to be posted, it simply tells you when you sat down at your computer to schedule the post.  Who needs to know that?

And of course the iPhone app doesn't permit you to schedule posts, nor does it permit you to unpublish a post you've already published.  Let me explain the latter.  Let's say you accidentally publish a post while using the iPhone app - something I did within the first minute of using the app.  You have no option to unpublish the post, to save it again as a draft.  Your only option is to delete the entire post and lose it forever.  Why?  Who knows.  When I asked Blogger about this, I was told that the app wasn't intended to have fancy features (my paraphrase).  Unpublishing a post is fancy?  Scheduling posts is fancy?  Showing which posts are already scheduled is fancy?  Listing the posts in chronological order - or at least in the same order they are on the computer - is fancy?  Using a consistent method for time-stamping the posts if fancy?

Oh, and here's another fun little thing Blogger did with their new update.  They're forcing Americans to use a French calendar.  Seriously.  American calendars start every week on a Sunday.  French calendars starte every week on a Monday.  It matters.  When scheduling a post for a future time while using Blogger on your computer, you're presented with this calendar that you're supposed to click on to pick the date.  Good luck trying to figure out what day is Thursday in the third of fourth week of the month. Every single time you have to look back at the top of the calendar and verify the day because we don't do days like that in the states.

Now, I got a little lecture from someone at Blogger about how most of their users aren't American.  Yeah.  I've lived in France a few times, I'm familiar with the calendar.  But Google seems to do just fine changing the language of their interface based upon where you are, or what choice you select.  Why not let people select a foreign calendar if they want one?

And in fact, contrary to the Blogger executive's assertion to the contrary, the rest of the world does not use the French calendar where Monday is the first day of the week. In fact, it differs by country, even within Europe - a lot of countries start on Sunday, a lot on Monday, and even some on Saturday.  In other words, Blogger arbitrarily decided to shift to an entirely different calendar and force it on their users worldwide, when they could have simply given the users the choice.

And another thing.  In the old interface, you could see the titles of a good 12 posts above the fold of your Web browser.  Now with the new interface, you can see only 6 posts.  Why?  Apparently Google thought it would be really cool to give the users a lot of empty white space on the page.  Neat-o!  And funny, I mentioned this to them a few months ago, and now others online, who I don't even know, are making the same complaints. Whodathunk I actually know something about this blogging thing?

We are in the process of figuring out how to move our blog over to WordPress, after 8 years with Blogger.  I enjoyed working with a number of Blogger's top people, and Google's top people, in the past, including people I didn't even realize were top people, like Biz Stone (I just figured he was some helpful guy at Google LOL).  But the service has been slow to update, they never understood the need for group blogs a la DailyKos, and now this new interface quite literally kills the ability to mobile blog.  I've been in Europe this past 10 days or so, first in Sweden doing some work and then attending the Netroots Sweden conference, and now am in France strategizing with Chris about the move to WordPress and, more generally, figuring out a long-term strategy for the blog over the next few years.  I couldn't mobile blog all while in Sweden, even though I had Web access. I would have had to carry my ten pound laptop with me everywhere, walking half an hour back and forth to my hotel, and it just wasn't worth it.  I had my iPad, but what's the point in bringing it with if Blogger is simply going to delete my posts?

The blogger app has been live since at least September 3, 2011 - and it appears it hasn't been update since, at least that's what the iPhone's app store says.  No updates in 8 months.  Yet Google is now forcing people to use an app that isn't ready for prime time, and hasn't been updated for 8 months.  And read the reviews for the iPhone app over at the store - they're horrible.

This new content management system, that isn't even compatible with the iPhone and the iPad, and this iPhone app that looks like it was written by a child, are an embarrassment to Google.  Someone should be fired for designing this garbage, for approving of the design, for making such inferior, not-ready-for-prime-time products live, and then for not even bothering to update them for over half a year.

I have been a big fan of Blogger over the years and have extolled their virtues.  But this is obscene.  You'd be fired if you did this at a lesser company.  At a place like Google, this should never have even happened in the first place. Read the rest of this post...

What happened to Canada? (Ans: Corporate power is global)

This piece by Chris Hedges is from a few months ago, but the point he makes hasn't somehow magically disappeared (h/t the aggregator blog anotheroldwoman for the article; the original appeared at truthdig.com.)

Hedges starts with a comparison — the "old" Canada, the one we think we remember, versus the new Canada, the one that actually sits on our borders. Here's his opening (my emphasis and paragraphing everywhere):

What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state.

Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters.

And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.

This is the real shape of "globalization" as practiced since Ronald Reagan destroyed wafer-fab and computer-chip manufacturing in the U.S. The corporate war for power and profit is global.

As we wrote here, this is not the inevitable shape of globalization — it's not the only way to globalize economic activity. But it's the shape as practiced by the current CEO class, which controls (and drinks deep from) current corporate activity.

Hedges agrees:

The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries.

Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington.

This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.

This is not to depress you (it's true whether you like it or not), but to educate. It looks to me like a world-wide war has started, but it's being painted as sect against sect, nation against nation, skin color against skin color.

In fact, it's simpler than that — our globally organized overlords, versus us.

Last point from Hedges, that resistance must cross borders as well, that we must join hands over walls that only appear to divide us:

Those who seek to discredit this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful of the other. ...

Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines, wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” were trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.”

He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups and said that “if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”

One of the most valuable and beneficial activities of the Vietnam War era were the teach-ins, where the Movement educated itself about what it was facing.

With that education, people understood how the U.S. replaced France in the fight against Ho Chi Minh, their former WWII ally, to whom they promised a free Southeast Asia after Japan, and later France, were defeated — that the "anti-Communist" frame, in other words, was a lie. Unity around a common understanding is both powerful and necessary.

So consider this a teach-in. We may disagree about our tactics — Is it better to resist under a Romney presidency or under Obama? Dunno — but we should not spend time disagreeing about the facts. These are the facts.

Letting us confuse "our overlords" with "our protectors" is their biggest weapon. Let's take it from them, by seeing the world more clearly than they want us to (ahem, rule number 2 here).

Globally yours,

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
  Read the rest of this post...

Student drank urine after DEA left him in cell 5 days with no food, water, for smoking pot

This story is horrific if true. His crime? Smoking pot at home with some friends.  NBC San Diego:

[H]e was placed in a cell for five days without any human contact and was not given food or drink. In his desperation, he said he was forced to drink his own urine....

After days of being ignored, Chong said he tried to take his own life by breaking the glass from his spectacles with his teeth and then carving “Sorry mom,” on his wrists. He said nurses also found pieces of glass in his throat, which led him to believe he ingested the pieces purposefully.

He said when employees discovered him in the cell that they looked confused and nervous. A DEA employee rode with him to the hospital, where they paid for Chong’s visit.
He spent three days in the intensive care unit at Sharp Hospital and his kidneys were close to failing.

The DEA has not apologized to Chong, said Iredale.

Jesus Christ. If this story is true, there should be congressional hearings on this and heads should roll. We get so concerned when some Secret Service agents have sex with a hooker, but when DEA agents torture and leave to die an American college student, what's the repercussion? Read the rest of this post...

Sarkozy reaches out to far right in desperate attempt to win votes

Current president of France Nicholas Sarkozy may end up winning over a few votes with this outreach, but it probably won't be enough. The far right is already fed up with him and the leader of the National Front is telling supporters to submit a blank vote in protest. (The practice of submitting a blank vote happens often enough in France though it still remains in single digits.) Tonight is the big debate between Sarkozy and the challenger François Hollande but few expect the debate to change any opinions. More on the far right outreach by The Guardian:

Sarkozy's alternative May day Labour rally, which he initially said was a defiant celebration of "real" work versus the traditional trade union marches, had caused a political slanging match in France. A Communist newspaper and various commentators likened the president to Marshal Pétain, the leader of France's Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime in the 1940s, for trying to appropriate the "values of work" for the right. His party slammed the parallels as shameful and disgusting. Sarkozy told the crowd: "We don't want Socialism!" He stressed the importance of loving France, the value of work, and promised a new French social model with fewer rules and red tape. He said France must defend "values, identity and the frontiers that protect us", adding: "Do you think China doesn't defend its identity?"

Read the rest of this post...