Month: October 2013

“Manfluencers” don’t eat quiche. (They eat protein pie.)

by digby

Fergawdsakes:

In a June survey of 900 meat-eating men ages 18 to 64, 47% were deemed “manfluencers” by Midan Marketing LLC, a Chicago market research group focused on the meat industry. Manfluencers are responsible for at least half of the grocery shopping and meal preparation for their households.

Food company executives hope more men shopping means new opportunities for foods some men have traditionally shied away from in this country, including yogurt and hard cider. The changes are often cosmetic: larger portions or darker color schemes instead of recipes on the backs of packages.

Lots of products on food shelves are big no-nos to men, says Lu Ann Williams, head of research for Netherlands-based Innova Market Insights. Others help men feel more, well, manly. “A beer or soda in a long-necked, brown bottle makes a man feel like a man. Drinking out of a straw does not—puckered lips and sunken cheeks are not a good guy look.”

Which helps explain Powerful Yogurt, a Greek yogurt launched in March featuring a bull’s head symbol on red-and-black packaging and an image of stomach muscles next to the slogan “Find Your Inner Abs.”

It’s hard for me to believe that men really give a damn about this, but if they do, they need to get over it. The idea that eating certain food makes you look “like a girl” is so stupid I don’t know what to say.

But hey, these marketing people know what they’re doing so there must be a bunch of guys out there who have been too afraid to buy yogurt or drink a coke (with or without a straw) because they think it’s all girly so I’m sure this will make somebody some money, the most likely being the marketing company that came up with concept of “manfluencers.”

(They are missing the most important food “manfluencers” of all, though: mothers.)

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Rebuttal ‘o the day: Brian Beutler

by digby

Responding to Ross Douthat’s proposition that conservatives’ real opposition to Obamacare stems from their fear that it will drive out innovation, Beutler smashes him to smithereens:

In the real world, the broader right’s problem with Obamacare (and single payer and national health care) is that it taxes the rich to subsidize the poor and middle-class. Where the right runs into trouble with just coming out and saying it is that in a system like Obamacare, the benefits and beneficiaries aren’t easy to pigeonhole or dismiss. It’s not just a system for the underclass, but also for people who are sick and people who want to take economic risks but have families and are thus indentured at unfulfilling jobs.

This problem doesn’t exist with less kludgy but more targeted programs like food stamps. And thus the conservative campaign against food stamps is very telling. There’s really no denying that food stamps “work,” in the sense that they actually allow poor people to eat food and thus prevent millions from going hungry. You can quibble with the design of the program, perhaps, but not with the fact that for all the poverty in America, there isn’t a rash of poor people starving to death.

But conservatives want to cut food stamps by billions and billions of dollars. Because they think it’s unfair to tax job creators to subsidize losers.

That’s the nub of it when it comes to Obamacare too. And it’s why the right and the left will find it impossible to reach some kind of health care accord in the future if for some reason it becomes imperative to scrap the existing system. I don’t think the issue is that the liberals are hyper-invested in any particular “brand” of health care financing. But they’re not going to trade away parts of the system that protect vulnerable people unless the things that replace it provide a similar level of welfare.

And conservatives just hate that with a passion. They honestly believe that anything that helps people (they don’t like) is stealing from them. Things that help them (or people they like) are “earned.” That’s just who they are. Conservative “wonks” who believe their fellow travelers are having sophisticated internal dialogs about the best way to provide public services while preserving American ingenuity in the private sector need to join the New Democrats. They’re the only ones who still think along those lines.

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What’s so bad about government/corporate spying anyway?

by digby

A number of people have questioned why I am against government surveillance on behalf of (so-called) American corporations and I’ve been clumsy in my explanations. Via Emptywheel I found this great discussion of it by Bruce Schneier. He talks about the early dreams of the open internet and how it has resulted in a democratization of the way much of our society is organized. (Blogging, for instance …) But the early promise is giving way to more powerful interests which are creating a more familiar sort of organization:

But that is just one side of the Internet’s disruptive character. The Internet has emboldened traditional power as well.

On the corporate side, power is consolidating, a result of two current trends in computing. First, the rise of cloud computing means that we no longer have control of our data. Our e-mail, photos, calendars, address books, messages, and documents are on servers belonging to Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on. And second, we are increasingly accessing our data using devices that we have much less control over: iPhones, iPads, Android phones, Kindles, ChromeBooks, and so on. Unlike traditional operating systems, those devices are controlled much more tightly by the vendors, who limit what software can run, what they can do, how they’re updated, and so on. Even Windows 8 and Apple’s Mountain Lion operating system are heading in the direction of more vendor control.

I have previously characterized this model of computing as “feudal.” Users pledge their allegiance to more powerful companies who, in turn, promise to protect them from both sysadmin duties and security threats. It’s a metaphor that’s rich in history and in fiction, and a model that’s increasingly permeating computing today.

Medieval feudalism was a hierarchical political system, with obligations in both directions. Lords offered protection, and vassals offered service. The lord-peasant relationship was similar, with a much greater power differential. It was a response to a dangerous world.

Feudal security consolidates power in the hands of the few. Internet companies, like lords before them, act in their own self-interest. They use their relationship with us to increase their profits, sometimes at our expense. They act arbitrarily. They make mistakes. They’re deliberately—and incidentally—changing social norms. Medieval feudalism gave the lords vast powers over the landless peasants; we’re seeing the same thing on the Internet.
[…]
Government power is also increasing on the Internet. There is more government surveillance than ever before. There is more government censorship than ever before. There is more government propaganda, and an increasing number of governments are controlling what their users can and cannot do on the Internet. Totalitarian governments are embracing a growing “cyber sovereignty” movement to further consolidate their power. And the cyberwar arms race is on, pumping an enormous amount of money into cyber-weapons and consolidated cyber-defenses, further increasing government power.

Technology magnifies power in general, but rates of adoption are different. In many cases, the interests of corporate and government powers are aligning. Both corporations and governments benefit from ubiquitous surveillance, and the NSA is using Google, Facebook, Verizon, and others to get access to data it couldn’t otherwise. The entertainment industry is looking to governments to enforce its antiquated business models. Commercial security equipment from companies like BlueCoat and Sophos is being used by oppressive governments to surveil and censor their citizens. The same facial recognition technology that Disney uses in its theme parks can also identify protesters in China and Occupy Wall Street activists in New York. Think of it as a public/private surveillance partnership.

What happened? How, in those early Internet years, did we get the future so wrong?

The truth is that technology magnifies power in general, but rates of adoption are different. The unorganized, the distributed, the marginal, the dissidents, the powerless, the criminal: They can make use of new technologies very quickly. And when those groups discovered the Internet, suddenly they had power. But later, when the already-powerful big institutions finally figured out how to harness the Internet, they had more power to magnify. That’s the difference: The distributed were more nimble and were faster to make use of their new power, while the institutional were slower but were able to use their power more effectively.

And what about us? You know, the regular people who aren’t hackers or corporations or government?

Most people, though, are stuck in the middle. These are people who have don’t have the technical ability to evade either the large governments and corporations, avoid the criminal and hacker groups who prey on us, or join any resistance or dissident movements. These are the people who accept default configuration options, arbitrary terms of service, NSA-installed back doors, and the occasional complete loss of their data. These are the people who get increasingly isolated as government and corporate power align. In the feudal world, these are the hapless peasants. And it’s even worse when the feudal lords—or any powers—fight each other. As anyone watching Game of Thrones knows, peasants get trampled when powers fight: when Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon fight it out in the market; when the U.S., EU, China, and Russia fight it out in geopolitics; or when it’s the U.S. vs. “the terrorists” or China vs. its dissidents.
[…]
Without the protection of his own feudal lord, the peasant was subject to abuse both by criminals and other feudal lords. But both corporations and the government—and often the two in cahoots—are using their power to their own advantage, trampling on our rights in the process. And without the technical savvy to become Robin Hoods ourselves, we have no recourse but to submit to whatever the ruling institutional power wants.

This is why it would be nice to have our government operating under the democratic, constitutional restraints it was founded on. It’s not as if these power arrangements are new, just because they are using a new technology. The principles under which we are supposed to live grew out of resistence to exactly the same power arrangement we are watching manifest in these government/corporate surveillance partnerships.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. The constitution anticipates these sorts of threats to our democratic system. We just need to follow it.

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“Perhaps we were too naive”

by digby

Today’s New York Times has a couple of must-read articles on the revelations of wiretaps on European leaders. This one, a straight news story, about the anger amongst the Europeans is kind of sad:

The disclosures contained in the documents leaked by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have crystallized a growing sense in Europe that post-Sept. 11 America has lost some of the values of privacy and accountability that have been the source of the world’s admiration for its version of democracy.

So fierce was the anger in Berlin over suspicions that American intelligence had tapped into Ms. Merkel’s cellphone that Elmar Brok of Germany, the chairman of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a pillar of trans-Atlantic exchanges since 1984, spoke Friday of America’s security establishment as a creepy “state within a state.”

Since Sept. 11, 2001, he said, “the balance between freedom and security has been lost.”
[…]
Germany, basically a post-World War II creation of the United States and its allies, is much less accustomed to such lecturing, with Germans to this day frequently referring to the United States as their country’s school for democracy.

Now, said Guntram Wulff, director of Breugel, a policy organization in Brussels, “the students are calling the teacher,” reminding the Obama administration of democratic values.

That the call came from a German chancellor who was raised in Communist East Germany, and thus has personal familiarity with government spying, heightened the irony and the bitterness.
[…]
Yet, even united, the Europeans often feel like bystanders, powerless to stop the dithering or insensitivity of their partner, the world’s No. 1 power. Threats to halt talks on a trans-Atlantic trade deal that would create a free market of about 800 million people in Europe and the United States are empty, since the deal would produce much needed growth and create jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.

That mutual dependence has kept the old couple together for decades. But many analysts warn that the younger generation may be far more fickle. The old-guard Atlanticists who nurtured modern Germany knew war, or cold war and division. A year of study in America constituted their discovery of the world.

Today’s young Europeans can go anywhere, and glean information from all sorts of sources. A job in Shanghai, Singapore or India is seen as little different from one in Los Angeles or New York, Ms. Heuser said. Meanwhile, in the United States Congress, there are fewer and fewer young members with foreign experience, something once gained, in many cases, by military service.

After this week, the older European generation is wondering about the marriage, too. “America has always been about freedom and a guarantor for freedom,” said Mr. Brok, bitterly. “Perhaps we were too naïve.”

He sets off on Sunday on his latest trip to Washington and glimpse of a security machine that he suggested is so drowning in data that it misses valuable clues, like the Russian warning about the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston Marathon bombings.

“In China, I expect such behavior,” he said. But, from America, “this is real disappointment.”

Those older Europeans thought we lived by a different set of rules than other powerful nations, but in the end we’re just like everybody else. That’s sad for them and sad for us.

All I see on TV are gobsmacked Americans wondering why in the world it’s even considered bad manners, much less a betrayal, for the American government to spy on their allies on behalf of —well, who knows what? “The American people?” (I really doubt that bugging Angela Merkel’s personal phone or spying on Brazil’s oil company accrues to the average citizens’ benefit.)But in this news analysis, David Sanger writes that the very blase excuse we see coming from just about everyone — “they all do it” — doesn’t really carry water when you are the most powerful nation on earth with capabilities beyond the wildest dreams of anyone else. It’s even worse when your allies have entrusted much of their own potential defensive capabilities to you and you abuse that trust by treating them like enemies.

The US desired hegemonic military power after WWII and was able to get it as its allies were mired in the rubble of the war and its enemies in misguided ideology. The Europeans and others gave up any pretentions to military greatness and trusted the US as their proxy. It was an unusually placid relationship for a group of nations that had spent thousands of years fighting each other and anyone who came near them. I supposed it’s unsurprising that this relationship would fray over time, particularly once their mutual enemy, the Soviet Union, broke up. But this trust has been vital in the post war peace and it’s a shame to see the US take it for granted. But it did more than that.  It started acting irrationally.

During the run up to the Iraq invasion and later with the torture revelations I wondered when the worm was going to turn and our behavior would finally turn most countries from allies and respectful economic competitors to mistrustful potential enemies. What happens when a powerful nation becomes a rogue superpower, out of control and beyond normal restraint? When its political system becomes so dysfunctional that cranks and fools are able to bring the world economy to the brink of crisis repeatedly, for bizarre goals which even they know are unattainable? How can we expect our allies to respond when the new administration that promised to reverse this behavior is obviously incapable of stopping the paranoid fringe in the government? And even worse, when it is also revealed to have not only failed to restrain the clandestine spying and aggressive cyberwarfare planning that began under its loathed predecessor but actively expanded it, targeting its friends and foes alike? What are they supposed to think?

When a nation is as powerful as the US it is inevitable that it will inspire some combination of loathing, fear, respect and trust. In most of the post war period the US has had far more friends who respected and trusted it than loathed and feared it, despite the fact that its respect and trust was often unearned and undeserved. That may be changing now and I don’t think Americans should be so dismissive. We are not going to like living in a world in which everyone sees the United States as dangerous and threatening.

Here’s the livestream of the anti-spying rally in DC today:

Live streaming video by Ustream

Here’s something you can do to help level the playing field with CEOs

by David Atkins

Where progressives find themselves unable politically to alter actual legal realities themselves, oftentimes the best substitute is increasing transparency on the realities that exist. Campaign finance is one such area, where in the absence of actual publicly funded campaigns and the ability to exclude big money from the process, the current rage is disclosure laws.

A similar tactic is being pursued for CEO pay:

We already know CEOs of major corporations took home 354 times more pay than the average rank-and-file U.S. worker in 2012. Now, we have the opportunity to see what CEOs make compared with the typical worker in their own companies.

A rule proposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would require companies to disclose the ratio of total compensation between CEOs and the pay of the typical worker. The SEC rule is part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Major corporations like Walmart really don’t like this, which is why we need your help.

The AFL-CIO has petition to implement the rule. Please go ahead and sign it. As long as Republicans hold the House these are the sorts of things we can do to make progress until such time as we can hopefully alter the balance of power in Washington.

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We just don’t have enough food for everyone

by digby

Meanwhile, in exceptional America, food stamps are still being cut:

Next month food stamp benefits will automatically shrink for all 47 million Americans enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Pamela Gwynn of Crawfordsville, Ind., heard about the cut in a letter from the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration. The letter explained that a federal law called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly known as the ‘stimulus package,’ had given food stamp recipients a temporary boost in 2009. ‘The increased benefits provided by this law are expected to expire on November 1, 2013,’ the letter said. ‘Most families will see their benefits decrease in November due to the end of the extra benefits provided by the 2009 law.’

Gwynn, 63, said a series of brain surgeries in the late 1990s left her partially deaf and reliant on $731 per month in disability benefits from the Social Security Administration. Her monthly food stamp benefit will go down from $91 to $80. Gwynn did some arithmetic and figured that would leave her 88 cents per meal. ‘Eighty-eight cents won’t buy anything except a cup of ramen noodles,’ she said. ‘They just keep cutting and cutting. Eighty-eight cents — you cannot even buy a can of tuna for 88 cents.’

Little Friskies was on sale for 39 cents a can yesterday. Steal some mustard and mayonnaise packets from the local take out joint and you’ve got yourself the makings of a delicious catfood salad. When you’re 80 and on the “reformed” Social Security you’ll be glad you know the recipe.

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“The implementation has been horrendous”

by digby

Here’s an interesting story about health care reform:

A few weeks into the launch of the most sweeping health care reform law in a generation, John Boehner declared that the implementation was a disaster.

“The implementation,” the Republican leader said, “has been horrendous. We’ve made it far more complicated than it should be.”

Boehner, of course, was talking about the rollout of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit — known as Part D — enacted in 2003 by President George W. Bush. He discussed the implementation woes during a Feb. 6, 2006 appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” on his fifth day as House majority leader.

But did he want to repeal the benefit? No. The future Speaker soberly acknowledged the problems but saw potential in the law and called for improving it. “The good news is that the competition that’s being created has lowered premiums significantly below where Congress thought they’d be when we put the bill together, so the competition side is good,” he said. “I think the implementation side continues to need to be improved.”

It was a rough time for the law’s proponents. The soft launch was “anything but smooth,” according to the Washington Post, marred by at least two delays along with other, deeper problems. Upon launch, the Bush administration admitted to receiving “tens of thousands of complaints by seniors, pharmacists and others” about implementation failures. Health and Human Services vowed to “fix every problem as quickly as possible.”

Boehner was far from alone in pushing to fix the problematic law, rather than repealing or dismantling it. And his judgment was vindicated — the Medicare Part D program turned out to be a success, expanding medical coverage for millions of seniors at a lower cost than many expected. Today it is a fixture of the Medicare program. Fortunately for Bush and his party, Democrats were a willing partner in tweaking and improving the law.

Yes, that was fortunate.

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Gene Sperling welcomes the confidence fairy back home

by digby

Joshua Green reports.

This morning, Gene Sperling, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, appeared before a Democratic business group for what was billed as a speech about the economy after the shutdown, followed by a Q&A session. The White House didn’t push this as a news-making event, so it didn’t get much billing. But I went anyway and was struck by what Sperling had to say, especially about the upcoming budget negotiations that were a product of the deal to reopen the government.

In his usual elliptical and prolix way, Sperling seemed to be laying out the contours of a bargain with Republicans that’s quite a bit different that what most Democrats seem prepared to accept. What stood out to me was how he kept winding back around to the importance of entitlement cuts as part of a deal, as if he were laying the groundwork to blunt liberal anger. Right now, the official Democratic position is that they’ll only accept entitlement cuts in exchange for new revenue—something most Republicans reject. If Sperling mentioned revenue at all, I missed it.

But he dwelled at length, and with some passion, on the need for more stimulus, though he avoided using that dreaded word. He seemed to hint at a budget deal that would trade near-term “investment” (the preferred euphemism for “stimulus’) for long-term entitlement reform. That would be an important shift and one that would certainly upset many Democrats.

Click the link for the exact quotes. What he’s saying is that we need more growth and in order to get it we have to inspire “confidence in the long run that we have a path on entitlement spending and revenues that gives confidence in the long-term fiscal position that we’re not pushing off unbearable burdens to the next generation.” In other words, “welcome home, confidence fairy!”

Recall as well that the president is reported to have opened the door to this:

President Obama made a similar commitment [to preserve Social Security] during a meeting with the Democratic Senate caucus last week, but added that if the Republican offer also included infrastructure money or investment in early childhood education, a major priority of Obama’s, it would at least be worth considering. The president added that he was open to reforms to Social Security Disability Insurance.

Green concludes:

None of what Sperling said was entirely new. Rather, it was what he chose to emphasize (and not emphasize) that struck me. Afterward, Sperling took a grand total of one question from the audience. I hustled after him to ask if was really proposing an entitlement-cuts-for-stimulus budget deal. Sperling smiled a little awkwardly and said something about how he’d love to negotiate with me. (Not sure what that was about.) But he didn’t rule out a deal that cut entitlements without additional tax revenue, even when I asked him a second time

But don’t worry. Everyone assures me that the Democrats will never give up their demand for revenue so there’s nothing to see here.  Move along….

Update: Or, it’s all good as long as the president gets something he thinks is important in return.

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Stop calling them bullies or they’ll hit you

by digby

Love this:

Fox News attacked efforts to restrict school bullying by describing them as attempts to limit conservative free speech.

It could be that it shows growth in their characters that conservatives are able to admit they are bullies. But I doubt they realize that’s what they’re doing.

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He’s just calling it like he sees it

by digby

Nah, no racism in the GOP:

“The law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt. If it hurts a bunch of college kids [that are] too lazy to get up off their bohonkas and go get a photo ID, so be it. If it hurts a bunch of whites, so be it…if it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”

Update: Ed Kilgore notes that this yahoo is just some low level nobody who is probably getting more attention than he deserves. But he notes that there is something worth pointing out:

…Yelton said something in his defense that we keep hearing so often from conservatives that I think it’s worth paying a bit of attention:

Yelton told a North Carolina radio station Thursday that the “Daily Show” had edited his interview in such a way that his comments were taken out of context. In the interview on voter ID laws, Yelton had criticized “lazy black people that wants the government to give them everything,” and told correspondent Aasif Mandvi that one of his “best friends” is black.

How could that comment possibly be taken “out of context?” What’s the “context” that could make it non-racist? It’s really getting to the point where the anti-anti-racism mania on the Right is convincing people that if they don’t say “I’m a racist,” then calling them out for racist comments is unfair, if not an actual example of “playing the race card” and hence racism itself. This is a particularly kind of twisted illogic that does indeed need to be exposed.

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