Month: November 2013

BatCat Robocop Hulk Smash

by digby

Gee, I wonder what they’re going to use this monstrosity for?

Bradley takes a ride in the BatCat, a remote controlled telehandler robot used by the Los Angeles Police Department in emergency situations. Equipped with cameras and sensors for navigation via a remote operator, the LAPD’s BatCat can lift vehicles and tear down walls with its massive telescopic claw.

Every big city department needs one of these. It should make events like this much safer for the remote robot operator:

A terrifying ordeal for a Philadelphia woman, federal agents raided her home but she says they got the wrong house.

This happened on the 2200 block of Judson Street in North Philadelphia. Corinne Webb describes her morning as a wake up call that brought her to tears.

Webb, who suffers from asthma, says the agents not only broke up her front door, but they searched her home, overturned furniture and upset her whole family.

“They had lights in my face, guns, everything. I couldn’t even see to come down the steps,” Webb said.

Following the incident, agents showed her a picture of a man that she did not know.

After only living in the area for one year, the intrusion left Webb confused.

“They came here no warrant, no nothing, bust my door open, broke my bed, and told me nothing,” Webb said.

The raid at Webbs’ home appears to be in association with the takedown of the Leon Little drug Operation Tuesday.

Federal Agents say a $3 million dollar illegal enterprise obtained and distributed nearly 400,000 prescription pills such as oxycodone and Xanax. The drug raid netted 27 arrests across the area.

“The defendants charged today are drug dealers, just like street dealers pushing heroin and cocaine.”

DEA Officials in charge of the early morning raids as well as other law enforcement agencies had no comment on the incident at Webb’s home saying they were not able to discuss what happened during the street operations in North Philadelphia.

Just hours after the incident a work crew from the Philadelphia Housing Authority replaced the door that was broken up during the raid, but the new door did little to calm Webb’s nerves and her anger.

h/t to RP

Village fanboys on parade

by digby

On the president asking them to the White House for off the record “chats”

The facts are off-the-record, but the sentiment is not,” Chuck Todd, the NBC News political director and chief White House correspondent, said of the meetings. “When you know how the president thinks about something, when you understand his point of view, how do you avoid talking about it?” Todd said. “It’s in your head.”

“He sees columnists as portals,” another journalist who has attended meetings said. “It works — I feel it work with me. It’s almost impossible to spend hours face-to-face with the president, unfiltered, then write a column or go on television without taking his point of view into account.”

Read the whole thing for a good laugh. If you want to know how the Village works in a Democratic administration it’s all spelled out for you.

“I’m not going to deny that we hope this informs people’s reporting — the point is to have a good discussion, but also to deepen their understanding of our perspective,” the source familiar with the president’s thinking said.

Yes, I’m sure it deepens something. Get a load of this pile of fanboy bullshit:

“The confidence he exudes in these sessions is even greater than the confidence he exudes in public,” one attendee said. “And, as in public, it’s the president who does most of the talking.”

Still, no one doubts that the president values hearing the thoughts and opinions of his contemporaries.

“The president cares a lot more about the opinions of Fred Hiatt or Tom Friedman than he does about the average U.S. Senator,” said one journalist. “He’s naturally predisposed to analysis. In his own mind, that’s what he is: he’s like us. He wants to be a writer, and so he likes to talk to writers.”

Oooh baby.  He’s so very … mmmm … confident. And he loves them.  He really, really loves them.

* Not one woman mentioned in this article by the way.  Not that there are very many of them working for the op-ed pages, but still, you’d think he would at least invite Ruth Marcus. She’s as good a centrist know-nothing as Tom Friedman any day …

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Guess who this is?

by digby

It’s not hard if you think about it. She hasn’t changed all that much:

That’s right. It’s the first woman speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, at the 1961 inauguration.

h/t to Michael Beschloss

The anti-tax movement has been even more harmful than you think


by digby

I have spoken to many European friends over the years about how they deal with their so-called “tax burden” which to any American sounds like it’s extraordinarily high. And they always laugh at me. They know they actually pay much less for all the things a modern society has to offer — and they have the peace of mind that goes with living in a society where you don’t face bankruptcy every time life throws you a curveball.

Josh Holland has written a very good piece on this subject in which he examines just how destructive the cagey and self-serving plutocrats’ sponsorship of the “low tax” propaganda in America has been:

Delinking taxes from the services they pay for has arguably been the modern conservative movement’s greatest success. No politician has ever been booed off a stage for promising to cut taxes. But decades of public opinion polling shows that, with a few exceptions, Americans are actually quite fond of the goods and services the public sector provides. They may be wary of the idea of “big government” in the abstract, but they like well-maintained infrastructure, safe food and clean water, efficient firefighting and policing, Medicare and Social Security and virtually every other government-provided service you can name.

This paradox is well known to politicians and policymakers, and has caused a good deal of hand-wringing among those who favor a progressive tax system that raises enough funds to cover the services Americans expect. But there’s another consequence of anti-tax demagoguery: low, low taxes come with a steep cost. In fact, a lower tax bill – especially for federal taxes — actually works against the economic interests of most Americans.

That’s because we pay ridiculously high out-of-pocket costs for things that are provided by the public sector in other developed countries. The difference is quite dramatic. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — also known as “the rich countries club” — tracks both public and private financing of social spending. Americans pay almost four times as much as the citizens of other wealthy countries for things such as retirement security and health care on the private market – 10.6 percent of our economic output versus an average of just 2.7 percent among OECD member states.

Contrary to popular belief, American families and corporations enjoy relatively low taxes – in the OECD, we ranked third from the bottom in total tax burden in 2010 – but it’s almost a wash when you add back what we spend out-of-pocket. The eight OECD countries with the highest tax burdens in 2010 (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Italy, France, Austria and Finland) paid out an average of just over 32 percent of their economic output for social services, while we forked over just under 30 percent.

The difference is that we ranked near the bottom in the OECD (26th out of 34 countries) in terms of public spending on these services. Government-provided services accounted for around 19 percent of our gross domestic product (GDP), compared with 29 percent of GDP in those high-tax countries. The difference was made up from out-of-pocket spending by citizens.

You may think you’re spending less because you have lower taxes and more “choice.” But you’re not. You’re paying more and often giving a bunch of your money to middle men and “service” providers whose only job is to skim a nice little piece off the top. Because: freedom.

If you haven’t been to a European country, as most Tea Party types have not, you might not realize that you don’t actually feel less “free” there. It’s far from perfect, of course, with its own set of pathologies. But people don’t commonly lose everything there when they get sick. And they don’t have to fight with everything they have to ensure that they can be assured they will live their elder years in something other than penury. Even their conservatives wouldn’t dream of touching their social welfare programs.

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Aristocracy rising

by digby

Gaius Publius at Americablog has a neat piece up today about our wealthy “betters,” jumping off this interesting piece by Chris Hedges, who talks about what it was like to grow up around the rich and shameless. Both are well worth reading.

I wanted to just highlight this comment from an Americablog reader:

Hedges had better and far different access to the rich than I did. I only worked for them in their offices. But everything I read here is consistent with what I saw. It wasn’t so much that it was terrible (it was often rather pleasant to be able to get IT to fix problems immediately, have phone calls and emails returned quickly and other things that aren’t common in big corporations until you are working for the CEO) as it was surreal. These people live in a different reality. Many of the things I saw were more funny than hilarious (so long as you have a thick skin). The executive stopping by the admin assistants’ cubicles to talk about what he or she did that weekend and then walking away without the least bit of interest in anyone else’s lives was a common occurrence. I know some of my colleagues were offended but it was moments like that when I realized what kind of people I was dealing with and not to expect anything from them. Most of them are sociopaths. Not all, certainly, and I would like to make that point, but I found that the majority were not concerned about anyone’s wants or needs other than their own, including their own family.

I don’t know if it’s correct to call them sociopaths, but I can certainly verify this observation about powerful corporate CEOs. I worked with a very few over the years who were decent, normal people. For the most part, they live in a bubble in which they completely lose the capability of living like everyone else in this world lives. They didn’t know how to do every day things like mail a letter and had no idea how to order the simplest services. In many ways it seemed to me that I was dealing with a very spoiled child, which is interesting since Hedges makes this particular observation about the rich kids he grew up with:

I spent time in the homes of the ultra-rich and powerful, watching my classmates, who were children, callously order around men and women who worked as their chauffeurs, cooks, nannies and servants. When the sons and daughters of the rich get into serious trouble there are always lawyers, publicists and political personages to protect them—George W. Bush’s life is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich.

Some of the top executives and CEOs I worked with over the years grew up like that and some didn’t. But the deference that’s shown to “the boss” in corporate America ends up putting them all in that position after a while. It takes a very special person to fight the temptations the deference to wealth and power necessarily requires of mere workers in a dog-eat-dog economy. As I said, some do manage to do it but they’re few and far between in my experience. And the amazing thing is that — like the Village celebrity stars — they all consider themselves to be salt-of-the-earth everymen, even as they are waited on hand and foot by armies of servants and underlings.

I confess that I relate to Hedges on this:

My hatred of authority, along with my loathing for the pretensions, heartlessness and sense of entitlement of the rich, comes from living among the privileged. It was a deeply unpleasant experience. But it exposed me to their insatiable selfishness and hedonism.

I wasn’t privy to that wealth and privilege as a child. But when I entered the corporate world I saw it up close and personal in an industry that makes a fetish out of worshiping fame, wealth and power. I had always viscerally rejected pretension and authoritarianism, but this opened my mind to the corrupting nature of our American “success” myth. Sometimes I wish I’d never seen it. I think I was happier not knowing.

This discussion reminds me of this oldie but goodie called “Yearning to be subjects”.

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Oh Difi. Again?

by digby

It figures that instead of tightening the requirements on the NSA that Difi and her panel would actually loosen them. It’s just how she rolls. Here’s Emptywheel with the details:

Here’s how, in June, DiFi described the terms on which NSA could access the dragnet database.

It can only look at that data after a showing that there is a reasonable, articulable that a specific individual is involved in terrorism, actually related to al Qaeda or Iran. At that point, the database can be searched. [my emphasis]

Here are the terms on which her Fake Fix permits access to the database.

there was a reasonable articulable suspicion that the selector was associated with international terrorism or activities in preparation therefor.[my emphasis]

The bill passed yesterday does not require any tie to al Qaeda (or Iran!). An association with al Qaeda (and Iran!) is one possible standard for accessing the database. But it also permits use of the data if someone is “associated with activities in preparation” for international terrorism.

Does that include selling drugs to make money to engage in “terrorism”? Does that include taking pictures of landmark buildings? Does that include accessing a computer in a funny way?

All of those things might be deemed “activities in preparation” for terrorism. And this bill, as written, appears to permit the government to access the database of all the phone-based relationships in the US based not on any known association with al Qaeda (and Iran!), but instead activities that might indicate preparation for terrorism but might also indicate mild nefarious activity or even tourism crossing international borders.

“International terrorism” is such a nice vague term, don’t you think? And judging from what we know about previous government incursions into our privacy (and the privacy of virtually every person on the planet) should they deem it “necessary” I’m going to take a wild guess that Marcy’s list of “possibilities” is just a start.

I confess that I have cynically assumed that Difi’s public hissy fit over Angela Merkel’s phone tap was likely a kabuki designed to prove to foreign leaders that spying on foreign leaders is the one bridge too far. (They don’t like it.) Other than that, Feinstein has been all too happy to rubber stamp any cockamamie rationale the NSA comes up with and work hard to legalize their illegal behavior every time they get caught.

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Would this cosmic message fly today?

by David Atkins

When America sent a reconnaissance spacecraft called Voyager out into great beyond in 1977, knowing that it would one day leave our solar system never to return, our scientists gave thought to the possibility that an alien civilization might discover it. We feared then, even more so than today, that our fledgling civilization might destroy itself utterly, and wanted any potential alien beings who might happen upon our craft to know who we were, what we were like, and we aspired to be. To that end we passed along diagrams of our language and numerical system, our location in the universe and the galaxy so far as we could describe it, details of our physiology, and pictures of our lives and civilization.

We also

Moment of zen

by digby

Uhm …

In case you’re wondering, that’s Matt Lauer as Pamela Anderson.

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