Month: December 2013

Talkin’ to the wimminfolk

by digby

This is pretty good:

They look so natural in black and white, don’t they?

Meanwhile, back in the states;

As Republican candidates figure out how to best win over women voters, Iowa GOP Senate candidate Mark Jacobs thinks he has the answer: appeal to their emotions.

In an interview Sunday with WHO-TV in Des Moines, host Dave Price asked Jacobs what the “biggest difference between men and women” is, in terms of reaching out to them as voters.

“I think you have to connect with women on an emotional level,” said Jacobs. “And with a wife of 25 years and an 18-year-old daughter, I’ve had a lot of coaching on that.”

There you go, fellas. That’s the way to do it. Be especially patronizing about it too.

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More of what you already knew: bad service jobs are replacing good skilled jobs

by David Atkins

We already knew it anecdotally, of course, but a new MIT study adds further weight to the notion that outsourcing and mechanization are turning previously well-paying skilled jobs into low-paying service jobs:

The widening chasm in the U.S. job market has brought many workers a long-term shift to low-skill service jobs, according to a study co-authored by an MIT economist.

The research, presented in a paper by MIT economist David Autor, along with economist David Dorn, helps add nuance to the nation’s job picture. While a widening gap between highly trained and less-trained members of the U.S. workforce has previously been noted, the current study shows in more detail how this transformation is happening in stores, restaurants, nursing homes, and other places staffed by service workers.

Specifically, workers in many types of middle-rank positions — such as skilled production-line workers and people in clerical or administrative jobs — have had to migrate into jobs as food-service workers, home health-care aides, child-care employees, and security guards, among other things.

“This polarization that we see is being driven by the movement of people out of middle-skill jobs and into services,” says Autor, a professor of economics at MIT. “The growth in service employment isn’t that large overall, but when you look at people with a noncollege education, it’s a very sharp increase, and it’s very concentrated in places that were initially specialized in the more middle-skill activities.”

It’s not just that these jobs pay less, are less fulfilling, and have less room for advancement and mobility. It’s also that their schedules are more haphazard, making life more difficult:

In Autor’s view, studies of this kind have clear implications for policymakers: The findings, he says, can “alert people to the changing opportunity set faced by contemporary workers. I think that is relevant to education policy and labor standards.”

For instance, he suggests, recognizing that an increasing number of workers are in the service sector might lead some policymakers to endorse regulations about hours and working standards that would help these parts of the American workforce.

“It seems like people in these jobs are treated almost gratuitously badly,” Autor says. “If you work in retail, it’s possible you won’t even know your hours until the beginning of the week. … Having uncertainty about your schedule from week to week, [when] you need to get your kids off to school, makes life that much tougher. … These jobs offer flexibility, but mostly to the employer.”

The United States, he adds, “is unusual in offering almost no standards in this type of work.” And while such standards would impose some costs on employers, Autor suggests that those trade-offs could be part of a larger debate about employment today.

Better labor protections for service workers would certainly help. Beyond that, though, it’s just another sign that the global economic paradigm is irreparably broken. A paradigm shift in the social contract is needed if we are to avoid becoming a two-tiered society of the very rich and pampered, serviced by the hopeless and desperate poor.

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Moment of zen: gymnast style

by digby

A classic Presidential moment. Happy Birthday McKayla Maroney. We’re impressed. pic.twitter.com/27tbBQW7rc
— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) December 9, 2013

Leaders do matter

by digby

I have often disagreed with Andrew Sullivan, but on this we certainly see eye to eye.  He’s talking about leadership, specifically in light of the death of Mandela and his greater meaning to the cause of freedom. He first talks about the popular notion in current political science that pooh-pooh’s the the idea that leadership a matters very much, for good or ill.  He quotes Stephen Dyson:

Tucker draws our attention to the dangers of the “great leader” view of politics: it promotes apathy and resignation as we wait for superheroes to appear and fix all of our problems. Yet there are also dangers in minimizing the role of leaders, and they go beyond missing important causes of major events, although this is a clear risk. In the explanations of historians, the reporting of journalists, and the political decisions of citizens, leaders often play the role of personifying abstract trends, ideas, and forces, and offering a human connection between politics and life. People learn, understand, and are motivated to take action by compelling narratives, and compelling narratives involve individual human beings. A worthy goal of science is to provide systematic, rigorous knowledge about issues of social importance. But science should also engage with the moral and empathetic possibilities that come from taking leaders seriously.

Sullivan adds:

Alas, political science – a misnomer from the get-go (and I say that with a PhD in it) – is terrified of human nature, individual character, the unknowable biographical and psychological factors that bear down on any leader’s decisions, and anything that, effectively, cannot be quantified. But a huge amount of human behavior cannot be quantified. Which is why I often thought, as I sat through another stats class, that we’d do better to study Shakespeare than mere regressions to the mean.

I have no idea if political science is terrified of human nature but I do believe absolutely that human behavior cannot be quantified. Political science is a very useful addition to our store of knowledge but it hasn’t even come close to the subtle, sophisticated understanding of humanity of say, the Bible or Shakespeare or Plato or Kant or even Stephen King.

And while it’s true that waiting around for the man on the proverbial white horse can bredd apathy and allow way too much celebrity cultism in politics. But having expectations of leadership and demanding accountability from them is hugely important. It’s fundamental to how human beings understand how the world works.

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Setting the record straight on Mandela and the American Right

by David Atkins

Al Sharpton provides a breath of fresh air, pointing out that in South Africa America chose the wrong side, calling the ANC Marxists and terrorists:

One thing the left must do a better job of is not letting conservatives rewrite history. It would be great if progressive media outlets could spend more time regularly featuring the past statements of conservatives about Medicare, Social Security, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, etc., and comparing them to those of today. At the very least conservatives should not be allowed to appropriate the scorned progressive heroes of yesteryear. Their words should hang around their heads like millstones for generations.

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“It’s time for you to leave”

by digby

Update: Never mind. It’s an actor making a point.

A nasty little Google boy gets mad and says what he really thinks:

“Why don’t you go to a city that can afford it? This is a city for the right people who can afford it. You can’t afford it? You can leave. I’m sorry, get a better job. It’s time for you to leave. “

I love San Francisco. I used to live there, went to school there. But people like this are ruining it, I’m afraid.

This attitude very much reflects the thinking of far more 1 percenters than you might imagine. On some level I think they know they don’t deserve the outlandish sums they “earn” in these elite jobs and have to convince themselves that they are getting rich because they work so much harder and are simply more deserving than those who make less money. The only way they can successfully rationalize their good fortune is to attack the characters of those who aren’t doing as well.

The Google nerds are actually amateurs in this department:

Today, numerous Philadelphia protesters from groups including Occupy Philly, Americans United for Change, Philadelphia AFL-CIO, Fight for Philly, SEIU PA State Council, Protect Your Care, Keystone Progress, Moveon.org, NCPSSM, Progress Now, and AFSCME demonstrated at the Wharton School for Business at the University of Pennsylvania after Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) canceled his speech there, apparently afraid of dissident audiences.

As the hundreds of protesters entered the Wharton School and chanted about economic justice, a number of students appeared on the balcony above. These students began chanting in unison, “Get a job! Get a job!”

While the students who jeered the protesters certainly do not necessarily represent all Wharton students, it’s important to understand the context of the elite status they likely either come from or graduate into. Wharton graduates much of the nation’s corporate elite, with the median starting salary for an MBA graduate being $145,000 — six times the poverty level for a family of four.

The school’s Board of Overseers is staffed with with multiple Goldman Sachs executives and high-ranking employees of a wide variety of financial firms. Meanwhile, it’s Graduate Executive Board is staffed with senior employees of Bank of America, Blackstone Financial Management, and PMC Bank. Wharton’s endowment is $888 million, greater than that of many large public universities. Essentially, the students jeering the protesters represented the future financial elite.

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Using Mandela to reclaim America from Obama

by digby

Newt Gingrich is losing his touch. He foolishly praised Mandela without explaining how Mandela would think of Obama the same way he thought of the apartheid government of South Africa and his followers went nuts.

Larry Klayman shows how it’s done:

…We are ruled by someone who is in effect the pharaoh and at the least a Muslim at heart who disdains the Judeo-Christian heritage and foundations upon which our nation was forged and who has rung up extreme national debt and loathes capitalism, instead seeing it his “duty” to redistribute wealth to “his” people for years of their slavery. President Barack Hussein Obama and his compromised if not corrupt enablers in Congress and in the judiciary, like a time warp, have thrust We the People back to 1776 and provoked our Second American Revolution. And, the current revolutionary climate is even more severe, since unlike the colonies, contemporary America is on the steep decline. Our resources, wealth, ethics, spirituality and liberties are being stifled by a socialistic choke hold on our economy and lives, where our “Muslim” president and the government, not God, is to be worshiped and obeyed – else authoritarian henchmen and thugs at the NSA and IRS will destroy you.

To seek redress for our grievances, as our forefathers attempted leading up to independence day on July 4, 1776, the Reclaim America Now Coalition gave notice in front of the White House on Nov.19 of this year that if the people’s freedoms were not restored by the day after Thanksgiving, the Second American Revolution would begin in earnest. True to the predictions of anyone living in our times, our grievances went unanswered by our illegitimate government usurpers, and now we must make good on our threats of non-violent, civil disobedience to attempt redress.

In this regard, as we mourn the death this week of Nelson Mandela, a great man who, like his American counterpart Martin Luther King, used civil disobedience successfully to bring freedom to his people and by definition all people (who are created equal with certain unalienable rights, as Jefferson put it), let us take Mandela’s achievement in liberating South Africa from bondage as a further example of what we can accomplish in freeing our own nation from the choking despotic governmental slavery of Obama and his pliant Democratic and Republican minions in Congress and the judiciary.

We will soon be announcing the date to convene the Third Continental Congress in Philadelphia early next year where, taking a page from the Founding Fathers, we will meet to plan the next steps of our Second American Revolution, with delegates from all 50 states.

We will also use the occasion to appoint committees to coordinate the revolution and to elect a government in waiting to take over on the day when our current corrupt leaders are forced by the citizenry to leave their thrones and freedom is restored to our shores.

Like our Founding Fathers in 1776, the time is now to risk all we have to save the nation from government tyrants before all is lost.

I mostly know Larry Klayman from the Great Clinton Panty Raid, in which he played a substantial role as the principle in Judicial Watch. He was pretty extreme but he wasn’t nuts. He’s nuts now.

On the other hand, I suppose I’m foolishly failing to take into account that he might just be doing this for the money. If so, these guys are having to work extremely hard these days to earn their Wingnut Welfare. This is nothing short of a humiliation ritual.

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What if Big Brother is your crazy brother-in-law?


by digby

Everyone says the good news about the NSA spying is that they assure us that they have no interest in using all the information they’re filing away about Americans. Unless we are a terrorist or know someone who is a terrorist or know someone who knows someone who might be a terrorist, (or might accidentally be overheard committing what someone might think is a crime) we have nothing to fear from all this surveillance.

Well, maybe not from the NSA, at least not this afternoon.  But they aren’t the only game in town:

The National Security Agency isn’t the only government entity secretly collecting data from people’s cellphones. Local police are increasingly scooping it up, too. Armed with new technologies, including mobile devices that tap into cellphone data in real time, dozens of local and state police agencies are capturing information about thousands of cellphone users at a time, whether they are targets of an investigation or not, according to public records obtained by USA TODAY and Gannett newspapers and TV stations. 

The records, from more than 125 police agencies in 33 states, reveal: About one in four law-enforcement agencies have used a tactic known as a “tower dump,” which gives police data about the identity, activity and location of any phone that connects to the targeted cellphone towers over a set span of time, usually an hour or two. A typical dump covers multiple towers, and wireless providers, and can net information from thousands of phones.

In most states, police can get many kinds of cellphone data without obtaining a warrant, which they’d need to search someone’s house or car. Privacy advocates, legislators and courts are debating the legal standards with increasing intensity as technology — and the amount of sensitive information people entrust to their devices — evolves.

Many people aren’t aware that a smartphone is an adept location-tracking device. It’s constantly sending signals to nearby cell towers, even when it’s not being used. And wireless carriers store data about your device, from where it’s been to whom you’ve called and texted, some of it for years.

The power for police is alluring: a vast data net that can be a cutting-edge crime-fighting tool.

Last fall, in Colorado, a 10-year-old girl vanished while she walked to school. Volunteers scoured Westminster looking for Jessica Ridgeway.

Local police took a clandestine tack. They got a court order for data about every cellphone that connected to five providers’ towers on the girl’s route. Later, they asked for 15 more cellphone site data dumps.

Colorado authorities won’t divulge how many people’s data they obtained, but testimony in other cases indicates it was at least several thousand people’s phones.

The court orders in the Colorado case show police got “cellular telephone numbers, including the date, time and duration of any calls,” as well as numbers and location data for all phones that connected to the towers searched, whether calls were being made or not. Police and court records obtained by USA TODAY about cases across the country show that’s standard for a tower dump.

The tower dump data helped police choose about 500 people who were asked to submit DNA samples. The broad cell-data sweep and DNA samples didn’t solve the crime, though the information aided in the prosecution.

That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?  They used this data to “ask” people to submit their DNA as they were under suspicion for a kidnapping based solely on their cell phone location. (Keep in mind that your DNA will likely be put in another permanent data base which they will then have as irrefutable evidence of your presence at a crime scene if it should ever turn up. Of course, since police never plant evidence you have nothing to worry about.)

But it’s a little girl’s life at stake, you say. Nobody should be reluctant to do whatever it takes to return her. Ok.  But what about this?

A South Carolina sheriff ordered up four cell-data dumps from two towers in a 2011 investigation into a rash of car break-ins near Columbia, including the theft of Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott’s collection of guns and rifles from his police-issued SUV, parked at his home. 

“We were looking at someone who was breaking into a lot of vehicles and was not going to stop,” the sheriff said. “So, we had to find out as much information as we could.” The sheriff’s office says it has used a tower dump in at least one prior case, to help solve a murder. 

And if that didn’t work I guess they planned to break down the doors of everyone in town without a warrant and search them for the missing items. Hey, they needed that information.

And they’re collecting boatloads of it:

Law-enforcement records show police can use initial data from a tower dump to ask for another court order for more information, including addresses, billing records and logs of calls, texts and locations. 

Cellphone data sweeps fit into a broadening effort by police to collect and mine information about people’s activities and movements. 

Police can harvest data about motorists by mining toll-road payments, red-light cameras and license-plate readers. Cities are installing cameras in public areas, some with facial-recognition capabilities, as well as Wi-Fi networks that can record the location and other details about any connecting device.

It is, unsurprisingly, being misused by local yahoos for their own purposes:

Some examples of documented misuse of cellphone data-gathering technology: 

In Minnesota: State auditors found that 88 police officers in departments across the state misused their access to personal data in the state driver’s license database to look up information on family, friends, girlfriends or others without proper authorization or relevance to any official investigation in 2012. And those were just the clear-cut cases. Auditors said that more than half of the law enforcement officers in the state made questionable queries of the database, which includes photos and an array of sensitive personal data.  

In Florida: The state’s Supreme Court is hearing a case in which a lower court found Broward County police overreached by conducting real-time tracking of the GPS location of a man’s cellphone, using still-undisclosed techniques in collaboration with the cellphone carrier. The problem in that case: The police did so under authority of a court order that defense lawyers said authorized them to get only historical location data about his cellphone. 

In Illinois: A suburban Chicago police officer responsible for overseeing access to the department’s criminal history database used the system to look up his girlfriend’s record. Similar cases have shown up in other states, resulting in cases involving harassment, stalking and identity theft, among others.

It isn’t just Big Brother who’s watching our every move. It’s our crazy brother-in-law too. Just casually accepting this seems like a bad idea to me.

All that information is from a major USA Today and Gannet investigation that everyone should read. I get that  most people don’t see this as any big deal — they’ve seen it used on Law and order and it caught “the bad guy.”  But in real life this adds up to the police having access to a whole lot of personal information without any probable cause or a warrant and that adds up to way more power in the hands of police.  And they already have too much.

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Satan in the public square

by digby

I don’t know how they’ll decide that this is not acceptable while nativity scenes (or whatever) are, but I’m sure they will:

In their zeal to tout their faith in the public square, conservatives in Oklahoma may have unwittingly opened the door to a wide range of religious groups, including satanists who are seeking to put their own statue next to a Ten Commandments monument on the Statehouse steps.

The Republican-controlled Legislature in this state known as the buckle of the Bible Belt authorized the privately funded Ten Commandments monument in 2009, and it was placed on the Capitol grounds last year despite criticism from legal experts who questioned its constitutionality. The Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit seeking its removal.

But the New York-based Satanic Temple saw an opportunity. It notified the state’s Capitol Preservation Commission that it wants to donate a monument and plans to submit one of several possible designs this month, said Lucien Greaves, a spokesman for the temple.

“We believe that all monuments should be in good taste and consistent with community standards,” Greaves wrote in letter to state officials. “Our proposed monument, as an homage to the historic/literary Satan, will certainly abide by these guidelines.”

Greaves said one potential design involves a pentagram, a satanic symbol, while another is meant to be an interactive display for children. He said he expects the monument, if approved by Oklahoma officials, would cost about $20,000.

Rep. Mike Ritze, R-Broken Arrow, who spearheaded the push for the Ten Commandments monument and whose family helped pay the $10,000 for its construction, declined to comment on the Satanic Temple’s effort, but Greaves credited Ritze for opening the door to the group’s proposal.

“He’s helping a satanic agenda grow more than any of us possibly could,” Greaves said. “You don’t walk around and see too many satanic temples around, but when you open the door to public spaces for us, that’s when you’re going to see us.”

I once thought that this sort of action would illustrate to everyone why it is wrong for public spaces to feature religious monuments: you can’t pick and choose which religions are acceptable. But now I realize that the people who care about this will have no problem doing just that. They are long past believing in free exercise of religion. They now believe that the Constitution is a collaboration between Jesus and George Washington and that freedom of religion applies only the Christianity (and maybe the Jews if they don’t get too uppity.) I’m not sure how the Supreme Court would deal with this but I’d imagine they’ll find a clever way out. There’s just no way anyone’s going to let Satan on the courthouse steps. Unless he comes in the guise of a politician …

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Teach the children well

by digby

Some of the “non-partisan, fact-driven” things children will learn from the new book are:

• Ted Cruz Is A Man Of Great Virility And Stamina: Many “career establishment politicians are far too out of shape, old or overweight to even perform such a magnificent feat” as standing on the Senate floor and talking for over 21 hours. But not Ted Cruz!
• Ted Cruz Can See The Future: Cruz spoke with “clairvoyant precision” about the “quickly approaching Obama Care disaster.
• Cruz Is The Constitution’s Guardian: Ted Cruz is a “passionate fighter for limited government, economic growth, and the Constitution.
• America Is A Christian Nation: American history is “replete with official references to the value and invocation of Divine guidance, including official Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, House and Senate chaplains, the national motto ‘In God We Trust,” the Pledge of Allegiance, [and] religious paintings in the National Gallery.” So hands off those government-sponsored Ten Commandments monuments!
• Providing Health Care To People Who Can’t Afford It Is Worse Than War: Cruz’s failed stand against the Affordable Care Act “was so important because millions of citizens believe Obama Care is worse than any war. At least American soldiers have weapons with which to defend themselves.”

Ted should be all for this. He too was indoctrinated with extremist right wing propaganda from a very early age:

RAFAEL EDWARD CRUZ’S CONSERVATIVE baptism came at 13, when his parents enrolled him in an after-school program in Houston that was run by a local nonprofit called the Free Enterprise Education Center. Its founder was a retired natural gas executive (and onetime vaudeville performer) named Rolland Storey, a jovial septuagenarian whom one former student described as “a Santa Claus of Liberty.”

Storey’s foundation was part of a late-Cold War growth spurt in conservative youth outreach. (Around the same time in Michigan, an Amway-backed group called the Free Enterprise Institute formed a traveling puppet show to teach five-year-olds about the evils of income redistribution.) The goal was to groom a new generation of true believers in the glory of the free market.

Storey lavished his students with books by Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises, political theorist Frédéric Bastiat, and libertarian firebrand Murray Rothbard—and hammered home his teachings with a catechism called the Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom. (Cruz was a fan of Pillar II: “Everything that government gives to you, it must first take from you.”) Storey’s favorite historian was W. Cleon Skousen, an FBI agent turned Mormon theologian who posited that Anglo-Saxons were descendants of the lost tribe of Israel. Skousen was also a patriarch of the Tenther movement—whose adherents view the 10th Amendment as a firewall against federal encroachment. (By Skousen’s reading, national parks were unconstitutional.)

Cruz was a star pupil. “He was so far head and shoulders above all the other students—frankly, it just wasn’t fair,” says Winston Elliott III, who took over the program after Storey retired. When Storey organized a speech contest on free-market values, Cruz won—four years running. “It was almost as if you wished Ted might be sick one year so that another kid could win.”

Cruz and other promising students were invited to join a traveling troupe called the Constitutional Corroborators. Storey hired a memorization guru from Boston to develop a mnemonic device for the powers specifically granted to Congress in the Constitution. “T-C-C-N-C-C-P-C-C,” for instance, was shorthand for “taxes, credit, commerce, naturalization, coinage, counterfeiting, post office, copyright, courts.” The Corroborators hit the national Rotary Club luncheon circuit, writing selected articles verbatim on easels. They’d close with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free…it expects what never was and never will be.”

Oh the irony …

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