Undernews for March 15

Undernews for March 15

Since 1964, the news while there's still time to do something about it

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A poker player's guide to environmental risk assessement

From our overstocked archives, something that seems applicable to what's happening in Japan right now., Originally published in 1997 in Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual (WW Norton)

Sam Smith

Some simple rules

1. Calculate the stakes as well as the odds.

2. The odds of something happening at any moment are not the same as the odds of something ever happening. In ecological calculations -- especially ones in which the downside could ruin your whole millennium -- it is the latter odds that are important.

3. When confronted with conflicting odds, ask what happens if each projection is wrong. Temporary job loss because of environmental restrictions may come and go, but the loss of the ozone layer is something you can have forever.

4. When confronted with conflicting odds, remember that you don't have to play the game. There are other things to do with your time -- or with the economy or with the environment -- that may produce better results. Thus, instead of playing poker you could be making love. Or instead of getting jobs from some air or water degrading activity, the same jobs could come from a more benign industry such as retrofitting a whole city for solar energy.

5. Don't let anyone -- in industry, government, or the media -- define an "acceptable level of risk" for your own death or disease. They may not have the same vested interest in the right answer as you do.

6. If the stakes are too high, the game is not worth it. If you can't stand the pain, don't attempt the gain.

What poker taught me

I was a poker player long before I started paying attention to environmental problems. One of the things I learned while playing poker is that you can, from time to time, beat the odds -- but don't count on it. That's why you won't find me in Atlantic City or Las Vegas.

The second thing I learned is that even when you do beat the odds, don't count on it happening again. There's a big difference between one good hand and a whole good night.

The third thing I learned is that you can, from time to time, beat the odds -- but you usually have to stay in the game long enough for it to happen. Meanwhile, you can lose an awful lot of money. You have not only to calculate the odds but the stakes as well. And you are always on the edge.

Three scenes from the edge

1. A little girl makes a sand castle. It is a beautiful day and a beautiful sand castle, constructed not far from the edge of the water. The tide has risen only halfway. Then the girl's mother calls her for lunch. They go to a little carry-out near the beach and do some shopping. When they finally return it is high tide. The little girl looks for her castle but the sea has come in and washed it all away. She is sad but her mother says they can come back tomorrow and build another one.

If the little girl had consulted an oceanographer (or even an older kid), she might have learned that the probability of her castle being destroyed approached certainty and that she could have avoided catastrophe by moving the construction site to a safer, if less appealing, location.
On the other hand, should she have been accosted by a conservative columnist, she might have been informed that since the water had been safely rising for four hours and thirty three minutes it was clear that her castle was not in any danger. Anyone who told her otherwise was anti-growth, and a knee-jerk, liberal alarmist.

2. During their vacation, the girl's mother rents a house right at the edge of the beach. It is a beautiful house next to a beautiful beach. It is constructed on stilts between the highway and the first line of dunes. The following winter the mother gets a call from the real estate agent saying that she'll have to choose another location for next summer -- a gale has destroyed the house and several others near it. The agent calls it a "freak storm;" the mother explains it to her child by saying it was an "accident."

In fact, such storms occur in this area every 7 years on average. Over the years some 32 houses have been destroyed or badly damaged just along this stretch of beach. The owners had worried a bit about the danger when they first built the house, but no one else seemed concerned so eventually they stopped thinking much about it. Besides they read an article that said that "scientific support for the notion of a drastic rise in sea level has waned rapidly." The article didn't note that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had reported that over the past 100 years, sea levels have, in fact, risen four to eight inches. Or that this was enough, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, "to have eroded over 40 feet of a typical barrier beach on the East Coast of the United States." Or that the New York Times reported that "At the most likely rate of rise, some experts say, most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States [will] be gone in 25 years. They are already disappearing at an average of 2 to 3 feet a year. "

3. At home or at the beach, the little girl and her mother live on another edge. With nearly six five billion other humans, they exist in that thin layer where the atmosphere and the earth's crust meet. Like many parents these days, the mother finds herself occasionally worrying about the world in which she is raising her daughter. She's confused. For example, there was a 1995 story about global warming in the Washington Post that split the arguments so neatly one could easily reach the author's own conclusion: "When you sort through the confusion, how much you worry about greenhouse warming turns out not to be a matter of science." A MIT professor was quoted who said, "It comes down to personality, it comes down to politics."

Then just two months later, the New York Times reported: "In an important shift of scientific judgment, experts advising the world's governments on climate change are saying for the first time that human activity is a likely cause of the warming of the global atmosphere." When her daughter asks her a question about global warming, she doesn't know quite what to say.

The principles of poker, it turns out, are useful lessons for thinking about the environment as well. Let's return to the sand castle for a moment. There is a 100% probability that the little girl faces ecological disaster. The castle will definitely be washed away. On the other hand, she is only playing a penny ante game. In building the castle, she's engaged in a random act of harmless amusement. Her distress over her loss will be temporary -- after all she can build another one right away. Further, no one -- and nothing -- suffers permanent damage by either the castle's construction or destruction.

With the beach house, the game changes. The chances of destruction are far less, but still objectively calculable. Mathematically minded home owners could have figured what the chances were of losing their houses during a winter storm or, far more importantly, during all the winter storms that might occur during their lifetimes.

Incidentally, these two sets of odds are not the same. If you toss a coin there is a fifty percent chance it will come up tails; if you repeatedly toss a coin, however, there is almost a hundred percent chance that it will eventually come up tails.

Now if the down side of your game is not merely a coin that lands tails up, but the loss of your house -- or a nuclear plant radiation leak or a massive oil spill -- then the probability of something happening ever becomes far more important than the probability of it happening on a particular occasion.

Finally we come to the ultimate game -- a long future of uncertainty and highly disputable odds, in which the ante is the earth and human life itself. Here is the opposite of the sand castle problem: now we have unknown odds but enormous stakes.

So what does poker have to tell us?

It says you have to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. And as a rule of thumb, whatever the odds, you don't want to bet either your house or your planet on a game of chance

Newspapers struggle in an online world

From a new report from Pew Research Center:

For the first time, too, more people said they got news from the web than newspapers. The internet now trails only television among American adults as a destination for news, and the trend line shows the gap closing. Financially the tipping point also has come. When the final tally is in, online ad revenue in 2010 is projected to surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time. The problem for news is that by far the largest share of that online ad revenue goes to non-news sources, particularly to aggregators. . .

The old news economic model was fairly simple. Broadcast television depended on advertising. Newspapers depended on circulation revenue and a few basic advertising categories. Cable was split -- half from advertising and half from cable subscription fees. Online, most believe there will be many different kinds of revenue. This is because no one revenue source looks large enough and because money is divided among so many players. In the biggest new revenue experiment of 2010, the discount sales coupon business led by Groupon, revenue can be split three ways when newspapers are involved. On the iPad, Apple gets 30% of the subscription revenue and owns the audience data. On the Android system, Google takes 10%. News companies are trying to push back. One new effort involves online publishers starting their own ad exchanges, rather than having middlemen do it for them. NBC, CBS and Forbes are among those launching their own, tired of sharing revenue and having third parties take their audience data. . .

The leading study on the subject finds that so far only about three dozen newspapers have moved to some kind of paid content on their websites. Of those, only 1% of users opted to pay. And some papers that moved large portions of content to subscription gave up the effort. A new survey released for this report suggests that under certain circumstances the prospects for charging for content could improve. If their local newspaper would otherwise perish, 23% of Americans said they would pay $5 a month for an online version. To date, however, even among early adopters, only 10% of those who have downloaded local news apps paid for them (this doesn't include apps for non-local news or other content). At the moment, the only news producers successfully charging for most of their content online are those selling financial information to elite audiences -- the Financial Times is one, the Wall Street Journal is another, Bloomberg is a third -- all operations aimed at professional audiences, which means they are not a model that will work for general interest news....

Population stability is possible in a few decades

Joe Bish - This fall, probably in late October, human population will exceed 7 billion people. Yet, on this score, the young adults of today’s world have an unprecedented hope. For the first time in modern history global population stabilization is possible within our lifetimes. United Nations calculations show that if global fertility settles at 1.4 children per women within a few decades, down from today’s average of 2.6, our planet’s rapid population growth could completely halt by 2045, at just over 8 billion. That is only 34 years away.

Down East Journal: Hyphenating an Irish past

Sam Smith

The estimable Brunswick Times Record recently published an interesting article about Maine's Irish immigrants who were so important in the creation of the state.

Except the paper didn't call them Irish, but rather Ulster-Scots.

Being part Irish Protestant myself, it's a problem with which I'm familiar. Even my own family members disparage their ancestors by referring to them as Scotch-Irish.

In fact, the early American ancestors of those who now call themselves Ulster-Scots or Scotch-Irish mostly described themselves as Irish. The modifiers were added in the late 19th century to create distance from poor Irish Catholic immigrants coming into the country in large numbers - and thus are a bit snotty and prejudiced.

Besides, those of us of Irish Protestant background shouldn't denigrate our contributions to both American and Irish culture, which include:

- Redefining St. Patrick's Day as a cause for bawdy celebration and not simply as a day of holy obligation.

- Founding important American support groups such as the Hibernians, the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick, and Irish Aid societies

- Helping in the largely Protestant revolt of 1798. With two minor exceptions there would not be another Irish armed rebellion until the 20th century.

- Irish Protestant emigrants played a major role in the American Revolution and the revolution in turn influenced events in Ireland. For example, the first copy of the Declaration of Independence to be printed outside of North America appeared in the pages of the 'Belfast Newsletter.'

- Among the influences on Irish Protestants were the writings of Tom Paine. His 'Rights of Man' was declared "the Bible of Belfast.' 40,000 copies were sold in Ulster and it was reprinted in four Irish newspapers.

- Irish Protestant Thomas Addis Emmett, brother of 1798 uprising leader Robert Emmett, was captured and condemned but later won a reprieve. In 1804, a year after his brother was hung, he emigrated to America. He became the highly regarded attorney general of New York. Tom Paine liked him well enough to leave him $200 in his will.

- A 20th century Protestant fighter for the Irish cause, Erskine Childers, was executed on charges of possessing a small pistol after helping Eamon de Valera and other IRA members lead a rebellion against the Irish free state government. His son would become president of Ireland in the 1970s. In support of his father's execution, Winston Churchill said, "no man has done more harm or done more genuine malice or endeavored to bring a greater curse upon the common people of Ireland than this strange being."

- Although he would later become far more conservative, Protestant poet WB Yeats as a young man was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. An 1899 police report called him as "more or less revolutionary."

- Yeats said of Irish Protestants during a 1925 Senate debate on divorce, "We . . . are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence."

Why would anyone want to dilute such a history with mere Scottish blarney?

American nuke lobbying group also serves Japanese companies

Justin Elliott, Salon - The Nuclear Energy Institute is a Washington-based trade group that has been widely quoted in the press -- including Salon -- in recent days as representing the American nuclear industry. What media reports haven't mentioned is that NEI is actually an international organization that serves several Japanese member corporations, including the very company whose reactors are at the center of the crisis: Tokyo Electric Power Co. . .

NEI also gives out lots of money in campaign contributions. Its political action committee spent $500,000 last election cycle. It's not clear if that means that foreign money -- say, from Japanese power plant operators like TEPCO -- has gone to American politicians.

Japanese lawmaker pointed to cover-up of nuclear accidents

Stephen C, Webster, Raw Story - According

to a US diplomatic cable released night by The Guardian:

"Taro Kono, who studied and worked in the United States and

speaks excellent English, is a frequent embassy contact who has interests

in agriculture, nuclear, and foreign policy issues," the US embassy

document notes. "He is relatively young, and very outspoken,

especially as a critic of the government's nuclear policy. During this

meeting, he voiced his strong opposition to the nuclear industry in

Japan, especially nuclear fuel reprocessing, based on issues of cost,

safety, and security. Kono claimed Japanese electric companies are hiding

the costs and safety problems associated with nuclear energy, while

successfully selling the idea of reprocessing to the Japanese public as

'recycling uranium.'"

It goes on to say that Kono accused Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade,

and Industry of becoming obsessed with their old policies, such as

on food safety where radiation standards had not changed since shortly

after the Chernobyl incident in 1986. He also accused the METI of only

providing lip service to efforts for renewable energy, instead focusing

much of their resources on the development of nuclear power. He added

that the country's major electric interests once torpedoed a series of

television interviews he was filming. The companies allegedly threatened

to pull their sponsorship when he began to speak frankly about the

dangers and drawbacks of nuclear energy.

Missouri workers beat back anti-union bill

AFL- CIO - With some 500 workers in the Missouri state Senate gallery, backers of a so-called right to work bill, we were unable to unable to muster enough support to bring the legislation to a vote. Senate minority leader Victor Callahan (D) said supporters of right to work for less legislation who claim it will attract more businesses to the state might as well be arguing “let us race to become more competitive by emulating the Third World… through unions and good jobs we created a middle class. The middle class didn’t cause recession, Big Banks did."

Senate leaders said they would not bring the bill back up this week and it was uncertain it if would be on the agenda after the legislature’s spring break next week. Last week more than 5,000 workers rallied in St. Louis against the bill.

How important are apologies?

From Barking Up the Wrong Tree

Apologies are commonly used to deal with transgressions in relationships. Results to date, however, indicate that the positive effects of apologies vary widely, and the match between people’s judgments of apologies and the true value of apologies has not been studied. Building on the affective and behavioral forecasting literature, we predicted that people would overestimate how much they value apologies in reality. Across three experimental studies, our results showed that after having been betrayed by another party (or after imagining this to be the case), people (a) rated the value of an apology much more highly when they imagined receiving an apology than when they actually received an apology and (b) displayed greater trusting behavior when they imagined receiving an apology than when they actually received an apology. These results suggest that people are prone to forecasting errors regarding the effectiveness of an apology and that they tend to overvalue the impact of receiving one.

Source: "How Important Is an Apology to You?, Forecasting Errors in Evaluating the Value of Apologies" from Psychological Science

Word

Today is the Ides of March. Beware of geeks bearing GIFs. - Scott McLarty

Great moments in Manhattan

Jose Martinez , NY Daily News - A Manhattan mom is suing a $19,000-a-year preschool, claiming it jeopardized her daughter's chances of getting into an elite private school because she had to slum with younger kids. . "At age four, [York Avenue Preschool] was still teaching [Imprescia's] daughter about shapes and colors - a two year old's learning environment," the suit says... "Indeed, the school proved not to be a school at all, but just one big playroom," the suit says.

The GOP platform

TPM - Kansas State Rep. Virgil Peck (R) suggested that the best way to deal with the illegal immigration problem may be the same way the state might deal with the problem of "feral hogs" -- by shooting them from a helicopter.

Help the editor

Sam Smith - I have long puzzled over the fact that the North got so emotionally involved in the Civil War. I know the argument of loyalty to union and so forth, but the cost was so immense that I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it. Perhaps it's because we now live in such an amoral time that it's hard to relate to so many giving up so much out of conscience.

But this morning searching for something in one of my books, I came across this passage:

"In America, by the time of the Civil War, slaves were the country's most valuable capital asset. In a nation with an annual federal budget of only $50 million, slaves had a market value of $2 billion, or more than twice that of all the country's railroads."

I had never before thought about what a huge financial interest northern businesses and workers had in ending slavery.

So my question for all you historians out there who correct me on other stuff is this: how big a factor was economic self interest in the north's desire to save the union?

Pocket paradigms

The fraud, the huckster, the salesman are not new phenomena in America; what is new is that they now so strongly control every estate of our society. Those of a character that would have once caused Americans to close the door, hang up, or say "no thank you," now teach our children, run our government, and tell us what to think. They are filled with postmodern versions of Willy Loman: "He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He' s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine." America once made things people wanted, said things that needed to be said and fixed things, including itself, that needed fixing. Now it is out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. The problem, as Willy Loman discovered, comes "when they start not smiling back - that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished." - Sam Smith

Wisconsin Dems get nearly half of needed recall signatures in two weeks

Greg Sargent, Washington Post -Dems have now collected over 45 percent of the signatures necessary to hold recall elections for eight GOP state senators, the Wisconsin Democratic Party tells me. Dems have now collected over 56,000 signatures supporting the recall drives, according to party spokesman Graeme Zielinski, after another surge in organizing activity over the weekend. That’s up from rougly 14,000 after last weekend. This means Dems are well ahead of schedule: In each targeted district, Dems need to amass the required signatures ¬ 25 percent of the number who voted in the last gubernatorial election ¬ by a deadline of 60 days after first filing for recalls, which happened nearly two weeks ago.

Senate leader declares Wisconsin a fascist state

Sent: Monday, March 14, 2011 3:52 PM
To: *Legislative Senate Republicans
Subject: Senate Democrat voting privileges in standing committees

Dear Members,

With the return of the Senate Democrats this weekend, questions have arisen regarding Democrat members’ participation in Senate standing committee public hearings and executive sessions.

Please note that all 14 Democrat senators are still in contempt of the Senate. Therefore, when taking roll call votes on amendments and bills during executive sessions, Senate Democrats’ votes will not be reflected in the Records of Committee Proceedings or the Senate Journal. They are free to attend hearings, listen to testimony, debate legislation, introduce amendments, and cast votes to signal their support/opposition, but those votes will not count, and will not be recorded.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact my office.

Thank you,

Scott Fitzgerald
Senate Majority Leader
13th Senate District

Corporados score highest profits in 18 years during deep recession

Bloomberg - Record earnings fueled by the highest profit margins since 1993 are giving executives more leeway than ever to boost dividends as the bull market enters its third year.
Margins will climb to 8.9 percent in 2011, the highest level in at least 18 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg on non-financial companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index through March 11.

Franken: Corporados out to kill the Internet

Mike Zapler, Politico - Sen. Al Franken claimed that big corporations are "hoping to destroy" the Internet and issued a call to arms to several hundred tech-savvy South by Southwest attendees to preserve net neutrality... Net neutrality, he added, is "the First Amendment issue of our time."

Receiving a hero's welcome from the liberal crowd, Franken took repeated shots at big telecoms, singling out Comcast. He said Comcast is looking to change the basic architecture of the Web by implementing a pricing scheme that allows moneyed interests to pay for faster speeds, leaving everyone else behind. That would be a particularly bad development for the independent musicians and artists gathered here, he said.

"The real end for Comcast is to put Netflix out of business entirely," Franken said, because of the threat that Netflix's streaming video business could pose to Comcast's cable franchise. "In the end, the American people will end up paying a lot more for worse service."

Morning Line: Using bribery to cancel the Constitution

Sam Smith

No, I'm not talking about the bribes - corporate and personal - given to politicians in the form of campaign contributions. That's rotten, but at least we know about it, and even talk about it sometimes.

But there's another form of bribery that gets no attention. The use of federal funds to undermine state and local decisions by making these funds conditional on actions that the federal government has no constitutional authority to order. It is greenmail - with dollar amounts too large for the states and localities to ignore and so everyone plays along with the scam. Thus we have George Bush and Barack Obama blithely redesigning the country's local schools in utter contempt of what the Constitution intended.

It has become so bad that private foundations have gotten into greenmail, recently most dramatically by the ones that told the DC government they couldn't continue to get continued funding if they dumped Michelle Rhee. If an ordinary citizen tried to bribe politicians like this, they would be subject to a lengthy prison term. But foundations just call themselves nonprofits and get away with it.

The media has been major enablers of greenmail, rarely mentioning the conflicts involved and so the public hasn't heard about it. But it's there and it's big and it's well past time to do something about it.

Research: Being alone isn't so bad

Leon Neyfakh, Boston Globe - Spending time alone can look a little suspect. In a world gone wild for wikis and interdisciplinary collaboration, those who prefer solitude and private noodling are seen as eccentric at best and defective at worst, and are often presumed to be suffering from social anxiety, boredom, and alienation.

But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us ¬ that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life ¬ that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone.

Portland Oregon mandates stinky government offices

KPVT, Portland OR - The Portland City Council approved a proposal to make all city offices fragrance-free. The policy is designed to protect employees with health issues, such as asthma.
This means all workers will be asked to not wear cologne, perfume, aftershave or other scented products like hair sprays and lotion. Employees can now face disciplinary action for wearing too much scent.

Washington Post still hasn't figured out the Internet

The Washington Post, an archaic publication supported by profits from the Kaplan education test tyrant outfit, still hasn't quite gotten the Internet down, witness this note by columnist Ezra Klein: "The Washington Post underwent a redesign over the weekend, and unexpectedly, my RSS feed has moved. The new one -- which is also full-text -- can be found at: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/rss_ezra-klein. I hope you'll follow over with it."

For those of you who don't use RSS, it's short for Real Simple Syndication and an awful lot of people do use it. So it's wise to tip off your readers when you're changing the game.

For those of you who do use RSS, you can go here for the current links.

We haven't finished scouting all of them, so we don't know whether they have all have changed, but a good way to check is to look at the date of the last RSS feed in a particular category.

Alan Greenspan still pimping for the plutocrats

National Journal - Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, armed with charts and data, says he has fingered the primary culprit for the sluggish recovery: government activism. It's not that the financial system came within a hair of destroying itself, or that this recession was the worst since the Great Depression, or that American households suffered a huge hit to their wealth just as a huge share of Americans were approaching retirement.

No, Greenspan says in a paper. Corporations have been cowed into submission by the the fear of financial regulation and other government intrusion.

“I conclude that government activism is hampering what should be a broad-based economic recovery," he wrote in a paper earlier this month.

Greenspan presents this finding as the unavoidable conclusion of objective empirical analysis, but his argument is surprisingly sloppy and grounded more in ideology than in statistics. Put simply, it goes like this: The normal reasons for a refusal to invest -- excess capacity, lack of demand, soaring government deficits -- explain less than half of the current sluggishness. Since there aren’t any better explanations, what else could it be except “government activism”?

Pocket paradigms

The average American is subjected to 3,000 commercial messages a day. If you have a good day, a half dozen people will tell you a truth worth remembering. Thus the lies win out 500 to one. - Sam Smith

Governor increases pensions costs for state workers. . .except himself

Mike Tipping, Kennebec Journal, ME - Under Gov. Paul LePage's proposed budget, teachers and other state employees will be required to increase their contributions to the pension system, from 7.65 percent of their salary to 9.65 percent. One public employee currently paying 7.65 percent, however, won't see an increase. The governor has exempted himself. . . .If LePage faced the same increase as state employees, it would cost him $5,880 over his term.

The embedded media

Sam Smith - "Clinton spokesman resigns after WikiLeaks flap" reads the headline in USA Today, a good example of how the embedded media twists the facts right from the top. The abuse of an American citizen by the US Army is not a "Wikileaks flap." This is what PJ Crowley was addressing and what USAT wanted to minimize. In fact, the mainstream media is treating much of the Wikileaks revelations as though they were insignificant compared to the fact that they were once secrets. In other words, in the media's view, protecting the government is more important than protecting their citizen readers.

Shop talk

In case you think your editor is the only progressive in his family,
here's a shot of his wife's young cousin taking part in a Madison protest

The case for doing away with the debt ceiling

Michael Hiltzik, LA Times - Under normal circumstances, there's nothing wrong with symbols. They communicate information nonverbally, provide rallying points for popular movements, give tangible form to abstract concepts. But when a symbol becomes a fetish, you have trouble.

Consider one wholly artificial symbol currently making waves in Washington: the federal debt limit. . .

The debt limit was first enacted in 1917. The idea then was to give the Treasury more freedom to issue debt, not less; since otherwise Congress would have to hold a vote on every bond issue, it was deemed easier to give Treasury blanket authority, but not unlimited authority.

By the 1960s, the limit became a constraint. Since 1962, Congress has changed it at least 74 times. Perversely, the debt limit acquired the reputation of a brake on fiscal irresponsibility. But that's plainly a fantasy. The debt limit doesn't keep Congress from enacting any spending bills it desires, along with tax breaks, creating deficits that have to be closed with debt. . .

Keeping up with Japan

The Obama budget has $36 billion in loan guarantees for new nuclear plants

Emendation

A few days ago we incorrectly said that President Obama had supported giving corporations the rights of individuals in campaign spending. Here is Wikipedia's summary of his position:

||| President Barack Obama stated that the decision "gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington ¬ while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates." Obama later elaborated in his weekly radio address saying, "this ruling strikes at our democracy itself" and "I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest". On January 27, 2010, Obama further condemned the decision during the 2010 State of the Union Address, stating that, "Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests ¬ including foreign corporations ¬ to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities." ||||

GOP war on the middle class: no laptops in coach class

Rumor Mill - GOP Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) warned of a nefarious plot to blow up jet liners using carry-on laptop bombs. Gohmert learned of the plot, he explained to Fox News' Fox and Friends host Gretchen Carlson, while flying from DC to Texas. "This engineer from IBM was telling me that he there was enough highly reactive lithium in his laptop battery to destroy 25 747s- the only thing stopping most people was that a lack of education. Anyone with a basic knowledge of organic chemistry is a potential terrorists- and the worst part is that they teach organic chemistry at elite liberal college- or madrasas as the terrorists call them.."

Gohmert assured Carlson that American public need not worry saying: "The first thing I did as soon as I landed was tell the TSA- we've got to do something about laptops. Specifically those in coach- there's no reason someone flying coach needs to use a laptop. Seize the batteries and either make them buy new ones, or check them." Carlson, again added- "that's true- all the 911 hijackers flew coach!" ...Gohmert added that teaching organic chemistry to anyone without background checks is exactly the same as strapping a bomb on to a suicide bomber

Opposition to Afghan war up 20 points since 2009

Most Americans have less than $25,000 saved up for retirement.

Dean Baker on unrigging the rules

Michigan GOP governor wants to slash business taxes by $2 billion while cutting working class services

Department of Good Stuff: Amsterdam orchestra plays on delayed 747

Cops being taught to hate Muslims

Memo details Runsfeld coming in as chief of staff post-Watergate including blowing up a safe

50 bike blogs

ENDS

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