Yep

Begin The Spin

U.S. Adds 165,000 Jobs, Unemployment Rate Dips

 The headline unemployment rate ticked lower to 7.5% from 7.6%, the lowest in four years. Economists had predicted an increase of 145,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate would remain unchanged.

Perhaps the best news out of the jobs report was that highly disappointing March numbers were revised upward to 138,000 non-farm jobs created, up from the 88,000 originally reported. In total, revisions added 114,000 jobs to the workforce in February and March. 

Get ready for the new spin which will shift from "Obama is ruining the economy" to "it should have happened sooner and would have if a conservative was in charge!"

Meanwhile, check out the revised February numbers...wow!

Tragic

We currently live in a society that goes to great lengths not to offend people for their way of life. Schools teach children to be kind to one another and try to understand what it's like to walk a mile in someone else's shoes. Yet, I do not get this.

And I never will.

Truly, this is a foreign country to me and yet it's just a few states away from me. We have young hunters up here in the North Woods but there aren't any ads in the paper for "my first rifle" or an abundance of photos that show children with guns. People in my state take gun safety a lot more seriously. Apparently, they don't in states like Kentucky.

How could this mother be so fucking stupid? I really don't care if I offend anyone with this but what a class A moron! Even though this tragedy resulted in one death, it's still the same thing as Newtown...idiot mom allows child access to guns...results in loss of young life.

Oh well, accidents happen, I guess. There's nothing to be done whatsoever. Anyone who tries to do something or prevent something like this is Hilter.

The Greatest Nation, Impotent Before Madmen....

Proving Me Wrong Every Single Time

Take a look at this new ad from the GOP.



Note the photo at the 19 second mark. That's President Obama consoling Nicole Hockley, mother of Newtown shooting victim, 6 year old Dylan Hockley. I didn't think it was possible for conservatives to get any lower. They continue to prove me wrong every single time.

I'm wondering what kind of people do a victory dance by showing the mother of a 6 year old shooting victim in a campaign ad. Senator Toomey was right. This was all about stopping Obama, not about protecting 2nd amendment rights.

Great Blog

I was having a discussion with Nikto the other day about how informative it would be if someone started a web site that illustrated the regularity of gun violence in this country. Well, guess what? There already is one and it's great.

Joe Nocera is doing every American a service with his daily updates. This needs to be expanded on a larger scale so people can see how truly awful this problem is and work to prevent further injuries and deaths. As of right now, the federal government is not doing anything to stop this so it has to be up to us.

What should we do?

President Juice

At the press conference on Tuesday, ABC's Jonathan Karl asked the president whether or not he had "the juice" to get things done in Congress. Mr. Obama smiled and quoted Mark Twain about premature demises but the question made the rest of the nation wonder...does he?

It's fairly obvious that the president has a great deal of disdain for Congress. This would include his own party as well as the Republicans. He doesn't have the patience for the schmooze game and he lacks assholeishness of Lyndon Johnson to make people's lives a living hell until they pass what he wants passed. So, he opts to play the long game and that means that in the short term, he looks weak and ineffective. Hence, the comment about juice.

But reporters like Karl should take note of what the president has accomplished thus far. That's pretty impressive, if you ask me. It demonstrates that his opting for longer term victories is a much more effective strategies. Besides, the political media is locked in the 48 hour news cycle and has the emotional intelligence of Kim Kardashian so what do they really know?

What many also fail to note is that conservatives simply don't want to allow the president to win...anything. Senator Pat Toomey, co-author of the Manchin-Toomey gun safety bill, summed it perfectly.

"In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized," Toomey told editors from Digital First Media in an interview published Wednesday by the Norristown Times Herald. "There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it."

There's a word for that...what is it?....I can't quite seem to remember what it is...hmm...:)

David Firestone echoes this sentiment.

It doesn’t really matter how many business groups say the immigration system has to change, or how many suburban voters are disgusted by the easy access to guns for criminals. For these Republicans, the visceral hatred of the president is their only guiding star, and they are absolutely convinced the voters in their districts feel the same way.

I call it Obama Mental Meltdown Syndrome (OMMS). Not to be outdone by the Bush Haters and still stung by the fact that at least they had a reason to loathe our 43rd president, OMMS sufferers remind of children. They stomp their feet, foam at the mouth, and just can't stand the fact that "the other side" is, in reality, winning. President Obama is transforming this country to a center left one just as Ronald Reagan moved it to the center right. They know this is happening and that's why they are doing precisely what they are doing.

The problem for them, however, is that voters are not on their side. Further, the president and the Democrats have learned that they need to be more aggressive in an ongoing way in rallying support. 2014 is not going to be 2010, hence the transformation of the president's campaign machine into Organizing For America.. If conservatives continue the way they are now and don't pass immigration reform, for example, 2014 is going to be very kind to the president. 2016 will be even kinder.

Moreover, if Hillary runs and wins, which she likely will given all of this and the very weak GOP field, you can say buh-bye to the politeness and soft peddling of Congress by the White House. Heck, she'll make Lyndon Johnson look like Mother Teresa!

WTF??!!

PART FOUND NEAR WTC FROM TYPE OF JET HIJACKED 9/11

What I find interesting about this story is the rope they found that was possibly used to lower it in to the crevice. Is this a message? Or has it just been stuck there since 9-11-01?

Filthy Gun Grabber!

Not On Display

With the recent dedication of the George W. Bush presidential library, I think it is only fitting that I reprint, in its entirety, Tomas Young's letter to our 43rd president and vice president. No doubt, this will not appear on display in Dallas.


To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From: Tomas Young 

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care. 

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. 

I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief. I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. 

I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole. Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage. I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. 

I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences. I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. 

I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire. I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? 

I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul. My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

Sweet!

Good news on the economic front.

U.S. economic growth accelerated from January through March, buoyed by the strongest consumer spending in more than two years. The strength offset further declines in government spending that are expected to drag on growth throughout the year. 

Despite the sequester and the tax increases, I think this year is going to be fantastic, economically. We've certainly started it off right!

Good Words

If only Americans reacted the same way to the actual threats that exist in their country. There's something quite fitting and ironic about the fact that the Boston freak-out happened in the same week the Senate blocked consideration of a gun control bill that would have strengthened background checks for potential buyers. Even though this reform is supported by more than 90% of Americans, and even though 56 out of 100 senators voted in favour of it, the Republican minority prevented even a vote from being held on the bill because it would have allegedly violated the second amendment rights of "law-abiding Americans". 

So for those of you keeping score at home – locking down an American city: a proper reaction to the threat from one terrorist. A background check to prevent criminals or those with mental illness from purchasing guns: a dastardly attack on civil liberties. All of this would be almost darkly comic if not for the fact that more Americans will die needlessly as a result. Already, more than 30,000 Americans die in gun violence every year (compared to the 17 who died last year in terrorist attacks). 

What makes US gun violence so particularly horrifying is how routine and mundane it has become. After the massacre of 20 kindergartners in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, millions of Americans began to take greater notice of the threat from gun violence. Yet since then, the daily carnage that guns produce has continued unabated and often unnoticed.

People are noticing, though, and I don't think the gun community is going to be happy in the next couple of elections. Kelly Ayotte isn't faring well after her vote. Pat Toomey, however, is faring well. Once again, I don't think the Right cares about winning elections anymore. Just arguments.

Where Are YOU on the Chart

Busted!

Over the course of the last few months, we've seen that austerity measures in Europe aren't working. One would think that they learned their lesson after the worldwide economic depression in the 1930s but they haven't. Neither have conservatives in this country who are so emotionally obsessed with the government spending less money that they really can't see how cuts in spending are harmful. Now we have the proof that not only are they harmful, they are decidedly not beneficial. In short, high public debt does not consistently stifle economic growth.

Thank you, Thomas Herndon!

Whither Syria...

President Obama has some tough choices to consider over the next few days as he considers whether or not Syria has crossed the red line of chemical weapons use. Assuming they have used them on the rebels (and that's a big "if," at this point), is it really our business to get involved in another country's civil war? The Assad regime is terrible for its people and awful for the world. They are a state sponsor of violent extremism and have a penchant for targeting Israel, one of our closest allies in the world. So, there's no doubt we'd all be better off if he was gone.

But what would be put in his place? We've seen that slippery slope with the Arab Spring in Egypt. The rebels that are fighting in Syria right now are jihadi extremists who very well could impose a theocracy complete with Sharia law in place of the Assad government. Clearly, this would be worse and likely destabilizing to the region. Israel would be at even greater risk. We also have to consider Russia's stake in all of this as they are a staunch ally of Syria.

If I were the president, I would tread cautiously and, if it is confirmed that chemical weapons were used, any action that is taken should be done so with a broad consensus starting with the Arab League. While this decision is being made, we need solid intelligence on what the Syrian rebels plan to do if they assume power. Are they going to be part of the world community and participate in open elections and democracy? Or will they be worse than Bashar Assad?

Football, Boxing, Boston and Three Unsolved Murders on 9/11/11

A couple of weeks ago the NFL moved to dismiss over 200 cases brought by thousands of football players suing the NFL for brain damage caused by concussions they received while playing football. In many cases players who had just suffered severe brain trauma were immediately sent back out on the field.

Repeated concussions, or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, can cause dementia and Parkinson's Syndrome. There have been numerous documented cases where individuals suffering from CTE committed assaults, murder and suicide. The problem is that CTE is almost impossible to diagnose until an autopsy is conducted.

So when Time Magazine ran an article that asked whether brain damage that Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev suffered as an amateur boxer contributed to his rage against the United States, imagine the outrage among conservatives, as reported by Fox News:

“TIME should be ashamed and embarrassed by this article. It is just beyond absurd, and is another silly and infantile attempt to deny the obvious,” AmericanThinker.com columnist C. Edmund Wright told FOX411. “Boxing, and football, have been related to brain damage in the past, but none of the boxers or NFL players who committed suicide did so by killing innocent eight-year-olds in a crowded public square. The analogy doesn’t pass elementary school logic.”

No, football players haven't killed eight-year-olds in public. But victims of CTE have killed girl friends, spouses and their own children. 

Media critic John Ziegler concurred. “It is hilarious to watch the media do mental gymnastics to try to avoid concluding that radical Islam was what motivated the bombings,” he said. “If the fake Onion paper tried to parody this, they simply could not.”

John Conway, CEO of Astonish Media Group, found the article “sensationalized and grasping at straws,” while Dan Gainor, Vice President of Business and Culture and the Media Research Institute, noted: “Every time there is another act of terror linked to radical Islam, journalists go out of their way to excuse it or rationalize it. There was a time when news magazines had gravitas, now they only way they get attention is by acting like your crazy uncle.”

Of course, none of these media pundits knows anything at all about CTE. Nor do they seem to have read the Time article, which includes the following paragraph:

That points to the difficulty of establishing any link between the condition of a brain and actions that may or may not result from it. Cantu points to the case of the late pro wrestler Chris Benoit, who killed his wife and son and then himself in 2007. When his brain was studied after he died, it showed signs of CTE—but here too it might have had little to do with his murderous behavior. “In Benoit’s case the behavior was again premeditated. It took place slowly, over the course of a weekend. He even sedated his son first so he wouldn’t suffer,” Cantu says. Criminally pathological? Certainly. But triggered by CTE? Probably not.

Time asked an obvious question, consulted experts and printed their conclusions. The experts thought that the bombing was a premeditated act that lacked the impulsiveness usually associated with behaviors caused by CTE.

Conservatives and FOX News were confused because they thought Time was using their tried and true trick of "just asking a question" and guilt by association to link boxing and the bombers. They had to attack because they didn't want their simplistic narrative of radical Islam being the sole cause of the Boston bombing to be confused by inconvenient facts or mitigating circumstances.

In their rush to condemn all of Islam for the actions of two disturbed individuals (or "losers" as their own uncle describes them), conservatives are doing exactly the same thing they accuse liberals of when they demand restrictions on all gun owners because a few (well, it's actually dozens at this point) crazed individuals like Adam Lanza and James Holmes committed mass murder.

The NRA insists that mental illness is the cause of mass murder, not access to guns or explosives. We know that repeated brain injury is a cause of mental illness. So it's only logical to ask whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev suffered brain trauma that would cause murderous behavior.

Which brings us to those murders on 9/11/11. Authorities are now wondering whether Tamerlan murdered his best friend and two other men on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. If those murders were the kind of impulsive act of enraged violence typical of CTE, brain damage may well have sent Tamerlan on a downward spiral of guilt, anger, depression and despair that ultimately resulted in the senseless bombing in Boston and suicidal behavior afterwards.

We should also ask the following questions: did brain damage play a role in Tamerlan's arrest in 2009 for assaulting his girl friend? Could brain damage have made Tamerlan more receptive to a violent and radical interpretation of Islam in the first place? Did brain damage make it harder for Tamerlan to concentrate and therefore study, ultimately forcing him to drop out of college?

The authorities should look closely at Tamerlan's brain. If it has the lesions indicative of CTE he's no less guilty. But if brain damage was partially responsible for the tragedy in Boston, it raises questions about the potential risk from sports where concussions are routine.

Just because you're a boxer or a Muslim doesn't mean you're going to blow people up. Muhammad Ali was both. But all that brain damage did leave Ali trembling with Parkinson's at the age of 42.

So you might think long and hard before signing your kid up for football, boxing or martial arts.

Internet Sales Taxes: a Chance to Fix a Broken System

The Internet is going insane now that the Internet sales tax bill has passed a test vote in the Senate. The bill would require companies with sales of more than a million dollars worth of out-of-state sales to collect sales tax for the states where their customers live.

Why is this needed? When people buy things from out-of-state companies through mail order or the Internet they're supposed to pay sales tax to their state. But no one does. This means that the states, most of which are really strapped for cash these days, are not getting funds needed to pay for the services used by the freeloaders who actually live there. We're talking tens of billions of dollars here.

Thus, Internet companies that don't pay sales tax have a huge advantage over local businesses. Retailers watch helplessly as people stroll down the aisles of their stores looking at merchandise, trying it out and asking clerks questions, only to place an order on Amazon with their cellphone while they're still in the store.

The Senate bill, once opposed by Amazon, now enjoys the Internet pioneer's backing. The reason is that Amazon will soon be paying sales taxes anyway, because it's planning to build warehouses near large cities to achieve same-day delivery, allowing them to compete directly with brick and mortar retailers.

But some people are attributing a more sinister motive: they think Amazon wants to crush any upstart competitors by making them collect onerous sales taxes. This, everyone fears, will stifle innovation and snuff out the entrepreneurial spirit forever more.

Typical reactions to the bill are like Megan McArdle's, of The Daily Beast. They argue that small businesses won't be able to handle paying sales tax to all those jurisdictions. However, opponents of the bill keep forgetting that this will only affect companies with at least one million dollars in out-of-state sales. Small businesses will never have to bother with collecting out-of-state sales taxes.

All this outrage is misplaced. The real problem is that the sales tax system is broken and this is the perfect opportunity to fix it.  

The thing is, many small businesses already have to collect out-of-state sales taxes. For example, if you're a small vendor who sells stuffed animals, or comic books, or Star Wars light-sabers at out-of-state at conventions like Comic-Con or Gen-Con you have to collect sales tax for anything you sell there. And then you often have to continue to file with those states for years afterwards, even though you may never make another sale there again.

Selling things on the Internet is exactly the same thing: the customer brings your virtual sales floor directly onto their computer screen, and they make the purchase in their home.

Computing sales tax on such purchases is not difficult. This is the Internet, after all, and there are computers. Computers can take an address and calculate exactly how much sales tax is due and who should get it. PayPal already does this on behalf of small businesses, though it's up to the businesses to do the necessary filings and payments to the state.

And that's where the magic of entrepreneurship comes in. This is a perfect opportunity for an someone to start up a new Internet business to make collecting sales taxes painless for everyone.

When this bill becomes law state legislatures will have a huge incentive to streamline their sales-tax filing systems, which are predicated on the idea that only in-state businesses collect sales taxes. They will rush to provide mechanisms for direct computerized payment of sales taxes, and eliminate  onerous filing requirements.

That will also make it easier for in-state companies to collect sales taxes. And that's a win for everyone.