Contributors

Thursday, July 03, 2014

Unemployment Rate Drops

U.S. employment growth jumped in June and the jobless rate closed in on a six-year low, decisive evidence the economy was moving forward at a brisk clip after a surprisingly big slump at the start of the year. Nonfarm payrolls increased by 288,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent, its lowest level since September 2008, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Data for April and May were revised to show a total of 29,000 more jobs created than previously reported.

This marks the 5th straight month of 200K+ job growth which is great news for the US Economy. Of course, this is not so great for the Republicans who have now officially lost the economy as a campaign issue in the fall. If the economy is the #1 issue in the fall election and it's going in the right direction, why would they want to vote an incumbent out of office?

Wednesday, July 02, 2014

Still Loving Quora

After just over two months on Quora, I have to report that I am really having a blast! If you haven't gotten on yet, I urge you to do so. There is such a great variety of people with different views on Quora that I honestly feel right at home. I've struck up some great online friendships.

And I can't believe the traffic. Take a look at how many people read and upvoted one of my answers. Wow! It's also kind of funny to note how sometimes a quick answer (like this one or this one ) generates a lot of views and upvotes. I wish that I could get some more traffic here but I think people tend to flock where there is more population and that's just not here in my little online, small town newspaper. Although, Nikto's last few posts have gotten double what we normally get on daily pieces so that's pretty cool.

And I've more or less confirmed what I thought about TSM commenters out in the real world...they are pretty much cowards. They never ask questions of their own, rarely answer and seem to only upvote or offer a comment here or there. It makes sense because they know how batshit their ideology is outside of the bubble and their insecurity simply won't allow any sort of negativity. Oh well, at least they are mildly self aware:)

Even the downvotes and negative reactions to some of my questions haven't really bothered me. There is just such a nice balance there that is more representative of reality. What comes next promised to be most exciting!



Tuesday, July 01, 2014

Why All the Red-State Pill Popping?

Opioid painkiller abuse is a serious problem in this country. High profile cases include actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died of a heroin overdose earlier this year after getting hooked on prescription painkillers, and Rush Limbaugh, whose hearing loss may have been caused by oxycontin abuse.

A study of prescription rates across the country is interesting: doctors in Minnesota (where I live) issue fewer than half as many prescriptions for opioids than Alabama:
[T]he rates were much higher in some southern states. In Alabama, which led the country, there were 143 painkiller prescriptions for every 100 people in 2012. There were 11 other states where each adult, on average, got a least one painkiller prescription that year, including Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky.

CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden told reporters that officials don't think the high rates of prescribing in some states are because people living there have more pain. "This is an epidemic that was largely caused by improper prescribing practices," he said during a media briefing.
These excessively high prescription rates contribute directly to higher death rates by overdose in those states. Florida changed their regulations to combat an epidemic of oxycodone overdoses with great success:
Between 2010 and 2012, annual overdose deaths in Florida dropped 16.7 percent, from 3,201 to 2,666. And deaths from oxycodone, the generic name of the ingredient in many brand-name opioid painkillers, fell by more than half, according to an analysis published in MMWR.
Why are the conservative states so ready to pop addictive painkillers? There's some research that finds conservatives to be driven more by fear, something that seems to be borne out by the attitudes so many conservatives espouse when they insist they have to carry guns everywhere they go. Does all that fear also make conservatives more afraid of pain?

Are southern doctors letting drug companies use them to bilk insurance and Medicaid out of billions of dollars to hook patients on addictive drugs? Are patients just getting prescriptions so they can turn around and sell the pills on the black market?

I don't know. All I can say for sure is that if the numbers were reversed, conservatives would be telling us how liberals are wimpy nancy-boys, how blue-state welfare policies encourage prescription drug abuse and Obamacare is leading to moral decline by giving them heroin-light instead of making them tough it out.

What I do know from personal experience is that these drugs are extremely dangerous. Some years ago I contracted pneumonia, though I didn't know it because I had no problems breathing: the main symptom was an incredibly bad headache that prevented me from sleeping.

When they finally prescribed the right antibiotic, they also gave me a prescription for Percocet (oxycodone and acetaminophen) so that I could sleep. I took one tablet. But as soon as I would start to fall asleep I would stop breathing. I had to force myself to stay awake and breathe until the drug wore off.

I cannot understand why people put this crap into their systems just for the hell of it...

Quite A Contradiction


Corporations Take Control of Women's Reproductive Health


Monday, June 30, 2014

Supreme Court Okays Corporate Interference in Personal Lives

The Supreme Court decided in favor of Hobby Lobby's claim that paying for birth control violated "the company's" freedom of religion.

This is wrong on two counts.

First, corporations are not human beings and cannot have religions. Corporations do not attend church. They cannot be excommunicated. They cannot be married. They cannot partake of holy sacraments or receive communion. They cannot be baptized. They cannot vote. They cannot go to prison.

Corporations are legal entities created by government. They exist to prevent the owners from being held personally liable for corporate debts and actions. If Hobby Lobby goes bankrupt, the company's creditors cannot go after the owners' personal assets to recoup debts. The CEO is not culpable for crimes committed by other employees.

That means that the owners of Hobby Lobby are not personally responsible for actions that corporation takes that are required by law.  The owners and officers of the company are not the company, unless they are a sole proprietorship that is is not protected by the liability limitations that Hobby Lobby's incorporation provides.

Thus, if Hobby Lobby wants to force their religious beliefs on their employees, they can't hide behind the shield of corporate law that the government provides them. The Supreme Court should have  allowed this only if they dissolved the corporate entity the Hobby Lobby owners hide behind.

Second, the company's argument against providing coverage was this:
The companies objected to some of the methods, saying they are tantamount to abortion because they can prevent embryos from implanting in the womb. Providing insurance coverage for those forms of contraception would, the companies said, make them complicit in the practice.
They're saying that their religion prevents them from giving money to person A, who will give that money to person B to provide contraception to person C.

Then why is is acceptable for them to money directly to person C who will spend it on contraception?

What happens when Hobby Lobby finds out that one of their employees is spending that money on forbidden contraceptives? Or when they find out that an employee has had an abortion? Based on their victory in the Supreme Court today, won't they feel emboldened to fire that employee, because the employee is using their money to make them complicit in the practice? How can the government force them to pay people who violate their core beliefs?

How long before other "family-owned" corporations come crawling out of the woodwork saying that they can't hire Hindus because it would make complicit in paganism, or Jews because it would make them complicit in the death of Jesus, or women because their religion preaches that women should stay in the home, or gays because -- well, gays!

In the final analysis the Hobby Lobby case is not about corporate freedom of religion. It's about employers thinking they have the right to control the private lives of the people who work for them.

In particular:
[Hobby Lobby] said they had no objection to other forms of contraception, including condoms, diaphragms, sponges, several kinds of birth control pills and sterilization surgery.
That means Hobby Lobby thinks corporations have the right to tell an employee the only method of birth control they will accept is sterilization, if they couch their reasons in appropriately mystical terms.

That should give even the most die-hard conservative reason to doubt the wisdom of this decision.

The Perception of A Conservative


Sunday, June 29, 2014

NPR Plays The Cult of Both Sides

Last Friday, the president spoke in my hometown and NPR in Minnesota aired a post speech analysis. At about the 12 minute mark, Keith Downy, chair of the Minnesota Republican party joins the conversation and, thus, any criticism of NPR being liberal goes directly out of the fucking window. For the next few minutes, Downy spins the usual yarn about how the free market can just sort itself out. If we had only left the government out of it in 2008, all would be well with our economy today.

What fucking planet are these people living on?

Worse, he's being terribly dishonest because he would have done the exact same thing the president did. I'd like Mr. Downy or any other free market fundamentalist to point to real world evidence of their theory. Show me a recession that was that bad and then show me how doing nothing worked out.

Of course the real treat of the segment was Andy from Sioux Falls, a small business owner fed up with federal taxes, who comes in at around 14 minutes into the segment. After hearing his remarks, I have to question whether or not this man was an actual small business owner or whether he was a Tea Party troll calling in to wax Ayn Rand. No business owner (large, medium, or small) turns down making more money because they are worried about paying federal taxes. What a ludicrous bunch of nonsense! After Downy's ad hom on the woman the president met with to discuss local economic concerns, I was left to wonder how NPR let themselves get into such a position.

When will the "liberal" media stop playing the cult of both sides? Sometimes there is only one side to a story. Supply side economics doesn't work. Even the guys that came up with it (David Stockman, Bruce Bartlett) have admitted they were wrong. You can't simply ignore aggregate demand and pretend it doesn't exist. The problem with our economy today is that there are not enough people buying things so businesses don't hire people. There isn't enough population at the top to support our economy.

The middle class is the engine that drives our economy and when they have more money, our economy will improve.

A Sunday Reflection


Saturday, June 28, 2014

Free Speech and Clinic Safety

Noah Feldman from Bloomberg breaks down the recent SCOTUS decision which allows anti-abortion activists inside the buffer zones that clinics have created in front of their buildings for safety. He notes that a first glance might reveal a big victory for abortion foes. Yet, a closer examination reveals much more.

The crucial element in the opinion — the element that got the liberals on board and enraged the conservatives — is that Roberts said the law was neutral with respect to the content of speech as well as the viewpoint of the speakers. That conclusion protected the possibility of other laws protecting women seeking abortions that pay more attention to what Roberts said was missing here, namely proof that the law was narrowly tailored.

What would be a real world example?

Consider a law banning sound trucks blaring on your street at night. It would probably be constitutional, because the government has a significant interest in citizens’ sleep, and there would be plenty of other times for sound trucks to operate, leaving ample alternatives for communication. It is this standard that Roberts applied to the buffer zone — and that will therefore be applied to other, similar buffer laws in the future.

Essentially, the details of the ruling give fair warning to abortion foes who may be emboldened to shout or threaten clinic patrons. The constitutionality of a ban or a buffer zone is still there because (surprise!) the freedom of speech is not unlimited.

Friday, June 27, 2014

Democrats Counting Cash

On behalf of all Democrats and liberals, I would like to personally thank John Boehner and all Republicans everywhere for helping out with our fundraising yesterday. The DCCC has the best day it's had this year with a cool half mil coming into the coffer. Thanks dudes!

Perhaps continued attacks on the president will also increase voter turnout in the midterms and he can kick their ass a third time:)

The Thad Tizzy

I'm still trying to figure out why the Tea Baggers and other malcontent conservatives are pissed off about Thad winning the runoff in Mississippi. Democrats can vote in primary elections. It's the law. Why are the being all whiny about it? Don't the Republicans want to expand their base? What better way to do so than by illustrating to African American voters in the state that Thad Cochran considers their interests as well.

It will never cease to amaze me how conservatives continue to do everything in their power to contract their voting base.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Getting Blood Out of a Stone

When you give money to a charity, you expect that they'll spend it on the things they promised to. Right?

So when people gave the American Red Cross $300 million for Hurricane Sandy relief, you would expect that the organization would be quite proud to show how well they did for their donors. Right?

Wrong.

ProPublica tried to find out the details of how the Red Cross spent the money it received for Hurricane Sandy. But getting the information from the Red Cross is like getting blood out of a stone:
If those details were disclosed, "the American Red Cross would suffer competitive harm because its competitors would be able to mimic the American Red Cross's business model for an increased competitive advantage," [Gabrielle] Levin [counsel for the Red Cross from the law firm Gibson Dunn] wrote.
People give the Red Cross their very blood for free, a donation which carries significant risk of personal bodily harm, and they turn around and sell it to hospitals for a hefty fee. And they're whining about trade secrets?  People give you blood and money. What's the big secret?

When a tax-exempt public charity starts spouting corporate-speak about trade secrets, competitors and business models, they seem to be hiding something.

But what? By all accounts, the Red Cross is doing a pretty decent job of turning donations into help for people in need (91% of every dollar raised goes to humanitarian services). They post the IRS form with the salary of CEO Gail McGovern ($628,386 in 2013). That's not excessive, even though some Internet nitwits pretend it is, and the five other corporate officers listed also have reasonable salaries.

There are a lot of unscrupulous charities out there that do a lot worse job than the Red Cross. The Red Cross is out there on the front lines whenever there's a disaster, so it's pretty obvious they're actually doing something.

Other charities, not so much. There are a zillion charities for veterans, children (foreign and domestic), animal shelters, wildlife, medical research, and so on. But you can never really tell that they're actually doing anything with your money: we'll always have homeless vets, cancer, heart disease, too many pregnant cats running around loose and endangered species. Lots of these charities are completely phony. Most of them spend far more on fund raising than the cause they're supposed to be helping.

The Red Cross is different. They're always around, always helping people when they need it most. But because we trust and depend on them, they really need to be up front about what they do with the money we give them. Because if they're not doing their jobs right, people are going to die.

All charities should be held to that same standard. If the Red Cross is afraid to divulge their "business model" because they believe that the weaselly worthless charities will start poaching Red Cross donors, then we need to strengthen the laws for charitable giving to stop the scum from ripping us off.

A Frivolous Lawsuit?

Conservatives like to whine and shriek about frivolous lawsuits right up until the point when they actually start one themselves.

House Speaker John Boehner confirmed Wednesday that he intends to sue President Obama in the long-running dispute between the administration and congressional Republicans over the scope of the administration's executive authority to enforce laws. 

"I am," Boehner told reporters, when asked if he was going to initiate a lawsuit. "The Constitution makes it clear that a president's job is to faithfully execute the laws. In my view, the president has not faithfully executed the laws." Boehner added: "Congress has its job to do and so does the president. And when there's conflicts like this between the legislative branch and the administrative branch, it's in my view our responsibility to stand up for this institution in which we serve."

I wonder how much this is going to cost the taxpayers.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

When Every Quarter Is a Bad Quarter

The Commerce Department says that US economy contracted 2.9% in the first quarter, mostly due to bad winter weather. To be sure, there were lots of other factors:
The latest revisions reflect a weaker pace of healthcare spending than previously assumed, which caused a downgrading of the consumer spending estimate.
and
[Orders for durable goods] were dragged down by weak demand for transportation, machinery, computers and electronic products; electrical equipment, appliances and components; as well as a 31.4 percent plunge in defense capital goods orders.
and
Other drags to first-quarter growth included a slow pace of restocking by businesses, a sharp drop in investment on non-residential structures such as gas drilling and weak government spending on defense.
So, when people save money on healthcare and the government cuts spending, the economy suffers. No wonder economics is called the dismal science: even things that are supposed to good are bad.

But the largest single factor was the weather. Recently a group of economic and public figures from across the political spectrum released a report called Risky Business that details the economic effects of climate change. These include former Republican Treasury secretaries Hank Paulson and George Shultz.

Climate is just another word for long-term weather. Climate change will usher in bad weather every quarter: rising sea levels, more flash flooding, more torrential rains in some areas while other areas suffer perpetual drought, more powerful storm surges and tornadoes, and larger snowfalls. In states like Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana it will be too hot and humid to work outside without risk of heat stroke. In other words, when we're not digging out from snowstorms, mudslides, tornadoes, and floods, it will be too damn hot to get any work done. Productivity will go into the crapper.

The report states that some areas may benefit from a milder climate, like Minnesota and North Dakota. Hey, two out of 50 states ain't bad.

Wrong About Scott Walker

I didn't think there was much to the "Scott Walker is a criminal" stuff that has been floating around these last few years but it looks like that story might have a bit more to it. It's not surprising that Scott Walker says that the probe is all over. Far from it. 

The scope of the criminal scheme under investigation "is expansive," Schmitz wrote. "It includes criminal violations of multiple elections laws, including violations of Filing a False Campaign Report or Statement and Conspiracy to File a False Campaign Report or Statement."

Well, I guess I was wrong again:)

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Revenge of the Nerds?

A recent study found that "popular" kids aren't as successful at real life as they are at impressing their classmates:
At 13, they were viewed by classmates with envy, admiration and not a little awe. The girls wore makeup, had boyfriends and went to parties held by older students. The boys boasted about sneaking beers on a Saturday night and swiping condoms from the local convenience store.

They were cool. They were good-looking. They were so not you.

Whatever happened to them?

“The fast-track kids didn’t turn out O.K.,” said Joseph P. Allen, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. He is the lead author of a new study, published this month in the journal Child Development, that followed these risk-taking, socially precocious cool kids for a decade. In high school, their social status often plummeted, the study showed, and they began struggling in many ways.
As technology has become more important to success in the workplace, kids who studied in school, applied themselves and went to college are making more money.

Sure, drunken frat boys with rich daddies can still get into Harvard and Skull and Bones, and they can get high-paying jobs through their connections. But if you look at the list of the richest people in the United States, you see it's basically divided into two parts: the self-made techies (Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg) and the guys who got handed everything from daddy (the Kochs and the Waltons) with the occasional odd ducks like Warren Buffett and Sheldon Adelson.

The rise in popularity of video games (including computerized versions of D&D, a nerds-only activity at one point), films like Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Star Trek, Star Wars, Gravity, the entire Marvel canon, and the worldwide acceptance of and total dependence on the Internet have completely changed the face of entertainment, commerce and social interaction in ways that only nerdy science fiction writers and fans had contemplated thirty years ago.

And then there's this hoverbike, a sort of rev. 0.0 of Luke Skywalker's landspeeder or Anakin's airspeeder. What could be a surer sign that the future is here and that the nerds have won?

Yet, despite all that technological progress, I just know that the cool kids will still go out and get themselves killed drinking and shooting womp rats.

Can You Spot The Racism In this Photo?








































Update: A couple of comments failed to note this. 

Racism isn't like a smelly fart. It doesn't always have to be that apparent.

Monday, June 23, 2014

The Gaseous Form of Manure

During the recent Senate hearing on climate change, Republicans once again trotted out one of their stupidest talking points: the notion that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.
"I would say CO2 is a different kettle of fish," said [Senator Jeff] Sessions [(R-Ala)]. "It's plant food. It's not a pollutant in any normal definition."
Cow manure is also plant food. But you don't want it flowing freely through the streets or tainting your drinking water. 

Carbon dioxide is lung excrement.  It is a waste product of all animal life as well as the combustion of fossil fuels.

In other words, all that hot air Senator Sessions is spewing about climate change is almost literally the gaseous form of bullshit.

We can withstand carbon dioxide in small quantities, but it is deadly at higher concentrations. At 100,000 ppm (10%) it is deadly. Carbon dioxide poisoning -- CO2 retention -- is the direct cause of death by suffocation. It kills submariners and divers whose equipment fails.

If you put a plastic bag over your head the carbon dioxide pollution your lungs produce will kill you in short order. It's really that simple.

When people commit suicide in their automobiles or die accidentally from faulty venting of natural gas or propane heaters, the carbon monoxide (CO) from incomplete combustion kills them first (because CO binds to hemoglobin). But the carbon dioxide would also get the job done; it just takes a little longer.

Finally, plants need to respire oxygen in the absence of sunlight to drive their life processes, just like we do, and at that time they exhale carbon dioxide, just like we do. That means plants -- just like humans -- will die if the concentration of CO2 gets too high.

Carbon dioxide is therefore the very definition of a pollutant, though like many pollutants it is harmless in sufficiently small quantities. And since even oxygen is toxic at sufficiently high concentrations, Sessions' notions about "plant food" are idiotic from the get-go: it's all about proper concentrations.

Burning so much oil, gas and coal puts CO2 into the atmosphere far faster than plants and other natural processes can possibly remove it. That excess CO2 has been building now for 150 years, and it's heating the earth by entrapping the sun's warmth on the surface, instead of radiating that heat back into space in the infrared.

The earth is packed with life because it is has balanced systems, like the carbon cycle and the water cycle. Humans are knocking those cycles out of kilter on a massive scale: there are seven billion of us now.

We have doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere over the course of several decades by burning gigatons of oil, gas and coal that had been buried over a billion years. At the same time we've deforested millions of square miles of forests that can no longer cleanse that "plant food" from the atmosphere because we're burning those all down too.

So, let me summarize in a folksy way that Mr. Sessions will understand: if you put too much manure on your petunias you'll kill them. And if we put too much CO2 into the atmosphere we'll kill the plants -- and ourselves.