Without doubt the highlight of the current presidential campaign has been Bad Lip Reading and here is the latest effort.
#indecision2012
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Get the pop tart!!!
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It's really tragic that religious groups in this country make it so politically suicidal for Americans to come forward and admit that they don't believe in a higher power. As a result we get almost every politician feeling like they have to pander to church-goers just so they don't get shouted down by the radicals on the right.
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Since his election last November, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has consistently proven himself to be little more than a shill for his conservative corporate pals. But his latest proposal really boggles the mind. Michigan has among the worst roads in the entire nation and we have no money to fix them (or any of the other things that need repair).
One of the big reasons our roads are roads are so decrepit is that Michigan remains one of the only states in the country that still allows 80 ton trucks which just tear up the pavement. Most states limit trucks to just 40 tons. Instead of addressing this problem, Snyder has proposed changing the way roads are funded.
He wants to eliminate the retail fuel tax of $0.19 per gallon on gas and $0.15 on diesel and raise the cost of vehicle registration by an average of $120 per year. That would more than double the amount I pay for registration on the vehicles in my household.
He also wants to implement a wholesale fuel tax which he claims "is a more viable long-term funding approach." How is a fuel tax levied at the wholesale level any more viable than a retail tax? A wholesale tax is still passed along to drivers when they fill their tanks. The only difference is that the amount they pay will be further obfuscated when the tax is shifted upstream.
A further downside of this shift in the tax burden is that it disincentivizes efficiency and punishes those that drive less. A car owner that drives 1 mile or 100,000 miles will pay the same. If the wholesale tax works out to be less per gallon than the current retail tax (fat chance of that) driving further or driving a thirstier vehicle will actually cost less.
Simply raising the current retail tax instead would encourage less petroleum use and put less load on the roadways, which would ultimately cost us less to maintain and build. But a straight-up increase in an existing tax to fund absolutely necessary infrastructure is absolutely anathema to a Republican hack like Snyder. Instead he will shuffle the deck chairs in a way that will probably cost the 99% more in the end while making it seem like the opposite.
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Snyder floats increasing vehicle registration fees as idea to raise $1B for Michigan roads
Gov. Rick Snyder said today he thinks the state should try to find a way to raise an additional $1.4 billion in revenue for roads …
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John Voelker takes a good look at the so-called "reporting" on Fisker and its DoE loans since last week. The trigger for all this was the release of the EPA efficiency estimates for the Karma, Fisker's first product which I wrote about at the time.
https://plus.google.com/114133424228405038490/posts/fKBxFpZ51sq
In short, while the Karma's numbers are disappointing, any criticism of the ATVM program (the DoE low interest loan program) because the Karma is assembled in Finland is disingenuous. Fisker always planned to have the Karma assembled in Finland by contract builder Valmet. The bulk of the loan money was meant for development and production of the second Fisker model which should eventually emerge from a former GM plant in Delaware. Check out John's story for more.
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Fisker's Federal Fiasco: Loans, 20-MPG Electric Cars, Shoddy Reporting
Today, if the news cycle cooperates, ABC News will air a segment on its Nightline program that looks at Fisker Automotive–makers of the 2012 Karma plug-in luxury sport sedan–and the low-interest loa…
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In the days before the G8 summit in France last week, French president Nicolas Sarkozy decided to invite influential people from the technology and content fields to discuss the role of the internet in society in a forum dubbed eG8. Unfortunately what Sarkozy had in mind was less of an open discussion on modern communications and more of a rubber stamp on his intention to increase control over content and copyright. Sarkozy has been a strong proponent of so-called “three strikes” rules that would ban people from using the net if they are accused of copyright infringement three times.
Note that was accused not convicted. Major media companies have shown no aversion over the past decade to accuse people of theft and infringement often in cases where the appearance of a piece of media was merely incidental such as a radio playing a song in the background of a video on youtube. Companies like Viacom have gone further by suing Youtube for serving up infringing material that in many cases has been posted by agents of Viacom itself for promotional purposes.
The major media companies clearly have no credibility in this game, nor does Sarkozy.
“Now that the Internet is an integral part of most people’s live, it would be contradictory to exclude governments from this huge forum,” said Sarkozy. “Nobody could nor should forget that these governments are the only legitimate representatives of the will of the people in our democracies. To forget this is to take the risk of democratic chaos and hence anarchy.”
Here Sarkozy couldn’t be more wrong. Even in a democracy – or especially in a democracy – government is NOT the sole legitimate representative of the people. The people themselves in a modern country can be a far better representative of their own will than a government that is typically more beholden to huge corporate donors than to its own constituents. To imply otherwise indicates that control is far more important that freedom. Freedom is messy and people like Sarkozy and the heads of big business need to learn to deal with that.
Thankfully not everyone on hand was simply a lacky for Sarkozy and the entrenched incumbents. Among the luminaries participating in eG8 were the great prof. Lawrence Lessig and musician/writer/activist John Perry Barlow. Lessig’s comments about the importance of taking a more hands-off approach to copyright and the internet are in the video at the top of this post.
Barlow was on panel with the French culture minister and the heads of 20th Century Fox, Universal Music France, Bertelsmann, and a French publisher. Those other participants defended the need to protect the works they own, as opposed to created, since none of them are actual creators of anything. They are merely salespeople. After hearing everyone else speak Barlow summed up with the fundamental truth that IDEAS ARE NOT PROPERTY
I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call “intellectual property.” I don’t regard my expression as a form of property. Property is something that can be taken from me. If I don’t have it, somebody else does.
Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the Internet, which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost.
This is a concept that Lessig has also been expressing for many years and it’s one of the driving forces behind creative commons. Unlike tangible property, when someone else uses or expresses your idea, it doesn’t preclude you from using it yourself. What makes it special is what you do with it.
Over the past decade in particular but for some time before that there has been an increasing movement to protect the powerful in our society at the expense of the common people. This movement has accelerated dramatically in the past year at least in part because of the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case that essentially freed corporate interests to spend as much as they want on political campaigns while individuals remain shackled by campaign finance laws.
We can see the initial effects in places like Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan where newly elected republican governors and legislatures have moved rapidly to bring in legislation to strip public sector employees of collective bargaining rights and here in Michigan to dissolve local governments and school boards and replace them with private sector “emergency financial managers.”
However, the problem goes well beyond that into many other sectors of society. For example a company called Medical Justice that aims to protect doctors from frivolous malpractice suits sells them contracts that they can use with their patients. Doctors using these contracts force patients to sign them before providing treatment. These contracts are meant to provide a shield for the doctors from public reviews of their work. According to these “anti-defamation” contracts patients can either be prohibited from posting online reviews of their doctors or the doctors are given the right to edit or delete online postings from patients.
While bogus reviews from disgruntled employees or others with a grudge are always a potential problem, no such contract will do anything to stop it. Anyone can set up a blog or go on Facebook, Twitter or some other site and make negative comments. Doctors are ill-served by paying for such contracts and any patient presented with one should refuse to sign and go find another doctor. If a doctor is truly providing bad service the public should know about it and the doctor should either improve or go out of business. DoctoredReviews.com has an excellent response to this whole subject.
Another prime example of the powerful trying to gag the ordinary is pointed out by Seth Godin. In Iowa the legislature is moving forward with a law that would make it illegal to record activities at industrial farming operations without the owners consent. The reality is that many of these operations treat animals very poorly in the pursuit of higher profit margins. While there is nothing wrong in general with profit, the food produced by these farms is often of lower quality (taste and nutritional value) and more susceptible to contamination from pathogens like e-coli.
When public health is at risk, the idea of government banning anyone from showing what goes on these facilities is extremely troubling but unfortunately entirely consistent with politicians that have been funded by the wealthy and powerful.
Godin goes on to explain that public transparency is almost invariably better for business than gagging the public. Republicans like to go on and on about protecting free markets, but they really only care about one side of the equation. A truly free market requires that both buyers and sellers be informed about the true value of a product and be aware the total supply and demand. Without this knowledge, one side can easily manipulate the other to their own benefit and that is never a good thing for the long-term health of a market or a society.
Regardless of whether the market is for medical services, chicken or labor, both sides of the supply demand equation must be educated and free to take their products/services or money elsewhere.
With republican heavyweights like Newt Gingrich and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen showing absolutely no reluctance to reverse course on policy in Libya as soon as President Obama actually began to enforce a no-fly zone, it’s worth looking at their opinions from another perspective.
Back in 2001, when former President George W Bush decided to invade Iraq, the decision was made on the pretense that Iraq was amassing weapons of mass destruction and providing material support to Al Qaeda. As many of us at the time said, neither assertion was true, and time has proven us correct. Nonetheless, Bush and his cronies sent American soldiers into Iraq and now nearly a decade later, tens of thousands of them are still there despite the fact that Iraq has never attacked America.
Now the question is what to do about Libya. We largely stood by and watched while the people of Tunisia and Egypt overthrew their entrenched leaders and we are doing the same now in Syria and Yemen.
Many republicans are now staunchly opposed to action in Libya even though they were all for it just a few weeks ago. What nobody seems to be mentioning is the fact that unlike Iraq, Muammar Ghadaffi actually has had his agents attack American interests including Pan Am flight 103 and a German disco frequented by American soldiers. Despite the fact that Ghadaffi actually has a history of attacking Americans (something that Saddam Hussien never actually did) Gingrich and Ros-Lehtinen are opposing action in Libya.
That’s not to say that U.S. forces should be involved, because the results of this are certainly unclear. My point is simply that the Republican leadership are just a bunch of political hacks and hypocrites who stand for nothing more than to oppose a Democratic president in order to further their own ambitions.
For those looking for more intelligent and thoughtful coverage of what is really going on in Egypt, Al Jazeera English is the place to go. Unfortunately, there isn’t a major cable company in the United States with the guts to carry the Qatar-based channel.
However, thanks to modern streaming technology viewers can bypass the gate keepers at KableTown. If you have a Roku hooked up to your TV, add the Newscaster channel and you will now find Al Jazeera English listed as one of the available programs.
Roku rocks!
The Republican argument that giving tax cuts to the richest Americans will get them to create new jobs is clearly bogus. The tax cuts were enacted in 2001 and ramped over the past decade. They are currently at their peak so those Americans should be creating jobs at a prodigious pace right now.
Taking a look at the current unemployment rate, it’s clear that those jobs have not been created. So why should we believe speaker-to-be Boner that things will be any different by extending the cuts?
It’s simple, they won’t be any different.
Unless democratic senators stand up and support Bernie Sanders and his promise to filibuster this deal, things will not get any better as a result of this extension. Obama should be absolutely ashamed of himself and rather than whining about “sanctimonious and pure” people that oppose this deal, he should grow a pair and realize that republicans never have and never will compromise with him. He is the only one compromising here and has clearly demonstrated that he has no credibility left.
Frank Luntz is a Republican pollster, but more importantly he uses the words that he tests to manipulate the American people. Were it not for Luntz’s words we likely would not have had a Republican controlled congress from the mid-90s and the last eight years of the Cheney-bush administration. Using words to manipulate people is of course nothing new, especially in politics and it happens across the political spectrum.
The problem is that Luntz is particularly effective at find words that hit at irrational fears of Americans and twisting them around into often outright lies. A prime example is on this week’s edition of On the Media at just over 7 minutes in.
Luntz is interviewed on the subject of health care reform and the messages he is crafting for Republicans. Luntz is having the anti-reform side (yes that is an example of using words to manipulate, because the Republicans would love to reform the health industry, but not in anyway that will be beneficial to MOST Americans) de-emphasize the phrases free-markets and competition. He replies to a question about this with
“Well it’s not a matter of changing their principles, because what they support stil maintains an individual focused system rather than a collective system.”
The fundamental problem with this statement is that it runs counter to the entire premise of insurance. Insurance at its core is about collectivism. Insurers collect premiums from customers and pool risk over a large number of customers. The concept is that people pay in such as for homeowners insurance into a pool of money. Ultimately most people will never have their house burned down, robbed or destroyed in an earthquake, while others will. Some will collect more in claims than they pay in while others will get nothing. Because you can’t predict everything that will happen in the future, this mechanism allows large numbers of people mitigate financial risk down the road.
The problem with Luntz’s emphasis on individual focus is that it eliminates the whole point of an insurance system. While in many cases individualism is a good thing, health care probably isn’t one of them. When you get really sick or seriously injured the costs can so easily become totally overwhelming. While the wealthy can often afford to take care of themselves, the vast majority of us cannot in an extreme situation like this. Many of us will never need this kind of expensive care, but if we do a collective insurance system can literally be a lifesaver.
This is not about communism as Luntz would like to imply, this is about helping people when they need it most.
Next up the falacy of rationing
