Imagine - It Went Straight To Video

It's hard to imagine that Hollywood could have come up with something worse than 10,000 BC, but it looks like they've managed:


It's something to do with a volcano that causes a glacier to move at transonic speed across North America. It sounds like someone got two disaster movie scripts caught in a paper shredder, then tried to glue them back together, and hired a rabid lunatic to edit the result.

Geology blogger Rachael adds:

There's a volcano. It unleashes a glacier. Don't ask me how. But it's a fast glacier. A really, really, really, really fast glacier that like a thousand miles across and can get from the Arctic to the US in a day or two, because it is seriously pissed off and has installed a turbo. And then it destroys New York City, because that's what you do when you're the world's fastest glacier that's been set free by a volcano. Because New York City once spat on your shoes and called your mom a fucking ice cube.

Hilarity Ensues: We've Declared War on a Glacier

I think you could put a slide show together of every explicit thing that Anthony Weiner has ever texted or tweeted, and it would be more inspirational. It would certainly be less preposterous.

The only good thing I can say about this one is that they clearly didn't waste a pile of money on it.

Comic For The Day

Copyright issues make it unwise to embed here, but this comic encapsulates my feelings about all the hypocritical calls for Anthony Weiner's resignation.

[At least, it does if you ignore the thought expressed by the first comment at that link, which is that it's unfair to prostitutes.]

(h/t Lockwood)

“We got them [Republicans] cornered on Medicare"

Caption: Just waiting for the sleigh to pass by again.

Image credit: Arrr!.

This, according to Robert Reich, is one of the excuses offered by DC Democrats for their shameful inaction on the economy. That inaction is clearly a deliberate policy, as this statement from Austan Goolsbee, President Obama's advisor on economics, said early last week:

"We do not have a sense of panic from one month’s jobs numbers, nor should we be having a sense of panic in general," Goolsbee said, speaking to a gathering of personal finance writers and editors at the White House on Wednesday. "Over the last six months, we have had added a million jobs in the private sector, which the president’s the first to say 'That’s not enough. We’ve got to do more, and get that higher.' But I really do not think that you take a variable series like the monthly job numbers, you don’t want to overreact to one month’s numbers that are different from what has been the trend."

Austan Goolsbee: No Economic Crisis

Now, Goolsbee is an economist, which tells me that the man is either a lunatic, a liar, a complete incompetent, or far too feckless to be in the job he's in. Let's examine why, shall we?

First, there haven't been a net of a million jobs in the last six months. Here are the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) numbers for unemployment for the last six months, which is December through May:

BLS Job Growth Month by Month, Dec. 2010 thru May, 2011

Month	Job growth
December, 2010	103,000
January, 2011	36,000
Februrary, 2011	192,000
March, 2011	216,000
April, 2011	244,000
May, 2011	54,000

Which adds up to the economy adding about 845,000 jobs more than what it lost in the last six months. So, this number isn't even a million before you note that the workforce has grown by more than that in that time.

In addition, according to this BLS table, in 2010 employment shrank by a net of 813,000 jobs, while the employable population grew by roughly two million people (NOTE 1). If you assume that we've added another million in the first half of this year, the Obama Administration has lost another 2.9 million net jobs since it took office, on top of the millions of net jobs (roughly ten million, if one compares the workforce size in 2001 vs. 2009 (NOTE 2)to the net growth in jobs during that time) the Bush Administration lost while it was in office. The only reason the official unemployment rate isn't through the roof right now is that there are so many people either employed part time, or completely off the unemployment rolls thanks to having been out of work for more than 100 weeks.

We in the Land of Not DC have been living with diminished expectations and the imminent threat of economic collapse for almost four years now. I'm hard pressed to imagine how anyone other than a barking mad, brain-dead worthless excuse for an economist wouldn't think this is a serious issue. Yet this clown has been Obama's chief economic advisor.

As I wrote more than two years ago, you can tell a lot about a potential government executive by who he chooses for his advisors. Read that link and tell me we couldn't have seen Libya and the continued operation of the black sites coming.

To return to the quote that is the title of this article, and the source for it, I'll quote Reich's conclusion:

Americans are scared, with reason. We’re in a vicious cycle in which lower wages and net job losses and high debt are causing consumers to cut their spending — which is causing businesses to cut back on hiring and reduce pay. There’s no way out of this morass without bold leadership from Washington to rekindle consumer demand.

If the Democrats remain silent, the vacuum will be filled by the Republican snake oil of federal spending cuts and cut taxes on big corporations and the wealthy. Democrats — starting with the President — must have the courage and conviction to tell the nation the recovery is stalling, and what must be done.

The Swamp of Washington and the Morass of the Economy

Reich wrote this after having interviewed a few Democratic "leaders" over the last few days. That's where this article's title comes from, which Reich says is what one or more of those "leaders" said to him when he asked why they weren't doing anything to create jobs. They clearly feel no need.

And here is, once again, where I differ with Prof. Reich. This isn't a case of Democrats being afraid to tell us what's going on. They simply feel no need. They figure that we, labor and progressives, will continue to support them no matter what. I have little reason to think they're wrong. Given the large number of people out there who still think that criticizing Obama is tantamount to racism, or at the very least, a sign that one is not a serious progressive, why should I? The Democrats are right - as long as the Republicans look all scary and whatnot, they can just pretend to be protecting Medicare and Social Security, and plenty of those allegedly serious people will gladly carry their water. They've been doing it for years, and they clearly don't see the need to change what they're doing.

Heck, even Ariana Huffington has caught on, if only slightly:

[T]he president, even on the heels of the latest round of depressing numbers, is oddly passive. "This economy took a big hit," he said Friday. "It is just like if you had a bad illness, if you got hit by a truck, it's going to take a while for you to mend."

Being hit by a truck is not a bad metaphor -- but he left something out. If you get hit by a truck, you are taken to a hospital for major interventions. When you are wheeled through the emergency room doors on a gurney, people react; they move purposefully and quickly; machines are brought out; desperate measures are taken. But that's not at all what happened with the economy. Instead, the economy got hit by a truck, was wheeled into the ER, and those in charge largely left the patient to heal on his own while they went into a back room to talk about the long-term building plan for the hospital. And, every now and again, they come out to tell the patient: "Remember, you were hit by a truck. It's going to take a while to mend."
...
Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg recently released a report in which he warned the administration that, as HuffPost's Mark Blumenthal put it, "backward-looking campaign messages about who is to blame for the recession or whether the recovery efforts are succeeding are doomed to failure." What voters want, according to Greenberg, are real solutions that "ask the richest to pay their fair share of taxes," invest in "education and innovation" and "confront the power of money and the lobbyists." As he puts it: "There is a real economy out there that's not changing."

Something We Can Say With Certitude: The Economy Stinks!

[links from original]

I say "only slightly", because she goes on to call the Obama Administration's policy "surrendering" to Republicans. It's not surrendering. Obama's choice of advisors demonstrates that clearly. It's what the President believes in.

That's where we are at the mid-point of 2011. We're no closer to getting the real economy in gear than we were in late 2008. This is clearly just fine with the folks who run the Democratic Party. I've gotten a chuckle whenever someone describes the Republican Party as "the Party of Hoover" lately. It should be abundantly clear that the Democrats are the ones doing nothing useful to help the economy, just as Hoover refused to do anything useful to help ordinary Americans after Black Thursday. They became the party of Hoover in 2009, when they spent an entire year making sure that the health care "reform" bill didn't improve health care, or even make it more accessible for the average American (NOTE 3).

What the Republicans are these days, I'm not sure. The "Party of Nero" might be the closest I can come to an actual political figure. Unless you prefer the Party of Homer. Any metaphor for lunacy or pig-ignorance will probably suffice.

Until progressives and labor finally decide that they've had enough of this, and will be willing to put up with Republican leadership long enough to demonstrate that they will not blindly support the Democratic Party no matter how much it screws us, nothing will change. And by "nothing", I mean the slow-motion train wreck that is our economy, the continued slide into government lawlessness, and the slow erosion of our ability to educate and defend ourselves.

For anyone who has or is tempted to say that this makes me irresponsible, crazy, or otherwise unfit to have an opinion on this matter, then you are welcome to do one of two things:

* Suggest an alternative plan, with at least some comprehension of the difficulties and how you would deal with them, or

* get lost.

Really, it's that simple. I am open to suggestions, because I don't like the prospect of even two years of Republican rule any more than you do. But I am mortally tired of the schoolyard name-calling posing as serious commentary from the Democrats' useful idiots. There are few options, and near as I can tell, none of them are happy ones. What we're really discussing is which path holds any hope at all.

And if you don't see that, go somewhere else. You're getting the kind of government you deserve, and that would be just fine if you weren't also inflicting it on me.


NOTE 1: I'm using the "non-institutionalized" population growth here rather than the growth of the BLS's idea of how big the work force is. The reason is the long-term unemployed. If you look at the BLS stats, you'll note that in 2010, the work force was actually smaller than it was in 2009, even though the eligible population grew by two million. In the face of such obvious dishonesty, the eligible population growth is the most viable number. Hell, no one's just retiring early these days.

[UPDATE:Changed "was in 2008" to "was in 2009" in this note. "2008" was a typo.]

NOTE 2: This is based on the growth in the size of the work force, as determined by the BLS, though basing it on the size of the eligible population yields a similar number.

NOTE 3: If you don't know why I write this by now, let me just sum it up this way: Being forced to buy insurance that you can't afford to use isn't the same as having access to health care. That's particularly true when none of the new insurance regulations have an agency with a budget to enforce them. Someone will have to handle and adjudicate millions of complaints annually, and that someone most certainly will not be the United States Department of Justice. Anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to point out where in the budget there are several billion dollars set aside to do this.

UPDATE: Apparently, I'm not alone. As Lambert puts it, "not voting for evil is simple, cheap, and non-violent." Frankly, I'm starting to think that we'll be very lucky to not see serious violence in the next decade or so. What anyone with any sense would get from what I wrote is that there are a whole lot of folks out there with nothing to lose, and more all the time.

Quote Of The Day

Caption: Taken by an Italian astronaut as he was departing the International Space Station, this photo shows the Space Shuttle Endeavour on her last mission. Click on the picture to enlarge. Full sized image.

Image credit: Paolo Nespoli/NASA

Referring to photos like the one that leads this article, lizpolaris writes at Corrente:

How incredibly ironic - now it's finished, the US will never have the capability to visit the ISS again. I suppose it's our gift to the world. The best our society could do and now we've inspired others to take up the quest of space.
...
My daughter will turn 30 next week. The first shuttle flew 2 months before she was born, when I was 7 months pregnant. I could only imagine the world she would inherit. This crumbling, greedy, crass country was not what I had in mind.

'Majestic' shuttle picture encapsulates US' fading glory

Nor would I have imagined this is the country we would be living in thirty years after the Shuttle first flew. As I mentioned in April, the Obama Administration has started a new program to develop a manned launch vehicle, but whether that ever comes to fruition at all, let alone in the operational lifetime of the ISS, is anyone's guess.

It's just another reminder of what we've lost.

Free Advice

Here's some free advice to website designers:

If you're going to define the color of your website's background, define the default text color, as well.

Now, free advice is often worth what you pay for it, but in this case, I'll offer an example why I say this, and how to fix it. Here's how a page at Firedoglake looks on my computer screen at the moment:

Image credit: Screenshot of FireDogLake page by Cujo359

See how the text of my comment is washed out? That's because I'm using a reversed desktop color theme for on my computer. People who have a bright screen with limited contrast sometimes like to do this. Unfortunately, it makes the default text color a very light gray or white. Not good if someone defines the background color on a website to be white, but doesn't bother to define the default text color. This is just bad programming technique, as far as I'm concerned. What this practice does is define the background color at the website, but leave the choice of text color up to the visitor's web browser.

To fix this, I downloaded that FDL page, and changed Cascaded Style Sheet style_003.css from this:

Firedoglake Ajax Commenting Theme
*/ /* Tags */
body {
        font: normal 13px Arial;
        background: #F2F1EC;
}

To this:

Firedoglake Ajax Commenting Theme
*/ /* Tags */
body {
        font: normal 13px Arial;
        background: #F2F1EC;
        color: black;
}

With the result that the page now looks like this:

(And no, the blue lines didn't disappear because of the change I made. That's to do with the difference between the downloaded page and the one loaded from the website.)

Just to short-circuit some return free advice:

• Yes, I know I can tell my browser to use its own colors, rather than the website's. This is almost invariably a bad idea.
• Yes, I know that I can tell my browser to use a different default text color (like black), instead of the desktop theme's. Firefox doesn't do this properly, though.

I like the look of a reverse desktop color theme, and I wish I could use it as the default in my web browser. Plus, as I said, not defining one thing while defining the other is bad practice. Letting one bit of software determine one part of the look of one's website, and another, completely different bit of software determine the rest, is also an invariably bad idea.

No Surprise Here

Raise your hand if you were surprised at this:

Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York said today he has engaged in "several inappropriate" electronic relationships with six women over three years, and that he publicly lied about a photo of himself sent over Twitter to a college student in Seattle over a week ago.

"I take full responsibility for my actions," Weiner said. "The picture was of me, and I sent it."

Rep. Anthony Weiner: 'The Picture Was of Me and I Sent It'

Now, if you're a woman, go ahead and put your hand down. If you've still got your hand raised, please answer the following question:

How many times have you photographed your own crotch?

A few days ago, in his denial that he sent the photograph that we've seen far too much of, Weiner admitted that he wasn't sure whether he had actually taken the photo or not. Which, for those who didn't sleep through their introductory philosophy course, implies pretty strongly that he had, indeed, taken some pictures of this subject.

Of course, it's possible that I'm the only man in America who owns a digital camera and yet hasn't taken a photo of his groin, but this just strikes me as one of those things that many of us could deny without having to hedge very much. As in "it's theoretically possible that I, when I was either blind drunk or otherwise completely out of my mind, had someone take a picture of my groin while I was in my underwear." I think that's as much qualification as I'd need to apply to an answer to such a question. And frankly, given the questions that would result from that qualification, I think I could have avoided using it. Yet Rep. Weiner couldn't do that, despite having denied having sent the photo.

So I had to wonder why he would have taken such a thing, if he didn't want to e-mail it somewhere.

Why do I bring this up now, you ask? Because I really didn't care about this until the truth finally came out, and I realized that Weiner is probably going to have to explain far more to his constituents now than if he'd either told everyone who was asking about this to go screw themselves, or had just come clean to begin with. And I kinda liked the guy, as much as I like any Democratic politician these days.

So, here we are. Another promising career seems to be in jeopardy, if not in ruins, because America seems to be far more fascinated with this stuff than with what Rep. Weiner and his colleagues are doing about unemployment, Medicaid, or any of about a hundred other things that mean far more to us as citizens than anything Weiner is likely to do with a Twitter account. Plus, of course, we're here because another Democratic politician couldn't handle this sort of thing any better than John Edwards did.

As I wrote to another New Yorker a few years ago, in vain as it happens, it's not the crime, it's the coverup, kapisch? Heck, this wasn't even a crime, was it? Of course, our political class still haven't learned the fundamental lesson of the Vietnam War, why would I expect that they'd learned the lesson of Watergate?

Sunday Photo(s)

A few days ago, it started looking like spring here in the Northwest. Here are a few photos from the BPA trail in Federal Way, WA, near the Weyerhauser Aquatic Center:

Image credit: All photos by Cujo359

Panther Lake looks lovely when there is water in it:

It was warm enough that some local residents decided to take a dip:

This was right around noon, and when it's near the summer solstice, the sun is really high in the sky, as you can see from this shot of a path through the forest:

Click on the photos to see them full size. Have a good Sunday.

Quote Of The Day

Glenn Greenwald, on yet another of many reasons why this President is no better than the last one:

Seymour Hersh has a new article in The New Yorker arguing that there is no credible evidence that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons; to the contrary, he writes, "the U.S. could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein's Iraq eight years ago -- allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimates of the state's military capacities and intentions." This, of course, cannot stand, as it conflicts with one of the pillar-orthodoxies of Obama foreign policy in the Middle East (even though the prior two National Intelligence Estimates say what Hersh has said). As a result, two cowardly, slimy Obama officials ran to Politico to bash Hersh while hiding behind the protective womb of anonymity automatically and subserviently extended by that "news outlet"[.]

The WH/Politico attack on Seymour Hersh

[emphasis mine]

The Obama Administration has made as much of a habit of doing this as the previous one. Actually more, I think. Dick Cheney was perfectly willing to talk crap about people like that in public. What's more, they are continuing the same failed policy of the Bush Administration regarding Iran. That policy is to pretend that Iran is a danger to the United States, when it may not be a particular danger to anyone.

Which is another example of why I have no use for President Obama.

Greenwald then went on to provide another illustration of why I have no use for the people who cover Obama and other DC politicians:

But the most hilarious part of this orgy of cowardly anonymity comes at the end, when Politico explains what is supposedly the prime defect in Hersh' journalism:

Hersh has faced criticism for his heavy reliance on anonymous sources, but New Yorker editor David Remnick has repeatedly said he stands by his reporter’s work.

That's the criticism that ends an article that relies exclusively on anonymous government sources, appearing in a D.C. gossip rag notorious for granting anonymity to any powerful figure who requests it for any or no reason. The difference, of course, is that the Pulitzer Prize-winning, five-time-Polk-Award-recipient investigative journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib scandal grants anonymity to those who are challenging the official claims of those in power (that's called "journalism"), while Politico uses it (as it did here) to serve those in power and shield them from all accountability as they spew their propaganda (which is called being a "lowly, rank Royal Court propagandist").

The WH/Politico attack on Seymour Hersh

While he's had his share of false alarms in recent years, Hersh is still an example of what journalists should be - people who try to uncover the truth. (The plain fact is that when you look into things that people are trying very hard to keep hidden, you're not always going to get it right.) There isn't one "reporter" at Politico who appears to be even dimly aware that this is something journalists could do if they put their minds to it.

Which is why I don't have any use for them and their kind. It's also a good reason why folks like Barack Obama can get away with what he does.

Just One Left

The second-last Space Shuttle flight ended yesterday:

Caption: Space shuttle Endeavour on the STS-134 mission made its final landing at the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, Wednesday, June 1, 2011, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Endeavour, completed a 16-day mission to outfit the International Space Station. Endeavour spent 299 days in space and traveled more than 122.8 million miles during its 25 flights. It launched on its first mission on May 7, 1992.

Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

There's just one flight left, which will be performed by Atlantis. After that, there will be no manned space flight by a NASA vehicle for at least five years.

UPDATE (Jun. 3): Yesterday's Astronomy Picture Of the Day was this:

Image credit: NASA/APOD

The Shuttle is moving so quickly across the planet that the earth lights are blurry. The stars were a little more stationary relative to the point of view of the photographer, so they aren't as blurry.

Clicking on the picture will enlarge it somewhat. If you want a bigger version, click on the "Image credit" link to be taken to the APOD page. Clicking on the picture there will get you the full size version.

That's the way I want to remember Endeavour, helping to build the space station that is by far our biggest presence in space.

A Philosophical Question

After explaining that Mitt Romney's promise to keep the federal budget at less than 20% of GDP is not possible, Paul Krugman goes on to ask:

But Romney is willing to pretend to be an ignorant extremist to have any chance of getting the Republican nomination. So this ends up being a character issue: do you want a man that cynical in the White House?

The Unbearable Cynicism of Being Mitt

The way I look at it, there are two possibilities here. Either Romney will keep this promise, even though it's crazy, or he won't. If it turned out to be the former, then I really don't think we're any worse off than we are right now. The Democrats are going to do something like this anyway. They talk like they won't, but as with the health care "reform" effort, they are doing something else behind the scenes. They will pass a Medicare cut, and almost certainly will either renege on the promise to raise the maximum income level for Medicaid coverage to 133%, or they'll figure out how to get more blood out of that turnip somehow. In short, in contrast to what Romney would do, they are telling us they want to do the smart thing, and are actually doing the stupid thing.

Or, the other possibility is that Romney has no intention of keeping his promise. In that case, I'm not bothered at all that he's lying to people who are so deliberately ignorant that they don't know how much their government is spending on what, and yet demand that it cut spending. People that stupid aren't ever going to believe the truth, because there will always be someone around who is dishonest enough to tell them what they want to hear. If he does that, and then breaks that promise, good for him.

In short, I don't have much of a problem with that idea. There are plenty of reasons I don't think Romney would make a good President, but this barely rises to the level of being an interesting philosophical question.

When it comes to character, if this is the worst Romney does, he's no worse than the current occupant of the White House.