Posts from — December 2010

This was good day for people, according to the BBC widget on my sidebar:

In 1689 the British “Bill of Rights” established the primacy of the Parliament over the Monarchy. This was the template for the first ten amendments of the US Constitution, and they are also referred as “the Bill of Rights”.

In 1773 the Boston Tea Party took place. As I have already noted, the action was an expression of the dislike of the colonists for corporate tax breaks, and corporations themselves. Unlike our current leaders, the Founding Fathers disliked and distrusted corporations. The East India Company had much in common with WalMart, as many of its products were the result of the labors of poorly paid labor in Asia, and the Company tended to drive local businesses under with its lower prices because of its monopolies in certain areas and its favored tax status.

The site has been down at random intervals today because of some maintenance at my hosting service.

I have been so busy with “Real Life” that I missed the announcement, and only figured out what was going on after it affected my attempts to post earlier.

The CBC reports that the Competition Bureau takes on Visa, MasterCard

At issue are fees charged to merchants by Visa and MasterCard every time a transaction is processed. The credit card companies collect between one and a half and three per cent of the total amount of the transaction. The companies can charge even higher fees on premium credit cards.

According to Canada’s competition commissioner, the rules have eliminated competition between the rivals and driven up the cost to merchants, which ultimately affects the prices consumers pay.

“Visa and MasterCard’s anti-competitive behaviour hurts businesses and consumers alike,” said Melanie Aitken, Canada’s competition commissioner.

The US still can’t figure out that no one else puts up this crap from corporations. The Canadians have actual health care for everyone, and they don’t tolerate anti-competitive behavior. They expect businesses to follow the rules … or else.

From CNN’s health blog – CDC: 1 in 6 Americans get food poisoning annually

According to CDC’s 2011 Estimates of Foodborne Disease, 1 in 6 Americans will get sick from known and unknown bacteria, viruses and microbes each year resulting in about 128,000 hospitalizations and about 3,000 deaths. This new data was released by the CDC online Wednesday (the two reports summarizing their results will be published in the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Disease Journal in January, which is why the numbers are called “2011 estimates”).

With about 50 million people getting sick from the food, maybe we should have an agency that looks at food safety… oh, wait, we do but they don’t have the power to actually do anything about it because that would be government interference in private business matters. The “market” will take care of it 😈

The CNN political blog reports that Senators argue over Christmas

…

“It is impossible to do all of the things that the majority leader laid out without doing – frankly, without disrespecting the institution and without disrespecting one of the two holiest of holidays for Christians and the families of all of the Senate, not just the senators themselves but all of the staff,” [Arizona Senator Jon] Kyl said Tuesday.

Reid took to the Senate floor to respond, calling comments by Kyl and Republican South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint – who threatened to delay Senate votes – “sanctimonious lectures.”

“Yet some of my Republican colleagues have the nerve to whine about having to stay in action to do the work that the American people pay us to do,” Reid said. “We could work, as most Americans do, during the holidays. Perhaps Senators Kyl and DeMint have been in Washington too long.”

One of the first things the Republicans plan to do in the House is to return to their three-day work week and 40-week work year. Apparently they think that $170k+ per annum doesn’t rate a 40-hour work week. They are scheduling 120 days in session for the year, a third less time than the school teachers they are always complaining about having it so easy.

Perhaps if Kyl weren’t so quick to slap holds on every bill in sight, he might not have to work through Christmas.

As I was interested in the other case on the Health care bill in Virginia, I found the Bloomberg article dated November 30, 2010, Obama’s Health-Care Reform Law Survives Challenge by Christian College.

In that case it was Liberty University’s “crack legal team” [crackpot would be closer to the truth] attempting to dismiss the law on freedom of religion grounds. It was a pathetic case pathetically presented, and has nothing in common with the case that Judge Hudson decided.

I have seen a lot of people making all kinds of claims that prove nothing other than they didn’t take the time to read the entire opinion. Many of the claimed omissions were, in fact, dealt with in other parts of the opinion than the summary quotes that people decided to use in their opinion pieces.

This was a very narrow decision decided solely based on the issues presented to the judge in the case. The case law cited is from the two parties who were involved and the most current rulings that affect the primary issues. This case will go to the Court of Appeals, and probably end up as one of the cases included if the Supreme Court decides to take up the issue.

It will fall under the Fourth District Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, which has been the most conservative of all the Districts for years. This is where the judge’s decision will be graded, not in the media opinion pieces, and Judge Hudson knows it, just as he knew it would be appealed no matter how he ruled. No judge likes to have decisions overturned.

The CNN story about U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson’s decision isn’t very informative, but they included a link to the decision [PDF, alas].

Basically the judge said that Congress can’t magically make “inactivity” into “activity” so it can regulate it, and it can’t turn a “penalty” into a “tax” by stuffing it in the Tax Code.

He did not rule the entire law unConstitutional, only the mandate. Virginia was attempting to get the whole thing thrown out because Congress didn’t include a standard severability clause that would allow for individual provisions to be removed without affecting the entire law. The judge essentially ruled that Congress just overlooked it in the rush to get the bill done, because the clause has become standard procedure, besides the issues were going to be settled in higher courts, so there was no point in doing anything dramatic.

The decision shows a very reasoned and workman-like approach to the case. It covers the arguments presented by both sides and rendered a decision based on established precedent and the actual text of the law. If you read it, his point was declaring “inactivity”, not buying insurance from a private company, to be an “activity” under the Commerce Clause was above his pay grade.

No soaring rhetoric, but no “judicial activism”. The Feds couldn’t convince him that not doing something was the equivalent of doing something.

Of course, I’m prejudiced, because I never accepted that particular piece of “legal fiction”.

This is my firmly held opinion of the people who follow the lead of Barack Obama in the Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch, the Democratic Party, and the blogs. If you haven’t figured out by now that he is to the right of even the Blue Dogs and is only prepared to attack those on the left, you should just become Republicans and stop wasting the time, money, and energy of the progressive half of the electorate.

This is Saint Lucia’s Day for Scandinavians.

It features special treats that are handed out by a girl wearing a crown of candles, Lucia coming from the Latin for light, LUX.

Saint Lucia was an early Christian martyr from Syracuse on Sicily, but her official feast day, December 13, fit perfectly with the local pagan celebration of the Lussi on December 13, which was the Winter Solstice at the time. Yep, more cover to continue the fun mid-winter celebrations by pretending they are associated with Christianity to get the Church off everyone’s case.

This is a chart prepared by Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, hardly a DFH which show the effectiveness of various strategies for providing stimulus to the economy.

Badtux has another chart on his ice floe showing who gets what under the various tax cut plans. It’s a nice chart but it is missing one small piece of information – the Obamapublican plan allows a tax rebate of up to $800 for household making less that $40,000 expire.

Zandi’s chart shows that, as a package, the new plan is actually worse that doing nothing. If you do nothing, the government can afford to actually start pumping some real job-creating stimulus by repairing some the aging infrastructure, and continue to help the state’s through the BAB program.

Thanks to his masterful handling of his job, according to the latest McClatchy-Marist poll, Obama would lose an election to Mitt Romney. He is losing his base by bad-mouthing them, and isn’t gaining any independent support.

I’ve seen this, Military Bans Use Of Removable Media After WikiLeaks Disclosures, in several places and am astounded.

First off, it wasn’t that long ago that reporters were buying thumb drives in Afghan markets that contained classified information, and there was supposed to have been a ban as a result of that fiasco, but the rules not many years ago specified that that equipment could not be connected to any military network if it had a removable device of any kind, or a printer. The back-up media and printing was centralized and under the control of the system administrator. Disk-less workstations were the norm.

Military communications security seems to have been flushed down the porcelain throne this century. They are classifying more and more, and doing less and less to protect it.

If you accept that one Army Specialist is responsible for all of the information that WikiLeaks is posting, how much have the professional intelligence agents managed to walk off with?

[Just a reminder: There are NO cuddly animals in Australia.]

Spent most of the day on my back under a sink fixing things that my “help” had busted. It is back to the freezer for Florida tomorrow after two days of relatively mild temperatures [as in closer to “normal” than the week before].

Brian Stewart of the CBC has an interesting opinion piece on the effects of the current WikiLeaks document dump: Telling truth to power, and rather elegantly at that.

He essentially says that the cables show that the State Department has a lot of talented people all over the world who can write good, precise prose, and who are willing to give thoughtful and honest opinions about the governments they deal with. He compares them very favorably with top-line foreign correspondents.

People he spoke to about the piece talk about feeling more confident in the competence of US embassy officials after reading the cables, as they certainly reflect a more realistic view of the world, than what is often coming from Washington.

I would like to stress again that the majority of these documents are personal opinions by US officials, and no one can know for sure which are true, and which are designed to mislead foreign intelligence services. Without context, it is impossible to judge.

For a very long time the editorial cartoonists avoided going after Obama because most of them do caricatures and they wanted to avoid stereotyping. They avoided many missteps that were made, or attributed them to other people.

Well, those days are definitely over. Mark Fiore has a new animated video that tears BO a new one. Almost the entire collection of cartoons for the week of December 6 at McClatchy spindle, fold and shred him. David Rees has Get Your War On running again in New York magazine.

Web sites like Protest Obama have sprung up, and established sites like Democracy for America are running calls for No Deal on the Obama-Republican tax cut plan.

I ran some numbers on this deal, and turns out that under the deal more than 40% of the households at the bottom will have their taxes increase under this plan. Obama keeps bringing up “the average family”.

Remember: whenever you hear “average” in a discussion of money in politics, the person using it is lying about something. Honest people use “median”, which is the point in the middle, with half the group above and half below. If Bill Gates is in a room with a dozen people from a homeless shelter, the average net worth in that room is in the billions, but the median net worth is near zero. Words make a difference.