Posts from — May 2013

Towel Day

If you are going to the beach this weekend, don’t forget your towel, especially if you are driving over a bridge, 😈

The latest CBS report on the I-5 bridge collapse over the Skagit River north of Seattle, Washington indicated that they are blaming it on an over-sized load hitting a support girder.

Of course it couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the bridge was part of the initial Interstate system and was built during Eisenhower’s first term in 1955, and no doubt modeled with an Erector Set [a common practice at the time].

Since the Reagan administration all of the highway money has been spent on new roads, many of them unneeded, and less and less on routine maintenance. That bridge should have been replaced years ago with a more modern design, without the girders and with wider shoulders, but fixing things doesn’t generate the campaign money that new roads do.

People need work, and those with money are willing to pay the Treasury to hold it, so we should be fixing our decaying infrastructure, but we can’t do it. The reason we can’t do seem to boil down to Paul Krugman is shrill and J.M. Keynes was ‘Teh Gay’, so anything that looks and acts as an economic stimulus is totally unacceptable to the Village.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] has issued the official guess for the 2013 hurricane season: NOAA predicts active 2013 Atlantic hurricane season

For the six-month hurricane season, which begins June 1, NOAA’s Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook says there is a 70 percent likelihood of 13 to 20 named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher), of which 7 to 11 could become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including 3 to 6 major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5; winds of 111 mph or higher).

These ranges are well above the seasonal average of 12 named storms, 6 hurricanes and 3 major hurricanes.

These used to be forecasts, but now they are guesses until we can figure out the new patterns for tropical storms.

[I wonder how long it took them to come up with an acronym pronounced ‘Noah’?]

Hermit Crab

Go away!

[Editor: Hermit is definitely not happy that I discovered where she hangs out.]

Friday Ark

Gallup’s polling on Congressional Approval Rating shows it is stuck in the teens. This sort of makes a contempt of Congress finding worthless, when over 80% of the people have contempt for Congress. People are not going to get too upset about anyone accused of lying to Congress until they see some Congresscritters punished for lying to the people.

The members of both Houses of Congress make a minimum of $174,000 per annum. That’s better than three times the median income of US households. They get health insurance and other benefits on top of that. For that kind of pay I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect them to spend 40 hours per week at their job. I’ll give them Federal holidays and two weeks vacation, but every time you turn around they are ‘in recess’. They spend more time in recess than a kindergarten.

Nothing is getting done, and they aren’t even trying. I would grant them a round trip ticket home every two years, but they seem to be traveling home at taxpayer expense nearly every week. The job is in Washington. If you don’t want to stay in Washington, don’t run for national office.

Contempt for Congress certificates might make some money for someone with some skill with graphics. The market is over 240 million Americans.

Digby’s place, Hullabaloo, is currently unreachable. There is a legacy referral to “haloscan.com” somewhere in her template, and Haloscan is pining for the fjords. I assume that that the last remnants expired overnight.

The BBC had a nice piece on Steve Wilhite’s campaign to get people to pronounce his creation, the Graphics Interchange Format [GIF], the way he intended “JIF”, a soft “G” or “J” sound, not the hard “G”. As is often the case with acronyms, the meaning was created after the abbreviation. Wilhite was paying homage to his favorite peanut butter, Jif, but was forced to use a “G” for it to be plausible.

The articles says that Pepsi, Jif, and Doritos were the principle foods of the coders. It must be a graphics thing, because I always went with Coke, Snickers, and Fritos. Of course, I changed to coffee and doughnuts as I got older.

… and when did he know it?

Susie Madrak covers the latest lie from Chairweasel Issa.

Maybe we need a special prosecutor to find out why he has denied knowing about the IRS ‘problem’ until recently when there is documentary evidence showing he knew about it last year? What’s he covering up? Can he prove he’s a US citizen, and not part of Agenda 21? 😈

Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest has a long post laying out the facts in the IRS ‘problem’.

Fun facts about the IRS and the income tax:

The IRS was actually created in 1862 by the first Republican President to aid in the collection of the income tax imposed to pay for the Civil War.

The Sixteenth Amendment that created our current version of the income tax was drafted, passed, and sent to the states for ratification by a Republican President [William Howard Taft] and a Republican Congress in 1909.

You would think that people who claim to be Republicans and conservatives would show a little respect for their Party’s ‘accomplishments’.

Oklahoma has two Senators, Thomas Coburn and James Inhofe. They both voted against the aid package for Hurricane Sandy. Coburn said that aid packages have to be offset by cuts in other areas of the budget, and Inhofe said it was filled with extraneous spending for areas he didn’t think were affected by the hurricane [although they were].

This time Coburn says he will again oppose aid without offsets, while Inhofe will vote for it because there won’t be any extra money in the bill.

There is no bill yet, because no one knows the cost of the storm, but the Senators from Oklahoma have made up their minds.

There is no word from the Senators of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, as to whether they will be willing to vote for aid to Oklahoma, but I suspect they will because they are neither as ‘politically pure’ as Coburn, nor as brick ignorant as Inhofe.

But Chairweasel Issa is pushing ahead.

CBS reports that Top IRS official to invoke 5th Amendment at congressional testimony

Lois Lerner, the head of the tax-exempt organizations division of the IRS, will invoke the Fifth Amendment in testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, CBS News has confirmed.

Lerner’s attorney, William Taylor, wrote in a letter to House Oversight Committee chair Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., that Lerner “has not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation” but, he says, “under the circumstances she has no choice but to take this course.”

When Zero reacted he told the Department of Justice to check for criminal activity in the IRS case. So Ms Lerner, a career civil servant, got lawyered up, and the first words out of any lawyer’s mouth are “Don’t say anything to anyone about this case.”

Ms Lerner has no idea whether she will be charged with anything, but she doesn’t trust the system, so she is protecting her own interests and pension.

Issa still issued the subpoena to force her to say she won’t say anything in public, so he can grand stand.

This is just for CBS – Note they weren’t targeting conservative groups, they were targeting political groups. Two-thirds of the groups pulled for extra scrutiny were not identifiably ‘conservative’. Stop repeating Republican talking points.

People watch TV shows and think that law enforcement have all of these great tools that solve all crimes in about an hour – WRONG!

The tools actually used by police departments can take days, weeks, or even months to provide answers.

On All Things Considered Melissa Block did a report on The Low-Tech Way Guns Get Traced.

This is a result of the NRA getting Congress to put restrictions on law enforcement to make existing laws ineffective, and burdening gun dealers, wholesalers, and manufacturers with a lot of unnecessary record keeping. If you are involved in the gun trade and you go out of business, you have ship all of your records to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. How many records do you think MalWart has? Cabela? If BATF is doing a search, you have to search your records to find what they want, even if it means going to an offsite storage site to find a record that is a decade old. This costs money, as does storing the records forever.

This is a cost to business of paranoia.

Dr Masters started the day with a recap of Sunday’s tornadoes: Tornadoes Slam 5-State Area, Killing Two; Outbreak Continues Today. Among those tornadoes was an EF-5 that touched down in Shawnee, Oklahoma. EF-5 tornadoes have winds in excess of 200 mph.

The National Weather Service warned that conditions were ripe for another outbreak of tornadoes today, and they were right.

This evening’s post: Violent tornado devastates Moore, Oklahoma

…There have been only six billion-dollar (2011 dollars) tornadoes in history:

1) Joplin, Missouri, May 22, 2011, $2.8 billion
2) Topeka, Kansas, June 8, 1966, $1.7 billion
3) Lubbock, Texas, May 11, 19780, $1.5 billion
4) Bridge Creek-Moore, Oklahoma, May 3, 1999, $1.4 billion
5) Xenia, Ohio, April 3, 1974, $1.1 billion
6) Omaha, Nebraska, May 6, 1975, $1 billion

The May 3, 1999 Bridge Creek-Moore tornado killed 36 people and injured 583. It damaged or destroyed 8132 homes, 1041 apartments, 260 businesses, 11 public buildings and seven churches. According to rough estimates of the size of the damaged area made by helicopters operated by news9.com and kfor.com, the damage footprint from the May 20, 2013 tornado is easily twice as large. I expect that after the damage tally from the May 20 tornado is added up, Moore will hold two of the top five spots on the list of most damaging tornadoes in history, and the May 20 tornado may approach the Joplin tornado as the costliest twister of all-time.

What’s it going to take before people start taking the weather shifts seriously? How much damage? How many deaths?

If you are in Britain this week. you should make a point of going to the Chelsea Flower Show. I’ve been there a couple of times, and even if your interest in flowers isn’t in the avid gardener class, it is a great experience.

Chelsea isn’t quite as old as the Rochester Lilac Festival, but the 600 varieties of lilacs are no match for the diversity of the Chelsea Show.

[Note: I lived a block and a half from the lilacs in Rochester, and when they were in bloom it was a great way to get rid of the odor of a house that had been closed up all winter.]

Benghazi:

John Cole explains the big news – the way ABC News got played by ‘sources’. Like many marks, Jonathan Karl still doesn’t want to admit he and ABC got conned.

Thomas Pickering going public apparently stung Chairweasel Issa enough that Mr Pickering has been subpoenaed to testify, but in a closed session. Issa claims there will be public testimony later, but neither Pickering nor I believe it. There will be ‘leaks’ from this testimony, and they will be distortions. I’m sure ABC will publish them anyway.

As Charlie Pierce noted the wingers are upset by Benghazi but not very clear about where it is.

IRS:

Digby found a piece about the Cincinnati IRS office that tells us that under 200 people are trying it deal with over 60,000 non-profit applications per year. The furor is over less than a hundred applications from that total. People were attempting to speed up the processing.

Even Texas judges can figure out that some tea party groups are PACs, not nonprofits.

Once again, for the IG and the media – of course the process was targeting political groups. Political groups don’t qualify for 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status. Read the law!

I’m willing to bet that any application for 501(c)(4) that had ‘volunteer fire department’ in their name got fast-tracked to approval. Names have significance.

AP Leak Hunt:

Marcy Wheeler has been following the AP phone records seizure.

I know I should be upset by this, but I’m having a hard time forgetting about how Nedra Pickler of the AP provided cover for the Hedgemony when it started the process that enabled the DOJ to do this. You reap what you sow. If it was being done to McClatchy I would be fuming, fussing, and ranting about it.

Update: I almost forgot. Zero is really feeling the effects of all of these scandals – his approval rating is going up.

In my post below, I assumed that the indignant wingnut was done in by one of her clients reporting paying her to the IRS. I was wrong.

Digby’s post on this individual has a quote from a different source that includes this statement from Professor Hendershott:

“The IRS calls my house and says … ‘I just wanted to let you know that we’re going to be auditing your business’ and I said ‘My businesses?’ and he said, ‘You know the expenses you take off for writing.”

So, she didn’t know she was in business, but she was taking deductions for the business she didn’t know she had, while not reporting the income.

The IRS is golden – she either lied about the expenses or lied about the income, so it’s a win-win for them – either way she was evading taxes. A nasty IRS agent would have told her to bring her toothbrush to the meeting. This is the kind of thing that put Al Capone in prison.