Let the howling begin!

Democrats in the House plan to use a parliamentary process, most often used by the GOP, as explicitly allowed in Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution, to pass by simple majority, changes to a bill that has already been passed. This is to bypass a parliamentary process requiring a super-majority (the filibuster). Article 1, Section 5 allows each chamber to set their own rules, here’s the relevant text:

Section 5.
Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings

Pretty straight forward. Each party has in the past howled about how unfair “deem and pass” and the filibuster are. Each party has used each pretty sparingly, until recently. Use of the filibuster by the Republicans has greatly increased in the last two Congresses. It went from rare to nearly a daily occurrence:

Last year, the first of the 111th Congress, there were a record 112 cloture votes. In the first two months of 2010, the number already exceeds 40.

That means, with 10 months left to run in the 111th Congress, Republicans have turned to the filibuster or threatened its use at a pace that will more than triple the old record. The 104th Congress in 1995-96 — when Republicans held a 53-47 majority — required 50 cloture votes.

This one reason it’s being used. I really don’t know if the Democratic leadership thinks that deem and pass will be better for the caucus electorally. I don’t think the GOP will be their “friends” either way. The voters may feel differently if something useful gets accomplished, but right now this tit for tat business seems to disgust most people. Approval of Congress in the toilet. Either for trying trying to run the country through “Demon Pass” (located someplace between Purgatory and Hell in Dante’s Inferno) or for failing to get anything done, depending on your point of view.

One point of view is inexpressible, taboo. I am not referring to atheism – the one belief system that clearly had no place in the vision of America Romney painted in his much-anticipated speech on faith last week. Rather, I’m thinking of the now entirely muted issue of whether the basic ethical foundations of Romney, Huckabee et al’s political views truly are “Christian” – in the good-neighborly sense of the word.

I am referring here to the sentiments that lie behind the candidates’ attitudes toward gays, which may have found their most honest and open expression in Huckabee’s recently resurrected 1992 suggestion that AIDS patients should be forcibly isolated. I am thinking too of Christian conservative opposition to progressive taxation, public spending for the needy and government “meddling” in such matters as anti-discrimination policies. And, of course, of the willingness to sacrifice women by genuflecting before a segment of the population that is scared witless by modernity and sugar-coats its fear and hate in the name of the sacred.

via Holier Than They – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

I think there’s very little Christ in what Christians support politically. As a bumper sticker I saw puts it: “God please save me from your followers.” The right has no special claim to God.

Try a beta release of IE? Will it be as crippled as IE 5 or as unstable as IE6, as much of a resource hog as IE7? Uhhhh, no thanks.

The only way I’ll deal with it is when forced to in order to support some customer facing websites. Yuck.

What America really needs are dumber people, it’s the only way they’ll buy the version of history these guys are pushing. American exceptionalism is back and as silly as ever.

This would form a floor for benefits, with an opt out for those who have other coverage. A mandate is a must. Spend more on effectiveness research, the Pharma lobby and medical device makers be damned. We need to know what actually works best, not what’s most profitable. Couple that with medical education reform that encourages people who actually want to practice medicine to go into primary care specialties like family practice and pediatrics, by relieving them of 6 figure student loan burdens. Begin slowing the growth of reimbursement to expensive sub-specialties.

Some years ago I worked at a small community hospital in St. Pete. I thought it interesting that an ophthalmologist would come on surgery days twice week and line up eight cataract cases, spend about 15 minutes each and get over $1000 each before lunch.

On another floor we’d have elderly patients in heart failure and diabetics with uncontrolled blood sugar. Both can easily be prevented by relatively inexpensive in-office care and regular follow-ups. We need to spend more on primary care and reimburse less to the guys like the ophthalmologist example.

But I digress, back to the flawed real world plan. Here’s the take I thought the most realistic on it’s chances:

And so Democrats in Congress find themselves facing an uncomfortable but clear choice. Although they may not reap political advantage from the legislation, most of them recognize that failing to pass it would be worse. The devastating aftermath of their party’s inability to act on health care in 1994 remains a vivid, cautionary lesson.

via Will It Pass? The Odds on Health Care – Room for Debate Blog – NYTimes.com.

Pass the plan or you democrats get it, death by circular firing squad. If they had anything remotely similar to party discipline, the whole thing would be a boring fait accompli. At least they keep drama going and going and going.

The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.

The plan, which will be submitted to Congress on Tuesday, is likely to generate debate in Washington and a lobbying battle among the telecommunication giants, which over time may face new competition for customers. Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service.

The blueprint reflects the government’s view that broadband Internet is becoming the common medium of the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries. It also signals a shift at the F.C.C., which under the administration of President George W. Bush gained more attention for policing indecency on the television airwaves than for promoting Internet access.

via Vast F.C.C. Plan Would Bring Net to More in U.S. – NYTimes.com.

Definitely an improvement….

Tim Geithner did manage to hold the financial system together for the most part through the worst financial crisis in modern times. Yet he seems reviled on both the left and the right. The media ignores the successes and plays up the failure, as the media so loves to do. I guess it sells more advertising.

Could he have done better? In retrospect nearly everything done by humans can be done better. Hindsight is 20/20 they say.  Populist anger is driven by the crisis causing the curtain to sag a bit, revealing ugly truths about the interrelationships between big money and the government. Americans like their illusions.

If you don’t want MS snooping around your PC have a look ay how to avoid the update that adds their nasty little “Windows Activation Technologies” update.

Maybe not. Hedge fund managers get a massive tax break worth billions because of a tax loophole that allows them to pay only 15% on the great majority of their income. I know I pay a helluva lot higher rate, but then again I’m not a downtrodden hedge fund manager. Despite a fix being passed by the House three times in three years the Senate may not even take it up.Why would this happen when approval of the financial industry is ranked just above convicted pedophiles and lepers?

If we were starting from scratch, after all, it seems unlikely that the Senate would choose this particular moment to pass a bill subsidizing money managers to the tune of billions of dollars a year. But, because the tax break already exists, it exerts a kind of gravitational pull that makes it hard to get rid of. In part, that’s simple economics—those who benefit from the tax break have more money to lobby for it to be kept in place. Furthermore, while the cost of subsidies is spread out among all taxpayers, the benefits are highly concentrated, so, naturally, opposition is generally diluted and diffuse while support is intense. If you work in private equity, it’s possible that nothing the government does matters more than keeping this tax break intact. And this pattern is true not just of subsidies but of government programs in general: every government action creates a constituency with an interest in keeping that action going.

Next year, when they’re doing eliminations and are down to the last two, rather than doing the retarded over-played faux suspense each week, I think with the least votes should fight for the right to continue. UFC and MMA is growing American Idol is not, so why not bring some blood and carnage to pump up the ratings? I can remember more than a few contestants I’d love to see getting some ground and pound, then choked out (Sanjaya anyone?). Yup I’d pay to see that.

Any resemblance to the iPad is tooootaly intentional.

The Americas’ economies are tightly intertwined, to the benefit of all sides. Most U.S. citizens, for example, probably don’t realize that their country exports as much to Latin America as to the entire European Union.

via Adios, Amigos | Foreign Policy.

h/t to Marginal Revolution

Read it yourself, Reid puts the GOP on notice that they will in fact use reconciliation to complete health care reform. Let the screaming from the right begin, now!

I suppose this means that Harry Reid does in fact have balls.

YouTube – Epic beard man.

67 year old white dude (Beard Man) insults a younger black man (Corn Rows) by asking him how much he would charge to shine his shoes. Admittedly, that could be construed as a racist remark by anyone. Jesus might have tried to pimp slap the guy. After exchanging some words Beard Man moves away to the front of the bus. They continue to insult each other. Corn Rows follows Beard Man to the front presumably to “put my foot up your ass”. At about 1:40 into the video he takes a swing at Beard Man. Using a clean, straight left and right hook combination that would be at home in a UFC fight Beard Man administers a beat down. After some “ground and pound” the fight is over Corn Rows says what sounds like “Bring an amber lamps” (ambulance?) presumably because he’s bleeding profusely through the nose.

The internet responds magnificently with a mash-up.  I caught this on Tosh.0 the other night:

Remember boys and girls, you should never, ever try to put your foot up the ass of a much bigger, somewhat disturbed, racist Vietnam veteran on an BART bus wearing an “I AM A MOTHER FUCKER” tee shirt. You might get your ass kicked and need an “amber lamps”. Then you might get creatively mocked on the internet to the tune of catchy southern rock version of an old Lead Belly song. Here’s your 15 minutes of fame dude, enjoy. You’ve earned it!

PS.  I don’t condone the inherent racism displayed by Beard Man. But Corn Rows did swing first, probably thinking he could beat up an old man. Also, I don’t think the origins of the Song Black Betty are racist. It seems that Black Betty was either slag for a liquor bottle or a flint lock musket.

Sensen No Sen: Puckering Mr. Cheney.

Back in 2006, I wrote a post entitled A Nation of Hypocrites that focused on the case of Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, private military contractors working in Iraq.  The two men uncovered what appeared to be illegal arms dealing by their employer, Shield Group Security, and reported it to outside authorities.

The result? Mr. Ertel and Mr. Vance, a Navy veteran and two-time voter for George W. Bush, were disappeared into a military prison without access to the outside world and without judicial review. Mr. Ertel was released after 6 weeks, but Mr. Vance was held for 97 days.  His family had no idea what had happened to him – his fiance believed he had been killed – and both men allege that they were tortured. It is only because the military deigned to release them – with implied threats that they’d better keep their mouths shut – that they are today free men.

Mr. Ertel and Mr. Vance brought suit against the military and against Bush Administration Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, focusing on three areas: cruel and inhumane treatment; violation of procedural due process; and denial of access to the courts.  Lawyers for Secretary Rumsfeld filed a motion to dismiss the suit, and on Friday, U.S. District Judge Wayne Andersen voided the second and third counts.  More importantly however, Judge Andersen also ruled that the former contractors had alleged enough specifics to warrant a hearing of evidence on the first count of cruel and inhumane treatment.

That last sentence should give both Rumsfeld and Cheney some pause. The defense describes the judges ruling:

Judge Refuses to Dismiss Suit Against Rumsfeld- Blog of Legal Times, Mike Kanovitz

Essentially the judge held that there is a constitutional violation for the types of brutality that are alleged in our complaint, and that someone who is even as high ranking as a Cabinet official can be held liable for that constitutional violation if he authorizes subordinates to commit that type of violence. Furthermore, the court held that even though he is a high placed official, the pleading requirements that apply to any defendant and any plaintiff are the same ones. And even though it requires a high amount of specific evidence for holding him liable, there’s enough evidence in the complaint that he did authorize this type of violence to be sufficient to force him to answer for these actions in a court of law.

Perhaps I am naïve to believe that powerful will ever answer for their crimes in this country. Even when they admit on national television that they “fans of waterboarding” in the context of ordering subordinates to use “enhanced interrogation techniques”** on detainees.

I think that down the road, when our children look at this phase of our history, they’ll see Mr Bush’s “War on Terrah” as a clear violation of America law and values. Something akin to the internment of the Japanese during WWII or Lincoln’s suspension of habeus corpus during the Civil War. Both of those previous examples involved much greater threats to the existence of this nation. Al-Qaeda, and it’s murderous thugs weren’t then and aren’t now an existential threat to the US. But our reaction to them most definitely is.

Our detainee policies, which sadly seem to be getting institutionalized as standard operating procedure despite empty campaign promises by Obama, have done more to recruit and fund terrorism than just about anything else we could have done. The stated aims of attacking us, was to get a reactionary response from the west that would open the flood gates to help mainstream violent jihad against the west among moderate Muslims. We did exactly what they wanted and  Al-Qaeda blossomed and morphed into the hydra-headed monster it is today.

I had hoped that a constitutional law professor would find some value in defending the Constitution, but Obama has consistently disappointed. He gave lip service to closing Gitmo early on, but has not followed through. Any opposition from right and he backs off. All I’ve seen is timidity and cowardice from him, when it comes to defending the Constitution.

I suppose one could argue that a sitting President would rarely, if ever, agree to voluntarily limit executive power and that is properly the role of the judiciary. Sadly, the federal courts from Supreme Court to the Appellate Courts, the District courts and career DOJ positions have been stacked with  “Good Bushies” who share the Yoo worldview of limitless executive power during times of war. And of course the “War on Terrah” has no end in sight, we’re essentially in a perpetual state of war.

Limitless executive power emanating from endless state of war, coupled with electronic surveillance unencumbered by meaningful judicial review. That sounds just like the optimum conditions for tyranny at the whim of the President. I didn’t trust Bush with that kind of power. I don’t trust Obama, or anyone else I can think of either. It’s not a partisan issue. This is a much greater threat to the underpinnings of American society than anything cave dwelling suicide bombers on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border can do to us.

**The phrase “enhanced interrogation” is rendered in German as “Verschärfte Vernehmung” and was favored by the Gestapo as softer term to cover the torture of resistance fighters and their supporters in German occupied areas. What the Bush administration approved of is identical to tactics used by Nazis and prosecuted during the Nuremburg Trials as war crimes. This is not to say that I think Bush is a Nazi, but that what we as a nation did and continue to ignore was by any reasonable definition torture.” Calling it “enhanced interrogation is much too Orwellian for my liking. It’s disturbing how it converges once you begin to think it’s OK for us to do it because we’re the “good guys”.

A long but worthwhile piece on improving education by improving teachers, rather than worrying about standardized test scores or charter schools or class size:

When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.

Seems obvious from my perspective as a bit of through put in the educational system. The difficulty seems that it’s hard to nail down exactly what separates the good from the bad. How would a well intentioned administrator implement a program to improve teachers? We don’t seem to know what to measure.

But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”

I share his curiosity about the subject. Our little one will be 3 this summer. Soon enough she’ll be headed off to a local pre-k program and become grist for mill of public education. Should concerned parents try private or charter education? The local elementary school is well rated, but is that enough?

I have a very personal connection to this effort. It’s is for my granddaughter Elisabeth and other families living with autism. She’s  and is a very sweet 5 year old little girl who’s still struggling to learn to speak. Please follow the link above and help if you can.

Elisabeth

I hope sometime soon laws are passed that prevent insurance companies from refusing to cover her and from carving out exceptions that offer reduced benefits to children like her. In many cases autism treated as a mental illness and covered with a greatly reduced set of benefits that prevents them from getting useful therapy that can mean the difference between an independent life or permanent dependence on public assistance. It’s just wrong, it’s not like kids with autism are looking for Prozac to “help” them through a bad break-up. Their victims of  a poorly understood condition that’s no fault of their own.

At the same time states and county school districts are cutting or considering cutting programs to help children with developmental difficulties, like Elisabeth. This will rob any chance of a future from autistic children who come from families that aren’t wealthy enough to pay for private schools and therapy on their own.

The more I see an hear about SSD devices, the more I like it. I know I’m going to upgrade to SSD for the OS and swap file partitions, perhaps with a few programs that would benefit from the extra speed. That would require a another drive for access to larger files, primarily audio and video content, most likely in the form of a pair of 500GB drive (in a RAID1 mirror array)  the old home server.  SATA disk drives are really cheap these days. I can remember buying a 20MB (yes that’s megabyte not gigabyte) drive as an upgrade for and IBM XT PC for $300 many years ago. Beat the crap out of running off dual 5.25″ floppy drives. These days with that much coin you could sport a 500GB RAID-5 3 drive array.

I run a Redhat derivative called SME Linux to act as web, file and e-mail server, as well as a firewall at home. It’s got a simplified web admin interface for basic tasks and no Gnome, KDE or other desktop software, but you can always open a terminal and get at the guts of it. It’s purpose in life is to be a LAMP server and it does fine in the role. The old SME box needs some new hardware at some point, particularly memory, as various web crawlers and spiders that index my blog can bring it too its knees. Memory usage seems to be the culprit, along with the bazillion MySQL queries that search engine indexing causes. Bumping up the available RAM and using SSD selectively sounds like a good way of bumping up performance without spending too much. The only reason I care is it causes Wordpress to throw database errors, making the blog unavailable (probably no major loss there) and makes my e-mail bog down to a standstill as well.

Meanwhile, my netbook might just get a 64GB SSD upgrade, to check out how well this may or may not help performance prior to spending the coin on a larger model. I saw some at my favorite retailer newegg.com that sport a lifetime warranty. You gotta like that.

Bondad at 538 takes on the notion that US manufacturing job are gone (and aren’t’ coming back) because free trade agreements like NAFTA allowed US markets to be flooded with cheap foreign goods. He literally graphs the issues to death.

The main point appears to be that that productivity increases and not a dearth of US manufacturing activity, foreign imports or outsourcing  has been the driver of job loss in manufacturing.  We need fewer workers per volume of goods. He closes with some points about a lack of a US export strategy similar to what’s practiced growing Asian economies, Chinese currency manipulation, and how productivity changes have primarily impacted those lacking a college education.

Update:

You could take the headline one of two ways, either it’s moribund and not coming back: Monty Python: Bring Out Your Dead

or

You could say it’s not dead it’s just resting: Monty Python: Parrot Sketch

Or maybe I just want excuses for posting Monty Python stuff.