It all comes down to a simple principle: the power to destroy a thing is the power to control a thing. The filibuster is only meaningful if used sparingly. And Republicans have shown utter disregard for that caution. They have shown that so long as they have at least 40 votes in the Senate, they will use it on anything and everything.

Democrats are idiotically hanging onto the belief that when the Republicans gain power in the future, maintaining the filibuster today will still allow them to use it then.

It’s stupid because it should be obvious by now that the first thing Republicans will do when they eventually win control of the Senate is end the filibuster. After years of using it on everything in sight, they would not hesitate one millisecond to snatch the power away from Democrats. If there is one things conservatives do, it is to project; they have abused the filibuster so much, they would expect nothing less from Democrats, and would not want to give them the chance.

Of course, it is only meaningful to end the filibuster for clearing nominations; for other laws, Republicans in the House will kill anything the Senate sends them anyway, and so the Democrats might as well put the onus of ending the filibuster on the Republicans (because you can be certain that if Democrats end it, Republicans will hypocritically use that as a cudgel).

I even believe that the Republicans would go one step further, and reinstate the filibuster before they lose power again. Because, yes, they are that hypocritical and self-serving, and yes, Democratic politicians are that stupid that they might even fall for that. Republicans were reluctant to “go nuclear” before, but they have become far more radical since then. They’d do it in a heartbeat if they thought it could work.

Honestly, the Democrats should have killed the filibuster completely in 2008, when Republicans made their “filibuster everything” strategy clear, and limiting the filibuster could have meant something as Dems had control of both houses. Even then, it would have been diminished because Obama was desperate to “be reasonable” with Republicans and give them loads of goodies even though they still voted unanimously against the most generous of compromises. But a lot more could have been passed with less sabotage by the GOP.

Republicans, simply put, are now in an all-or-nothing mode, literally. Which means, sadly, Democrats have to play the same game, or else be run over. Alas, they seem all too willing to be doormats.

Sarah Palin has a new book out on the fictional War on Christmas, with dancing images of liberal atheists becoming apoplectic whenever anyone wishes them a “Merry Christmas!” and liberals generally destroying America. Twice now I have been sorely tempted to post rebuttals of what she said, but have come to the realization that Palin needs to be treated the same as Ann Coulter: an opportunistic cultural baiter whose statements can all be boiled down to a simple “I hate liberals for reasons that have no basis in reality.” Such statements can only be addressed by ignoring them; it never pays to argue with crazy people.

About a month ago I got an email in Spanish from Facebook. Some guy with four names—two of them mine—had started an account on the service. Unfortunately, he appears to have made a mistake with his email address—he for some reason entered mine as his primary email account. I’ve had similar things happen before, when people who share my name get mixed up and enter my email address.

This one, however, was getting annoying. Every other day, I would get yet another email from Facebook, telling me about something or other that this guy needed to attend to. I tried sending him a message on Facebook, but no reply. I don’t know, maybe he’s sitting there wondering where his Facebook email is. Because I got the email notifying him that a message had been sent to him.

Finally, I got fed up with it. I realized that since my email was the one registered to the account, I could log in—and that’s what I did. I chose the “I forgot my password so email it to me” option, and got into the account. After checking, I discovered that after one month the guy had done absolutely nothing in his account. Feeling better about locking him out because I had changed the password, I proceeded to add a junk email address (thank you again, 10minutemail.com) and then removed my own, and then I logged out, never to return. Hopefully.

If they guy is annoyed that his Facebook won’t work, tough cookies. He annoyed me over and over again for the past month, now it’s his turn.

I am still seeing Americans going nuts over Fukushima as they largely ignore the extent and the damage caused by fracking. Others are now stating that it is time for us to go even more nuclear. To me, this is like arguing over whether you should submit yourself to a few dozen blasts from a shotgun using rock salt or a few body hits from a .45.

It is WAY past time to go solar.

And I don’t mean that just more people should go solar, though they should. I mean that instead of just loaning a bit here and there to solar companies, we should go all-out and start buying and installing solar on all levels.

Flatscreen LCD monitors should not have come as quickly as they did. At the time they were becoming popular, they were a poor alternative to CRTs. They were less bright, less sharp, were less able to present various resolutions sharply, had worse viewing angles, and were way more expensive. They had only one advantage: they were thin. That was enough for a lot of people to pay a lot extra for them.

So what happened? Because sales were good, producers started gearing up for them more. Corporations went all-out researching how to make the screens brighter, sharper, better, and cheaper. So now, LCD screens are superior to the old CRTs in so many ways, and they can be had for cheap too.

The lesson: you spend money purchasing a technology, it becomes a big market, and the technology improves, becoming more efficient, more effective, and much cheaper.

And that’s what we need right now: huge investment in solar. Maybe not Manhattan-Project huge, but something big.

One of my favorites: Solar Roadways. The idea that solar panels could be built into modular road, parking lot, and sidewalk panels. These panels would be covered with a specially engineered glass, tough enough to handle semi trucks rolling over them, and textured enough not to let cars slide under the worst conditions. Such panels would be much easier to install and maintain than asphalt or concrete; they would including heating elements to get rid of snow and ice; they would allow easy access to and protective cover for conduits for transmitting electrical power, data, water, sewage, and whatever else you want to run under them; and they would include LED lighting allowing for better night road markings and even interactive signage.

Initial costs would be high, but there are three mitigating factors. First, since laying asphalt and concrete also cost certain amounts, the real costs for the solar road are only what they would be above the costs of laying conventional roads. If laying asphalt costs $1000 for x amount of surface, and solar costs $1600 for the same amount of surface, then you’re really only paying $600 more for the added solar feature. Second, the energy the roads produce will pay back over time, eventually making the roads cost less, perhaps less than conventional materials; also, since maintenance is easier and additional benefits can be had, the solar version pays for itself even more quickly. And third—most importantly—the massive use of solar for such projects would spur research and production, creating solar technologies with higher efficiency and lower costs. The government should not be loaning money to solar companies. They should be buying solar technology, in large quantities. Investors will then have no trouble getting loans or capital elsewhere.

The estimate is that if one-third of all pavement in the U.S. were converted to such solar panels, we would not need any alternative forms of energy. That will be worth even more in terms of trade deficits, debts, and energy stability.

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There are several problems, the greatest of which is that right now, solar is not immediately cheaper than other kinds of energy; instead, it is an investment. Pay a lot today in order to save even more over time. But over the long run, it is cheaper. The problem there is that most people don’t act on the long run. They see the sticker shock today and think, maybe later.

Another problem is that solar has been ridiculed. Are you some California elitist liberal who thinks solar is the bee’s knees and love it just as much as your Whole Foods organic products and your New Age aromatherapy treatments? Har! What a dumb hippie you are! Didn’t you hear about Solyndra?

To dip briefly into conspiracy-theory possibilities, one could easily imagine this being opposed by the powers that be because it is essentially home-grown energy. Beyond the panels, no corporation can control the sunlight collected or trade on its future cost. That severely limits the profit-taking. Screw the fact that it is incredibly more friendly to the environment, infinitely more safe than oil, coal, or nuclear, and that it will cost billions less in terms of clean-ups in the future. If it can’t be controlled to yield hundreds of billions in profits, then what good is it?

This bias is evident in other ways. Often laws made in the shadow of energy lobbying even discourage solar:

The experience of Orrin Kohon, a Los Angeles resident with a second home in Hawaii, reflects the hurdles facing consumers hoping to join the rooftop movement. If all goes well, Kohon will soon receive local government approval to let workers mount an $18,000 leased solar power system on the roof of his Honolulu house. Monthly electric bills for his modest 1,750-square-foot abode run about $400—at 32.6¢ per kilowatt hour, the highest in the nation. With his rooftop system, installed by a third-party contractor, he’ll generate enough of his own power to lower that rate to 7.3¢ per kilowatt hour for the next 20 years. That’s a savings, he says, of $120,000 over that period. “It’s a hedge, like locking in $2-a-gallon gasoline,” says the 63-year-old owner of a Los Angeles career counseling service. “The thing is, I have to act now. If too many of my neighbors beat me to the punch, I won’t be able to connect.”

That’s because thousands of Hawaii residents have also realized that even the most elaborate systems, costing up to $55,000, can pay for themselves in as little as four years given current power rates and state and federal incentives that chop up to two-thirds off the installation price. This rooftop stampede is overwhelming the permit process—70 percent of all current permit applications in the state are for solar installations—and causing utilities to impose moratoriums in some areas on how much solar they are willing to accept to their power grids.

The rule of thumb had been that once rooftop installations made up 15 percent of the power on a given circuit, utilities could stay new connections until residents undertook an engineering study—costing as much as $50,000—that showed their addition wouldn’t destabilize the power grid. While that rule has been eased to 25 percent in Hawaii, the extra burden on consumers explains why “there are places on Maui where the saturation is such that we don’t even solicit for business there,” says Alex Tiller, chief executive officer of Sunetric, a Hawaii-based rooftop solar power installer.

The hidden costs of obtaining permits and regulators’ approval to install rooftop panels is a big reason the U.S. lags behind Germany, which leads the world in rooftop installations, with more than 1 million. The price of installed rooftop solar in Germany has fallen to $2.24 per watt. In fact, on a sunny day in May, rooftop provided all of Germany’s power needs for two hours. “This is a country on latitude with Maine,” says Dennis Wilson, president of the Mid-Atlantic Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar-installer trade group. “Germany is showing us what’s possible—if we can just get our act together.”

Oil, gas, coal, and nuclear utilities have to be told in no uncertain terms to step aside. They have had their run; if it is too hard for them to operate with competition, then they are no use to us. Let them close down and the government will pick up operations until enough solar is installed to shrink them into networking and backup operations.

It is time for solar. We have to commit, and commit big.

You often seem to hear this kind of story from some Obamacare opponents:

So, I get this letter from my health plan. It says I can’t keep my current coverage because my plan isn’t good enough under Obamacare rules. It tells me to go to the exchange or their website and pick a new plan before January 1 or I will lose coverage. …

Now, my plan covers about everything. Never had a procedure for either my wife or myself turned down. Wellness benefits are without a deductible. It covers mental health, drugs, maternity, anything I can think of.

The new plan would have a deductible $500 higher than the one I now have and a lot more if I go “out-of-network” inside the rest of the Blue Cross national network. …

Thankfully, my Blue Cross plan is offering me an “early renewal” which means I can keep this plan I really like until December 2014—at which point my beloved health plan is toast. My health insurance company is doing everything they can—this is not their fault.

Reports like this make me more than just a little bit suspicious. What sticks out here is the claim that the insurance plan the person now has is more or less perfect, and they are being forced to pay more for a worse plan. Well, if so, then what exactly is making their current plan non-compliant with the ACA relative to the inferior plan? That does not seem to make any sense.

I see two possibilities:

One is that insurance companies are using the ACA to defraud their customers, to dump people who have advantageous plans that the carriers would rather shed. When I see stories like the ones above, I never see any indication that the person in question did any investigating at all to discover why their current plan is non-compliant or why their carrier cannot give them only a slight adjustment to make the plan compliant. That would be the first thing I would do: call the insurer and ask what was wrong with my current plan.

I have the feeling that insurers are straining hard to find faults with so-called “Cadillac” plans so they can cancel them and save money. I would not be surprised if many such cancellations are fraudulent. Or that if the plans do fail legitimately it may be on some small point would could easily be repaired and the current policy continued—but the carrier, again, would rather dump these people and therefore throw up their hands and make the false claim that “there’s nothing we can do.”

The other possibility is that the writers of sad stories such as these are leaving out key facts—like, for example, what was non-compliant about such perfect plans. It had to be something—so what was it? And can we be certain that they actually found all the options regarding new plans they could sign up for?

Or is he being lied to? We recently heard Made-for-Fox-News stories of people who say that their insurance agents assured them they would have to pay higher premiums that sound suspiciously like the one detailed in the story quoted above—but which a cursory check showed were untrue, and better plans existed which the people had not found. The writer quoted above does not make clear that he actually checked things out for himself; could it be that he only checked with an agent who was trying to scam him?

Or is the person simply yet another anti-Obamacare crusader who is either exaggerating, lying by omission, or outright making crap up? Looking at other posts on the quoted blog, it sure seems that this guy is rather vociferously opposed to Obamacare and is not inclined to treat it objectively.

I’m not saying that he can’t be 100% informed and 100% honest, maybe he is. I’m not saying that the insurance companies can’t be honestly doing what the law requires and (as the write suggests) are truly trying their best to help their customers.

What I’m saying is that stories like these, because of what they say and what they don’t say, really sound like something else is in play here.

I saw this in Bloomberg today, highlighted on Sullivan’s blog:

As Tokyo shook early Saturday morning and loud shrieks from mobile-phone earthquake-warning alarms filled bedrooms around the city, one word immediately sprung to mind: Fukushima.

Those who don’t reside 135 miles away from the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl won’t understand this reaction. But the first thing most of Tokyo’s 13 million residents do once things stop wobbling is check if all’s well at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant still leaking radiation into the atmosphere and the Pacific Ocean.

My first reaction to reading this was, “What?” That’s not what I do. That’s not what anyone I know does.

This guy is full of shit. Cell phones did not go off last weekend. The alarm system only activates if an earthquake measuring 5 or greater on the Japanese damage scale hits, and last weekend was a 4. And people here do not nervously scramble to see if Fukushima was set off. Quakes have been so common here for the past few years, people just go, “Well, that wasn’t so big” and go back to their business. If one thing springs to everyone’s minds when the alarms do go off, it’s more likely, “Will this one hit Tokyo?”

This brings me back to the days after the big earthquake, when western news sources were reporting on the “panic gripping Tokyo” and the streets being deserted as everyone was “fleeing” the city.

Which was, of course, complete and utter crap. The streets downtown were empty because businesses were closed, the trains were not running, and people were not coming to work or going shopping in the center of the city.

Few people fled the city, and of those who did, many were non-Japanese who were panicked more from western news sources than anything else. That was such a notable exception that a new word was even coined to describe them: flyjin, a play on the Japanese word for foreigner, gaijin. Japanese people mostly sat tight.

And panic did not grip the city. People were tense, concerned—but there was no panic.

And now? Does everyone immediately think of Fukushima after every quake and check on Fukushima’s status?

Don’t make me laugh. Fukushima is in the news still, but people mostly ignore it nowadays. I rarely hear anyone talk about it. And after a quake, most people don’t check anything, except maybe for a few worriers.

The reporter who wrote that dreck actually seems to live in Tokyo. He should know better. My best guess is that he was trying to stir up interest in his writing by adding drama. People in the U.S. seem to be more rattled over Fukushima than do people in Japan—which is ironic, since the levels of radiation in Tokyo have been barely above normal background radiation. In fact, even at the height of the crisis, Tokyo was exposed to no more radiation than is consistently experienced in Denver (due to high altitude), save for very brief peaks.

Fukushima, naturally, is much worse. But Tokyo? We’re not sweating much here.

Sean Hannity airs a piece in which he finds three couples who are “victims” of the “Obamacare train wreck.”

Paul and Michelle Cox say that they cannot grow their business because of Obamacare. They had to cut employee hours down to less than 30 a week to avoid disastrous costs that would be incurred.

Allison Denijs and her husband say that they were forced off their current policy and had no choice but to choose from ACA-compliant policies, meaning they may not be able to keep seeing their doctor of choice.

Robbie and Tina Robison also say they’re being kicked off of their non-ACA-compliant Blue Cross plan, and they would have to pay 50% to 75% more under an ACA plan. Also, the ACA plan covers all kind of stuff they don’t need.

All in all, these people believe that Obamacare has derailed their health care and cost them dearly; it is likely that millions of Fox News viewers seeing this broadcast will even more strongly believe that Obamacare will similarly destroy their health care and their livelihoods.

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Eric Stern at Salon thought these stories sounded a little too much, so he investigated.

Paul and Michelle Cox’s business? They only have 4 employees, and the ACA only requires employers to contribute if they have 50 or more workers—so there is absolutely no need for the Coxes to cut down the hours of their workers. Either they did so under false beliefs, or, like so many businesses, they are dishonestly using the ACA as an excuse to cut costs on workers that otherwise would be cause for employees to complain.

Allison Denijs? Her family pays $20,000 a year for their current policy. If they shopped on their ACA marketplace, they could enroll in a similar plan that costs $7,600. They didn’t check, claiming that the web site didn’t work, but Stern found it working fine when he found a policy that would save them $12,400 a year.

As to her being forced to change doctors? That is not clearly a result of the ACA; Stern pointed out that insurers shrink doctor pools all the time as a means to save money—and there is little doubt that many of the big insurers are using the ACA as an excuse to do the damage while illicitly blaming the ACA as forcing them to.

Either way, Allison will save $12,400 a year. Does she value her current doctor that much?

Robbie and Tina Robison? They claim that their “insurance agent” told them that they would need a plan costing 50% to 75% more, and they refused to check their ACA exchange, claiming they simply oppose it outright. Their current plan costs $10,000 a year, so we are to believe their costs will increase to $15,000 to $17,500 a year. However, when Stern checked their ACA exchange for them, he found a plan that cost $3,700 a year, about 63% less than his current plan. And most plans, probably including his current plan, cover just as many unnecessary items they don’t need.

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Here are the results, boiled down:

• Many employers are using the ACA as an excuse to shortchange their workers and save money. They want to switch to part-time because the costs to them are less irrespective of the ACA. They would do this normally, but it would outrage their workers. With the ACA, they can claim they have no choice. If their workers watch and believe Fox News, they will fall for it and be hurt.
• Many employers with fewer than 50 workers are cutting hours of workers because they truly believe they have to. Their false beliefs were created by Fox and other similar sources. If they really don’t want to do this, then both their workers and they are being hurt by the falsehoods being spread by Fox and others.
• Many insurance companies are using the ACA as an excuse to jack up prices and reduce offerings, depending on the false beliefs generated by Fox and others to blind their customers to the alternatives.
• Many Fox viewers are avoiding the ACA exchanges and rejecting cheaper and better insurance plans simply because they are not aware that the cheaper plans exist and are not horrifying traps, or because they oppose the entire system for reasons that are similarly untrue. As a result, these people will be severely penalized because of what Fox tells them.

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So, people who would be helped by the ACA are made to hate it and become weapons against it. People told lies then take actions which ultimately cause a great deal of self-inflicted damage. Employers take advantage of this for profit, and even employers who mean well are made to fear and thus do things which not only do harm to them and their employees, but which actually bring about the very conditions they were told to fear.

This is not the first time that a right-wing campaign to spread utter falsehoods has generated such results. Take the lies about unions. Unions help almost all workers, across the board. They improve pay and benefits and help cut down on employee abuse. This is not to the detriment of corporations—they profit from having a customer base which is able to afford what they sell. However, it is the default position of corporations to make more money and pay out less, regardless of long-term, indirect effects. If there is any way to fire workers, they do; if there is any way to pay them less, they do. If there is any way to cut their benefits and cut corners on their working conditions, corporations will do that. That’s what corporations do, as a rule. Conservatives talk about the built-in checks that keep such abuse in line; the problem is, the built-in check is unions, and conservatives have been deliberately and systematically destroying these.

They accomplish this by turning against the unions the very people who would benefit from them. People are told that if the minimum wage is raised, they will lose their jobs. They are convinced that if corporations have to spend one penny more on them, even in the context of billions in untaxed profits, “job creators” will be, sadly, “unable” to keep them on. They are told that unions are populated by violent thugs. They are told that they are over-taxed, and a chief reason is that unions demand and get overpaid cushy jobs just for themselves, and live the high life at government expense. Thus, the very people who would be helped most by unions are made to fear and hate them, and become instruments to destroy them.

Another rather prominent example is Affirmative Action. The lie was spread that businesses must hire minorities and women even if they are not qualified. Many managers actually believed this, even when their offices were not even under quotas at all—not to mention that no quota nor AA in general ever requires any manager to hire an unqualified worker; if a good-faith effort was made to hire and no qualified minority or female candidate appeared, the manager is off the hook, even when under a strict quota.

I remember an exchange with someone who said this was not true, and he saw it happen in his own workplace. However, all he saw was that an apparently unqualified minority worker was hired—he did not see any law or regulation which said that was necessary. And this is what happens: people actually believe the crap that conservatives dish out as horror stories, and they react accordingly—thus completing a self-fulfilled prophecy that, yes indeed, these things actually happen.

No they don’t. Not legitimately, in any case. Mr. Cox had absolutely no reason to cut his workers hours, and the Denijs and Robison families could save a small fortune on their insurance, and be just as happy with it, if they did not buy the lies and propaganda issuing forth from “news” organizations like Fox.

The ACA is not hurting people. Fox news, the Tea Party, the Republican Party—they are hurting people. And, obscenely, making these people hurt themselves.

At TPM, Cathy Reisenwitz made an argument that laws against revenge porn are worse than the problem itself. She begins with a disturbing hint that the law may be like marijuana laws that put people in prison:

The state of California can now add people who post naked photos of their former partners to its criminally overcrowded prisons if they do so without permission and with the intent to cause emotional distress or humiliation.

It seems to me that this comment is wholly unnecessary. If the prisons are overcrowded, we should not put people there who have committed awful crimes? And yes, revenge porn is that sort of crime. Not nearly as bad as rape, but definitely in the same category. I am perfectly OK sending such people to jail.

She then gapes in puzzlement that the law would do more:

Proposed legislation in New York would actually widen to the ban to include photos victims take of themselves.

Yes, that’s right. Just because someone took a selfie does not make it any better when the jilted boyfriend publishes it on the Internet. Why should it?

But that’s not Reisenwitz’s main objection.

While well-intentioned, this kind of legislation is over-broad, poses serious free-speech threats and may not even be necessary going forward.

The first thing it’s important to keep in mind is that revenge porn laws criminalize speech.

Huhwhat?

As the ACLU has discussed, such laws can be used to censor photos with political importance. As Jess Rem pointed out for Reason magazine, people such as Jeff Hermes, Director of the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard, share this concern about the law. Hermes has stated that revenge porn laws could have kept former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D) nude selfies legally suppressed.

Uh yeah, no. Aside from the less significant but still relevant points that (1) it is arguable that politicians’ personal sexual peccadilloes are really newsworthy, and (2) relevant parts of the photos can be blacked out or pixellated in the case that context is somehow deemed necessary, there are two reasons why this is not an issue.

First, it is not necessary to show the image in order to report on the story. Even if a story about a politician sexting someone is not gratuitous in and of itself, the photos certainly are. I would not deem it a great threat to free speech if the media were limited to only telling us about Weiner’s selfies rather than showing us the images.

And second, no journalist would ever be prosecuted for revenge porn that did not specifically involve them. To make the person who released them liable is not something that affects freedom of the press, any more than outlawing the release of classified documents did in cases like Edward Snowden’s.

Not to mention that these laws often include language that specifies the offender must have “intent to cause emotional distress or humiliation.” If someone releases photos of a politician in a state of undress, it could be for the purpose of revenge—but the claim could very easily be made that it was for the purpose of informing the public, thus making even the person releasing the images safe from prosecution.

In fact, the laws may not be strong enough. People wishing to release these images will probably find loopholes, like having a third party post the images on the Internet. If sharing the photos with a private third party is not illegal, and if the third party has no cause for humiliating the victim, then probably no case could be made.

Reisenwitz suggests, however, that there is enough legal protection without the new laws:

Civil lawsuits have always been available to victims. Late last year a Texas judge ordered an ‘indefinite’ lock on revenge porn site PinkMeth.com as Shelby Conklin sought “punitive damages of more than $1 million for intrusion on seclusion, public disclosure of private facts, appropriation of her name and likeness and intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

The case was eventually settled, and the offenders paid restitution instead of serving time in jail. This is just one example of the many successful lawsuits by victims of revenge porn.

Before the law, there were already at least seven different kinds of laws revenge porn could have violated, depending on the circumstances. They include but are not limited to laws dealing with extortion and blackmail, child pornography, invasion of privacy, copyright infringement, voyeurism, intent and violation of the Consumer Protection Act.

The first example Reisenwitz cites is clearly inapplicable. It was against the revenge porn site, not the person releasing the images. You don’t even need revenge porn sites to release such photos, and sites not intended for such photos could claim they had no idea of the photos’ origins. Also, many of the charges dealt with commercial distribution, something that would not apply to an individual posting to a porn forum. Not to mention that many such sites will not be within the courts’ jurisdictions, or that any victim making such a case will become a huge target for similar sites and their supporters.

The other laws? Extortion and blackmail laws would only apply if the jilted party made such threats, which is probably very rare. Child pornography would apply only in limited cases. I’m not a lawyer, but I would think citing invasion of privacy is pretty weak—people are not penalized for spreading personal information about exes, and the fact that the photos were consensual probably negates this as a possible legal avenue. Copyright infringement could apply to selfies, but not to images taken by the perpetrator—and it would be pretty difficult to assess financial damage if you had no intent to sell the images yourself, and the perpetrator did not profit themselves. Voyeurism is laughable in this context. As for the Consumer Protection Act, it relates to commercial profit, again not applicable to the individuals.

It’s pretty clear that these laws are insufficient. Mitchell Matorin has a much more detailed rundown.

No, the law is not worse than the crime. Not in the least. And frankly, laws against privacy infringement are far, far too weak in this country. As with all forms of intellectual property and information in general, we are in a new age, and the laws are too far behind. These new laws are not inappropriate, and in fact, we need a lot more regulating how information is collected, disseminated, and bartered.

Balking at making revenge porn illegal is, if anything, a frightening step in the wrong direction.

Democrats: How can we make government work for the people?

Republicans: What’s in it for us?

Give a terrorist a cookie… and he’ll want a glass of milk.

That’s essentially what happened before. In 2011, the Republicans did the same thing—they threatened to default on the debt—and to stop them, Obama and the Democrats gave them a cookie. That cookie is still with us in the form of sequestration, which gave the Republicans almost the level of cuts that even Paul Ryan demanded in his non-fact-based budget proposals from 2008.

This year, they came back for the glass of milk with a vengeance. However, this time, the Democrats were somewhat less stupid, and simply refused. They denied the Republicans the chance to get their hands on the ACA, even a little bit, and agreed pretty much only to negotiating more in the future. This infuriated the extremists:

The conservative activist group FreedomWorks railed against the Senate deal as a “complete surrender” to Democrats. The group joined a trio that includes Club for Growth and Heritage Action in advising lawmakers to oppose the plan because they will use it to rank Republicans in their annual scorecards.

You might want to say that, despite the puerile insanity of the Tea Partiers, despite their wanton disregard for the national good in their petty drive to destroy what they would have cheered from a Republican administration, that Obama and the Democrats themselves should not have let it come so close, that they should not have played with default. That as painful as any capitulation may have been, allowing the country to go into default is not worth that or any other risk.

However, this is not a rational analysis. Democrats tried giving in, even if not very much, in 2011, and it brought us here. This time the Republicans were demanding even more. Had the Democrats caved—even in a small way—then we would be right back at the brink again next time, and again after that, having taught the Republicans that threatening to default on the debt works.

It would, in fact, only get worse. The demands would become grander and more obscene each time, the language even more vitriolic, the game of chicken more perilous. The Republicans would believe in their own indestructibility, convinced that the Democrats would cave. And at some point, after vast amounts of damage caused by the demand they were granted, default would come, and that would be catastrophic.

And the raving lunatics would go home screaming about how Obama and the Democrats were the cause of it all. Just like they have been this week, standing before crowds of veterans squealing about how Obama shut down the government and how Democrats refused to negotiate. These people know even less shame than fact.

Frankly, the entire debt-ceiling thing should not even exist. The time for that debate is when Congress decides to spend. To make the decision to spend and then threaten not to owe what they decided to spend is the height of infantile madness. It’s like taking out a loan to buy a house and then telling the bank that you refuse to owe them any money.

Over the past decades, it has generally been a quiet form of protest, a procedural protest regarding deficit spending. Now, however, that we have a party which has proved itself incapable of rational behavior, it is like a flamethrower in the hands of a four-year-old boy, who thinks it’s an incredibly cool way to demand more cookies.

Sadly, despite the precipitous drop in the polls, the Republicans may not end up paying a price. The expert wonks generally agree that it is improbable that the GOP will lose control of the House. Between gerrymandering, vote suppression, and the public’s dependable propensity to forget last year’s wrongdoings, it is likely that the independents will again make brashly stupid decisions and will return to power the same gang of thugs barren of knowledge, sympathy, or compassion.

I cannot state how badly I want them to be wrong.

Bill Maher had Carol Roth on his show, yet another of the long line of conservatives calling themselves “independents,” talking deficit reduction we somehow never heard when Bush was in office. One of her points was about how Obama has raised the debt by “6 trillion dollars over the last four and a half years,” and despair that we have to raise the debt ceiling at all.

First of all, the $6 trillion number only comes from adding the full spending for 2009—which was George W. Bush’s budget, not Obama’s. And what Obama did spend over that was expressly to deal with the massive economic catastrophe Obama inherited on day one.

That’s a favorite ruse conservatives love to play: conflate the tail end of Bush with Obama’s own record, as in “Obama gave us a $1.4 trillion deficit,” or “Obama drove the unemployment rate up to 10%.”

A less contrived total deficit would be $4.7 trillion over five years. So, where did that come from? Did Obama just say, hey, let’s generate $4.7 trillion dollars in spending that wasn’t there before?

Of course not. Almost all of the debt under Obama has been from the money that, again, George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress committed us to. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And then there was the damage caused by the fiscal cataclysm Bush handed Obama in early 2009.

The fact is, Obama has done almost nothing but cut the deficit since he came into office:

Year	Deficit in $ Billions	$ Change in Billions
2009	1,413	—
2010	1,294	-119
2011	1,300	+6
2012	1,087	-213
2013	973	-114

But that’s not good enough for Roth; she was appalled that Obama’s spending was still raising the debt ceiling at all: “[The debt ceiling is] going up because the government overspends, because they refuse to balance the budget…. If they didn’t overspend, we wouldn’t be hitting the debt ceiling.”

So, what was Obama supposed to do, cut $1.4 trillion dollars in one year? To wipe that out in even five years would require raising revenue and/or cutting the budget by $282 billion per year, every year. Something unprecedented, save possibly for coming off of wartime spending at the end of WWII.

When Bush was in office, most of that time being when Republicans also controlled both houses of Congress, deficit spending went up more often than it came down (up 5 years, down three years). When it went up the first two years of Bush’s budgets, it went up by huge amounts: $286 billion and $220 billion.

The three years the deficit went down under Bush, it went down by $94, $70, and $87 billion dollars, an average of $84 billion a year—something conservatives at the time hailed as little short of genius. Under Bush overall, the deficit increased $192 billion a year—and we did not hear conservatives complaining even a tenth as much as they do now.

Under Obama, the deficit has fallen an average of $110 billion per year.

Even under Bill Clinton, while he was creating a surplus, it went down only $70 billion a year.

So, what exactly do conservatives expect from Obama, when they themselves are entirely mute on where this money should be cut? Of course, we know where they want to cut it: Social Security and Medicare, the exact programs they claim they want to “save.”

We know where Republicans do not want to cut it: from the military, where almost all of the waste and overspending exists. In fact, they want to increase our ludicrously high military spending. They not only want to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan, they want to start a new war in Iran—and wanted to invade Syria, at least until Obama said he’d take action there.

And we know where Republicans do not want to raise revenue: from millionaires and billionaires, and from corporations making tens of billions in profit every year with many of them paying no taxes at all on those profits.

So when a conservative whines about how Obama is spending us into oblivion? I would suggest trying to speak facts to them, but they would almost certainly not listen, and would instead probably spout the same utter bullshit like Roth was on Maher’s show.

A terrible story out of San Francisco:

The man drew the gun several times on the crowded San Francisco commuter train, with surveillance video showing him pointing it across the aisle without anyone noticing and then putting it back against his side, according to authorities.

The other passengers were so absorbed in their phones and tablets they didn’t notice the gunman until he randomly shot and killed a university student, authorities said. …

“These weren’t concealed movements — the gun is very clear,” District Attorney George Gascon said. “These people are in very close proximity with him, and nobody sees this. They’re just so engrossed, texting and reading and whatnot. They’re completely oblivious of their surroundings.”

In a case such as this, of course it seems horrifying that a gunman who would eventually shoot someone would go unnoticed (although how the situation would have been improved if anyone had noticed is not exactly made clear). However, there is also a clear judgment being made here: that it is a bad thing, perhaps irresponsible, negligent, or asocial, to be engrossed in a technological device in a public place.

This is one of those time I have to roll my eyes and sigh out loud.

The context here is riding a train for long periods of time, something I do on a daily basis. Without some kind of diversion, you are just sitting there looking at nothing. 99.9% of the time, nothing is happening. People are just sitting and standing. This is not a social situation. No one is interacting—nor do people want it to be that way; you’re mostly surrounded by strangers, and people get annoyed when there is too much active talking. As a result, you mostly get people being there, silent, like they would be in an elevator. However, in an elevator, you’re just there for a minute, not an hour.

What are you supposed to do, remain quietly observant and vigilant in case someone brandishes a gun?

The clear implication is not only were people “oblivious” to their surroundings, they were pathetically or irresponsibly detached because they were engrossed in electronic devices.

This has become somewhat of a popular complaint for some time now. It stems from the idea that if people engage in some new portable personal entertainment, in particular of an electronic nature, while in public, it is assumed to be impolite, like you are shutting yourself off from others.

I have never respected that complaint. It’s as if the one complaining expects everyone else in public to pay attention to them. Why?

Sure, if someone keeps bumping into other people or causes some kind of damage, that would be different. But that’s regarding something that occupies your visual attention while moving or operating a vehicle. That’s a legitimate concern, and I fully agree with laws about texting while driving. Or if there is a social event where a person attending is supposed to be paying attention to others—a party, a meeting, even just a conversation—then yes, it’s asocial to instead be absorbed in something else.

However, that’s not what we’re talking about here. Train passengers are not driving the vehicle. Someone sitting alone in public, in a park, at a coffee shop, at a bus stop—these people are not expected to be engaged with anyone else.

So, how is it asocial or in any way wrong for these people to occupy themselves?

But that’s not the only point here—it’s not just occupying yourself, it’s doing it with some new device. Remember complaints some time back when Walkmans first came out? Same thing now. It’s the same scorn for technology that even still generates fear of crime on the Internet when the same crimes could just as easily happen in any other context.

Consider how different the reaction would be if people on the train with the gunman were reading books or engaged in conversation with someone they were traveling with. Would there be the same level of disdain, the same feeling of contempt? Almost certainly not. There would be more of a sense of shared horror, a feeling of sympathy rather than condescension. Like nobody in a movie theater noticing someone in the back row brandishing an Uzi, or no one in a library noticing the someone walking by carrying a handgun. It would be considered more proper.

But entertain yourself in public? With an electronic device? Of course not. You should be happy to ride a train for long periods of time with nothing to do. Jerk.

Have you noticed that liberals generally check to see if the latest news story about Republicans is actually satire, while conservatives tend not to check if the latest satire about Obama and Democrats is really news?

Conservatives have been become so extreme, so breathtakingly bizarre in their actions, so ludicrously hypocritical in their statements, that it is hard to even do satire about them anymore. If you try, someone will quickly link to a news story where they actually did that thing. And they are so desperate to believe that Obama and liberals are corrupt and evil, so trusting of extremist political sources, that they will generally believe even the most laughably impossible claims about the left.

Really, do you think more than a few nutty liberals would believe that Mitt Romney introduced death panels in his healthcare program in Massachusetts? That if the government shut down under Bush, that he would have had helicopters cover Mount Rushmore with a giant sheet? That a Republican president would actually have the FCC classify MSNBC as “satire” rather than a “news” source?

47% of Republicans believe that Obamacare “death panels” are true. 49% of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the 2012 election for Obama, despite the fact that ACORN shut down in 2010. Various polls show Republicans ranging between 25 and 65% believing Obama was not born in the U.S. 29% of Louisiana Republicans said Obama was responsible for the Katrina response. More than 85% of Alabama and Mississippi Republicans believe that Obama could be a Muslim—but the good news is that only 55 to 65% think that he is a Muslim.

A lot of this comes down to critical thinking skills, and how willing you are to be honest about your own political bias. This is not to say that all liberals are smart or honest and all conservatives are dumb or obstinate—but the tendencies definitely seem to break that way.

I had a conservative coworker once who, when asked, said that he honestly believed that the programming on the Fox News channel was not politically slanted. The question was not whether he believed what they were saying, but rather whether there was any political bias. He very honestly and steadfastly professed his belief that they presented information accurately.

Now, I like watching shows like Rachel Maddow, and consume media much like that, in addition to more mainstream media outlets (I tend to use the Google News aggregator over any one source). But if you asked me if programs like Maddow or sites like The Huffington Post have a political bias, of course I will recognize that. If I am reading the New York Times or watching CNN, and I see a story praising an Obama program, explaining how Democrats in Congress are responsible, or otherwise stating something not fully objective, I will recognize it as opinion and not “news.” Even if I see something which is apparently factual and objective, I will not assume that I am receiving all the facts about it. When I hear a conservative make a claim I disagree with, I will do a search for the facts instead of simply dismissing or contradicting the statement, just in case I am wrong about my assumption, which happens more often than I like.

That is my impression, at least, of how liberal culture tends to process information; we tend to be skeptics, we tend to respect critical thinking and objectivity. We like scientific methods, we are more willing to test our beliefs. Hardly all of us, but it is the tendency, the subcultural trend. It is hard to see how half of all Republicans could believe ACORN stole even a single vote in 2012 if this were the tendency on the conservative side. Their thought processes seem to be much more based in faith, which is considered a highly-respected attribute—and which transfers from their spiritual reflections into their political considerations.

Unfortunately, faith in anything political—especially when it reinforces your biases, left or right—is tantamount to utter gullibility.

Computers have the ability to analyze scanned printed words and convert it to selectable text. This is called Optical Character Recognition, or OCR for short.

However, even with relatively clean printed text to work with, OCR still often fails to render the text completely accurately; An r followed by an n or m can get confused, or a d could become a c followed by an l, making the word “down” into the word “clown.”

This one has to be my all-time favorite, however:

Even in 2009, it was pretty evident. A foreign leader asked Obama:

“We don’t understand it. You’re trying to make sure everybody has health care and they’re putting a Hitler mustache on you — I don’t — that doesn’t make sense to me. Explain that to me.”

Conservatives are doing things which would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Some things which we even take for granted now. Think about the following facts in the context of what would have passed muster a few generations ago—or even more alarmingly, in the context of sound reason.

Conservatives run a propaganda channel on TV which they shamelessly pretend is a “news network.”

Conservatives openly mock facts, deny science, and fervently stand behind statements which are easily proven false.

Conservatives are openly suppressing liberal voters under the laughable pretense of openly discredited “voter fraud.”

Conservatives work almost exclusively now via obstructionism, essentially stopping all meaningful legislation.

Conservatives oppose any and all legislation favored by the opposition regardless of what it is, even if it was what conservatives themselves were promoting until very recently.

Conservatives have utterly rejected the core principle of American politics—compromise—and now genuinely threaten to destroy the American economy if they do not get their extremist agenda passed. For conservatives, “negotiation” means nothing more than “give us everything we want and you get nothing.”

Conservatives are opposed to virtually any policy that would help their supposed constituents, the people: health care, retirement benefits, a living wage, solid public education, college education, union protection, infrastructure, corporate and government regulation, clean air, clean water, clean and/or cheap energy, environmental protection, reproductive choice, progressive taxes, network neutrality, unemployment insurance, food stamps, responsible gun control, the ability to sue if wronged… the list goes on and on and on. Anything that would help the people of the country, anything that would help the economy at large, conservatives oppose.

What do conservatives fight for? Lower taxes, mostly for wealthy people. Oil and coal. Military spending. Land wars in the Middle East. Privatization.

And yet, tens of millions of Americans who are most hurt by what Republicans are doing vote them back into office time and again.

Could the lack of a well-informed electorate somehow be involved?

Together, of course, with the excruciating inability of Democrats to effectively counter all of that or to even provide a marginally attractive alternative choice. As I put it in 2010, if Republicans had to advertise truthfully, their campaign slogan would be this:

We’re Crazy and Destructive, but the Other Guys Are Ineffective at Stopping Us!

You hear a lot about teacher tenure nowadays. Tenure is bad. Teachers get tenure automatically and then are guaranteed a job for life no matter how incompetent they are. We see reports in the press about how tenure makes school systems worse.

So, it’s a real problem, right?

Let’s begin with the article I link to above. It comes from the Wall Street Journal—a conservative publication, now owned by Murdoch, so there is immediate suspicion of bias. Then the report it quotes comes from the National Bureau of Economic Research, often cited as “non-partisan” and “highly respected,” which just happens to always report that Democratic ideas are failures and conservative policies are the bee’s knees. I’ll get back to this later.

Instead, let’s look at tenure itself.

Do all teachers automatically get tenure? No. You have to get certified and then teach while being evaluated for 2 to 5 years, depending on the state. During this time, a teacher can be fired at will, without any reason whatsoever. At the end of the review time, you are either given tenure, or you are dismissed. If the school grants tenure, that means that the school, after years of review, feels that you are qualified. If you do not pass muster, then you should not be allowed to continue teaching, and the school should hire someone else who is. If an incompetent teacher gets tenure, then it is a clear failure of the administration to perform their duties.

Is tenure a lifetime appointment? Don’t teachers wish. No, it’s not. Teachers with tenure can be fired, and often are. It is important to understand that K-12 tenure—the issue everyone is talking about—is very different from university tenure.

Does tenure make it almost impossible to fire a bad teacher? If a teacher is performing badly, the school can fire them; they simply need evidence of the poor performance, which would probably take the form of evaluations and student performance relative to other teachers—in short, the very data that would inform a school of poor performance in the first place. There is often talk about how it costs huge amounts of money to go through the process. Maybe, in some states, that could be true, but if it is, then the answer is not ending tenure, but instead to revamp the system so that standard evaluation methods could be applied to the process. However, I have the feeling that most “expensive” terminations are padded with costs like the full teachers’ salary during the period of review. I also suspect that most “extremely difficult” terminations are over reasons that tenure was designed to prevent, namely ones that are not actually related to teacher performance.

So, if a teacher can be fired, what is tenure about? Simple: it means a teacher cannot be fired “at will.” The school is required to show cause and to go through the process of demonstrating that cause. Which is, to be honest, what every employer should be required to do with every job. The fact that this is not true is not indicative of fault in schools, but instead of faults in how we generally treat workers like disposable objects.

So, why is there such a furor over teacher tenure?

The answer is simple: teachers are a liberal constituency. If you are a liberal constituency, conservatives will try their best to destroy you, and failing that, to vilify you. They will manufacture false outrage over trumped-up scandals and drive you and your organizations into the ground.

Who are the biggest supporters of Democrats? Unions. Conservatives are rather blatantly doing everything they can to vilify and crush labor unions. People are made to feel that unions are run and populated by thugs and demand sweet, cushy jobs at the expense of the public.

Hollywood is a liberal constituency, so it is often denigrated, devalued, blamed, and dismissed by conservatives (until a movie star voices support for conservatives, at which point Republicans swoon and try to elect that person to some office or another).

Any city with liberal leanings is smeared. San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, many cities in New England—all horrific bastions of sin and disgrace. You’ve been hearing a lot about “San Francisco Values” and “Chicago-style Politics.” You’ve seen how Detroit has been treated. They are not the “Real America.”

Minorities are also big supporters of Democrats. So guess who just can’t help insulting, smearing, and working against the interests of minorities? Who works day and night to slant election laws to keep minorities from voting? Who attacks immigration reform and blames illegal immigrants for society’s woes?

Young people are also Democratic constituencies, but they’re harder to target—and yet conservatives often do. Republican politicians are known for resenting college voters (remember Rick Santorum sneering at the idea of going to college?), with many conservative vote-suppression techniques aimed squarely at them. Some Republicans have started challenging student voting rights altogether.

Tenure is not a problem. It is simply yet another opportunity for conservatives to paint a liberal group as a scapegoat.

Derek Thompson writes that the Stimulus and Obamacare are the first and second “most divisive legislation in modern history.”

He’s wrong. The laws are not at all divisive. The Republicans are. The current conservative movement is the most divisive in modern history.

It’s easy to see. Consider these two scenarios.

First, imagine that the 2008 economic crisis happened two years earlier, in 2006, smack in the middle of Bush’s second term. Bush probably would not have tried to pass a stimulus like Obama’s, but consider what would have happened had he done exactly that.

The important point to remember is that Republicans and conservatives in general did not oppose the stimulus because it spent a lot of money; Bush had spent way more over the previous years and they were not really all that opposed to it. They would not have liked so much spending on infrastructure, but they would not have violently opposed it, either—so long as it was a Republican administration passing it. Democrats, not even close as willing to be divisive and opposed on purely partisan grounds, would have gone along with the bill. They would probably have complained that it did not spend enough on infrastructure and other left-wing wish-list items, but they would not voted against it.

When the stimulus passed, the horrendously plummeting job market immediately reversed, the stock market turned around and began a comeback, and several months later, unemployment stopped rising. Had this happened in 2007, Bush would have been hailed as an economic savant, a hero who stopped an impending economic disaster.

Try to tell me that wouldn’t be the right wing’s take on the issue. There’s really no question—of course they would have reacted that way.

The Stimulus in itself would not have been “divisive” at all.

Obamacare would have played out similarly. Imagine that in 2008, Romney got the GOP nomination and then won, maybe riding high on Bush’s Stimulus recovery. He brings the Massachusetts health care plan—essentially Obamacare—to the national level. Democrats complain, wanting single-payer Medicare for All, but Romney sticks with the conservative plan, which was created, after all, by the strictly conservative Heritage Foundation. Conservatives did not oppose the plan when the Heritage Foundation proposed it. Conservatives did not oppose the plan when Romney instituted it. They only opposed it when Obama made it his own.

Republicans, pleased to get on top of a winning issue that Democrats would otherwise have dominated, would have approved the conservative health care plan proposed by a conservative president who had successfully implemented it before. Some right-wingers would have opposed it, but not nearly enough to stop its passage. Again, Democrats would have complained it did not go far enough, but most would have voted for it.

Again, the legislation is not divisive at all.

People have to understand: the Stimulus is not divisive. Obamacare is not divisive. Obama is not divisive. Obama is hardly even a liberal, for Christ’s sake.

The current political atmosphere is divisive only because conservatives have decided that such extreme partisan rancor works well for them. Period. End of sentence.

Never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Motto of the man who hoards 40% of the wealth held by 100 people, after he has become wealthy.

Currently debunked at Snopes:

Article headline: Fox News classified satire by FCC written by Sarah Wood. States that Fox News will now have to run a disclaimer across the bottom of the screen stating “This is not a valid new source”. Is this true?

Indicative of how screwed up our world is, satire makes eminently more sense than reality. The satirical article specifies:

A statement put out by the FCC says, “The decision to classify Fox News as satire has come after several years of evaluation regarding the sources of their reporting and the bias of their programming. While much of their content is based on legitimate news, it is spun is a way that cannot not be deemed newsworthy to the viewing public. If Fox News so chooses to report actual news stories of legitimacy without skewing the content we may overturn our decision and reclassify the network to a valid news source once again.”

One can be assured that the FCC does not have the authority to do any such thing.

The thing is, there should be some group, somewhere, doing exactly that.

I have always believed that there should be a strictly non-partisan, independently-funded journalism ratings organization which sets several standards of responsible journalism—one which tracks accuracy, use of identified and reliable sources, relevance of news stories, use of objective language, clarity, etc.—and uses that data to rate everything from individual journalists to entire news organizations.

The freedom of the press was established as a primary right for the purpose of ensuring a well-informed electorate, one which would then be able to make informed decisions when casting votes. That system is now virtually destroyed, in large part because of Fox News and organizations like it. Something needs to be done to reverse that trend.

As I predicted, BCN’s practice of fragmenting iPhone models to diminish their top-rank standing has, as I predicted, rather spectacularly backfired.

As you can see from the graphic at right, the iPhone now occupies 9 of the top 10 spots (#10 being held by the Galaxy S4). Yep, nine different individual iPhones with a specific model, capacity, and carrier each all sold better by themselves than the Galaxy S4 did altogether.

And note the dates: 9/16 ~ 9/22. Meaning that this is just from the first two or three days of sales. Meaning that next week, with a full week of sales (albeit without the punch of the first-day buying spree), we may see the iPhone garner even more spots on the top list.

After all, the #11 spot went to Kyocera’s Gratina, the #12 spot to the Xperia A, and the #18 spot went to a Panasonic handset. The iPhone claimed all other seven spots in the 11-20 list.

And three spots in the 21-30 list. But I just find it amusing that 16 of the 20 top-selling phones are iPhones.

What I find interesting is that the high-capacity models are gaining top spots, when usually it is the 16 GB models that dominate—a discouraging sign that the prior system of making the new top-quality 16 GB iPhone free with a 2-year contract is no longer in effect—the much-less-appealing 5C has probably taken that place, making those who lust after the 5S pay a monthly fee or even buy outright, meaning that they pay only a little more to get the higher-capacity version.

I have a student in one of my classes who says that she has already ordered the gold iPhone 5S, but may have to wait a month or more before she gets it.