Today’s legal and technical systems give far too much power to copyright holders, in ways that range from annoying to ruinous. Content owners have bulled their way into most every crevasse, dictating unreasonable terms and causing headaches wherever they go–and usually to no good effect.

DRM in HDMI cables, for example, made my brand-new DVR completely unusable for perfectly legal recording of hi-def TV shows, for example. Content providers have litigated their way to getting a cut of blank media sales, extorting who knows how much without even any proof that they lose any sales to piracy. And speaking of extortion, they have started an industry of nuisance lawsuits, preying on people with unreliable IP address identification, forcing them to pay thousands of dollars in what amounts to a shakedown, or face even more than that in legal fees alone. Meanwhile, copy-protection schemes forced on paying users create all kinds of limitations and annoyances–while non-paying pirates have full and free use of media at the highest qualities.

One of the many results of this campaign is policies concerning content-playing services like YouTube, which bend over backwards to please content owners. You may have noticed that if you make a home movie and add a bit of your favorite music to it, YouTube will probably mute the audio or apply restrictions and ads; fair use is not recognized, nor are international variations in law. It doesn’t have to be a directly-applied soundtrack, it can be just a snippet of music playing in the background; that’s enough to have your content taken down on copyright violation grounds.

However, content owners are given far too much leeway. One recent example occurred when a hapless YouTube uploader tried to put up a video of himself outdoors collecting a wild salad. There was no music playing, just this guy talking in a natural setting. The music licensing company Rumblefish demanded the video be taken down. Apparently, the birdsongs in the background were claimed by the company to be part of their copyrighted catalog.

NASA, however, is a more recent victim, with the news services playing the villains. NASA created a video of the LCROSS spacecraft crashing into the moon, and placed in the public domain–as are all NASA videos, being paid for with taxpayer money.

Well, not so much. The Associated Press claimed ownership, and YouTube obligingly conceded, taking down many accounts for “copyright violations” when they uploaded the NASA video to YouTube. One can only guess that the AP simply copyrights all video and audio that they pass on, even public domain content they have no right claiming ownership of.

But that was three years ago–and NASA continues to be plagued. This week, one of NASA’s own videos on NASA’s own YouTube page was claimed as the private property of the Scripps News Service, which had the video taken down.

Scripps eventually apologized for the “mistake,” but the content companies continue their practices of throwing copyright notices over broad swaths of content, whether they actually own it or not, penalizing countless people, many of whom have done nothing wrong–and most of whom constitute no threat or harm to any copyright holders. It has simply become a broad game of marking territory and punishing people without review or standing.

They did it!

Remember the Seven Minutes of Terror? Well, they’re over now, and NASA has yet another spectacular feather in its cap, as the Curiosity rover begins its new mission on Mars. Equipped with several cameras, including color, 3-D, and (I believe) higher-def cameras than we’ve seen on Mars before, Curiosity should provide us with quite a show.

For starters, the simple, low-res image of the lander’s wheel and the horizon:

NASA missions are always fun, and at $7 per American, this one seems well worth the cost. Compare that to $10,000 per taxpayer, or $4400 per American, for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. $2600 per American for the Iraq War alone, which was an entirely optional war. Hell, for one-tenth of the cost of the Iraq War alone, we could be sending a manned mission to Mars.

Sorry. So easy to split off and talk politics… What I meant to say was, go NASA, you ROCK!

In March, I debunked the Fox News claim that, after a one-month stall at 8.3%, “unemployment is not likely to fall much further and may rise again.” The message was that there is no hope for improvement, and that the numbers will stall or get worse for the indefinite future.

In the five months since then, Fox might, without looking too closely, seem to have been correct, in that the unemployment numbers have stayed steady since then:

• February: 8.3%
• March: 8.2%
• April: 8.1%
• May: 8.2%
• June: 8.2%
• July: 8.3%*

*July is really 8.254%; “8.3” is a rounding-up from that. It is only slightly up from 8.217% in June.

However, as I pointed out in March, conservatives often seem blind to the fact that unemployment numbers are a lagging indicator, especially when it means they can make Obama look bad, or their own guys look better.

Knowing that the unemployment rate lags about 9 months behind the jobs numbers gives us a bit of a crystal ball to see what will happen in upcoming months as far as unemployment goes. Yes, I know that it’s not that simple, but there is, in fact, a correlation. For example, the recent stall at 8.3% to 8.1% beginning last February matches very nicely with the stall in job creation that happened last year in May.

In March of this year, I predicted:

The bad news for Obama is that, for the next 4-6 months, unemployment will not be so hot–it may drop a point or two over the next 4-6 months (numbers might show a drop in June or July more than other months)…

I was not spot on where the slight drop would occur, but I was correct in that it could vary by a point or two. The real test, however, will be in next three months, about which I made this prediction:

[The unemployment rate] may not really start to change again until just before the election–which is the good news for Obama. The rate should start dropping regularly come September, when we see the numbers for August.

Based on nothing but a guess, I would say that the unemployment rate will probably be between 7.6% and 7.8% come November. The last three months, all good gainers, will show up in the unemployment rate in the three months leading up to election day.

That still remains a distinct possibility. My prediction was based on this chart:

A slump in job creation hit in May 2011 and continued for roughly six months up until October. Nine months forward, this would apply to February to July–which is precisely where the unemployment rate stalled. Then, from November 2011 (August 2012) there was a surge again, with overall job growth going above 200,000 per month. If the correlation holds true, then we should be seeing the unemployment rate going down again starting next month, at latest in October, but with an appreciable drop when the numbers come out just before election day.

Note that I am not hailing a recovery or anything, but rather simply the short-term number which could have a real effect on the election this fall.

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In the meantime, I am otherwise sanguine about Obama’s chances. Yes, the wingnuts have been going to town with the dishonest “You Didn’t Build That” campaign. However, Romney has been obliging in shifting the focus to his tax returns (making it seem for all the world that he’s hiding some pretty bad stuff in there), his tax plans (raising taxes on the 95% to pay for yet another whopping big tax cut for the rich), and his gaffe-tastic trip abroad (demonstrating that not only can he not handle foreign policy, he can’t even keep from pissing off our strongest allies for a day or two).

In the meantime, while the popular vote has not shown much shift (Obama 50.7%, Romney 48.3%), Obama has made significant electoral gains. Not just in total numbers (he currently leads Romney 300 to 238), but in how much he may have key states locked up. Pennsylvania was supposed to be a battleground state; the numbers have shifted so far in Obama’s favor, however, that Romney gave up and stopped advertising there. Ohio and Florida have shifted to Obama’s column fairly significantly, with Obama enjoying 6-point leads, which may expand as economic forecasts for those states predict improvement. At FiveThirtyEight, Obama is projected to have a 55% chance of winning Florida, and a whopping 71% chance of winning Ohio. In fact, Obama now leads in all swing states.

Not that things can’t change. However, there is presently no evidence that they will. If a change comes, it will come from somewhere we do not expect–a terrible last-minute scandal that Obama cannot deflect like Bush did with his drunk-driving charge, a sudden, unexpected economic downturn, a series of bad gaffes on Obama’s part–that kind of thing. The odds, however, seem to be against that.

In fact, I now see enough breathing room to tempt fate and possibly even foresee excellent election results for not just Obama, but the Democrats in general. Right now, both the House and the Senate look like toss-ups. However, look forward to November: what if Romney is in the doghouse, and enthusiasm for Obama is up? That could have a negative effect, as Obama voters will not feel as threatened and may feel less inclined to vote (an effect magnified by vote-suppression campaigns by Republicans, not to mention massive redistricting).

What about the other side, however? If Mitt Romney stands little chance to win, what effect will that have on Republican voters? A key point here is religion: traditionally, the strongest get-out-the-vote campaigns have come from the churches and fundamentalist elements, the deep-red areas which rally to send out the troops. What if the election is about sending these warriors of God out… to vote for a Mormon who stands little chance of winning anyway?

I am not talking about the possibility of a landslide for Obama–I refer instead to the possibility that a depressed fundamentalist vote in red states could lead to unexpected gains for Democrats in down-ballot races, possibly giving Democrats a majority in both the House and the Senate.

If they can win that, and if the rumors are true that Democrats in the Senate will finally wake up and realize that Republicans have succeeded in utterly destroying the usefulness of the filibuster in overall terms, then when the Senate resumes business next year and Democrats have a chance to rewrite the rules, they could do away with it–and, as a result, they could actually start to get things done without Republicans blocking everything.

This is my big hope–not that Romney loses big, but that the built-in religious prejudice, which until now has hindered Obama and the Democrats, will finally come home to roost for the right wing, possibly handing Congress to the Democrats.

If that happens, maybe Democrats can start some real infrastructure spending, raise taxes on the wealthy to a reasonable level, cut them a bit more for the middle class to help get the flow running better, and help at least some form of recovery finally come along.

In short, after four years of Republicans “leading from behind,” we can actually have a Democratic presidency which is more sabotage-proof than it has been.

Of course, Obama will probably make concessions to Republicans even then, even when he doesn’t have to.

This is a post from exactly a year ago, but merits repeating.

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I just want to bring up a little bit of history here. Back in 2000, when we were looking at surpluses, Republicans hated the idea. They were nearly apoplectic at the thought of government taking in more than it spent within a limited time frame. They used the catchphrase, “It’s your money,” as if the people were being robbed or something. It was as if the debt did not exist, and did not need to be paid off, so if the government had a surplus, that meant that taxes were too high.

Clinton and Gore proposed paying off the debt (by 2013!), extending the solvency of Social Security, and even establishing a reserve in case emergency funds were needed. Yes, the economic downturn at the turn of the century would have muted this, but had Gore been in office, the economy would have been much better. No huge tax cuts for the wealthy, no Iraq War, and, even if 9/11 had gotten past the counter-terrorism structure that Bush disassembled, the war in Afghanistan would have been shorter and far less costly. We might have maintained surpluses and actually gotten some debt reduction (though we probably would not have paid off the whole debt by 2013, especially with Republicans whining about surpluses and pushing for tax cuts); we certainly would have had a far healthier economy, back in 2001 and later on as well, no question about that whatsoever.

Republicans rejected the idea of paying off debts. They wanted to erase the surplus with tax cuts–which they did, and then some. Then 9/11 hit, and they added the burden of two massively expensive land wars in Asia. Over the years, they piled on more tax cuts, more unpaid-for entitlements, and precisely the kind of wasteful pork-barrel spending they always accused Democrats of, even worse than the Democrats actually carried out themselves. They drove the economy into a deep ditch, and then tried to pile all the blame on the next Democrat who took office, as if nothing untoward had happened in the previous eight years and the debt crisis had somehow how magically materialized the moment Obama stepped into the Oval Office.

Amazing how history can hinge on even the smallest of things. There is one graphic designer somewhere in Florida who slapped together the butterfly ballot for Palm Beach County for the 2000 elections. Had that person not made a simple design error, Gore would not have lost thousands of votes to Buchanan (and to Gore-Buchanan cross-votes), and the course of American history would have been changed to an astonishing extent.

And to think that in the 2000 elections, people bemoaned the idea that there was little or no difference between Gore and Bush.

The economy added 163,000 jobs last month, 172,000 in the private sector (25,000 alone in manufacturing) while the public sector lost 9000 jobs.

It would have been 171,000 added, except ConEd did some union busting and fired 8500 workers for not promising to not go on strike. Damn those people trying to get better wages and decent benefits! Don’t they know that wealthy people have gone weeks without another tax cut?!

Now that the jobs report is better than expected, will conservatives continue to focus on that?

Of course not! Not with a 0.1% uptick in the unemployment rate! Who cares if it’s a lagging indicator and reflects what was happening 6-9 months ago, we can use it to make things look worse than we have ma–er, than Obama has made them by obstructing all of Obama’s jobs prop–er, by, um, by being Socialist! Yeah, that’s what it was!

Tell me again, what were all the “jobs” bills forwarded by Republicans? I remember the “jobs” bill in which they said they could “create” a lot of “jobs” by doing away with regulations that would allow companies to pollute heavily without any controls (I guess in the medical care sector, or perhaps funeral homes), but what else did they do? Are we counting all those proposals to slash more taxes for rich people as “jobs” bills?

Anyway, the Republican whiplash reversal on jobs/unemployment in, wait for it, three….

Romney said on Hannity’s show, “It’s time for Harry to put up or shut up.” Essentially, stop making things up about the records I’m hiding.

But then Romney hits back with an equally egregious fabrication:

“It’s untrue, dishonest, and inaccurate. It’s wrong. So I’m looking forward to have Harry reveal his sources and we’ll probably find out it’s the White House.”

“You want to make up stuff about my tax records? Okay, I’ll make stuff up about your source.”

In one respect, Romney just did something we should have seen coming: he both whined about something the opposition did and then did the exact same thing himself. Usually, conservatives wait a while between the whining and the doing-the-same-or-worse, but Romney managed to accomplish both in just seconds. It’s a conscious strategy: make yourself out to be the victim, and the other guy can’t complain that you’re doing the same thing because he’ll look like a hypocrite. It’s kind of a political aikido move where you get to be a hypocrite but the other guy gets the blame.

It is, ironically, one of the more politically astute moves Romney has made in a while. Dishonest and hypocritical, but astute. In an honest accounting, however, Romney just ceded the high ground. Now they’re both on equal standing, and Romney has no right to complain.

It’s been a subject of discussion. Jon Stewart tore him a new one (whilst properly pointing out that Fox News, which also castigated Reid, does the exact same thing on a regular basis). Andrew Sullivan is asking whether or not we let our own guys cheat. That’s a meaningful question, actually; after all, we see conservatives allow blatant lying go on all the time. If we accept Reid’s behavior on this, what’s the difference?

I think there is a difference, and a significant one: few if any on the left believe Reid, or pretend to believe Reid, or are spreading Reid’s claim. That’s a huge difference with what would be happening were the same charge to come from the other direction. If this thing were done on the opposite side of the aisle, half of the conservative community would believe it and most everybody would be spreading it as if it were legit. Now, as it happens on the left, everybody is recoiling from it–while at the same time noting that Reid is playing dirty on a legitimate topic.

Few on the left approve of Reid, but everybody takes note that if Romney is not going to release his tax returns, the topic is open for exactly this kind of shenanigan.

But what of the issue itself? What of claimed similarities to birthers and demands for a long-form birth certificate?

Clearly not equivalent: tax returns are a normal disclosure, have been for three decades, and there are excellent reasons for demanding them; quite frankly, I would approve of a law requiring all federal political candidates releasing at least eight years of tax returns as well as their criminal records beyond the age of 18. These are extremely relevant to the employment of an individual to an office from which they could literally destroy the entire world. Birth certificates, on the other hand, are not the same thing, more of a technicality than an assurance, and candidate Obama not only provided his basic certificate but also was confirmed officially by the state, and had substantiating documentation in the form of news reports and eyewitness accounts. Not to mention, as we witnessed, releasing the long-form certificates did not go very far in assuaging the doubters in any case. There could have been Super-8 footage of the live birth, then a seamless walk to a window clearly showing the Hawaiian landscape, and still the birthers would not have been satisfied, claiming the whole thing was faked on a soundstage where they filmed the moon landings. College records are also not in the same league; they don’t show much more than scholarship skills, and frankly, right-wingers don’t honestly want that to be an issue.

Meanwhile, the precedent for tax releases is fairly well-established. Since 1980, only Reagan released just one year of returns, and it was relatively new then. Since then, all candidates except for McCain (who grudgingly let go of only 2) released at least 5 years of returns. Even Kerry, married into wealth, released 20 years; Bob Dole released 30. Obama released 7 in 2008 (now he’s up to 12), Gore 8. Even Dubya released 9.

Romney is even more relevant in these concerns than anyone else, considering (1) the fact that everyone, including Romney himself, has made great hay about his personal finances and how relevant they are to the campaign; and (2) that personal taxation and the fairness of the tax system are more an issue in this campaign than in any other before.

In fact, it’s not just Romney–recently, most Republican candidates have been stingy about letting us know about their personal finances. While Obama now has 12 years of records available and Biden 14, Romney and Gingrich both released only 1 year, Santorum 4, and McCain and Palin each 2 years. The actual records are online here.

Does this make Reid’s comment fair, or at least acceptable politics? Nope. In fact, I am pretty sure that most liberals want Reid to shut the hell up, as this is exactly the kind of bullcrap that Romney can use to paint himself as the victim, thus excusing himself from having to do anything–like Bush 43 got out of the National Guard AWOL morass because Dan Rather bought into a false document.

In fact, I think the one person who wants Reid to double down and keep talking more than anyone else is Romney himself.

So I noticed that Apple now allows buyers to configure the low-end Retina Pros. When I saw that, I was nonplussed, upset that Apple had turned around and had essentially denied me the ability to get more storage in my computer… and then I saw that the storage upgrade would have cost $500, and realized that I would never have gotten it in the first place. Ah well.

According to the Brookings Institute Tax Policy Center (the TPC is a Brookings project), Romney will raise taxes on the middle class in order to pay for tax breaks for corporations, the rich, and especially the super-rich.

Brookings has been called “liberal” (as well as “centrist” and even “conservative”) in the past, but in fact is centrist, or at least a muddle of various positions. The Tax Policy Center is noted as being carefully non-partisan. While one of the three economists who made the analysis was an Obama adviser, another was an adviser to Bush 41. Furthermore, the institute went out of its way to make the analysis as favorable to Romney as possible. If there are any errors or misinterpretations, they are the fault of the Romney campaign for not making public all of the plan–probably because they know it’s bad news and are trying to hide it. But this analysis is decidedly not a liberal smear against Romney.

So, what is Romney’s plan? If you recall, he plans to:

• cut all income taxes by 20%
• reduce the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%
• eliminate the estate tax

This is all, of course, heavily slanted to the rich. Take the 20% income tax cut for “everyone.” Sounds fair, right? Everyone gets the same cut, right? Welllll, no. If you pay as much as 35% on your income, you get a 7% cut; if you pay, say, 10% (which the poorest tax-paying families do), you get a paltry 2% cut.

Yep, that’s fair, right? And why do this? Under the presumption that rich people will then use that money to create jobs. Which is complete BS. We know for a fact that this kind of tax cut is the least stimulative expenditure the government can possibly make.

Then corporations get a whopping 10% tax cut, or 30% of their current rate. And will they be required to add a single job? Hell, no. Nor will they, if they can manage it; corporations are about increasing profits, not jobs.

And the estate tax? Well, right now, a married couple would have to inherit more than $10 million for even one penny of an inheritance to get taxed. And farmers and small business owners–usually trotted out as the “victims” of the estate tax–are rarely, if ever affected by the tax. Only a handful of farms a year, for example, owe anything at all, and the family gets 14 years to pay it. Nope: this tax is ultimately a tax on the rich, and a tax on the rich only. Paris Hilton, this cut’s for you!

In the meantime, the cuts would hike the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars more than Bush’s standing cuts already do–more tax cuts for the rich that Romney wants to defend, by the way–and Romney has promised to be revenue-neutral on this. So, how can he pay for it?

By socking it to the middle class, of course:

His rate-cutting plan for individuals would reduce tax collections by about $360 billion in 2015, the study says. To avoid increasing deficits–as Romney has pledged–the plan would have to generate an equivalent amount of revenue by slashing tax breaks for mortgage interest, employer-provided health care, education, medical expenses, state and local taxes, and child care–all breaks that benefit the middle class. …

Millionaires would get an $87,000 tax cut, the study says. But for 95 percent of the population, taxes would go up by about 1.2 percent, an average of $500 a year.

Got that? Romney himself will get enough to pay for another car elevator, while Joe Six-pack has to give up, well, you decide–money for his kids’ college funds? Any hope of paying off his mortgage early? Cutting corners like buying enough clothes, or food, or what few luxuries the family can afford nowadays? Or, probably, more likely, just descending even further into debt.

Anyone who makes less than a couple hundred grand a year and votes for Romney is either a certifiable moron, or they care enough about conservative social values or foreign policy to pay through the nose for it. But then, 45% were stupid enough to vote for McCain, another nine-figure millionaire who forwarded tax plans which would also short-change poor and pay handsomely to the rich.

And none of this even touches on the fact that Republicans are on the record as wanting to tax people who are so fracking poor that they can’t even pay taxes in the first place. If Romney gets into office, the chances are that the Republican Poor Tax will be far more likely to pass.

Contrast this to Obama, who wants to end the deficit-bloating Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, while maintaining the tax cuts for the middle class–and in the meantime, has cut the payroll tax, as well as several other taxes, for the poor and the middle class. For people who work, not for people whose fortunes work for them.

Update:

Romney, predictably, is calling the study “biased” and “liberal.” Neither institution involved is “liberal,” and if they are biased, it was in favor of Romney, not the reverse.

Not to mention that when the exact same group that the Romney campaign is now calling “liberal” and “biased” came out with a report on Rick Perry’s tax proposal last November, Romney called it an “Objective Third-Party Analysis.”

Krugman takes a look at the study and confirms that not only were they fair, they actually went out of their way to be more fair than they needed to be:

The question one might ask is, did TPC – which is actually painstakingly and painfully nonpartisan – make questionable assumptions to get its results, so that some other set of assumptions might portray Romneynomics in a more favorable light? And the answer is no: TPC actually bent over backwards to literally give Romney every possible benefit of the doubt.

Here’s what they did. They took Romney at his word that he plans to offset his cuts in income tax rates by broadening the base, that is, limiting exemptions and other loopholes. They also assumed, however, that Romney would not be willing to tax dividends and capital gains as ordinary income, since he has made it clear that he opposes any rise in taxes on investment income. As they point out, this leaves a relatively small pool of loopholes to close – big enough that the Romney tax cuts could, in principle, be paid for by base broadening, but not with a lot of room to spare.

So which loopholes are closed? TPC made the most Romney-friendly assumption they could – namely, that base broadening is concentrated on top incomes as much as possible. First you eliminate all deductions that benefit those with more than $1 million in income; then all that benefit those with between $500,000 and $1 million; and so on. …

So they’re actually giving Romney every possible benefit of the doubt – and still his plan is a redistribution from the middle class to the rich. In practice it would surely be much worse.

Not much to decode in Romney’s charge: if the conclusion is unfavorable to Romney, it must be liberal. Forbes, which concluded that the TPC was impartial, or perhaps only slightly left-leaning, came to that conclusion in part by asking if the TPC analyses “loved” Obama’s or McCain’s tax plans better. That’s baloney–if Obama’s plan was fiscally more responsible and more accurate in its claims, the TPC would not be “liberal” for recognizing that. This is more of that BS “balance” in reporting–if Obama tells the truth and Romney lies, you can’t say that without being “liberal” or “pro-Obama.”

In the end, the real question is, was the TPC’s analysis fair? And the answer seems clear: it was more than fair.

As Krugman pointed out, and as I did earlier, if the Romney campaign doesn’t agree, they can release the details of the plan themselves and show everyone how ‘fair’ their plan is. Romney wants to be secretive about his religion, secretive about his taxes, secretive about just about everything–including, apparently, his proposals for what he would do as president. We, apparently, have no business knowing what they are, and we’re liberal and biased if we make the best possible guess while being as favorable to Romney as possible.

That’s fair, isn’t it?

There’s one thing I find deliciously ironic about the fact that Romney has royally screwed the pooch and insulted millions of Britons.

He can’t apologize.

You want to find knee-jerk conservative wingnut web sites fast?

I figured out a quick way: Google “James Holmes” and “Registered Democrat.” Presto.

I won’t link to the site, but Breitbart is running this headline:

Now, I had no idea this headline existed before I did the search. But the search was a natural one, since for the past many years, whenever there is some horrible crime, the worst, most pungent, ultra-right lunatic dingbats immediately start posting about “Registered Democrat [insert villain’s name here].”

I expected to get Free Republic posters (they were further down the page of results), but Breitbart is a natural candidate for crap like this, of course.

And then some: Republican Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (recalled) blames gun control and the people being shot at directly. Emphasis in the former senator’s Facebook post mine (spelling is his):

This is certainly a time for prayers for the victims and the families of victims in this horrific crime in Colorado. I just had a call from a very good friend of mine in San Diego, California who’s neice Kim, Kim’s best friend Mikayla and Kevin were in the Theater in the front rows. Kim and Kevin got out and as he was trying to get Mikayla out she said she was shot. As the rush of the crowd exiting through the exit door pushed Kevin and Kim out they lost Mikayla.

As of my phone conversation they were not aware of her status. What a heart breaking story. Had someone been prepared and armed they could have stopped this “bad” man from most of this tragedy. He was two and three feet away from folks, I understand he had to stop and reload. Where were the men of flight 93???? Someone should have stopped this man. Someone could have stopped this man. Lives were lost because of a bad man, not because he had a weapon, but because noone was prepared to stop it. Had they been prepared to save their lives or lives of others, lives would have been saved.

All that was needed is one Courages/Brave man prepared mentally or otherwise to stop this it could have been done. When seconds count, police are ony minutes away. My prayers are with all of those suffering from this sensless act, may God be with them in this moment of pain and heartache.

Yep. He thinks that people should attend movie screenings armed, and if there is ever a mass shooting, people in the audience should return fire. If only!

As to where the “men of Flight 93” were, well, I am sure that if the Republican former state senator had been at the theater, he would have rushed the man shooting continuously into the crowd, no question. Right.

What is amazing is that he seems oblivious to the fact that he is, in fact, criticizing his friend, as his friend was not “prepared” and did not sacrifice himself to save others by trying to tackle the gunman.

Later, in response to the media printing his Facebook post verbatim and in full, Pearce complained that he was being “mischaracterized.”

All I did was lament that so many people should be left disarmed and vulnerable by anti-gun rules that try to create a sense of safety by posting a sign that says “No Guns”, when the only real effect is to disarm everyone who could have saved lives.

I think I should have ended my last post with, “And a crazy-ass conservative from Arizona will start spewing fanatical pro-gun rhetoric in three, two, ….”

The conservative world is gleefully playing with Obama’s statement, “If you’ve got a business–you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Out of context, just that one bit, is being used endlessly by the right wing to attack Obama, claiming that he denigrates small business owners, as if Obama was saying that no business owner built their own business.

Which, of course, is an outright lie. Obama did not say, “If you’ve got a business–you didn’t build your business. Somebody else made your business happen.” Obama did not even come close to saying that. Every politician and pundit attacking Obama with it knows they’re lying, or are blind and stupidly following the party line without checking. By now, almost certainly the former.

Here is Obama’s complete quote, with relevant parts in bold:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business–you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

Reading the entire statement, in context, it is very clear that Obama is not saying that business owners didn’t build their own businesses; he was saying, without any doubt, that business owners did not build the support structures that helped them build their business. A business owner didn’t educate himself, didn’t build the country himself, didn’t build the roads and bridges. The society built these things, other people pitched in, and it was the community effort which gave the business owner the vital tools without which that business would not thrive. Obama followed the statement by issuing another example, that a business owner didn’t invent the Internet, which helped their business like a hundred other support structures.

His meaning was clear: we all depend on the community, and so we all owe the community. Instead, right-wingers cut off the beginning and end, and falsely claim that Obama was putting down hard-working job creators. There’s no way you could actually look at the whole context and honestly conclude that Obama was saying that small business owners had no hand in building their own businesses.

It’s complete and utter bullshit they’re pushing–but it’s the kind of bullshit that works, and perhaps can win an election.

If you’re wondering why this sounds familiar, it’s because there was another case, about 12 years ago, of a Democratic presidential candidate making a statement about creating the Internet which was taken out of context in the exact same way–and the result of it was that the American people, to this day, still believe the bullshit lie. And the Democratic candidate lost the election by a few hundred votes. (Well, technically he won by thousands, but that’s another story.)

From my 2006 article:

Let’s get one thing straight: Al Gore never said that he “invented the Internet.”

There are a lot of myths out there perpetrated by conservatives. … This one started on March 9th, 1999, when Al Gore appeared on Wolf Blitzer’s “Late Edition” show on CNN. On the program, Gore made the following statement:

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system. [the full context of the quote in the interview can be reviewed here.]

… An unkind (and dishonest) interpretation of Gore’s quote makes it seem like Gore was claiming that he single-handedly created the Internet. But that’s not what he said. He said that he took the initiative, that he took an early leadership role–which, by definition, means that he was not alone in the task, nor does it even mean that he was the only leader.

… The irony here is that Gore, in fact, was instrumental to the creation and popularization of the Internet as we know it today. In the 1980s, DARPA had defunded civilian use of the Internet; it could have died right there had it not been for Gore pushing for funding to restart the Internet as a civilian and business network. That took the form of the 1989 National High-Performance Computer Technology Act introduced by Al Gore. The fact is, all along the way, Gore was behind the growth of the Internet, which in itself was largely responsible for the huge economic boom of the 90′s. Ironically, conservatives who enthusiastically credited Reagan with every bit of good economic news in the 80′s, churlishly denied Clinton and Gore any credit for the boom of the 90′s, claiming that it was the Internet that was responsible.

Gore was instrumental in creating a huge economic and industrial miracle worth countless trillions of dollars to the nation. In return for this, the GOP distorted his rightful claim, mocked him as a liar and made a laughingstock out of him. In an election won by only a few hundred votes, the value of the “invented the Internet” lie could easily have been worth that many votes in Florida.

Good to see that the GOP’s priorities are in order.

To back this up, you can read a letter written by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, the two guys most credited with “inventing” the Internet (more specifically, developing the TCP/IP protocol suite central to Internet technology), in which they praise Gore for his work. Or, if you prefer a more mainstream debunking, see Snope’s teardown of the lies told by the right wing.

Despite all of these facts being available before the 2000 election, people believed the lie. In part it was because the right-wing moved in lockstep to repeat the lie ad nauseam; in part because there was a sound bite which sounded similar to what the lie claimed (people still swear they “heard” Gore say he “invented the Internet”); in part because debunking the lie takes longer than and is more complex than perpetuating it; and in part because the “liberal media” played along with the lie.

Guess what’s happening all over again?

FAIR not only debunks the current lie, but points out how the media is implicit in perpetuating it. Some are calling it out as a “distortion,” but usually in the last line of an article; no one in the mainstream media applies the headline, “Romney and Conservatives Distort Obama’s Statement,” which would be fair and accurate. Instead, they simply report on Romney attacking Obama with it, or worse, that it is a “problem” for Obama–which, ironically, is chiefly because the media is not doing its job in debunking the outright lies.

When reporters do get around to mentioning how the attack is completely false, they usually “balance” the piece with a statement about Obama’s use of Romney’s “I’m not concerned about the very poor” line–in effect, excusing Romney’s lie instead of just reporting it. Well, Romney’s remark about not being concerned about the poor was quoted out of context, but it was not distorted in meaning. Romney said that as part of a statement about how he was not concerned about the rich, either, but instead was concerned about the middle class. While that shows he was not favoring the rich over the poor, it does not change the fact that he openly stated that he was not concerned about the very poor, that he believed they were well taken-care of. Obama’s citing that was not a distortion, and did not change the meaning of the words spoken.

In contrast, what Romney and conservatives are doing now is a bald-faced lie; they are distorting what Obama said, they are changing the meaning completely. Obama never did that. So, why are reporters, who already bury the fact that Romney and others are lying, use the story to show “equivalence,” when, in fact, there is none?

Imagine at work, you say something innocent, but another worker, trying to beat you to a promotion, takes it out of context and makes it sound like you were insulting the boss, and then spreads it all around. A coworker who knows all that has happened meets with the boss, and does not tell the boss about the real statement and the lie behind it, and instead tells the boss, “Yeah, it’s a problem for the guy who said it, all right! I can see why you’d be angry about it!” When the boss asks that worker for a detailed report on the topic, the report is titled “Smear Against Boss a Problem for Worker Seeking Promotion,” and only mentions the distortion on the last page, next to an item which points out that a year ago, the person being lied about did something that could, incorrectly, be interpreted as a similar act.

How would you feel about such “fair and impartial” reporting of your actions?

This is money in the bank for the right wing; they will not let up on this. They know, from experience, that lies like this are easy to spread, are very damaging, can have a strong effect, and that the media will let them have it.

The only think to do is to fight the lie. The problem is, that didn’t work before.

If there’s one thing that Republicans excel at, it’s playing dirty.

ThinkProgress has this:

One of the principal weapons used by James Eagan Holmes in the horrific Dark Knight Rises shooting would have been subject to a series of sharp restrictions under the now-expired federal Assault Weapons ban. The AR-15 rife carried by Holmes, a civilian semi-automatic version of the military M-16, would have been defined as a “semiautomatic assault weapon” under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. If the law was still in force, semiautomatic assault weapons would have been outright banned…

I would like any schmuck who thinks it necessary to have such features as semi-automatic firing along with high-capacity magazines for “home defense” or “hunting” to go to each of the victims’ families and explain exactly why their loved ones had to die to protect the “fundamental right” for features such as those. Not that anyone should go bother those people literally, of course. But just compose, in your head, exactly how you would explain it. Then switch roles and see how you might think it would sound from the other end.

Sorry, but I just believe that reasonable limitations for public safety are not only necessary, but that striking them down or keeping them out of legislation in the first place is criminally irresponsible. I support the individual right to keep and bear arms, but not without the same type of limitations covering other rights: exceptions and requirements to protect the public safety. The old “your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins” rule is exercised everywhere else, but with guns there is some magical exception. Buying more than one gun a month, or more than two a year, for that matter, is not necessary to exercise your right to be armed. Buying semi-automatic rifles with 100-round magazines is not necessary to exercise your right to protect your home or to go hunting. Training, licensing, and registration would no more limit the right to keep and bear arms than it does the freedom to drive an automobile–and look at how many people drive. Just to name a few.

These and other reasonable restrictions would save lives. They would hamper criminals, and stop more than a few. And they would not stop any law-abiding citizen from arming themselves reasonably for home defense, hunting, or any other legitimate use for a firearm.

You want the right, you take on the responsibilities. This is human lives being taken, not to help protect your home, but to let people who get their jollies from extreme weaponry get their rocks off, and for companies who make and sell these weapons to rake in the profits. Forgive me, but this royally pisses me off. The debate on responsible and reasonable gun control has been all but ceded to the far right. This is simply part of what happens as a result.

In an asinine move, the gun-rights lobbies are even suggesting that we wait several weeks before discussing the gun control question publicly:

“When something like this happens, the anti-gun groups jump on this right away, immediately, and make all sorts of claims and statements,” said Tom King, president of the state Rifle and Pistol Association.

“This is a time for finding out what really happened and healing and dealing with this psychologically. The time for debate can come in two weeks, three weeks.”

Oh, thank you, Mr. King, for so kindly considering my psychological state. Ironic that they approve of a cooling-off period for talking, isn’t it? Not ironic at all, of course–they want people to forget about that reason why responsible gun control should exist. Now, however, is the perfect time to discuss the issue. And if the facts are not fully known regarding the current tragedy, we’ll do just fine reliving the many gun massacres from recent years.

Oh, and for any genius who might suggest that an armed audience would have been the right answer, just consider two things: the specter of dozens of panicking people firing away within a packed crowd in the darkness, and the fact that the killer was wearing a bulletproof vest.

Yeah, that would have turned out real well. Not to mention the fact that, even under normal conditions, I don’t like the idea that the asshole sitting right behind me kicking my seat from behind for two hours is also carrying a firearm.

For those who believe that after-the-fact punitive laws are sufficient enough for public safety, I think you have some funerals to attend. Not just soon, but continuously.

And one more thing: the first imbecile to bring up the “gun ban” straw man, either purposefully or because they didn’t read beyond the first few paragraphs, gets a healthy dose of richly-deserved invective. I promise.

Wow! Six years ago today, I was struck by lightning. I even recorded it, audio on the link. Of course, it didn’t exactly hit me–the main bolt hit a few feet behind me and to the left, otherwise I might not be here any more. But some part of that lightning bolt split off and struck my foot.

I did not find out until a few days later that a co-worker and friend was hit in the exact same way by lightning on the exact same day, maybe just a few minutes before me.

I get hit indirectly by lightning, happen to be recording it at the time, and someone I know is also being struck on the far side of town at about the same time.

I am still in awe at the odds of that.

Exactly two years ago, a Microsoft executive claimed that Apple’s problems with the iPhone 4’s antenna issues would sink the iPhone, making it into “Apple’s Vista.”

“It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I’m okay with that,” said Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, in a keynote speech at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), which runs through Thursday in Washington, D.C.

Earlier in his talk, Turner poked fun at the reception problems that have dogged Apple’s iPhone 4 since its June 24 launch. “One of the things I want to make sure you know today is that you’re going to be able to use a Windows Phone 7 and not have to worry about how you’re holding it to make a phone call,” Turner said, referring to the Microsoft mobile operating system set to debut on smartphones this fall.

So, how did that prediction turn out? Let’s see:

Hmm. I can’t remember, did Vista exceed all sales expectations and take off like a rocket? Ummm…… No, I don’t think so.

And Windows Phone 7? With its rock-solid reception that everybody is talking about? Oh yeah, they’re at 4%. Everybody ran with the story that WP7 would explode to 20% in three years. So far? They dropped a fraction since January. So, not quite so rocket-like quite yet. And the iPhone 5 is bound to dazzle.

The Christian Science Monitor, inadvertently, I believe, more or less made clear in their headline what Republicans are doing with their voter purges:

A victory for Republicans, Florida wins use of federal database to purge voters

The giveaway: it’s a victory for Republicans. Not for fair elections, not for democracy, not for the nation. It’s a political victory for a strategy to disenfranchise Democratic voters in an effort to illicitly win an election.

Not what the Monitor meant, I am sure, but I think that everybody pretty much knows it to be a fact. The thing is, if you’re a news agency, you can’t say what is obvious–because if you do, then you’re a stinking lame-stream liberal media elitist, and not a “real” journalist who understands that there are always two sides to any argument and you have to give equal credence to both sides, no matter how obviously stupid and corrupt one of them might be. Unless they’re Democrats, because they suck at demonizing journalists for saying bad things about them.

Romney goes to appear before the NAACP. The big story in all the news outlets? He gets booed. But is that the real story? Most news reports talk about the booing mostly, as well as scattered heckling among the crowd; few mention that he received an ovation after he finished speaking. Businessweek mentions the ovation in their article; however, their original headline, “Romney Gets Ovation at NAACP After Boos‎,” was quietly changed later to just “Romney Booed at NAACP During Speech Criticizing Obama.” Andrew Sullivan’s take: “But I think [Romney] gets points for showing up.”

I don’t think Romney should get points for anything but political game-playing. The media, meanwhile, deserves scorn for hyping that very game. Romney and Obama get booed and heckled at various events; why is it such a huge story when it happens to Romney at the NAACP, especially when such a thing is expected? And why go to such lengths to de-emphasize the positive responses, which are, after all, more noteworthy?

Consider when Bill O’Reilly interviewed sitting president Barack Obama in February 2011; O’Reilly was extremely disrespectful, interrupting Obama dozens of times (remember when a reporter interrupted Bush once, and Bush stopped and scolded the reporter?). Were the newspaper stories about O’Reilly’s behavior? Hell, no. The “liberal media” is scared witless at the prospect of reporting truth when it makes conservatives look bad or liberals good; they know they’ll get labeled “liberal” and will suffer for it. Playing into conservative stories, meanwhile, gets them no scorn and loses them no ratings.

Romney understands this; it’s why he was so flummoxed when a Fox reporter actually pitched him a few tough questions. It’s why he knows he can flip-flop like a dying fish and dispense outrageous lies and not have to answer much for it. The media will not call him on stuff like that.

As they will not call him for playing the NAACP as he did. Romney wanted to be booed there; that’s what gets him points. He obviously cannot say much of anything to that audience that will make them want to vote for him, so why appear? The answer is so he can stir up empathy, get people to respect him for his “bravery” in standing up to a hostile crowd, and as a bonus, he can make the people and the organization appear biased, unfriendly, and ungracious.

And he knew the press would lap it up; he even scheduled an interview at (of course) Fox News after the NAACP speech, so he could play up how he was poorly treated by those disrespectful people. His campaign is even openly saying that he expected to be booed, playing up the “telling it straight” courage line, while at the same time punctuating the “biased and disrespectful” NAACP angle.

It was a political play, and the NAACP essentially gave him exactly what he wanted. I think that if they hadn’t reacted badly to his hits against the ACA, he probably had lines ready to deliver which would be more likely to get booed.

Yep. That’s essentially what he said:

Previewing the message that he will bring Tuesday to the swing state of Colorado, Mitt Romney told a conservative talk-radio host that President Obama’s tax cut extension proposal would “kill jobs” and harm the middle class.

“What the president is proposing is therefore a massive tax increase on job creators and on small business,” the unofficial Republican presidential nominee told Virginia-based conservative radio host John Fredericks in a taped interview that will air Tuesday. “Small businesses are overwhelmingly being taxed not at a corporate rate but at the individual tax rate. So successful small businesses will see their taxes go up dramatically, and that will kill jobs.”

“That will be another kick in the gut to the middle class in America.”

This is the most laughable whopper since the right-wing claim that Obama hates the troops because he gives them so many benefits–thus making them dependent on the government teat, not respecting their ability to stand on their own two feet.

What Romney is saying is that by giving a tax cut for the middle class and not giving an even bigger one to the rich, Obama will destroy jobs and thus hurt the middle class. Again, a lie along the lines of “give huge amounts of money to the rich and maybe some will trickle down on the heads of the poor and middle class.” When we did that, there was trickling all right, and they had the gall to call it “rain.”

What he doesn’t mention is that (a) there is zero evidence to support his claim, (b) that tax cuts for the rich in the past have shown no propensity to create jobs, and that (c) the tax cuts he is demanding for the rich (excuse me, for “job creators” and “small business owners,” the usual false fronts) will continue to create trillions of dollars more in debt, the same debt he and others in the GOP (1) created, (2) blame Obama for, and (3) claim is killing jobs. There are, as it turns out, multiple dimensions to the GOP’s lies and hypocrisies on this one.

Once again the GOP wants to kick the middle class in the family jewels and tell them it’s for their own good, counting on the American people’s known tendency to vote against their own best interests.

Betcha the media doesn’t call him out on the mass of inconsistencies, dishonest euphemisms, and outright lies packed into this line of BS. They would not want to actually tell the truth and therefore become part of the “liberal media elite,” no sir.

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More on Romney’s BS: the median small-business owner makes an income roughly in line with a standard wage-earner. While they are apt to have a broader income distribution–more have higher incomes than do wage earners–the number making over $250,000 is not great–only 3% of them, and many if not most of those are rich people disguising themselves as “small businesses.” As 97% of small business owners would get tax cuts under Obama’s plan, what Romney really means by “small businesses” is those rich people pretending to be small businesses.

As for “job creators,” Romney again means “rich people.” And that BS has been debunked, most notably by Nick Hanauer, an Amazon.com founder, in his TED talk (which TED awkwardly has not posted) where he points out that business owners are, by nature, job eliminators, that they hire only when forced to and cut jobs at every opportunity–and that the actual job creators are the middle class–the very people Obama is trying to give the tax cut to, which Romney is now trying to hold hostage so that the job eliminators can get crushing-debt-creating tax cuts.

Nick Hanauer’s must-see talk:

There’s a small shop in Akihabara called “Akiba Palette Town” which is known for its deals. They are very much the kind of shop that has cardboard boxes out front with cheap merchandise inside. They sell old computers for a few thousand yen a pop, and have all kinds of used CPUs, RAM, and other junk that’s fun to rummage around, and sometimes buy.

A few weeks ago, I went there and saw that they had some nice extras I wanted to pick up for teaching, including a USB3 cable (with the funky new peripheral connector) for ¥200, a few SATA cables for ¥100 each, and a VGA cable for ¥100 also. When I came inside to buy them, I was pleasantly surprised: they gave me half off on everything except the VGA, and the above came ¥300. And they probably still made quite the profit on that.

Today, I was leading a group of students around for our Computer Making Club, showing them the back streets in-between our purchases of parts for the club’s computer this semester. I figured I’d pick up the same collection of cables again, as I could use a few spares and regretted not having bought more the previous time.

So, I put them on the counter and the guy started adding them up. I was wondering what was going on as I saw some strangely high numbers on the tally screen, but figured they had their own odd accounting system. But then the total came up: ¥1380.

¥1380?? At first I thought it was a big mistake, and then I asked the guy how much for the USB3 cable, as an example. He told me it was ¥500. A guy sitting next to him confirmed that.

The box outside was clearly marked ¥200.

I just left the cables there and left, waving them off with an incredulous smile. No sale.

Because I figured out what had happened: when I had come in before, I was wearing different clothes, and looked the part of an otaku who knew what stuff was worth. This time, I had a t-shirt with an American college logo and a cap from our trip to Europe.

They had read me as a tourist and were actually trying to rip me off!!

I was more amused than anything else. Had they charged me full price I would have paid. But more than double? Fifteen bucks for a few pieces of crap they charged me four dollars for before?

Next time I go to that part of town, I intend to try again–the exact same items–and see what they try to charge me then.

I mean, wow. I’ve had shopkeepers try to rip me off before, but never in Japan, never so blatantly. It was a shock, albeit a transparent and amusing rip-off.

Of course, it was nothing to the crap we ran into in Greece; one merchant apparently thought I was unable to count, short-changed me, and when I called her on it, took back my change and then gave me even less back.

However, I did not expect that in Japan. Well, live and learn.