perceptionasreality

Occupy Unmasked trailer, Stephen Bannon

2012-02-10T10:13:00.001-05:00

US Labor Force, Participation Rate, January 1984 - January 2012

2012-02-03T09:45:00.000-05:00

Rod Watson, Buffalo News: GOP's Ethnic Cleansing

2012-02-02T11:00:00.001-05:00

Rod Watson article in the Buffalo News 2/2/2012:
GOP’s ethnic cleansing is a political ebb
As if the Republican presidential candidates weren’t providing enough evidence of the party’s disdain for black voters, State Senate gerrymander artists have made the sentiment in Western New York as clear as lines on a map.
The coded messages of the party’s national candidates: whites only.
Instead of [competing] for black voters, party leaders simply got rid of them.
[T]he GOP sends the message that it doesn’t want [blacks] at all.
[S]tate GOP is reinforcing the message with political ethnic cleansing.
Beyond simply telling blacks that it doesn’t want to compete for their votes... the state GOP’s ploy [compares] to those of Southern states enacting new voter ID restrictions.
[T]he method is different, but the strategy is the same... That strategy seems to be abandoning any effort to appeal to blacks, considering African-American voters useful only for one thing: scaring white voters.

Mr. Watson,
Your allegation of racism exhibits intellectual laziness.
Your perception of code words indicates clinical paranoia.
Your accusation of ethnic cleansing demonstrates historical illiteracy.
Your recrimination of principals bemoans impotent cowardice.
Your exaggeration of skin color illustrates ironic myopia.

Green Stimulus Bankruptcy Watch List

2012-01-30T22:43:00.005-05:00

Amonix
Ener1
EverGreen Solar
Fisker
Solyndra

EverGreen Solar green stimulus bankruptcy

2012-01-30T22:29:00.003-05:00

06/25/2009 --- EverGreen Solar awarded $25 M in stimulus funds
01/14/2011 --- EverGreen Solar panel maker moves work to China
08/15/2011 --- EverGreen Solar files for bankruptcy, plans asset sale

EnerDel, Ener1 green stimulus bankruptcy timeline

2012-01-30T17:53:00.004-05:00

09/29/2009 --- Department of Energy gives EnerDel $784,377
01/29/2010 --- Department of Energy gives EnerDel $118,423,163
07/20/2010 --- Department of Energy gives EnerDel $221,618
01/26/2011 --- VP Biden visits Ener1 plant in Greenfield, Indiana
03/31/2011 --- Department of Energy gives EnerDel $434,673
09/13/2011 --- Department of Energy give EnerDel additional $1,024,492
01/26/2012 --- Stimulus-backed energy company Files for Bankruptcy

Amonix green solar stimulus timeline

2012-01-30T17:33:00.001-05:00

08/17/2009 --- Department of Energy to give Amonix $5,209,835
09/23/2009 --- Department of Energy to give Amonix $504,338
04/21/2010 --- Solar panel manufacturer Amonix to create 436 jobs
07/19/2010 --- Solar company hiring 278 in North Las Vegas
09/17/2010 --- Stimulus funds energy projects in Nevada
10/28/2010 --- Amonix breaks ground on manufacturing facility in Las Vegas bringing 278 Green Jobs
05/18/2011 --- Solar array manufacturing plant opens in North Las Vegas
06/23/2011 --- U.S. Energy Secretary to tour North Las Vegas manufacturing plant
01/25/2012 --- Some 200 laid off at North Las Vegas Amonix solar plant

Police protecting Occupy #OWS...

2012-01-29T21:27:00.019-05:00

The Occupy movement does not understand that the police are actually protecting them... protecting them from people who are ready, willing, and able to defend their property with brute force.
If the police do not control these Marxists with the rule of law, the Capitalists will suppress them violently with the principle of self defense.
Many are eager, champing at the bit, to have the police stand down so they can have a crack at #OWS.

My friends and our baseball bats would not tolerate this on our streets... #OWS

Skateboarding drug dealers chase Occupy Portland from park

Occupy Oakland videos 1/28/2012 #OWS

2012-01-28T22:26:00.019-05:00

Occupy burns American flag at Oakland City Hall: "Fuck Ya!"

"... and to the plutocracy for which it stands, the privately owned central bank, under the Jews, with inequality and injustice for the 99."

Occupy storms Oakland YMCA:

Oakland City Hall surveillance camera:

Chris Christie to 1%: Occupy New Jersey

2012-01-28T15:48:00.002-05:00

Garden State Gov. Chris Christie has a message for the top 1% of income earners: Please occupy New Jersey.
Now that the governor has controlled state spending, he's pushing tax reform and hoping to steal businesses and residents from neighboring blue states.
"I'm going to start going after a lot of these hedge-fund guys who are in Connecticut and New York and say, 'You're going to get a better deal with us,'" says the country's most important Republican not running for president.
Mr. Christie's new tax-reform plan also offers an improved deal to the bottom 99%, which is why he may be able to move it through New Jersey's Democratic legislature: a 10% cut in tax rates across the board.
In 2010, he told the Journal's editorial board that the Garden State represented America's best example of a "failed experiment" in rising taxes and bigger government.
Politically, so far so good. A recent Quinnipiac poll gives him a 53% approval rating among the state's registered voters, and Mr. Christie says that private polls show him "in the low 60s."
With almost 3.9 million people working, New Jersey has added almost 60,000 private-sector jobs since he took office, while shedding more than 21,000 government jobs. Reforms of the pension and health programs for government employees will save taxpayers an estimated $120 billion over the next 30 years. A new limit on local property-tax increases appears to be working.
Now he reports that the state has been running modest surpluses for a very simple reason. He requires the commissioners of all departments to report each month on how they are meeting budgeted spending levels.
"What happened before in state government was that they would just spend, and then in April they would come to the governor's office and say, 'Oh, oops. Sorry, we need another 30 million. We need another 50 million.' And there would be a huge number of supplemental spending bills that would get passed on June 30th along with the budget for the next fiscal year," often with tax hikes to pay for them, says Mr. Christie. "And I said to my folks, 'If you don't manage to budget, you're going to get fired.'"
Having spent his first two years playing defense against unsustainable spending, Mr. Christie is eager to start competing with neighboring states for jobs, talent and capital. Step one was to decide which tax reform would be the biggest draw for new residents and new businesses. He chose to attack the income tax because "that will be the thing that will make us the most competitive from a jobs perspective." His decision was made easier when he saw neighboring New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo push through an income-tax increase in December.
"When Governor Cuomo raised taxes over here that made it even more attractive for me to go after the income tax . . . from a competitive perspective." He adds that with Gov. Dannel Malloy also enacting a tax increase in Connecticut last year, "it's a strategic decision as much as a philosophical decision."
As for individual income taxes, Mr. Christie notes that since 2003 the top marginal rate has risen to 8.9% from 6.25%. If Mr. Christie succeeds in knocking that top rate down to a flat 8%, Jersey will still be above Connecticut's 6.7%. But since Connecticut now edges New Jersey for the country's highest property taxes, according to the Tax Foundation, the Garden State is at least in the ball game.
As for New York, now that Gov. Cuomo has bumped the top rate up to 8.82%, some Empire Staters may be tempted to cross the Hudson, especially if they live in New York City and now face a staggering combined state and local income tax rate of 12.7%.
To be sure, even a reformed top rate of 8% in New Jersey would still be extremely high and won't necessarily keep residents from fleeing to Pennsylvania's 3% rate or to Florida, where there's no state income tax at all. But Mr. Christie is still catching flak for his baby step toward tax reform.
"We have an incredibly progressive income tax rate system and so when I'm getting push-back now about a 10% cut across the board and people arguing, 'Well it disproportionately benefits people who make more money,' I'm like, 'Well of course, because you made the decision to have an extraordinarily progressive tax code where the top 1% in New Jersey pays 41% of the income tax. So those are the folks who are going to get a large share of the . . . cut.' But everybody's getting a 10% cut."
Mr. Christie's plan also includes a boost in the so-called earned income tax credit—a "tax cut" even for people who don't pay income taxes. Because this credit is refundable, at the lowest income levels it functions as a wealth transfer from citizens who pay income taxes. "It's to get Democratic votes," he concedes, but "given how challenged some of the families are on the lower end of our income scale and how expensive it still is to live in New Jersey . . . I don't have a problem with it."
And for those at the upper end of the income scale... Mr. Christie argues that his state can't afford to drive away successful people.
Some may wonder how he can get anything after a political redistricting plan last year favored Democrats, who then went on to maintain their legislative majorities in the fall elections. One answer is that the governor of New Jersey holds significant powers, including the ability to impose salary terms if state-employee unions won't agree to contracts. As old contracts expire, he's been negotiating aggressively.
Mr. Christie still hasn't cut a deal with the state's largest government-employee union, the Communications Workers of America, but says "I can guarantee you this: They will not get a better agreement than the guys that already signed."
The savings from these agreements can ultimately translate into lower burdens on taxpayers, and so can Mr. Christie's ability to fill two new vacancies on the state's seven-member supreme court. For years, the infamous Abbott decisions have had the courts essentially adopting the role of legislators and dictating how much taxpayers must spend on various school districts.
"...it would be an awful thing for our system to have the executive and legislative branches just defy the judicial branch. But their decisions historically have been so outrageous."
Mr. Christie says that he doesn't favor defying the judiciary but adds, "I need to change the composition of the court and I intend to."
But is he fundamentally changing the political culture of New Jersey? This week's reaction to his tax reform suggests that he is. Democrats largely responded with their own plans to cut taxes, focused on local property bills.
"I think I'm making progress toward opening people's eyes and opening their ears to listening to a different approach. And all the Armageddon that the Democrats predicted when I had to do the things I had to do in the first two years, people are waking up this morning going, 'Hmm. Yeah, the sun's still shining. My kids are still going to school. My neighbor's got a job. He didn't have a job before. Maybe this guy knows something. Maybe it's working.'"

-exceprts from 1/28/2012 Wall Street Journal article by James Freeman

Donald Rumsfeld on Lawfare

2012-01-27T11:57:00.000-05:00

As never before in history, today lawyers and legal considerations pervade every aspect of US military operations. Besides contending with enemy bullets and bombs, the men and women in our nation's military and intelligence services must also navigate legal traps set by our enemies, by some of our fellow citizens, by some foreigners, and even by some members of Congress and officials at international institutions such as the United Nations... American military personnel have found themselves named in lawsuits across Europe and in the United States. The mere threat of lawsuits and legal charges effectively bullies American decision makers, alters their actions, intimidates our security forces, and limits our country's ability to gather intelligence and defend the American people. This is a new kind of asymmetric war waged by our enemies - "lawfare."
Lawfare uses international and domestic legal claims, regardless of their factual basis, to win public support or harass American officials - military and civilian - and to score ideological victories. Each legal action is a thread. The cumulative effects binds the American Gulliver. Enemies who cannot score military victories can nevertheless impair our defenses by litigating warfare. Lawfare is particularly effective against the United States, because it exploits America's laudable reverence for the law - to make us vulnerable to enemies who have nothing but contempt for those very instincts and institutions.
We cannot yet know what the full consequences of lawfare will be, but the trend is troubling. At home, judges - not elected representatives in Congress or the in the executive branch - increasingly determine how a president can operate during wartime against our nation's enemies. Terrorists have been given legal privileges and protections they are not entitled to by any standard. They violate nearly every law of war, yet our courts now perversely award terrorists more rights than any of our traditional military enemies have had throughout our country's history...
I received my first lesson in lawfare from a friend who had several close encounters with its spear point. In 2001, Henry Kissinger told me that when he traveled abroad he still faced threats of legal action for his work as secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations three decades after the fact. Various critics have alleged he was complicit in war crimes and other offenses in Southeast Asia to South America. This dedicated public servant and Nobel laureate has had to live with periodic threats of arrest resulting from the action of some rogue magistrate or grandstanding prosecutor - not in the nations of America's enemies, but in Europe, in countries with whom the United States is allied.
I came to appreciate keenly the dangers of lawfare during my second tenure as secretary of defense. In the spring of 2003, General Franks was named in a lawsuit brought before a Belgian court for his role in the Iraq war. The Belgian parliament had passed a law in the 1990s giving their nation's courts the jurisdiction to try war crimes, genocide, and other crimes against humanity wherever they were committed in the world. This concept of universal jurisdiction asserts that any court, anywhere in the world, could put American citizens - military or civilian - on trial if the alleged offense is described as a violation of international law. But we knew that what was claimed as international law was sometimes nothing other than the assertion of a hostile foreign critic perched on a judicial bench, or a university, or within an activist political organization.
Someone like General Franks, even after he retired from uniform, could be arrested and hauled into a Belgian court at any time. I realized something else troubling: Any American on Belgian soil was vulnerable to criminal prosecutions - prosecutions that easily could be motivated by nothing more than opposition to US government policy. Hundreds of US military personnel were stationed at NATO headquarters, including the American supreme allied commander and his staff. Thousands more American servicemen and -women transit through Belgium every year, making them ripe candidates for those wishing to harass them with lawsuits and arrest warrants alleging war crimes...
The more I considered the Belgian law, the angrier I became.
At a NATO defense ministers meeting on June 12, 2003, I made my views known. I walked up to Belgium's minister of defense, Andre Flahaut, and asked to see him in a side room.
Flahaut, a Socialist member of the Belgian parliament, and his left-leaning government were frequent critics of the United States...
In language that diplomats might describe as a "frank and full exchange," I raised my concerns about the Belgan law... I didn't recall the Belgians making any effort, for example, to arrest and try Saddam Hussein.
The urgency in my tone was unmistakable, especially when I made what seemed to be an obvious point. The Belgian government was justifiably proud of serving as the headquarters of NATO, the world's oldest military alliance... If Belgium was going to enforce a law that made its own territory inhospitable to Americans, I asserted, there was no reason why we could not move NATO's headquarters again [It left France in 1966].
"It is perfectly possible to met elsewhere," I said to Flahaut and, later that day, to the press.
Flahaut was counting on US funding for a new NATO headquarters in Brussels.
Within two months of that conversation, the Belgian government repealed their law.
Belgium was not alone in threatening American sovereignty with lawfare. The International Criminal Court (ICC) was proposed in the 1990s as a court for crimes against humanity, genocide, and systematic war crimes. By 2003, the ICC was being discussed as a possible forum to try US military and civilian personnel involved in the Iraq war. The American military had objected strongly to the ICC treaty for these reasons in the 1990s...
In the Defense Department we saw the International Criminal Court as a potential lawfare weapon against the United States. One aspect of the treaty that made the court so objectionable was that it would create offices for prosecutors who were effectively unaccountable - even if they acted politically or otherwise improperly - who could prosecute Americans without respecting their rights under the US Constitution... I pushed for the US government to "unsign"the treaty. In May 2002, a State official who agreed with our position on the issue, the tenacious undersecretary for arms control and international security John Bolton, formally announced that the United States would not ratify the treaty.
The fact that the United States was not party to the treaty and had unsigned it was not enough to protect American servicemen and -women. I had launched a global campaign to obtain commitments... from over one hundred nations that they would agree to never surrender Americans into ICC custody...
I think of sovereignty in concrete terms. It is a matter of freedom and autonomy. It means that we Americans control our destiny and are not ruled from abroad by officials we did not elect and courts we cannot hold accountable...
If unchecked, the growing international judicial encroachments on our sovereignty will encourage an unfortunate and harmful trend toward American isolationism. If US troops and officials can increasingly be tried in foreign courts, many Americans will decide that sending our military on humanitarian missions, aiding allies, or defending our interests abroad is not worth the risks. Victims of tsunamis and earthquakes overseas could no longer depend on American assistance. Would-be aggressors could take advantage of our reluctance to use military forces. Lawfare's greatest casualty will likely not be any one American official or serviceman. The greatest casualty will be the loss of America's willingness to use our military force for good around the world.

Warren Buffett's secretary Debbie Bosanek is either a rich one percenter, a liar, has a terrible accountant or a wealthy husband

2012-01-26T15:29:00.014-05:00

Buffett says he pays around 17 percent tax on all his income, while his assistant for the past two decades pays more than twice as much, at 35.8 percent. That weird disparity — one that confuses even tax experts unless she makes $200,000 to $500,000 a year — would certainly strike many as unfair.

Can anyone fail to see the irony of President Obama inviting Debbie Bosanek to sit by his wife for his State of the Union Address to use her as an example of tax unfairness, when the Buffett aide likely earns enough to put a bullseye on her back for the tax hikes Obama has long called for on higher earners?
IRS tax tables from 2009, the most recent year available, show an average federal tax rate of just 12 percent for taxpayers in the $100,000 to $200,000 bracket, rising to 19 percent for people with adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 to $500,000.
So Debbie Bosanek probably is in that $200,000 to $500,000 bracket.
If this is accurate — neither Buffett nor Bosanek has released their tax returns, but only given us a few facts meant to flesh out his claim that she pays a higher rate — she may even be part of the infamous 1 percent. In 2009, that required an adjusted gross income of $343,947.
Adjusted gross income is what a person is taxed on after deductions for things like the personal exemption, mortgage-interest payments, qualifying tax credits, etc. So it’s possible her raw salary is even higher.
While running for president and since taking office, Obama has been calling for higher taxes on upper-income earners... generally backing legislation that would hike taxes on earnings starting in the $200,000 to $250,000 range.
I [Steve Stanek] have a feeling Buffett and Bosanek are all over the map on their tax-rate claims.
ABC News this week used tax information selectively supplied to them by Buffett and Bosanek to make the case for how unfair the nation’s tax system is. It reported, “Bosanek pays a tax rate of 35.8 percent of income, while Buffett pays a rate at 17.4 percent.”
I don’t know how that’s possible, as the maximum federal income-tax rate is 35 percent. The average tax rate for the top 1 percent of earners was 24.01 percent in 2009, according to the IRS. And we’ve been talking about income taxes, have we not?
Or perhaps not. Maybe they’re including her payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. But that applies only to income below $106,800; there’s no payroll tax on earnings above that level.
There’s no way to tell what Buffett and Bosanek are talking about when they make their tax-rate claims.
I have a feeling they’re being mendacious. For Bosanek they are giving us her marginal tax rate, and for Buffett they are giving us the blended average rate.

Mr. Buffett told the Times of London five years ago that his secretary makes $60,000 a year and pays over 30 percent of her income in taxes. The Internal Revenue Service reports the average tax rate for someone making that amount is 11.6 percent. Even adding on payroll taxes, she isn’t paying anywhere near 30 percent.
The IRS publishes detailed tax tables by income level. The latest results are for 2009. They show that taxpayers earning an adjusted gross income between $100,000 and $200,000 pay an average rate of twelve percent. This is below Buffett’s rate; so she must earn more than that. Taxpayers earning adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 to $500,000, pay an average tax rate of nineteen percent. Therefore Buffett must pay Debbie Bosanke a salary above two hundred thousand.

Debbie Bosanek and her boss both declined Thursday to disclose how much she's paid, saying it's private.
In an interview with The World-Herald, Buffett also said none of the online guesses about Bosanek's salary is right, and the critics are missing his point.
Buffett said the issue isn't Bosanek's income, nor is her tax rate unusually high. "They can't attack the facts, so they attack the person. It's ridiculous."
Bosanek said she's not complaining about her salary or the taxes she pays, nor will she apologize for the home she bought last year in Surprise, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb.

Warren Buffett’s secretary last year purchased a second home in Arizona, a residence complete with a swimming pool and a “professional PGA putting green,” according to real estate records.
Debra Bosanek, 55, and her husband Gerald bought the 2100-square-foot home in Surprise, a city outside Phoenix. The Bosaneks paid $144,000 for the four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath property (the purchase was financed, in part, by a $115,200 mortgage).
The principal Bosanek residence is in Bellevue, Nebraska, several miles from Buffett’s corporate headquarters in Omaha. The couple’s 2568-square-foot home, built in 2000, also has four bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths which Sarpy County assessors last year valued at $217,716.

She said she and her husband, Jerry, looked at houses last June when they took their son, also named Jerry, to visit at the University of Northern Arizona campus in Flagstaff, where he is now a freshman. Her husband drives vans and other vehicles for a company that delivers air freight from Eppley Airfield to destinations in the Midwest.

[The Buffet - Bosanek] example shows how unwise it is to legislate from anecdotal evidence. The U.S. tax code overall is amazingly progressive. The rich pay much higher average effective rates than middle- or low-income folks. According to the Tax Policy Center, in 2010 the top 0.1 percent paid an average tax rate — including income and payroll taxes — of 30.7 percent, right at the Buffett Rule level. By contrast, middle-income voters — defined as those in the middle fifth of income distribution — paid just 12.8 percent. The bottom 40 percent of taxpayers had an average total tax rate of even less, just about 3 percent when you take into account various tax credits.

Class Warfare Warriors' Net Worth (Salary or Income) [Fed Campaign Contributions]

2012-01-26T08:17:00.073-05:00

Mika Brzezinski --- $4 M
Warren Buffett --- $50 Billion [$127 K]
Debra Bosanek --- ($300 K) *
Deepak Chopra --- $80 M
Robert Creamer** --- (2005 $2.3 M bank fraud conviction w/ $100 K salary from illegal funds as Exec. Dir. of IPAF)
Howard Dean --- $4 M
Maureen Dowd --- ?
Thomas Friedman --- $25 M ($550 K) (Lavin Agency client; speaking fee: $75 K)
Al Gore --- $100 M   [$55 K]
David Graeber --- ?
John Heilemann --- (Washington Speakers Bureau client; speaking fee: $10-15 K)
Katrina vanden Heuvel --- [$212 K]
Arianna Huffington --- $115 M
Van Jones --- $1.1 M
Paul Krugman --- In 2009 bought a $1.7 M apartment w/ a monthly maintenance fee of $1,820
Rachel Maddow ---- $12.5 M ($2 M)
Bill Maher --- $23 M
Chris Matthews --- $16 M ($5 M)
Michael Moore --- $50 M   [$37 K]
Markos Moulitsas ---- ?
Bill Moyers ---- ?
Barack Obama --- $11 M ($400 K)
Lawrence O'Donnell --- $8 M ($2 M)
Keith Olbermann --- $35 M
Nancy Pelosi --- $58 M
Robert Reich --- ($1.1 M income claimed on 2002 tax return; speaking fee: $40 K)
Diane Sawyer --- $40 M ($12 M)
Ed Schultz --- $11.5 M
Al Sharpton --- $5 M [$144 K]
Tavis Smiley --- $10 M
Hilda Solis --- $1 M ($200 K)
George Soros --- $22 Billion   [$3.8 M]
George Stephanopolous ---   ($8 M)
Matt Taibbi --- (Lavin Agency client...)
Richard Trumka ---   ($280 K)
Cenk Uygur --- $3.5 M
Joan Walsh ---   ($492 K)
Elizabeth Warren --- $14.6 M ($700 K)
Brian Willams --- $30M ($12.5M)
Matt Yglesias --- ?
Fareed Zakaria --- ?

*In a 2007 Times of London interview Mr. Buffett claimed his secretary Mrs. Bosanek made $60,000 a year and now he claims she pays over 30 percent of her income in taxes. The Internal Revenue Service reports the average tax rate for someone making that amount is 11.6 percent. Even adding on payroll taxes, she isn’t paying anywhere near 30 percent.
The IRS publishes detailed tax tables by income level. The latest results are for 2009. They show that taxpayers earning an adjusted gross income between $100,000 and $200,000 pay an average rate of twelve percent. This is below Buffett’s rate; so she must earn more than that. Taxpayers earning adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 to $500,000, pay an average tax rate of nineteen percent. Therefore Buffett must pay Debbie Bosanke a salary above two hundred thousand.
** Husband of Rep. Jan Schakowsky

1,000 Days Without A Budget videos

2012-01-24T12:42:00.002-05:00

Notable articles & editorials from January to August 2011

2012-01-24T10:09:00.003-05:00

August:
Will: Wisconsin's Woodstock Waterloo
Charles Lane: Liberals in deep denial about their incivility
July:
Pat Buchanan: Establishment Hysteria
Jonah Goldberg: "That's Racist" as a punchline
Reuters: China pollution halting Global Warming
Sowell: Talking Points vs Reality
WH economists: 'Stimulus' has cost $278,000 per Job
Mark Steyn: Obama's Declaration of Dependence
June:
Fear of debate ending faith in Global Warming
The failure of Al Gore
Mort Zuckerman: Economy is worse than you think
Reuters: The Obamacare Mess
Hitchens vs Mamet
Gunwalker, Gunrunner, Fast & Furious... cover-up
Sun to Earth: Mini Ice Age Cometh
Telegraph: Palin email frenzy backfires on Liberal media
George Will: IPAB & Gov't by 'experts'
Slate: Lunch with Mamet
Obamacare mandate means Congress owns you
WaPo: POTUS phony auto accounting
Internet Search Engines vs Planet Earth
WaPo: Popping the college education bubble
Greta FOX responds to Blow NYT
Politico: Police! Palin is ditching us
USDOJ: If you don't like Obamacare mandate, earn less $
CBS News: Media in danger because of Palin
Niall Ferguson: Austerity Works
Barone on the media's "unexpectedly" news
Mark Steyn on excessive regulation
May:
Mamet: a "Brain-Dead Liberal" no more
DNC: GOP waging War on Women
Reporting on British NHS
Wash Times: Judge: Release the Climate data
Rove: Medicare messaging in NY-26
WSJ: GOP: No retreat on Medicare reform
Shelby Steele: How to defeat Obama in 2012
Barone: 1,372 Obamacare waivers... to friends not foes
WSJ: Ryan Plan < Mediscared GOP = ObamaCare
Reuters: Pile of US debt would reach stratosphere
WSJ: Colbert Super PAC satire inadvertently defends SCOTUS Citizens United decision
CBS: Ryan: Class war can't fix debt-fueled eco crisis
Laffer & Moore on Boeing & NLRB
George Will on NLRB v Boeing
Origins of Obama's Southern Strategy...
Obama Osama Bounce
Karl Rove: 2012 Electoral Math
April:
Leading from Behind...
LAT: Obama's Odd Optics
At $50K a Year... The Bubble will Burst
Cold Temps Causing Global Warming
Stephen Moore: Nation of Takers not Makers
March:
WH: GOP Budget will Kill 70,000 Children
Census Scorecard: Conservative policies trounce Liberalism
Marijuana: Decriminalization & Legalization & Taxation
How many Model T's are on the road today?
February:
Ruth Marcus: Where's Waldo?
$228,055 for each job "saved"
January:
Government Self-esteem
Why the Left Lost It on Tucson
Krauthammer: Blood Libel

Newt Gingrich to Media: Obama is Saul Alinsky radicalism

2012-01-23T08:12:00.003-05:00

1/22/2012:

1/19/2012:

11/9/2011:

American Idol, Obama

2012-01-23T08:06:00.000-05:00

Apple, iPhone, Jobs, Obama, jobs, China, US, New York Times

2012-01-22T14:53:00.001-05:00

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.
But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.
Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.
However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.
Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 200,000 overseas... Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.
“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.
“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.
“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”
To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.
Privately, Apple executives say the world is now such a changed place that it is a mistake to measure a company’s contribution simply by tallying its employees — though they note that Apple employs more workers in the United States than ever before.
They say Apple’s success has benefited the economy by empowering entrepreneurs and creating jobs at companies like cellular providers and businesses shipping Apple products. And, ultimately, they say curing unemployment is not their job.
“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.
Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.
People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”
After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.
And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?
The answers, almost every time, were found outside the United States. Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad. Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.
In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.
...the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.
The impact of such advantages became obvious as soon as Mr. Jobs demanded glass screens in 2007.
For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.
Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.
When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. “The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”
An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.
That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.
In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.
Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.
In China, it took 15 days.
Some aspects of the iPhone are uniquely American. The device’s software, for instance, and its innovative marketing campaigns were largely created in the United States. Apple recently built a $500 million data center in North Carolina. Crucial semiconductors inside the iPhone 4 and 4S are manufactured in an Austin, Tex., factory by Samsung, of South Korea.
But even those facilities are not enormous sources of jobs. Apple’s North Carolina center, for instance, has only 100 full-time employees. The Samsung plant has an estimated 2,400 workers.
“If you scale up from selling one million phones to 30 million phones, you don’t really need more programmers,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, who oversaw product development and marketing for Apple until he left in 1990. “All these new companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter — benefit from this. They grow, but they don’t really need to hire much.”
The first time Eric Saragoza stepped into Apple’s manufacturing plant in Elk Grove, Calif., he felt as if he were entering an engineering wonderland.
It was 1995, and the facility near Sacramento employed more than 1,500 workers. It was a kaleidoscope of robotic arms, conveyor belts ferrying circuit boards and, eventually, candy-colored iMacs in various stages of assembly. Mr. Saragoza, an engineer, quickly moved up the plant’s ranks and joined an elite diagnostic team. His salary climbed to $50,000. He and his wife had three children. They bought a home with a pool.
“It felt like, finally, school was paying off,” he said. “I knew the world needed people who can build things.”
At the same time, however, the electronics industry was changing, and Apple — with products that were declining in popularity — was struggling to remake itself. One focus was improving manufacturing. A few years after Mr. Saragoza started his job, his bosses explained how the California plant stacked up against overseas factories: the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85. Wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities. Rather it was costs like inventory and how long it took workers to finish a task.
“We were told we would have to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays,” Mr. Saragoza said. “I had a family. I wanted to see my kids play soccer.”
First, some of Elk Grove’s routine tasks were sent overseas. Mr. Saragoza didn’t mind. Then the robotics that made Apple a futuristic playground allowed executives to replace workers with machines. Some diagnostic engineering went to Singapore. Middle managers who oversaw the plant’s inventory were laid off because, suddenly, a few people with Internet connections were all that were needed.
Mr. Saragoza was too expensive for an unskilled position. He was also insufficiently credentialed for upper management. He was called into a small office in 2002 after a night shift, laid off and then escorted from the plant. He taught high school for a while, and then tried a return to technology. But Apple, which had helped anoint the region as “Silicon Valley North,” had by then converted much of the Elk Grove plant into an AppleCare call center, where new employees often earn $12 an hour.
There were employment prospects in Silicon Valley, but none of them panned out. “What they really want are 30-year-olds without children,” said Mr. Saragoza, who today is 48, and whose family now includes five of his own.
After a few months of looking for work, he started feeling desperate. Even teaching jobs had dried up. So he took a position with an electronics temp agency that had been hired by Apple to check returned iPhones and iPads before they were sent back to customers. Every day, Mr. Saragoza would drive to the building where he had once worked as an engineer, and for $10 an hour with no benefits, wipe thousands of glass screens and test audio ports by plugging in headphones.
As Apple’s overseas operations and sales have expanded, its top employees have thrived. Last fiscal year, Apple’s revenue topped $108 billion, a sum larger than the combined state budgets of Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Since 2005, when the company’s stock split, share prices have risen from about $45 to more than $427.
Some of that wealth has gone to shareholders. Apple is among the most widely held stocks, and the rising share price has benefited millions of individual investors, 401(k)’s and pension plans. The bounty has also enriched Apple workers. Last fiscal year, in addition to their salaries, Apple’s employees and directors received stock worth $2 billion and exercised or vested stock and options worth an added $1.4 billion.
The biggest rewards, however, have often gone to Apple’s top employees. Mr. Cook, Apple’s chief, last year received stock grants — which vest over a 10-year period — that, at today’s share price, would be worth $427 million, and his salary was raised to $1.4 million. In 2010, Mr. Cook’s compensation package was valued at $59 million, according to Apple’s security filings.
A person close to Apple argued that the compensation received by Apple’s employees was fair, in part because the company had brought so much value to the nation and world. As the company has grown, it has expanded its domestic work force, including manufacturing jobs. Last year, Apple’s American work force grew by 8,000 people.
One source estimated that sales of Apple’s products have caused other companies to hire tens of thousands of Americans. FedEx and United Parcel Service, for instance, both say they have created American jobs because of the volume of Apple’s shipments, though neither would provide specific figures without permission from Apple, which the company declined to provide.
“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”
What’s more, Apple sources say the company has created plenty of good American jobs inside its retail stores and among entrepreneurs selling iPhone and iPad applications.
Eventually, the orbits of the men overlapped. “I’m not worried about the country’s long-term future,” Mr. Jobs told Mr. Obama, according to one observer. “This country is insanely great. What I’m worried about is that we don’t talk enough about solutions.”
The pace of innovation, say executives from a variety of industries, has been quickened by businessmen like Mr. Jobs. G.M. went as long as half a decade between major automobile redesigns. Apple, by comparison, has released five iPhones in four years, doubling the devices’ speed and memory while dropping the price that some consumers pay.
Before Mr. Obama and Mr. Jobs said goodbye, the Apple executive pulled an iPhone from his pocket to show off a new application — a driving game — with incredibly detailed graphics. The device reflected the soft glow of the room’s lights. The other executives, whose combined worth exceeded $69 billion, jostled for position to glance over his shoulder. The game, everyone agreed, was wonderful.

1/21/2012 New York Times article by CHARLES DUHIGG and KEITH BRADSHER with additional reporting by David Barboza, Peter Lattman and Catherine Rampell

1/19/2012 NBC Today, Ann Curry, Newt Gingrich, Food Stamps, Liberalism, Racism

2012-01-19T11:35:00.007-05:00

(5/2011)NBC's David Gregory accuses Newt Gingrich of Obama food stamp racism...
(4/2010)NBC's Norah O'Donnell accuses Newt Gingrich of Obama "athlete" racism...

longer version at 3 minutes 33 seconds:

Steve Jobs describes his philosophy to Walter Isaacson

2012-01-18T10:49:00.004-05:00

Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work.
If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things - that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline; you have to practice it.

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away.
The more the outside world tries to force an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, "Bye. I have to go. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here." And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.

For most things in life, the range between the best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one... I realize that A Players like to work with A players, they just didn't like working with C players... My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atom bomb project. I wasn't nearly as good as he was, but that's what I aspired to do.

From the earliest days at Apple, I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software, we'd be out of business. If we weren't protected, there'd be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get started.

I'm one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline.
The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter... If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know how to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because it allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation... It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.
Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People do not know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think that great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves... Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo new a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.
People pay us to integrate things for them, because they don't have time to think about this stuff 24/7. If you have an extreme passion for producing great products, it pushes you to be integrated, to connect your hardware and your software and content management. You want to break new ground, so you have to do it yourself. If you want to allow your products to be open to other hardware or software, you have to give up some of your vision.
I hate when people call themselves "entrepreneurs" when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They're unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest part of the business. That's how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before you. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now. That's what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money, that's what I want Apple to be.
I don't think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It's my job to be honest. I know what I'm talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. That's the culture I tried to create. We are brutally honest with each other... where we are yelling at each other, and it's some of the best times I've ever had. I feel totally comfortable saying "Ron, that store looks like shit" in front of everyone else. Or I might say "God, we really fucked up the engineering on this" in front of the person that's responsible. That's the ante for being in the room...
I was hard on people sometimes, probably harder than I needed to be... But somebody's got to do it. I figured it was my job to make sure that the team was excellent, and if I didn't do it, nobody was going to do it.
You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have done protest songs forever... but he didn't. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest. He would come out and do some acoustic guitar, and the audience loved him. Then he brought out what came to be known as The Band, and they would all do an electric set, and the audience sometimes booed. There was one point where he was about to sing "Like a Rolling Stone" and someone yelled "Judas!" And Dylan then says, "Play it fucking loud!" And they did. The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That's what I've tried to do - keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if your not busy being born, you're busy dying.
What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that's been done by others before us. I didn't invent the language or mathematics I use... It's about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how - because we can't write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That's what has driven me.

Beyonce's Obama re-elect T-shirt

2012-01-13T07:50:00.002-05:00

Beyonce is selling clothes she designed to raise money for President Obama’s re-election campaign.
Beyonce, who recently gave birth to daughter Blue Ivy with husband, rapper Jay-Z, is one of more than 20 designers creating everything from tanktops to clutches for Obama supporters to splurge on.
Beyonce, along with mom Tina Knowles (who heads up the entertainer’s House of Dereon fashion line) designed a t-shirt emblazoned with phrases the commander-in-chief made famous, such as “Yes we can,” and, “I’m in!”
The crew neck sells for $45 and, along with the other fashions, is only available for pre-order right now. The pro-Obama wardrobe items go on sale online Feb. 7.

-excerpts from Judy Kurtz 1/12/2012 article in The Hill
-you can order this shirt here...

-Obama designer apparel might violate Campaign-Finance Regulations

1/2012: US National Debt = 100% of GDP [the entire US economy]

2012-01-10T09:03:00.002-05:00

The soaring national debt has reached a symbolic tipping point: It's now as big as the entire U.S. economy.
The amount of money the federal government owes to its creditors, combined with IOUs to government retirement and other programs, now tops $15.23 trillion.
That's roughly equal to the value of all goods and services the U.S. economy produces in one year: $15.17 trillion as of September, the latest estimate. Private projections show the economy likely grew to about $15.3 trillion by December — a level the debt is likely to surpass this month.
"The 100% mark means that your entire debt is as big as everything you're producing in your country," says Steve Bell of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which has proposed cutting nearly $6 trillion in red ink over 10 years. "Clearly, that can't continue."
Long-term projections suggest the debt will continue to grow faster than the economy, which would have to expand by at least 6% a year to keep pace.
President Obama's 2012 budget shows the debt soaring past $26 trillion a decade from now. Last summer's deficit reduction deal could reduce that to $24 trillion.
Among advanced economies, only Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan and Portugal have debts larger than their economies. Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Italy are at the root of the European debt crisis. The first three needed bailouts from European central banks; Italy's books are monitored by the International Monetary Fund.
Economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics says reaching the 100% mark shows "the grave need to address our long-term fiscal problems."

-excerpts from 1/8/2012 USA Today article by Richard Wolf

Rubio letter to Obama on national debt, January 6, 2012

2012-01-06T11:07:00.001-05:00

Where the World's Richest One Percent Live... $34,000 = 1%

2012-01-05T18:40:00.008-05:00

1/4/2012 Krauthammer criticizes Obama's "recess" appointments

2012-01-05T09:33:00.003-05:00