Food... Not so much...

America’s new hunger crisis

 

By Ned Resnikoff

In the 22 years that Swami Durga Das has managed New York’s River Fund Food Pantry, he has never seen hunger like this. Each Saturday, hundreds of hungry people descend on the pantry’s headquarters, an unassuming house on a residential block. The first people arrive around 2 am, forming a line that will wrap around the block before Das even opens his doors.

“Each week there’s new people,” Das told MSNBC.com. “The numbers have just skyrocketed.”
The new clients are diverse—working people, seniors, single mothers—but many of them share something in common: they represent the millions of Americans who fell victim to food insecurity when the Great Recession hit in 2009, but didn’t benefit from the economic recovery.

And the worst may be yet to come.
Food activists expect a “Hunger Cliff” on November 1, when automatic cuts to food stamp benefits will send a deluge of new hungry people to places like the River Fund Food Pantry, which are already strained.

“I thought we were busy now; I don’t know what it will be like then, because all of those people getting cut will definitely be accessing a pantry,” said Das. “It definitely will be a catastrophe.”
Those cuts were never supposed to be catastrophic; instead they were intended to gradually wind food stamp spending back down to normal levels, after boosting them in response to the 2008 financial collapse.

In the aftermath of that collapse, as employment stagnated and poverty increased, food stamp use exploded: From a little over 26 million users in 2007 to almost 47 million in 2012, an increase of 77%. At the same time, the average benefits per person rose from $96.18 to $133.41.

The 2009 stimulus bill raised the cap on food stamp benefits and pumped an additional $45.2 billion into the program over the next several years. But as provisions of the law expire, the program is scheduled to receive a $5 billion cut over the next year alone. Those cuts will reduce monthly benefits for every single food stamp recipient in the country; a family of four will receive $36 less per month, on average.

Billions more in cuts are scheduled to occur in the following two years, despite the fact that food insecurity in America has not even begun to return to pre-recession levels.

“I believe we have a hunger crisis,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, who sits on a House committee responsible for the food stamp program. “When 50 million people in the richest country on the planet are hungry, that’s a crisis.”

There’s little sign that McGovern’s colleagues in Congress will step in to stave off the crisis. In fact, some Republicans in Congress are pushing further cuts to the food stamp program as part of broader budget negotiations that could bump an additional 4 million people off of the food stamps rolls by the end of next year.

Those cuts may be a political winner for a few politicians, but for people like Winsome Stoner, they could be devastating.

Stoner was among those to start collecting food stamps during the post-crash era. She was unemployed at the time, and her husband’s salary as a security guard was not sufficient to pay the rent and feed their five children. Now working full-time at the Bed-Stuy Coalition Against Hunger food pantry in her neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Stoner still collects $640 per month in food stamps. Even that, combined with her income and her husband’s income, is not enough.

“It does cushion me a bit, it helps,” she said. “But we still run out of food by the end of the month. The middle, sometimes.”

When there’s no more food left, and no more money to buy new groceries, Stoner and her husband go to food pantries. At the Bud-Stuy pantry, the largest emergency food pantry in New York City, Stoner is both an employee and a regular client.

Visiting food pantries is a common practice for those who can’t stretch their food stamp money, also known as SNAP benefits, until the end of the month, according to Lisa Davis, senior vice president of government relations for the national food bank network Feeding America.

“Right now SNAP benefits are not overly generous,” Davis told MSNBC.com. “They average out to be about $1.49 per person per meal, and we know from our food banks that many of the clients coming to them are those who are receiving SNAP, but the benefits aren’t getting them through the entire month.”

For Stoner’s seven-person household, a monthly SNAP benefit of $640 per month translates to about $1 per meal, assuming everyone in the family eats three meals a day. Thanks to the expiration of the stimulus package’s food stamp provisions, Stoner has already received word that she might soon receive even less—and without knowing how big the cut will be, she’s terrified.

“I don’t know if we’re going to get anything,” she said, her voice rising in agitation. “We’re not sure if we’re on it. I’m really worried, I really am.”

On the same week that SNAP recipients are expected to lose $5 billion in benefits, members of both chambers of Congress are meeting to negotiate another potentially massive budget cut to the program.

This week, a committee will attempt to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the farm bill. The Senate version includes $4.1 billion in cuts to food stamps over the next decade; the House version includes no language related to food stamps, but House Republicans are expected to insist on including language from a separate House bill, which would slash $39 billion out of program over the course of the next ten years.

If House Republicans get their way and passed a $39 billion cut, it would cause nearly 4 million people to lose SNAP eligibility in 2014 alone, according to projections from the independent Congressional Budget Office. That cut would magnify the effect of the “Hunger Cliff” by orders of magnitude.

“I’m sad to say that we’re constantly putting out fires wherever Republicans try to light them,” said McGovern, D-Mass., a member of the Agriculture Committee and one of Congress’ leading advocates for more robust nutrition programs. As a member of the Farm Bill conference committee, McGovern will be conducting “damage control,” trying to limit the scope of the cuts.

McGovern believes that nutrition policy in the U.S. should be overhauled as part of a plan to end hunger entirely. But instead, “what we’re doing is body blocking this cut and that cut,” he said. Recalling that Barack Obama promised during his first presidential campaign to end child hunger by 2015, McGovern added, “we haven’t done a goddamn thing to do that, to be honest.”

The version of the Farm Bill which originally passed the House Agriculture Committee would have slashed $20.5 billion from the program over the next ten years. However, the bill narrowly failed on the House floor in June, thanks to both Democratic opposition and some Republican defectors who believed the food stamp cuts were not steep enough. So the House Republicans introduced another Farm Bill which, in the words of Rules Committee chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, “excludes some extraneous provisions”: namely, any language regarding food stamps.

During the July floor debate, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., described the revised Farm Bill bill as “the death knell of the food stamp program,” because it would allow Republicans to introduce even steeper cuts in a separate bill dealing only with food stamps. Sure enough, in August, Oklahoma Republican Frank Lucas introduced a new bill cutting $39 billion from SNAP, nearly twice as much as Republicans had originally planned to remove from the program. The bill passed with zero Democratic votes.

The new bill “never came to the Agriculture Committee,” said McGovern. “It went right from Eric Cantor’s basement to the Rules Committee.”

The White House has promised to veto any major cut to food stamps, but with even the Senate legislation cutting $4 billion out of the program, some kind of haircut looks inevitable. If that happens, then food pantries will once again be forced to pick up the slack as best they can.

When people don’t have the resources to feed themselves, and government welfare programs aren’t giving them the help they need, food banks are often the safety net of last resort. However, these non-profit charities are also dependent on government subsidies, and many of them are seeing their budgets shrink even as demand for their services reaches unprecedented levels. This holds especially true in low-income areas where food pantries rely on the donations of churchgoers who are themselves struggling, said Food Bank For New York City president and CEO Margarette Purvis.

“For programs that have lower capacity, more of them are closed, and they are closed primarily because they rely on faith-based resources,” Purvis told MSNBC.com. “They rely on the collection plate.”

At the same time, federal grants for food banks and pantries have taken a haircut. Although food stamps were left untouched by the across-the-board budget cuts known as the sequester, food banks took a modest hit when TEFAP, a USDA program which subsidizes food storage and distribution for food banks, got trimmed by 5%. For the only food bank in the entire state of Alaska, that could not have come at a worse time.

“Even though it’s just a 5% cut, every little bit squeezes us, stretches us more and more,” said Mary Sullivan, director of advocacy and agency relations for the Food Bank of Alaska. “We’re already operating on a very narrow margin budget-wise, and we’re already leveraging so many dollars from the private sector to keep the program operating.”

Alaska covers the largest geographic area of any state in the country, and the Food Bank of Alaska delivers a lot of its food to remote, hard-to-reach areas. TEFAP distribution funds help subsidize the use of air freight and barge shipping to some of the most isolated places in the country. Despite continuing TEFAP assistance, “we continue to run the program at a deficit,” said Sullivan.

For food banks across the country, the government shutdown strained resources even further. As government workers temporarily lost their jobs and preschool-aged children lost the free meals which they would have received at their Head Start programs, pantries raced to make emergency food deliveries. Had the shutdown lasted into November, many food banks would have lost their TEFAP funding and may have had to stop making food deliveries entirely.

Reopening the government has relieved some of the strain on food banks and pantries, but not by much. The USDA still estimates that 49 million Americans are food insecure, and there are no indications that the number will come down anytime soon.

Newt’s revenge: Child labor makes a comeback

In just two years, right-wing legislators weakened four states' child labor laws -- and a raft of other protections

                      
By Josh Eidelson

Months after the Tea Party’s 2010 election triumph, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker made international news when activists occupied the Capitol in opposition to his anti-union gambit. But a report being released Thursday suggests Americans dramatically underestimate the scope and ambition of Republicans’ post-2010 push to ratchet workplace laws to the right – involving over a dozen states, a tangled web of under-the-radar coordination, and a broad constellation of weakened protections, from unemployment benefits to child labor laws.

“People in any given place, if they’re dealing with a minimum wage repeal in New Hampshire or something, mostly experience that as if it comes from a particular legislator in their state, and it’s explained as a response to the conditions in their state,” report author Gordon Lafer told Salon. “So when you put all the pieces together over the 50 states, one of the things you see is how concerted an effort it is, and how cookie-cutter the legislation is – and how much it’s not being driven by individual legislators, but by a national corporate lobby.” Lafer, a University of Oregon political economist who’s served as a policy adviser in the U.S. House, wrote the paper for the Economic Policy Institute, a D.C.-based progressive think tank whose funders have included foundations and unions.

According to Lafer’s report, “The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011-2012,” within those two years 15 states passed new restrictions on union collective bargaining or paycheck deductions; 16 passed new restrictions on unemployment benefits; four passed new restrictions on state minimum wage laws; and four reduced limitations on child labor. The child labor changes range from a Wisconsin law ending limits on 16- and 17-year-olds’ work hours to an Idaho law letting 12-year-olds be hired for manual labor at their school for 10 hours a week. Lafer notes that a Idaho school district spokesperson said that would both cut down on labor costs and teach kids “you have to be on time” and “do what you’re asked …”

Lafer highlights a slew of other laws passed in the two years following the 2010 right-wing electoral romp. Among them: Michigan banned safety regulations covering repetitive motion. Florida banned local paid sick leave mandates. Wisconsin banned compensatory and punitive damage suits over employment discrimination. New Hampshire made it easier for companies to classify workers as “independent contractors” lacking the legal rights of employees. Maine allowed employers to apply for employees to be considered disabled, and to determine what fraction of the minimum wage to pay employees classified as such.

The report also tallies a number of business-backed bills that were pushed in the same period but fell short of becoming law, including 17 “right to work” bills (along with the ones that passed in Michigan and Indiana); a Montana bill excluding tips from workers’ compensation calculations; an Oklahoma bill requiring those receiving unemployment to do 20 hours of weekly unpaid community service; and a Florida bill prohibiting municipalities from passing any rules to address “wage theft” – companies’ failure to pay employees’ their legally owed wages.

Lafer’s report emphasizes the role of a number of national right-wing groups in pushing such legislation, especially the American Legislative Exchange Council. “Ultimately,” writes Lafer, “the key ‘exchange’ that ALEC facilitates is between corporate donors and state legislators. The corporations pay ALEC’s expenses, contribute to legislators’ campaigns, and fund the state-level think tanks that promote legislation; in return, legislators carry the corporate agenda into their statehouses.” ALEC’s website states that its “Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force’s model policies on labor preserve freedom of association for employees while protecting worker choice and taxpayer dollars.”

Lafer challenges a number of rationales offered for the raft of policies, noting that Republicans went after public workers in states with comparatively small deficits, and passed right-wing education reforms in states with comparatively high test scores. He points out that ALEC warns against raising the minimum wage on the grounds that it “lures high school students into the full-time work force” and thus out of school, but the National Restaurant Association argued for ALEC-backed bills weakening child labor restrictions on the grounds that “employment teaches teenagers skills …”

“Running through what on the surface are contradictions is an agenda at every turn lowering wages and lowering the bargaining power of working people,” Lafer told Salon. He contended that agenda was designed not just to cut labor costs, but to reduce workers’ leverage, from growing the ranks of teenagers available to compete with adults for jobs, to strengthening managers’ authority to deny unemployment benefits, to denying or diluting the right to form a union. While Gov. Walker has decried “a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” Lafer argued that the right-wing workplace policies of the past few years “primarily affect exactly those people who are supposedly the beneficiaries of cutting wages and benefits in the public sector.”

“Basically,” Lafer told Salon, “the most powerful lobbies in the country are in a concerted attack across the country, and also across a wide range of issues, acting in such a way that is going to make it harder for people in the country to make a decent living.”

X-class

The sun emitted a significant solar flare – its fourth X-class flare since Oct. 23, 2013 -- peaking at 5:54 p.m. on Oct. 29, 2013. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This disrupts the radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing, anywhere from minutes to hours.

To see how this event may impact Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov
, the U.S. government's official source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings.

This flare is classified as an X2.3 class flare. "X-class" denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc.

Increased numbers of flares are quite common at the moment, since the sun's normal 11-year activity cycle is ramping up toward solar maximum conditions. Humans have tracked this solar cycle continuously since it was discovered in 1843, and it is normal for there to be many flares a day during the sun's peak activity.

The 1 percent’s flood insurance scam

It's time for wealthy with vacation homes and valuable shoreline land to pay their own way -- and not rely on us

                      
By David Dayen

Last May, when conservatives still pretended to love cutting the deficit and liberals still pretended to want to combat climate change, a broad bipartisan coalition passed a sweeping flood insurance reform bill – by a 402-18 count in the House – designed to align the costs of insuring homes in flood zones with the realities of increased storm frequency.

But yesterday, Rep. Maxine Waters – the lead author of the law – stood with several of her colleagues and proudly introduced a bill that would stall the implementation by up to four years, delaying any increase in flood insurance premiums until 2017. It’s difficult to argue that homeowners in flood zones alone should have to bear the burden of massive rate increases. But shrinking from the real costs from climate change and delaying them, rather than facing up to how it will affect every aspect of our economy, is a testament to a political class that is simply not equipped to deal with the consequences of a warming planet.

The National Flood Insurance Program, designed in 1968 to provide mandatory federal insurance to Americans living in coastal areas, has been hemorrhaging money after years of extreme weather. The NFIP, a division of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is meant to be self-supporting through premiums, relieving the pressure on disaster relief funding. But the NFIP borrowed $19 billion from the Treasury in 2005, after damages from Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. According to experts, its deficit after payouts from Superstorm Sandy approaches $28 billion.

The Biggert-Waters reform legislation, named for former Republican Rep. Judy Biggert and current Democrat Waters, was uncontroversial when it was introduced in 2012. It passed the House easily, and was eventually incorporated into a larger transportation bill that sailed through Congress. Biggert-Waters forced the creation of new FEMA maps to determine who needed flood insurance. It also allowed higher annual premium increases – to 20 percent from 10 percent – so premiums could gradually come more in line with actuarial realities. And for high-risk homes built before flood maps were adopted, which enjoyed generous subsidies, flood insurance rates would increase 25 percent a year, until they reached a level commensurate with the actual risk. If the homes changed hands, they would immediately move to the risk-adjusted rates. Over time, subsidies for 1.1 million policyholders, 20 percent of the program, would be phased out.

The law represented an alliance between fiscal conservatives interested in bringing the NFIP back into balance, and some environmental groups, who believed that subsidizing homeowners with low flood insurance rates failed the test of making the costs of climate change real, and would delay the spur to action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Repetitive loss” homeowners, many paying significantly discounted rates dating back to the 1970s, represent one-third of all NFIP claims, according to the R Street Institute, and continual subsidies for them result in “nothing but environmental catastrophe and financial ruin,” according to R Street fellow R.J. Lehmann.

But if Congress was on board with reforming the NFIP in 2012, it wasn’t ready for complaints from homeowners in flood zones in 2013. People across the country lost their subsidies, and saw their rates grow by 500 percent or more. One homeowner newly zoned into a flood area reported a $68,000 flood insurance bill. Real estate agents said the hikes were affecting home sales, because subsidized policyholders could not sell their properties to new purchasers who discovered huge rate increases. Many of the properties affected were vacation homes and secondary residences. But poorer areas in Louisiana and places like Rockaway Beach in New York consist of modest, middle-class homes, and the residents could not afford the hefty increases. Protests broke out in these areas, and members of Congress, who casually passed Biggert-Waters as a fiscal and environmental imperative, took the message.

Almost immediately, conservatives in flood-prone states like Mississippi and Louisiana, who routinely vote to balance the budget and slash federal programs, called for additional insurance subsidies from the government. But they weren’t alone. The increased threat from climate change of flooding all over the country ensured a regionally diverse coalition interested in shielding their constituents from higher costs. For example, the environmentally conscious Massachusetts congressional delegation, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, urged a delay to the rate increases, because homeowners around the state found themselves placed in a flood zone for the first time. Even Maxine Waters, who authored the bill, disavowed its consequences, saying that she never intended for it to generate “outrageous premiums.” (Multiple attempts to speak with Rep. Waters for this story proved unsuccessful.) FEMA director Craig Fugate was asked to postpone the rate hikes unilaterally, but he told Congress he didn’t have the authority to do so.

A Congress that can’t seem to agree on anything united on stopping flood insurance rate increases, with a bipartisan group working for weeks on reaching a resolution, even while the government was shut down. Finally, last Friday, Waters announced a deal that would delay the changes to the program by four years. It would force FEMA to conduct an “affordability study” to ensure that homeowners wouldn’t pay undue costs, and would allow reimbursement to policyholders who successfully appeal a change to flood maps that increase their rates. “This delay would allow FEMA to get their act together,” Waters said in a statement.

While some environmental groups understand the impulse of protecting people from giant rate increases, continuing to subsidize climate change-ravaged flood zones will only ensure escalating costs from carbon pollution. “People in government have not gotten their minds around the fact that climate change is an enormous driver of increased costs,” said Daniel Kessler, U.S. communications director of 350.org. Ironically, green groups are joined by anti-tax organizations arguing against the wasteful subsidies. Insurance trade groups also want to see the flood insurance program reflect real risks. But Congress appears to be inexorably moving toward delay.

Unsuspecting homeowners are obviously dismayed to find out about additional costs of living. But they simply reflect the reality of the warming world we inhabit. There are different ways to mitigate those costs – 350.org believes the fossil fuel industry should pay for it through a price on carbon, with Daniel Kessler noting, “They’re the only industry that doesn’t pay the cost of its own pollution.” But kicking the can down the road for four years serves almost nobody. It means that high-risk flood zones, many of them populated by wealthy vacation homes and investment properties, will continue to enjoy federal subsidies. It means the government will absorb those costs, when the money could go to climate change mitigation strategies. It means that Congress will not have to reckon with how to best avoid the climate change-fueled economic catastrophe headed toward us like a freight train.

“This is an unfortunate example of Congress bowing to pressure from a vocal minority of special interests worried about the effect it would have on their pocketbooks and profits, instead of looking at the longer-term economic impacts on the United States as a whole,” said RL Miller, chair of the California Democratic Party’s Environmental Caucus. “It’s a microcosm of climate change politics.”
Flood insurance rates that reflect the actual risks of flood damage will have to rise quite a bit. At some point, America will have to manage these costs. They cannot just constantly rebuild every flood-prone area, especially if it becomes increasingly unlivable. Maybe they will buy out the residents and relocate them. Maybe they will attack the problem at its source and drastically reduce fossil fuel emissions. But Daniel Kessler of 350.org made one thing clear: “The costs to act are less expensive than the costs of inaction.” Sadly, Congress is preparing to make the politically expedient choice of doing nothing.

How a Crazy Senator Became a Sudden Darling of the Respectable Right

BY MARC TRACY

Fanfare! Trumpets! There has been a Big Important Speech on the Future of Conservatism. Let’s take it Really Seriously. Sen. Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, went to the Heritage Foundation Tuesday and spoke. Milton Friedman and Irving Kristol were namechecked! Russell Kirk was quoted! The gas tax was proposed to be slashed 80 percent! Oh wait, I am supposed to still be mentioning the Serious parts.

I shouldn’t make fun, maybe. There are serious parts. Lee’s concern for “immobility among the poor,” the middle-class squeeze, and “cronyist privilege at the top,” and his desire to fashion a conservative response to them, is the right note for a Republican senator to strike. Amen to calls for “a new conservatism of the working and middle class,” because either we will get one or the failed attempt to give us one will prove it to be a contradiction in terms. Conservative intellectuals of a reformist bent welcomed the speech—Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam (they co-wrote a book on these themes), Rich Lowry, Jennifer Rubin. BuzzFeed political editor McKay Coppins called it a “lofty, agenda-setting speech” for its ringing declaration, “frustration is not a platform. Anger is not an agenda. And outrage, as a habit, is not even conservative” and for its forceful denunciation of the House Republicans’ sociopathic shutdown tactic, which futilely damaged the U.S. economy and very nearly caused the federal government to default—a narrowly evaded catastrophe.

Except, of course, Lee didn’t do that last thing. Lee was pro-shutdown! Other than Ted Cruz, he was probably the House Republicans’ most important ally in the Senate. And he did not denounce—or, in his case, repudiate—the shutdown tactics. So now you see why I couldn’t help but make fun.

I suppose if we set the bar low enough that insects can do the limbo with it, you could read his speech as endorsing a less insane way forward. But here is what happened Tuesday: One of Washington’s most staunchly pro-shutdown politicians, appearing at maybe Washington’s most important pro-shutdown organization, pointedly refused to condemn the shutdown or suggest he would not support a future shutdown if it meant trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.

On the contrary, Lee said, “I am proud of my friend Ted Cruz and the dozens of others—including Speaker John Boehner and the House Republicans—who fought Obamacare, continue to fight it, and will not stop fighting it.” At the outset, he narrated, “It began with our effort to stop Obamacare—a goal that all Republicans share even if we have not always agreed about just how to pursue it.” Absent a declaration that he no longer agrees with how he pursued it, one is forced to conclude that he feels the same way now. Douthat, Salam, and Lowry do not mention this.

There is a broader point here. If I ever found the bulk of my political views articulated by somebody whose most prominent action ever—undertaken in the past month and unrepudiated—was as grotesquely irresponsible as what Cruz, Lee, and the House Republicans put us through, it would cause me to question my views. I would reflect upon the fact that Lee and I share these beliefs, and that he logically extends them toward something totally self-destructive and crazy. I would have to conclude either that he is correct to do this, and therefore that my views must be wrong and that I must change them, or that he is not worth listening to, because he takes perfectly good ideas and warps them into something powerfully hazardous. There is apparently no such reckoning among the right’s respectable intellectuals—most of whom did oppose the shutdown itself, and not only for pragmatic reasons.

But in the meantime, let’s stick to the matter at hand. Can’t all reasonable people agree to ignore Mike Lee completely until he says he was wrong about the shutdown? Should this be a controversial suggestion? Given the gravity of the threat of a future shutdown, isn’t that the only responsible response?

Salam highlights several promising policy sketches that Lee offered; and truly, it is hard not to appreciate a Republican concerned with work-life balance issues. But Salam and the others misrepresent Lee—who, Salam notes, holds a relatively safe seat, and so presumably may speak his mind. Giving parents greater flexibility isn’t Lee’s foremost priority. According to Lee, “The first and most important policy goal Republicans must adopt to improve the lives of middle-class families is, and will remain, the full repeal of Obamacare.” How? Again, we have no choice but to presume that Lee believes that a legitimate tactic for repealing Obamacare is, and will remain, shutting down the government and threatening its default. How about we hear Lee out, and maybe even talk to him, sometime after he puts his gun away.

 

Dream Chaser flys

Test Flight Goes Perfectly...With One Small Exception

 

By Phil Plait

Last week, the Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) did a test drop of their spaceplane, called Dream Chaser. This was the first free-flight, approach, and landing test done for the vehicle, and, well, I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that after it was released by a helicopter, the Dream Chaser's computer and guidance system performed admirably, keeping the vehicle on target and at the right attitude (angle to the ground). Right up until the last moment, everything went really well.

The bad news is that the left rear landing gear didn’t deploy. The vehicle tipped over and swerved off the runway. It was damaged, though apparently not too badly. Officials at SNC said they can fix the vehicle and fly it again.

The company released a video showing the flight and (part of) the landing. You can see that the landing gear doesn’t deploy, though the video cuts off before the vehicle veers off (they’re holding that part pending a more thorough investigation):

All in all, this clearly wasn't an unmitigated succes, but neither was it a catastrophe. Mechanical failures like that are fixable, so I still have pretty solid hopes for this spacecraft.

The intent is for Dream Chaser to eventually be able to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station — it can carry up to seven people. It will launch on an Atlas V rocket (run by another company, the United Launch Alliance), and can land like a plane, horizontally. I’ll note it doesn’t have a front landing gear, instead using a skid, and the gear used for the test flight are not what will be employed for later flights.

Right now, SNC plans to launch the first Dream Chaser into orbit in 2016 for an autonomous (uncrewed) test, and then have a piloted test flight in 2017. Assuming all goes to plan, this will make it the third private company to launch a vehicle to orbit, after SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation (unless Blue Origin beats them to it).

Because I know a lot of people still harbor misconceptions about what’s going on, let me say a few words. We are currently in a gap in time when neither the U.S. government nor an American company can launch humans into space. However, this period is coming to end soon; SpaceX may launch a crewed Dragon capsule as early as 2015. If successful, SpaceX may be able to substantially undercut the cost of a seat on a Russian Soyuz flight. Sierra Nevada will follow shortly thereafter.

The last Shuttle set wheels down in 2011. I’ll note that when Apollo was canceled, it was over eight years before the Shuttle first launched (there were a handful of flights to orbit in that time, but nothing sustainable; even counting those there was a nearly six year pause in crewed flights). This current gap is not the longest we have suffered, and I strongly suspect we won’t have to hold our breaths for too much longer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QgdFotAkUEU

You Will Be Shocked at How Ignorant Americans Really Are

By Marty Kaplan

If you think the widening chasm between the rich and the rest spells trouble for American democracy, have a look at the growing gulf between the information-rich and-poor.

Earlier this year, a Harvard economist’s jaw-dropping study of American’s beliefs about the distribution of American wealth became a viral video. Now a new Pew study of the distribution of American news consumption is just as flabbergasting.

According to the Harvard study, most people believe that the top 20 percent of the country owns about half the nation’s wealth, and that the lower 60 percent combined, including the 20 percent in the middle, have only about 20 percent of the wealth. A whopping 92 percent of Americans think this is out of whack; in the ideal distribution, they said, the lower 60 percent would have about half of the wealth, with the middle 20 percent of the people owning 20 percent of the wealth.

What’s astonishing about this is how wrong Americans are about reality. In fact, the bottom 80 percent owns only 7 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the top 1 percent hold more of the country’s wealth – 40 percent – than 9 out of 10 people think the top 20 percent should have. The top 10 percent of earners take home half the income of the country; in 2012, the top 1 percent earned more than a fifth of U.S. income – the highest share since the government began collecting the data a century ago.

But America’s information inequality is at least as shocking as its economic inequality.

Pew sliced the TV news audience into thirds: heavy, medium and light. In my Jeffersonian fantasy, that distribution would look like a bell curve; in fact, it looks like a cliff. Heavy viewers watch a little over two hours of TV news a day, but medium viewers barely watch a quarter of an hour and light viewers average only two minutes a day. The top third of the country does 88 percent of the day’s TV news viewing; the middle third watches only 10 percent of the total time; the bottom third sees just 2 percent of the minutes of news consumed. Two-thirds of Americans live in an information underclass as journalistically impoverished as the minuscule bazillionaire class is triumphant.

 

This month, the Pew Research Journalism Project reported how Americans get their news at home. If you think it’s from the Internet, you’ll be surprised that the 38 percent of us who access news at home on a desktop or laptop spend an average of only 90 seconds a day getting news online. America’s dominant news source is television, and the disparity between heavy viewers of TV news and everyone else is as startling as the gap between the plutocrats and the people.

As for those heavy news viewers, says Pew, “There is no news junkie like a cable junkie.” A heavy local news viewer watches about 22 minutes of it a day at home, and a heavy network news viewer watches about 32 minutes a day. But a heavy cable news consumer averages 72 minutes of it a day. The gap between heavy, medium and light cable news viewers is especially stark. If you’re reading this, you’re probably in that 72-minutes-of-cable-news-a-day class. But medium cable news viewers see barely more than three minutes of it a day, and light cable news viewers see about 12 seconds of it a day. In other words, either you live in the country that watches more than an hour of Blitzer, O’Reilly, Maddow, et al, a day – or in the country that watches virtually none of them at all.

If you want to know where this is heading, consider another cheery piece of Pew research. Americans 67 to 84 years old spend 84 minutes a day watching, reading or listening to the news. Boomers (48 to 66) are close behind, at 77 minutes a day. But Gen Xers (33 to 47) spend 66 minutes, and Millennials (18 to 31) spend only 46 minutes a day. The kids are tuning out. I love it that 43 percent of “The Colbert Report” audience, and 39 percent of “The Daily Show” viewers, are 18 to 29 years old; the young audiences of those fake news shows get real news from them. But fewer than a million and a half Americans under 50 are watching them.

Much has been made of the ideological news bubbles we live in, where we see the world exclusively through Fox-colored lenses, or filters manufactured only by MSNBC or CNN. The Pew study upends this belief. It’s true that about one-quarter of American adults watch only Fox News, another quarter watch only CNN and 15 percent watch only MSNBC. But 28 percent of Fox News viewers also watch MSNBC, and 34 percent of MSNBC viewers watch Fox. More than half of MSNBC viewers, and nearly half of Fox viewers, watch CNN, and of CNN’s viewers, about 4 out of 10 also watch Fox, and 4 out of 10 also watch MSNBC.

It’s encouraging that our self-segregation into polarized news ghettos is a bit of a myth. But whatever joy there is in that finding is blunted by the disparity between people who watch a lot of news and people who watch almost none of it, and by the trend toward an even deeper division ahead. The danger democracy faces isn’t so much that different segments of our country inhabit alternative realities constructed from different data delivered by different news sources. It’s that a minority of the country watches a fair amount of news, and a majority may as well be living on the moon.

Fly'n Hawaiian still not fly'n.........

The Fly'n Hawaiian is still afloat. If you read the earlier posts on the cat built by the guy with no experience in building boats, then you know what this means. If you didn't, well lets just say the boat is built less than adequately to actually sail. The boat is still floating the Richardson Bay, north of San Francisco and has not yet moved under it's own power. For the last month a raging debate over how it is moored and will it survive the winter on the water. So far the boat has not taken on water but the owner has now mostly run out of money and the 'work' that was to be done has not been. Most sailors in the area are expecting to find the boat on the rocks or sinking into the mud in the coming weeks as the winter weather grows more extreme. The owner has also said he fears the boat will be lost or he will be forced to pay for its removal (which he can't since he has no money). In any case, if it does sink or breakup or actually sails I will let you know, but other than that I am going to try to forget this mess just like all the other half-baked boats that tried to go to see...

A human face for drone victims

By Dana Milbank

From Washington, the drone-warfare program looks almost aseptic: Remote-controlled aircraft fire with precision on targets half a world away.

But on Tuesday, this anonymous form of warfare assumed a name and a face: that of 9-year-old Nibila ur Rehman, who, along with her father and older brother, came all the way from Pakistan’s tribal region to talk about the drone strike that killed her grandmother a year ago.

“It was the day before Eid,” said Nibila, a beautiful child with caramel eyes and a shy smile. Through an interpreter, she told her story to lawmakers, staff and reporters in a congressional hearing room: “My grandmother asked me to come help her outside. We were collecting okra, the vegetables. Then I saw in the sky the drone and I heard a ‘dum dum’ noise. Everything was dark and I couldn’t see anything, but I heard a scream. I don’t know if it was my grandmother, but I couldn’t see her. I was very scared and all I could think of doing was just run. I kept running but I felt something in my hand. And I looked at my hand. There was blood. I tried to bandage my hand but the blood kept coming.”

Nibila finished her account and resumed tugging at her blue headscarf and dress, scratching her leg, resting her head on the table and doing other things a 9-year-old would do when asked to sit through a long meeting of grown-ups in a language she doesn’t understand. On the table in front of her was a drawing she had made of the attack.

When the session ended, an intern working for the congressman who hosted the hearing presented Nibila with two dishes of ice cream, vanilla and chocolate. The child eyed them warily. Told by the interpreter what the substance was, she took a tentative taste of the vanilla and then hungrily spooned more into her mouth. She smiled and nodded.

It was a heartwarming moment. But the United States owes Nibila something more than a dish of soft-serve.

The lawmaker who hosted the Pakistani family — the first victims of drone warfare to speak on Capitol Hill — presented them as evidence that the program should be abolished. That goes too far: The drones have been enormously successful in killing off al-Qaeda leaders. But the program has operated in such secrecy that Americans have not had an opportunity to debate the consequences of the killings done in their name.

The Post reported last week that top Pakistani officials have for years secretly endorsed the CIA drone strikes, received briefings on them and sometimes requested the attacks, even as they publicly denounced them. The attacks in Pakistan expanded dramatically in recent years, reaching 117 in 2010 before declining to 23 this year. Along the way, hundreds of civilians have been killed.

The Associated Press account of the strike that claimed the life of Nibila’s grandmother was typically anodyne: “A U.S. drone fired a pair of missiles at a mud brick compound near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing at least one person, intelligence officials said. There were conflicting reports about whether more than one person was killed in the attack in Tappi Khun Khel village in the North Waziristan tribal area, a major hub for Taliban and al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan.” The report said a cow and a buffalo were also killed.

Rafiq ur Rehman, Nibila’s father, gave his version on Tuesday. “Only one person was killed that day: my mother,” he said. As he went on, the interpreter choked up and had to pause before repeating his words in English: “I am the primary school teacher in my community,” he said. “As a teacher, my job is to educate. But how can I teach something like this? . . . How can I in good faith reassure the children that the drone will not come back and kill them too?”

Unfortunately for the cause, the lawmaker who hosted the event was Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), the flamboyant liberal who last week used an image of a flaming cross in an e-mail likening the tea party to the Ku Klux Klan. Only four other lawmakers attended the event, which began with a clip from an inflammatory documentary.

But the story of young Nibila and her family deserves more notice. Only a few outliers in Congress — such as Grayson on the left and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on the right — are likely to oppose the use of drones. But even if officials conclude that drone strikes are necessary, they owe the public a more honest account of casualties and a promise to compensate innocent victims with something more than frozen desserts.

Is Earth F**ked??????????

Journalist Naomi Klein writes in Britain’s New Statesman magazine that scientists often use softer language than they should when presenting their findings about the inevitability of climate change and the destruction it will bring. But now some scientists are raising their voices and taking action, demanding dramatic changes in the cultural and economic systems that are to blame for our fossil fuel dependency.

Klein starts with a talk by one UC-San Diego researcher, Brad Werner, who presented a talk at a American Geophysical Union conference last year entitled: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism.”
“When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the ‘are we f**ked’ question,” Klein writes, “Werner set the jargon aside and replied, ‘More or less.’”

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.]

Plenty of scientists have been moved by their research findings to take action in the streets. Physicists, astronomers, medical doctors and biologists have been at the forefront of movements against nuclear weapons, nuclear power, war, chemical contamination and creationism. And in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary”, because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence”.

Mini Transat

The Race Director of the Mini Transat has decided to implement plan B, which had been mentioned before the start at the last competitor briefing. The fleet will now stop at the port of Sada, near La Coruna, to wait for the strong winds from the south-west that will sweep Cape Finisterre, on 1 and 2 November to moderate and go northwest. The fleet is expected to arrive in the area on the night of October 31 to November 1.

This is the charm and complexity of the organisation of a race like the Mini Transat. Between those competing at a high level and those for whom this race is the adventure of a lifetime, there is a difference on how to run the boat. While the former are constantly looking for performance, others do not have any other objective than to run their business at their own pace. At the same time, crossing the Bay of Biscay reqires a weather window of about four days to clear the entire fleet.

University of Warwick

Nice work by the University of Warwick rowers to strip for charity. Some of the women’s sailing teams could learn a thing or two. A female university rowing club who caused a feminism row last year over their racy charity calendar have defied critics to bare all in an even saucier follow-up. The students from The University of Warwick's Rowing Society caused controversy last year after their saucy snaps were branded 'tacky' and 'sexist'. Featuring 17 members of the posh uni's rowing club the girls - aged between 18 and 21 - can be seen frolicking by the River Avon and at in their boat house in Barford, Warks. Second year History and Politics student Hettie Reed, 21, came up with the idea with pals Frankie Salzano, 21, and Sophie Bell, 19, who all feature in the calendar.

Veil Nebula

Frightening forms and scary faces are a mark of the Halloween season. They also haunt this cosmic close-up of the eastern Veil Nebula. The Veil Nebula itself is a large supernova remnant, the expanding debris cloud from the death explosion of a massive star. While the Veil is roughly circular in shape covering nearly 3 degrees on the sky in the constellation Cygnus, this portion of the eastern Veil spans only 1/2 degree, about the apparent size of the Moon. That translates to 12 light-years at the Veil's reassuring estimated distance of 1,400 light-years from planet Earth. In the composite of image data recorded through narrow band filters, emission from hydrogen atoms in the remnant is shown in red with strong emission from oxygen atoms in blue-green hues. In the western part of the Veil lies another seasonal apparition, the Witch's Broom.

Maya Gabeira

One hell of a scary few moments yesterday for Brazilian ace female surfer Maya Gabeira..
Nazare Portugal is now one of those big wave destinations, but it is only for the truly crazy or the mega skilled. Maya is no crazy, she is a skilled surfer but she was riding waves close to 100 feet tall at a very treacherous spot near the small fishing village of Nazare. She took a big fall on a big wave and was held under for a long time. Fortunately she was pulled from the water by fellow big wave surfer Carlos Burle. Maya was pull from the cold water unconscious and Carlos did CPR on the beach. He was able to revive Maya and she is now recovering in the hospital, only suffered a broken ankle from the wipe-out and being thrashed by the waves. Here to Carlos for his heroics and here's to Maya for surfing killer waves...

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GOP Civil War

Dems Fueling GOP Civil War — Next Up: ENDA

 

by Joshua Holland

The civil war raging between the Republic establishment and the tea party movement continues to heat up, and Democrats appear more than happy to sell ammunition to both sides.

Last week, Richard Viguerie, a legendary figure within the modern conservative movement, promised that the hard right would deliver a “bloodbath” to insufficiently conservative Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. “We need to primary every single one of these big-government Republicans,” he told NewsMax.

The same week, The National Journal’s Beth Reinhard reported that more traditional, business-oriented Republicans are ready to join the battle.

Tactics being discussed among Republican strategists, donors, and party leaders include running attack ads against tea-party candidates for Congress… promoting open primaries over nominating conventions, which can produce Republican hard-liners such as Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli and shutdown-instigator Mike Lee of Utah; and countering political juggernauts Heritage Action, the Club for Growth, and FreedomWorks that target Republican incumbents who have consorted with Democrats.

It’s no coincidence that as soon as the shutdown was over – a debacle that revealed deep fissures between the Republican-friendly business community and the party’s base — the Democrats pivoted toward immigration, an issue that GOP strategists say is one on which the party must moderate in order to remain viable in national elections, while 74 percent of Republican voters told Pew in late July that the party’s stance on immigration was either just right or too liberal.

The House looks like it will take a pass on immigration reform this year – Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a key architect of the immigration bill passed by the Senate earlier this year, is urging the lower chamber to oppose his own proposal. But now, HuffPo reports that another issue that’s as likely to drive a wedge into the Republican coalition is coming into play:

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act could come up for a vote in the Senate as early as next week, according to the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).
ENDA would ban workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. When the Senate convened Monday afternoon, Reid formally announced his plans to bring up the legislation during the current work period, which ends the week before Thanksgiving.

After Mitt Romney’s defeat, the Republican National Committee drew up an “autopsy report” which called for the party’s rebranding in order to broaden its appeal. The authors wrote that “there is a generational difference within the conservative movement about issues involving the treatment and the rights of gays — and for many younger voters, these issues are a gateway into whether the Party is a place they want to be,” and added: “If our Party is not welcoming and inclusive, young people and increasingly other voters will continue to tune us out.”

There was a polling memo released in September which found broad support for ENDA among Republicans, but few details were included and it was conducted by a GOP pollster who supports the party’s rebranding.

But we know that on same-sex marriage, there remains a significant divide between the party’s hardline base and both self-identified GOP “moderates” and the public at large. While Gallup found that 52 percent of Americans now support marriage equality, only 30 percent of self-identified conservatives and 23 percent of those who attend church weekly agreed. In the Pew poll, 56 percent of those Republicans who called themselves moderate said the party’s position on marriage was “too conservative,” while only 22 percent of tea partiers agreed.

What’s interesting about all of this is that less than a decade ago, in 2004, Republicans tried to use LGBT rights as a wedge issue to divide Democrats by pushing a constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage. A lot has changed since then — the public’s come a long way — and the shoe now appears to be on the other foot.

Sleaze Politician.....

What Ted Cruz Doesn’t Want You to Know

 

by Timothy Karr

By now it seems pretty clear that Senator Ted Cruz has a plan to occupy the White House. But he doesn’t want people to know too much about it.

And he definitely doesn’t want you to know about the special interests that have already begun to bankroll his political ambitions. That’s why the Texas senator’s latest crusade targets the Federal Communications Commission — and its efforts to better identify the funders of political ads.

Cruz has placed a hold on the Senate confirmation of Tom Wheeler to head the agency, despite bipartisan agreement to vote on Wheeler without delay. Cruz wants assurances from Wheeler that the FCC won’t follow the law and require disclosure of the real funders for dark-money political groups that clog the airwaves with negative and misleading ads.

These nominally independent 501(c)4 groups plowed millions of dollars into the 2012 elections, and there’s every indication they’ll be back in even greater numbers in 2014. And while the Federal Elections Commission is limited in its ability to identify the funders of the groups that emerged in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, the FCC has a clear legal path to mandate transparency.

Broadcasters are obliged by law to disclose who pays for political ads in exchange for using the airwaves. It’s a public interest bargain stretching back almost a century, and one that forms the foundation of US communications law.

Free Press and our allies won a major victory in 2012 when the FCC ordered all television stations to post this information to an online database the agency manages. In the past, you could find this information only by visiting each station, a time-consuming process that uncooperative receptionists, steep photocopying fees and incomplete and unwieldy paper files made even more complicated.
Now you can go to a single website and find important data on who is spending how much on political ads at major stations in the nation’s 50 largest television markets. (The FCC plans to include political file data from stations in all 210 U.S. broadcasts markets by 2014.)

While a vast improvement over its paper-file predecessor, the system has some glitches. The FCC should make it easier to aggregate, search and analyze the data by requiring television stations to upload their political files in a machine-readable format.

It should also require fuller disclosure. Communications law expert Andrew Schwartzman, who serves as a legal adviser to Free Press, has petitioned the FCC to enforce existing sponsor identification requirements and disclose the names of principal funders in the body of the ads themselves.

Taking this action would let viewers know that an ad from Concerned Taxpayers of America is actually the creation of two multimillionaires: the owner of a Maryland concrete company and a New York hedge-fund manager. And that scares Sen. Cruz and his supporters in groups like the Koch brothers funded Americans for Prosperity, which raises millions of dollars from anonymous donors to run attack ads against their political foes.

Letting the FCC do its job means advancing the public interest at a time when politicians are running amok in Washington. And that means shedding light on the money that helped elect many of these individuals, no matter which party they’re from.

Sen. Cruz shouldn’t deny us our right to know. His reckless ambitions are hurting our democracy. Cruz needs to lift his hold and stop blocking the FCC’s vital work on political disclosure.

Lies

The Lies That Will Kill America

 

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Here in Manhattan the other day, you couldn’t miss it — the big bold headline across the front page of the tabloid New York Post, screaming one of those sick, slick lies that are a trademark of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media empire. There was Uncle Sam, brandishing a revolver and wearing a burglar’s mask. “UNCLE SCAM,” the headline shouted. “US robs bank of $13 billion.”

Say what? Pure whitewash, and Murdoch’s minions know it. That $13 billion dollars is the settlement JPMorgan Chase, the country’s biggest bank, is negotiating with the government to settle its own rip-off of American homeowners and investors — those shady practices that five years ago helped trigger the financial meltdown, including manipulating mortgages and sending millions of Americans into bankruptcy or foreclosure. If anybody’s been robbed it’s not JPMorgan Chase, which can absorb the loss and probably take a tax write-off for at least part of it. No, it’s the American public. In addition to financial heartache we still have been denied the satisfaction of seeing jail time for any of the banksters who put our feet in cement and pushed us off the cliff.

This isn’t the only scandal JPMorgan Chase is juggling. A $6 billion settlement with institutional investors is in the works and criminal charges may still be filed in California. The bank is under investigation on so many fronts it’s hard to keep them sorted out – everything from deceptive sales in its credit card unit to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme to the criminal manipulation of energy markets and bribing Chinese officials by offering jobs to their kids.

Nor is JPMorgan Chase the only culprit under scrutiny. Bank of America was found guilty just this week of civil fraud, and a gaggle of other banks is being investigated by the government for mortgage fraud. No wonder the camp followers at Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC and other cheerleaders have ganged up to whitewash the banks. If justice is somehow served, this could be the biggest egg yet across the smug face of unfettered, unchecked, unaccountable capitalism.

One face in particular: Jamie Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. One of Murdoch’s Fox Business News hosts, Charlie Gasparino, claims the Feds are on a witch hunt against Dimon for criticizing President Obama, whose administration, we are told, “is brutally determined and efficient when it comes to squashing those who oppose their policies.” But hold on: Dimon is a Democrat, said to be Obama’s favorite banker, with so much entree he’s been doing his own negotiating with the attorney general of the United States.

But that’s crony capitalism for you, bipartisan to a fault. Rupert Murdoch has been defending Dimon in his media for a long time. Last spring, when it looked like there might be a stockholders revolt against Dimon, Murdoch was one of many bigwigs who rushed to his defense. He tweeted that JPMorgan would be “up a creek” without Dimon. “One of the smartest, toughest guys around,” Murdoch insisted. Whether Murdoch’s exaltation had an effect or not, Dimon was handily reelected.

Over the last few days, The Wall Street Journal, both Bible and supplicant of high finance as well as one of Murdoch’s more reputable publications — at least in its reporting — echoed the “UNCLE SCAM” indignation of the more lowbrow Post. The government just wants “to appease their left-wing populist allies,” its editorial writers raged, with a “political shakedown and wealth-redistribution scheme.” Perhaps, the paper suggested, the White House will distribute some of the JPMorgan Chase penalty to consumers and advocacy groups and “have the checks arrive in swing congressional districts right before the 2014 election.” We can hear the closet Bolsheviks panting for their handouts now and getting ready to use their phony ID’s to stuff the box on Election Day with multiple illegal ballots.

Such fantasies are all part of the Murdoch News Corp. pattern, an unending flow of falsehood and phony populism that in reality serves only the wealthy elite. Fox News is its ministry of misinformation, the fake jewel of the News Corp. crown, a 24/7 purveyor of flimflam and the occasional selective truth. Look at the pounding they’ve given Obama’s healthcare reform right from the very start, whether the non-existent death panels or claims that it would cause the highest tax increase in history.

While it’s true that the startup of Obamacare has been plagued by its website nightmare and other problems, Fox News consistently has failed to mention Republican roadblocks that prevented the program from getting proper funding or the fact that so many states ruled by Republican governors and legislatures — more than 30 — have deliberately failed to set up the insurance marketplaces critical to making the new system work. Just the other day, Eric Stern at Salon.com fact-checked a segment on Sean Hannity’s show. “Average Americans are feeling the pain of Obamacare and the healthcare overhaul train wreck,” Hannity declared, “and six of them are here tonight to tell us their stories.”

Eric Stern tracked down each of the Hannity Six and found that while their questions about health reform may have been valid, the answers they received from Hannity or had decided for themselves were not. “I don’t doubt that these six individuals believe that Obamacare is a disaster,” Stern reported. “But none of them had even visited the insurance exchange.”

And there you have the problem: ideology and self-interest trump the facts or even caring about the facts, whether it’s banking, Obamacare or global warming. Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists say that climate change is happening and that humans have made it so, but only four in ten Americans realize it’s true. According to a new study in the journal Public Understanding of Science, written by a team that includes Yale University’s Anthony Leiserowitz, the more that people listen to conservative media like Fox News or Limbaugh, the less sure they are that global warming is real. And even worse, the less they trust science.

Such ignorance will kill democracy as surely as the big money that funds and encourages the media outlets, parties and individuals who spew the lies and hate. The ground is all too fertile for those who will only believe whatever best fits their resentment or particular brand of paranoia. It is, as an old song lyric goes, “the self-deception that believes the lie.” The truth will set us free; the lie will make prisoners of us all.

Five Bills

Five Bills That Could Help Fix Our Broken Democracy

 

by John Light

Given recent events in Washington, we wouldn’t blame you for feeling dismayed about the prospect that Congress will be able to fix our broken democracy anytime soon, but there actually are a handful of bipartisan bills that could help.

Aaron Scherb, the director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, told us about five bills he’s watching that are aimed at making our politics more transparent, fair and functional. (Click on “track this bill” to find out how it’s progressing and what you can do to support it. )

• S. 375, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, would require Senators — and candidates for the Senate – to file electronic copies of their campaign fundraising reports with the FEC. Candidates currently only have to file paper reports with the secretary of the Senate, although at least a dozen Senators choose to file reports electronically. The bill is sponsored by Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) and has 36 cosponsors, including six Republicans. The legislation’s proponents argue that filing electronically will make disclosure statements available to the public more quickly at a lower expense. Track this bill »

• HR 1380, the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act would require the Government Printing Office to operate a website where the public could have access to all congressionally mandated reports — such as fundraising reports — in one place. The legislation is sponsored by Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), and has 14 cosponsors including two Republicans. Track this bill »

• The Voter Empowerment Act has been introduced in both the House (HR 12, sponsored by Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), with 176 cosponsors) and in the Senate (S. 123, sponsored by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), with 12 cosponsors). The act would amend various laws governing voter registration to make it easier to vote and harder for states to disenfrancise residents. Among other provisions, the act would require each state to create a website on which residents can register to vote and would establish national guidelines to make it easier to register, including same-day registration. Track this bill in the House and the Senate »

• HR 760, the Readable Legislation Act requires proposed legislation to more clearly lay out which laws that will be affected if the legislation is enacted, and how those laws will be affected. It aims to keep legislators from voting on legislation they don’t fully understand. “It gives members of Congress one fewer excuse to not study bills before voting on them,” a spokesman for the bill’s sponsor, Justin Amash (R-MI) told MLive, adding that it will “allow members of the public to follow what Congress is doing.” Amash has 28 cosponsors on the bill, including nine Democrats. Track this bill »

• The Supreme Court Ethics Act of 2013 has been introduced in both the House (HR 2902, sponsored by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) with 19 cosponsors) and in the Senate (S. 1424, sponsored by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-NY) with 5 cosponsors). It would require the Supreme Court to operate under the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which already applies to all federal judges except Supreme Court justices. Track this bill in the House and the Senate »

Scherb also noted this bill, which Common Cause and its reform-minded allies oppose:

• HR 2019 seeks to eliminate public funding of presidential campaigns and party conventions, and to use the savings for pediatric research. Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS) has 151 cosponsors, 10 of whom are Democrats. Roll Call writes that the reallocation of funding to pediatric research is part of a bid by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to soften the Republican Party’s image. Throwing out public funding, however, would give rich donors even more influence over elections than Citizens United has already granted.

Mickey mouse sailing........

Is this bitter nit-picking or a legitimate complaint?

The China Cup International Regatta was run over the weekend of 25th – 28th October on the waters off Shenzhen, China. In places it was so Mickey mouse one could almost imagine the Sailing Instructions were authored by Walt Disney.

The tone was set at the first day press conference where a representative of China Cup was asked the difference between The America’s Cup and China Cup and which was better.
The response was hilarious ‘Well the America’s Cup only has 2 boats and China Cup has 94 so obviously China Cup is better.’ Apparently the rest of the world disagrees with less than 6,000 total views on Youtube of the (largely 2 minute videos) from China Cup 2012 while the 2 hour offering of the last race of the AC has hit nearly ¾ of a million.

The headline class was the 35 strong Beneteau 40.7 fleet. This is a charter class, supposedly one design, but the boats were hardly equal. Most teams sailed with the supplied sails, paneled Kevlar from Hong Kong Sailmaker, UK Sails but the eventual winners Longcheer Yacht Club bought a set of locally produced paneled laminate sails with a scrim pattern suspiciously like a 3DL copy. They also had a ‘droopy boom’ suggesting a little bit of oversizing going on too!

Final addition was a total lack of Longcheer Yacht Club members on the boat, instead it was peppered with antipodean hot shots with a fair collection of world championships and medals between them. Strange that a yacht club can’t crew a boat with its own yachties. In second place was Vatti Team, the event sponsors, also full of hot shots – but at least they aren’t a yacht club and pros on board can be expected from a commercial team (they used the paneled sails and found it impossible to match Longcheer’s pace with the better sails). 3rd place Yo! protested the sails on the eventual winner and were effectively told to go away – ie their protest was thrown out by the 5 man international jury. As one Yo! crewmember Jamie Wilmot said “If you have a fleet of charter boats, they should all have the same sails.” It was a bit like racing a Porsche with a Volkswagen really.

Local 40.7 Team Tiger also had laminate sails, genuine North Sails this time, but at least they had the decency NOT to compete in the one design class. Only question there is why not IRC for which they have a certificate, instead choosing to dominate HKPN A with a score of 5 bullets throwing away a 2nd place but at least their win was unquestionable.

The Race management also left a bit to be desired with on Day 2 knowing the wind was light (they too were there after all) and knowing there were 3 races scheduled, set a course that took 3 hours to complete (by about half of some fleets – the rest DNF’d) and then crammed two 40 minute sprints in so they could ‘stay on schedule’. Then on the final day with the SI’s stating there could be no starts after 2pm and windward/leeward and an Island Race to complete (the published order) decided to run the latter first meaning that teams were off the water and on the dock by 3pm even though there was plenty time for the windward leeward. There would have been plenty time to run both if the published order had been maintained.

Racing was tight in some of the classes however with RHKYC entry, Nick Southward’s J-109 Whiskey Jack, going into the final day one point down only to turn it around with 2 bullets to take the top spot in IRC B on countback. They have ‘podiumed’ before in China Cup but this was their first overall victory. IRC A was won by the locally built (Zhuhai) and Hong Kong owned MC38, HuaAn Sailing Team driven for most of the week by Hong Kong match racer Peter Backe while the second HuaAn team won HKPN Division 2

Proof that you can fool some of the people all of the time, one owner commented “the organization has got better and better” and sure many sailors had an enjoyable few days sailing on new waters but “better than the America’s Cup?

I don’t think so! - Fan Chuan

A milestone

1500 posts!

Wow, I still can't imagine I have put 1500 posts up in such a short time. I started this Blog because a very close friend started one and my brother also has a Blog in which he posts items occasionally. I was just going to put up a store once in a while about what I was doing, then I decided to post my experience in Greece for the Olympics, which is getting close to ten years ago. That was a very challenging yet fun time for me, though it destroyed my faith in the company I worked for.

In any case I decided to continue to post, mostly on what I was doing around town or a story I thought was interesting. But lately I am posting a lot of stories on political topics, environmental issues, and space. I studied Astronomy and am still fascinated by our universe, though I do not work in the field any more, I do follow current events and discoveries on space exploration and research.

My political views are more keyed on the inequality of our country and the corruption that permeates the government. Since the American media will not come out and say that our government is corrupt, it is true and a lot of people are seeing that, I feel I need to put stories out that show how our government has been corrupted. The sad thing is that many others refuse to open their eyes and see the world for what it is. There was a silent Coupe and American is now controlled and run by a Plutocracy.

Also the sad state of Americans world awareness compels me to speak up. At one time the people of this country cared about and studied foreign relations and were interested in world events. But the education system of this country has been dumbed down so far that most people just can't understand that they are being used. I use as an analogy that Americans are like cattle. The cattle seem happy, they get to eat all they want until the day the are harvested. Even up to that point they don't understand what is happening. The sad thing is that this is happening in other countries, in some cases in worse conditions. The Chinese are now seeming what capitalism can do, you may get the car and TV, but you also get pollution, sickness, corruption and a loss of self identity.

Since the time I started this Blog, I have had some incredibly wonderful events happen in my life and some incredible terrible events as well. I have gone from the high to the low and back. I have not put everything in this Blog, but I see the flow and that is all that matters to me. Life is short and the end will come faster than we like, but while we are here we need to live and explore our world and universe. I hope that you as a reader have gotten something out of what I post. It is what I find interesting and may or may not be a mainstream view but it is part of our world.

XL pipeline and the end of the world....

X-Ray of a Flagging Presidency

 

by Bill McKibben

As the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline has worn on — and it’s now well over two years old — it’s illuminated the Obama presidency like no other issue. It offers the president not just a choice of policies, but a choice of friends, worldviews, styles. It’s become an X-ray for a flagging presidency. The stakes are sky-high, and not just for Obama. I’m writing these words from Pittsburgh, amid 7,000 enthusiastic and committed young people gathering to fight global warming, and my guess is that his choice will do much to determine how they see politics in this country.

Let us stipulate at the start that whether or not to build the pipeline is a decision with profound physical consequences. If he approves its construction, far more of the dirtiest oil on Earth will flow out of the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and reach the US Gulf Coast. Not just right away or for a brief period, but far into the future, since the Keystone XL guarantees a steady flow of profits to oil barons who have their hearts set on tripling production in the far north.

The history of oil spills and accidents offers a virtual guarantee that some of that oil will surely make its way into the fields and aquifers of the Great Plains as those tar sands flow south. The greater and more daunting assurance is this, however: everything that reaches the refineries on the Gulf Coast will, sooner or later, spill into the atmosphere in the form of carbon, driving climate change to new heights.

In June, President Obama said that the building of the full pipeline — on which he alone has the ultimate thumbs up or thumbs down — would be approved only if “it doesn’t significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” By that standard, it’s as close to a no-brainer as you can get.

These days, however, as no one will be surprised to hear, brainless things happen in Washington more often than not, and there’s the usual parade of the usual suspects demanding that Keystone get built. In mid-October, a coalition that included Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell, not to mention the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable, sent Obama a letter demanding that he approve Keystone in order to “maintain investor confidence,” a phrase almost guaranteed to accompany bad ideas. A report last week showed that the Koch brothers stood to earn as much as $100 billion in profits if the pipeline gets built (which would come in handy in helping fund their endless assault on unions, poor people, and democracy).

But don’t think it’s just Republican bigwigs and oil execs rushing to lend the pipeline a hand. Transcanada, the pipeline’s prospective builder, is at work as well, and Obama’s former communications director Anita Dunn is now on the Transcanada dime, producing TV ads in support of the pipeline. It’s a classic example of the kind of influence peddling that knows no partisan bounds. As the activists at Credo put it: “It’s a betrayal of the commitments that so many of us worked so hard for, and that Dunn herself played a huge role in shaping as top strategist on the 2008 campaign and communications director in the White House.”

Credo’s Elijah Zarlin, who worked with Dunn back in 2008, wrote that attack on her. He was the guy who wrote all those emails that got so many of us coughing up money and volunteering time during Obama’s first run for the presidency, and he perfectly exemplifies those of us on the other side of this divide — the ones who actually believed Dunn in 2008, the ones who thought Obama was going to try to be a different kind of president.

On energy there’s been precious little sign of that. Yes, the Environmental Protection Agency has put in place some new power plant regulations, and cars are getting better mileage. But the president has also boasted again and again about his “all of the above” energy policy for “increasing domestic oil production and reducing our dependence on foreign oil.” It has, in fact, worked so well that the United States will overtake Russia this year as the biggest combined oil and natural gas producer on the planet and is expected to pass Saudi Arabia as the number one oil producer by 2017.

His administration has okayed oil drilling in the dangerous waters of the Arctic and has emerged as the biggest backer of fracking. Even though he boasts about marginal US cuts in carbon emissions, his green light to fracking means that he’s probably given more of a boost to releases of methane — another dangerous greenhouse gas — than any man in history. And it’s not just the environment. At this point, given what we know about everything from drone warfare to NSA surveillance, the dream of a progressive Obama has, like so many dreams, faded away.

The president has a handy excuse, of course: a truly terrible Congress. And too often — with the noble exception of those who have been fighting for gay rights and immigration reform — he’s had little challenge from progressives. But in the case of Keystone, neither of those caveats apply: he gets to make the decision all by himself with no need to ask John Boehner for a thing, and people across the country have made a sustained din about it. Americans have sent record numbers of emails to senators and a record number of comments to the State Department officials who oversee a “review” of the pipeline’s environmental feasibility; more have gone to jail over this issue than any in decades. Yet month after month, there’s no presidential decision.

There are days, in fact, when it’s hard to muster much fire for the fight (though whenever I find my enthusiasm flagging, I think of the indigenous communities that have to live amid the Mordor that is now northern Alberta). The president, after all, has already allowed the construction of the southern half of the Keystone pipeline, letting Transcanada take land across Texas and Oklahoma for its project, and setting up the beleaguered communities of Port Arthur, Texas, for yet more fumes from refineries.

Stopping the northern half of that pipeline from being built certainly won’t halt global warming by itself. It will, however, slow the expansion of the extraction of tar sands, though the Koch brothers et al. are busy trying to find other pipeline routes and rail lines that would get the dirtiest of dirty energy out of Canada and into the US via destinations from Michigan to Maine. These pipelines and rail corridors will need to be fought as well — indeed the fights are underway, though sometimes obscured by the focus on Keystone. And there are equally crucial battles over coal and gas from the Appalachians to the Pacific coast. You can argue that the president’s people have successfully diverted attention from their other environmental sins by keeping this argument alive long past the moment at which it should have been settled and a decision should have been made.

At this point, in fact, only the thought of those 900,000 extra barrels a day of especially nasty oil coming out of the ground and, via that pipeline, into refineries still makes the fight worthwhile. Oh, and the possibility that, in deciding to block Keystone, the president would finally signal a shift in policy that matters, finally acknowledge that we have to keep most of the carbon that’s still in the ground in that ground if we want our children and grandchildren to live on a planet worth inhabiting.
If the president were to become the first world leader to block a big energy project on the grounds of its effects on climate, it might help dramatically reset the international negotiations that he allowed to go aground at Copenhagen in 2009 — the biggest foreign policy failure of his first term.

But that cascade of “ifs” depends on Obama showing that he can actually stand up to the oil industry. To an increasingly disillusioned environmental movement, Keystone looks like a last chance.