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December 28, 2011 04:31 PM UTC

Wednesday Open Thread

  • 52 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Malice scorned, puts out itself; but argued, give a kind of credit to a false accusation.”

–Philip Massinger

Comments

52 thoughts on “Wednesday Open Thread

    1. USA Today posted an article examining the latest GOP terrorist tactic to prevent the government from, well, governing:

      When Senate Republicans filibustered President Obama’s nominee to a key consumer watchdog post this month, it was the first time in history the Senate blocked an appointment in an effort to effectively shut down an agency.

      It likely won’t be the last. Already, Senate Republicans are threatening to hold up Obama’s nominees to a number of posts overseeing elections, labor law and health care – and in each case, they aim to kill the agency outright.

      Even some conservatives think this is a bad idea:

      “If your view is that an agency shouldn’t exist, and so you’re going to use your one vote against a nominee, that’s fine. But using the filibuster to raise the bar to 60 (votes), not because they’re awful people, but because you’re trying to delegitimize an agency, that’s very far over the line,” says Norm Ornstein of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

      So once again, the GOP declares nuclear war on the US, but if ever the Dems dare attempt anything that might possibly slow down adoption of the GOP’s radical right-wing agenda, they’ll go screaming “Waah, waah, waah!”

      Scott Gessler is just getting started, to name one example.

    2. It provides literally not one bit of evidence for its premise. Understandable, I guess, since if anyone actually talked about why Congress isn’t doing anything, we’d have to find someone responsible, and blaming both sides exactly equally is much easier.

      You could write this article the exact same way if you had no idea what a Congress actually was or did.  

  1. Vladimir Putin’s world is falling apart

    The thing about harsh authoritarian regimes is it’s not laws, or courts, or the rigid government hierarchy that makes them run. It is fear. And once the fear is taken out of the equation – suddenly, for the vanishing of fear is always sudden – it becomes clear that these courts, laws and hierarchies do not work. Everything just starts falling apart.



    But Putin’s own media is already failing him. Some of his closest aides are sending out friendly signals to the protesters. They have lost the fear, and that means the whole edifice will come tumbling down. That process is unstoppable:

  2. GoDaddy: A glimpse of the Internet under SOPA

    The person on the other end seemed startled that I had actually answered. It was someone from GoDaddy’s abuse department, who informed me that they were “turning off” weebly.com due to a complaint.

    “WHAT?” I said frantically into the phone. He explained that they had received a complaint about the content of a site, and that they were removing the DNS entries for weebly.com because of it. I asked him if they had contacted us previously — he responded that they hadn’t.

    The site in question featured a bad review of a local business, and that business had complained. Why on earth would a domain registrar take it upon themselves to police content?

    As calmly as I possibly could at that moment, I explained to him that Weebly served millions of websites — most of them US small businesses — and asked if he had already changed the DNS entries. He said that he had, but that it wouldn’t hit the system for another 10 minutes or so, and he could quickly revert it. Unbelievable — crisis narrowly averted.

    SOPA will pretty much end most widespread SAAS services like Salesforce.com because there will be at least one of their customers who violate it. And when they do, we all are shut off as their IP addresses are cut off.

  3. Time to end the war on drugs

    Now with a decade of experience Portugal provides a valuable case study of how decriminalization coupled with evidence-based strategies can reduce drug consumption, dependence, recidivism and HIV infection and create safer communities for all.



    The paper, published by Cato in April 2011, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

    So why do we continue to spend lots of money criminalizing drugs when the more effective approach, would also cost us a lot less?

  4. Did you know that your tax bill will be $800 higher in 2011, even if you made the exact same income?  That’s because the Making Work Pay credit didn’t exist in 2011.

    Background: For 2009 and 2010, the Making Work Pay (MWP) credit was a $800 deduction from taxes for joint filers ($400 for singles) who made less than $190,000 ($95,000 for singles).  Congratulations to you if you even knew it existed because it only showed up as an obscure line item on your Form 1040.  So, for the past two years, most joint filers paid $800 less in federal income taxes without even knowing it.  

    Well, that doesn’t exist in 2011 because the credit expired without a whimper.  Now, that hit to the middle/lower classes was tempered by the 2% payroll tax cut in 2011.  A family with $50,000 W-2 income saved $1,040 in taxes in $20/week increases in their paychecks.  

    Here’s the kicker: Those families have already spent that tax break.  When they prepare their 2011 Form 1040 they’ll realize that maybe they should have saved $800 of that payroll tax break to pay for the elimination of the WPT credit.  Oops.

    As obscure as this credit was, watch for this to become an issue in 2012 as more people learn the dirty truth about their 2011 taxes and scramble to pay the extra $800 for their 2011 federal income taxes.

    Discuss.

    1. Gee, I’m shocked…

      What would be interesting is for the Dems to propose continuing this, paying for it with a surtax on millionaires. That would force the Repubs to come out and say tax breaks for the rich, but not the middle class.

      1. If Congress doesn’t act by Jan. 14, the next debt ceiling increase will take place automatically. Where’s all the GOP hysteria this time around? Suddenly they don’t think it’s such a big dealanymore? After all that fuss?

    1. I think the thing is that there is a difference between crazy as in personally eccentric and crazy as in divorced from reality in a way that makes it impossible to function without a keeper.

      Kim Jong Il may have had plenty of the first kind of crazy but the crazy as a fox analysis seems accurate for a “crazy” dictator who managed to maintain complete control internally and manage external affairs in such away as to survive to be removed from power only by natural causes.  Few dictators, crazy or sane, are fairing so well these days.

  5. that the Colorado Board of Education voted (4 – 3) to join the State in the appeal of Lobato.

    Do you think it’s possible that they understand the kind of electrical blow back public education will face if the State has to eliminate a large portion of its vital services?

    (and, I do think education deserves much more funding, but just like at the federal level, it’s going to require additional revenue and new sources.  Cutting alone won’t get it;  you can only cut so many trotters off any one pig . . . )

  6. Not found in the US mainstream media:

    Egypt Islamists vow to protect churches

    Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood says it will protect churches during Coptic Christmas in January in a bid to prevent deadly attacks on Christian places of worship.

    “We have decided to form Muslim Brotherhood committees to protect the churches so that the hands of sin do not ruin the festivities like they did several times under the old regime,” the group said in a statement on Wednesday.

    It urged the ruling military council, which took power when a popular uprising ousted Hosni Mubarak in February, to help secure the churches.

    “We call on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the police to protect the churches in the same way they protected polling stations during the elections,” the Brotherhood said.

    http://news.msn.co.nz/worldnew

        1. Because of the loony proportional representation system in Israel, the fringe religious right parties have to be appeased in order for anyone to form a governing majority but this has really captured the overwhelmingly secular majority’s attention. These religious fanatics don’t just demand hair and neck to ankle cover. They demand that buses in their neighborhoods segregate the sexes and they are even putting up signs demanding the sidewalks be segregated. They stone cars that drive through on Shabbat.

          They’re a small minority who have been considered a pain in the ass, like the neighborhood grump who yells at the kids to get off the lawn, in the past but the 90% of ordinary, almost entirely secular Israelis are finally waking up to the fact that pandering to them because they are needed to form majority coalitions has gotten completely out of hand.

          American immigrants who consider themselves modern Orthodox Jews and move to these areas soon find out they aren’t anywhere near orthodox enough for these folks. They have exactly the same attitude as the morality police of Iran who terrorize women for allowing a strand of hair to escape their head coverings.

          They are as incompatible with a democratic Jewish state as is the insistence, also rejected by the Israeli majority, of a single state solution. And where they get this stuff is a beyond me. As patriarchal as the Torah may be, there’s nothing in it that approaches what these lunatics insist upon. It’s crazy and disgusting.

            1. that no major contribution to advancing the general welfare in the realms of science, medicine, technology, the arts, government or anything else has ever come from the ultra orthodox equivalent of any religion, certainly not from those wings of the Jewish, Christian or Muslim religions.  These groups all represent the worst of mankind’s impulse toward the spiritual with their emphasis on fear of intellectual curiosity, intolerance, dim, joyless view of humanity and insistence on punitive coersion.

      1. In-N-Out and Five Guys both make terrific burgers (and Smashburger is really good). But they’re all different and variety is the spice of life.

        As to a company’s owner’s religion – I figure that’s their business, not mine. Would you boycott a business because the owner is Muslim?

          1. And I really don’t see this as a big deal. Definitely not a reason to boycott a company. There’s a store in Boulder that gave over half their floor space to the Obama campaign in the last month of the ’08 election – should Republicans boycott it?

            1. And if you think none of them did, you’re delusional.

              This is just another part of the capitalist system as it’s envisioned to work by the Republicans – if you don’t like what a company is doing, either product-wise or socially, you’re supposed to boycott it and even protest it – as publicly as possible, really, since the acceptable capitalist way to change a company’s actions is to threaten their business model.

        1. I refuse to support an organization if some of my money (times lots of other peoples’ money) will be going to opposing causes that I believe in.  Similarly, I don’t shop at Walmart.

          There are plenty of places to spend my money – why shouldn’t I spend it somewhere that agrees with me more than just on my taste buds?

          But that’s different from boycotting a business because of religion.  Last I checked I was a Christian, and in addition to the two examples above I’m generally turned off by any store that sticks a Jesus Fish on the store window or by the register.  I’d rather not shop at anywhere that promotes shopping by religious affiliation.

          1. Although this does give me a suggestion for a new chick-fil-a line . . . How about the new “Jesus (or Tebow) Fish Manwich”? —  two perfectly deep-fried fishes on five loaves of bread  — “. . . enough to feed your hungry multitude right through the end of the fourth quarter . . .”

        2. I tried one in Orem, UT over the summer. If your competition is strictly fast food, it’s a contender, but if you want a GOOD burger, keep looking.

          Larkburger and Smashburger are both a lot better.

          1. Not many burger houses can.

            In the olden days, I always knew where my bass player was.  He was tripping on acid and at White Castle.  Whenever he didn’t show up for rehearsal, we’d send someone to go get him.

            I don’t know a thing about In-N-Out.  But when I used to work all night at an ice rink, I could always rely on the cops to bring me a sack of White Castle burgers at midnight.  Can In-N-Out touch that for product loyalty?

            I ate at Chick-fil-a once.  Too salty.  I don’t care what they believe.

            1. I don’t go east very often. It’s been 15 or so years since my last trip beyond Chicago, and either I never saw one or I didn’t keep an eye out. (Come to think of it, it’s been a while since the last time I really spent time in that city – flown there a few time to visit my wife’s family, but they’re well out of the city.)

              I do plan to check them out if I ever chance upon one. We’re going to New England in the summer, if all goes well – are they up there?

                    1. I used to patronize the one on Bloomfield Avenue on the Montclair/Verona border.  It has since been torn down and replaced with a car dealership, the bastards!

                      The cops used to get a sack of burgers for me (“Buy ’em by the sack!”) when they did their midnight patrol of the parking lot.

                      Hard to beat a dozen burgers and a coke for about $2.50.

        3. I just take my stand and not spend my money in certain businesses. Sometimes I let them know why their corporate policies, or their product, offends me, sometimes not.

          Religious fervor almost always drives me away, politics not so much. The Home Depot can give all they want to Republican causes; I’ll be back. But when Lowe’s goes crazy about Muslims–b’bye.

          About burger joints: It’s not the burger, it’s the fries. And no fast food joint does either like a good griller at a regular diner.

    1. and I happily admit I was totally wrong about Nene! In this new atmosphere with everybody sharing the ball and making plays instead of catering to Carmelo, he’s been spectacular. And Miller and Lawson together…wow! And Harrington! Gallo! The entire team chemistry is fantastic.  Even garbage time, most of the fourth quarter in both games so far, looks pretty damn good.  The assists! The steals! The fast breaks! The completely unselfish play! Miller’s a court genius and Fernando is whip smart. Great addition. Can’t think of a single player, no matter how far down the bench, I don’t like.  

      I know the Mavs are struggling and Utah is not at all what it was so we haven’t seen them play an elite team on its game yet  but these Nuggets are going to be joy to root for. It’s like getting rid of Carmelo got everybody out from under a cloud.  

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