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#donaldtrump
#community
#joebiden
#election2024
#abortion
#media
#elections
#law
#democrats
#healthcare
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#labor
#kristinoem
#republicans
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#russia
#culture
#election
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#dailykoselections
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#israel
#education
#supremecourt
#michaelcohen
Midday open thread
by
shanikka
for
Daily Kos
Community
Sunday, Feb. 17, 2013
Sunday, Feb. 17, 2013
at
12:00:08pm PST
Comin' for your ketchup.
Comin' for your ketchup.
With the March 1 sequestration date bearing down upon us (again), the calculus about the adverse impacts has begun anew. On Thursday, Education Secretary
Arne Duncan testified before Congress
about the cuts that would occur in education funding, confirming what we already knew: the states cannot make up for this lost money if sequestration takes effect. This will result in, amongst other things, catastrophic impacts on funding for special needs students, early childhood education and vocational rehabilitation programs.
Massachusetts, following suit, released its own state figures
highlighting things such as the fact that 200,000 LIHEAP recipients in Massachusetts are going to get a cold, rude, awakening when the subsidies keeping them from freezing in their homes (yes, it' s still COLD in Massachusetts) lose funding. But with Congress in recess until February 26, there are just 3 Congress-biz days to solve the problem (again.) The Republicans own the lion's share of the blame for this nightmare, no question. But Democrats in Congress and the Administration must own some of it too. After all, they also agreed to the mechanism through which the nation is being held hostage (again) right up to the fiscal cliff by the Republicans, the Budget Control Act, all while knowing it could cause so much human harm, when it simply didn't have to and could have called the Republican's bluff. The
Administration now saying it doesn't support sequestration
after having signed it into law in the first place is just a little bit too little, too late. Seriously, who really thinks that the debt markets the government insisted upon reassuring by signing the Budget Control Act of 2011 are feeling all that reassured now?
For those who are admirers of the Swiss when it comes to finance, here's another reason to cheer them. On March 3, the Swiss will be holding a
national referendum to (hold on to your hats!) limit executive pay.
The proposal, which landed on the ballot after 100,000 folks signed the "Fat Cat" petition circulated by the owner of a Swiss toothpaste company, would criminalize signing bonuses and golden parachutes and subject executive comp to mandatory shareholder voting. Apparently, the proposed law even has teeth, i.e. prison sentences for executives who violate it. It goes without saying that CEOs operating in Switzerland, which has some of the highest levels of executive compensation in the world (a practice which many Swiss blame, you guessed it, on Americans) think this is a very bad idea. Latest polling indicates, however, that around 65% of potential Swiss voters think differently.
This week, Senator Elizabeth Warren proved that she was everything Republicans feared she' d be when they blocked her appointment as head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Wielding over and over the perfectly reasonable, simple question
"When was the last time you went to trial?"
in a case involving financial malfeasance by the banking industry like a scalpel, Sen. Warren laid to rest without ever having to demagogue the lie that the government has really been trying to hold someone in the financial world liable for having nearly destroyed the world economy with their greed. And all in her first Senate Banking Committee meeting, too. It was a thing of beauty.
Poor Walmart. The global leader in selling cheap crap as cheaply as possible no matter what it does to worker wages and conditions took a bit of a beating in the markets on Friday after Bloomberg leaked internal e-mails confirming that despite its bargain-basement tactics,
Walmart's sales are a "total disaster" so far in February
, following a pretty bad January. The internal e-mails written by one of Walmart's SVP's asked "Where are the customers? And where is their money?" and bemoaned the situation as "the worst start to a month in the 7 years I've been with the company." Damage control quickly insisted that these assessments were mistaken. Time will tell, but suffice it to say, Walmart's stock took a spanking (2.2% loss) following the news.
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway already had a piece of your tater tots, ice cream and insurance. Now,
it owns a piece of your ketchup
, with the company's $28 billion joint acquisition (along with Brazilian investment firm 3G Capital Manager) of H. J. Heinz Company. using $14 billion in financing from JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Since it wouldn't be a newsworthy financial deal without
someone
trying to get greedy, the
SEC has filed suit over "suspicious trades"
that occurred right before the acquisition was announced. And, given that the acquisition has left Heinz beyond "in debt", investor services are already
downgrading Heinz stock
, one service taking it all the way down to "junk" status, despite the company's stock having been very strong prior to the announcement. But who cares, right? (I can't wait for the gecko ketchup commercials to start in earnest, myself.)
In its continuing effort to increase Apple's market share, Microsoft has come up with a
new twist in Office 2013: a "permanent license"
that will be valid on only the
first
computer upon which the software suite is installed. This may seem innocuous until you consider the routine nature of computer upgrades or catastrophic crashes that require a full reformat of the hard drive (like those which Microsoft products are known to cause from time to time). If either of these semi-regular occurrences happen? The user is SOL. Microsoft demurred when an attempt to actually clarify they were going to release a software product in which the original owner could never use the software again once installed on a different computer, was made by tech news folks. Microsoft says that if folks want portability, they need to use a different Microsoft product,
Office 365
, which is a subscription based product (instead of the outright purchase of Office 2013.) Only the genius that is Microsoft could voluntarily trash the market for a brand new product so that it could force people to rent from its cloud in perpetuity. And, as predicted,
consumers are Not Happy
. However, this latest market move combined with its
forcing customers off its Messenger service and into Skype
whether they like it or not merely confirms that Microsoft could care less.
But no worries – once Microsoft forces you into the monthly subscription boondoggle, if you don't pay they can just hire some of the same
collection agencies that are setting new lows
in terms of violating federal and state debt collection laws. One of the worst, purportedly acting on behalf of funeral directors, threatened to dig up the bodies of dead children if the bereaved didn't take care of their outstanding bills. (H/T to Jpmassar for diarying the latest and greatest practices in legal extortion as chronicled in CNN Money.)
It seems that ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) was channeling its inner meter men/maid, if you believe USA Today's report that
ICE was deporting folks at record levels not because ICE was torqued out about illegal immigration, but to fill its immigrant deportation quota.
Following the completely-predictable hue and cry from immigration activists and the Latino community,
ICE insists that it didn't really implement all of the possible steps
to identify potential deportees that were actually authorized, such as mining state drivers' license records to look for "foreign sounding names". But it does not deny the quota thing being part of dictated enforcement policy; perhaps that's because the 210,000 quota was exceeded by 15,000 souls. This story is just another reminder of the unbelievable wisdom of Meteor Blades:
Don't tell me what you believe. Tell me what you do and I will tell you what you believe.
Dear Kim Kardashian: If you marry a man and domicile in a state that has a well-known mandatory 6-month post-petition waiting period before a divorce judgment can issue,
it is not an emergency
if you get knocked up by someone else while you're creepin' and want to have your single status restored before that baby is born. It's called bad planning. Or stupidity. Or being a 'ho. Something along those lines. Even if your babydaddy is Kanye West. This is what happens when, if your husband's version of facts is true, you marry someone only to make millions in bank on the wedding television rights and then diss them just 72 days later by filing for divorce. You should have done the math before you got back into the free and single life. You can
wait for the trial
to see if you get a divorce (what you want) or the marriage is annulled (what your husband wants, claiming fraud) just like everybody else in California trying to get out of a bad marriage (even though, unlike you, most are not trying to beat the clock on the arrival of a bundle o'joy they conceived with someone not their husband.)