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Good Morning!
July, 2012
"This is the kind of tedious nonsense up with which I will not put!"
—Alleged marginal note by Churchill, 27 February 1944, to a priggish civil servant's memo objecting to the ending of a sentences with prepositions. The New York Timesversion reported that the Prime Minister underscored “up” heavily.
~Winston Churchill
Flight of the Bumblebee - The Swingle Singers
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News
Washington's press is the cabin boy of the political class – do quote me on that
Desperate for scraps from official Washington sources, many US reporters are now co-conspirators in an ongoing fraud
The weather here in Washington this week was hot and humid. That's on background, of course. Do not quote me. You can use the information only if you attribute to "a beltway source who could not be named because he is not authorised to speak about meteorology".
Here's what you can quote me on: such ridiculous, pusillanimous, deceitful attributions are a standard tool of the Washington press corps, which as a group is too caught up in its own self-importance and petty competition to understand it has become the cabin boy of the political class. In the name of supposedly informing the audience, Washington reporters are co-conspirators in an ongoing fraud.
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These are not whistleblowers being protected, or even insiders going out on a limb. The epidemic of blind quotes [when interviewees don't want to say anything on the record] is a standard way of giving a platform to officials speaking in an official capacity, yet with zero accountability. The practice is also supremely manipulative, giving the most banal information the allure of forbidden fruit.
America meets Austerity
The bottom line, on paper and on TV it seems like a perfect political message. But this is not just about politics. This is policy. Unless the two sides do something, $100bn will be cut from the budget next year. That means about $50bn comes out of the Defence Department, another 50 from almost every government programme.
What will that look like? I can't tell you, because the White House is refusing to say just how its agencies would find the money. Politically, being vague creates a broader panic, and that could increase political pressure. It doesn't take into account how the people who count on these programmes feel knowing the money or services they count on could just disappear next year. What would they do then? That isn't being discussed in this town, but everyone who counts on voters to keep their jobs can tell you how it would hurt the defence industry. Clearly, they have better public relations firms.
US homes drop pay-TV as DirecTV, Comcast, Time Warner lose subscribers
Large numbers of US homes have dropped pay-TV services, with big losses for satellite provider DirecTV, and cable companies Time Warner and Comcast. Rounding up the latest quarterly earnings results issued by major TV providers, Reuters reported today that Comcast lost 176,000 subscribers, Time Warner lost 169,000 customers, and DirecTV lost 52,000.
While Reuters said these losses total about 400,000 American homes dropping pay-TV service since the beginning of the year, it's still a small minority. Time Warner Cable has more than 12 million customers, for example, and many customers simply switched services, as Verizon's FiOS TV and AT&T's U-verse added 275,000 subscribers in the second quarter. The second quarter is traditionally weak because of people moving before summer and college students leaving campus.
However, signs of a shift from traditional TV services to Internet-based ones are there. Time Warner's cable losses were balanced somewhat by the addition of 59,000 Internet subscribers. And across the pond, UK officials are looking toward a future in which the use of TV airwaves can be eliminated altogether. In a House of Lords communications committee report titled "Broadband for all—an alternative vision," officials argued this week that Internet access should be seen as a "key utility" available to all, even in remote areas.
Gray whale baby boom is noted in Alaska and California
The biggest number previously counted was 18, reported in 1982 and 2011. Those tallies were for the full season, which runs from late June/early July until October. But 57 cow-calf pairs were recorded between July 1 and July 26 this year, according to the federal Alaska Fisheries Science Center.
"There's the potential that some of those are repeat sightings," said Megan Ferguson, project coordinator for the Aerial Surveys of Arctic Marine Mammals Project in a phone interview from Barrow. "But the fact that we're seeing a five-fold increase makes me think that it is a real increase."
B.C. government intends to cross-examine pipeline plan
The B.C. government has registered as an official intervenor in the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project Joint Review Panel, and is promising tough questions for the energy company when the final round of hearings on its pipeline begins in September.
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The province has requested eight-and-a-half hours of questioning, but critics say that's too little — and too late.
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"All that's left to them is asking questions 'cause they didn't put their evidence on the table," he said.
Immigrants prove big business for prison companies The U.S. is locking up more illegal immigrants than ever, generating lucrative profits for the nation's largest prison companies, and an Associated Press review shows the businesses have spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers and contributing to campaigns. The cost to American taxpayers is on track to top $2 billion for this year, and the companies are expecting their biggest cut of that yet in the next few years thanks to government plans for new facilities to house the 400,000 immigrants detained annually. After a decade of expansion, the sprawling, private system runs detention centers everywhere from a Denver suburb to an industrial area flanking Newark's airport, and is largely controlled by just three companies.
Impressions from crisis-hit Spain
I spoke to Basilia, a woman in her late forties. She told me her husband, her grown-up sons and her brother are all unemployed. The entire family relies on a state benefit of 420 euros ($510) per month, and this is due to expire in October.
"After that, who knows?" shrugs Basilia. She was contemptuous of government training programmes for the unemployed.
Senate Panel Funds Ships, Drones Military Doesn’t Want
For the first time in over a decade, the Pentagon’s budget has to shrink, thanks to a deal to cut the deficit that Congress and President Obama struck last year. Yet a key Senate panel voted on Thursday to fund big-ticket hardware — ships, cargo planes and drones among them — that the U.S. military is trying to get rid of in the name of saving cash.
When the Pentagon rolled out its requested budget in February, there were some conspicuous absences. The a version of the Air Force’s high-flying Global Hawk surveillance drone, known as the Block 30, was chopped. So was the C-27J, a propeller-driven cargo plane used for Afghanistan. For its part, the Navy opted to retire nine old ships and reroute the cash it would take to modernize them into other priorities.
If the Senate Appropriations Committee, one of the two most powerful in Congress, gets its way, that’s all out the door. On Thursday, the committee voted to approve a $604.5 billion defense budget for the next fiscal year. It’s about $100 million less than what the Obama administration asked for. But it still includes money for the Global Hawk Block 30; the C-27J; and those nine old Navy ships.
Does Cybercrime Really Cost $1 Trillion?
These estimates have been cited on many occasions by government officials, who portray them as evidence of the threat against America. They are hardly the only cyberstatistics used by officials, but they are recurring ones that get a lot of attention. In his first major cybersecurity speech in 2009, President Obama prominently referred to McAfee’s $1 trillion estimate. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the main sponsors of the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 that is expected to be voted on this week, have also mentioned $1 trillion in cybercrime costs. Last week, arguing on the Senate floor in favor of putting their bill up for a vote, they both referenced the $250 billion estimate and repeated Alexander’s warning about the greatest transfer of wealth in history.
In addition to the three Purdue researchers who were the report’s key contributors, 17 other researchers and experts were listed as contributors to the original 2009 report, though at least some of them were only interviewed by the Purdue researchers. Among them was Ross Anderson, a security engineering professor at University of Cambridge, who told ProPublica that he did not know about the $1 trillion estimate before it was announced. “I would have objected at the time had I known about it,” he said. “The intellectual quality of this ($1 trillion number) is below abysmal.”
Obama authorizes secret support for Syrian rebels
President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing U.S. support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government, sources familiar with the matter said.
Obama's order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence "finding," broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.
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A U.S. government source acknowledged that under provisions of the presidential finding, the United States was collaborating with a secret command center operated by Turkey and its allies. Last week, Reuters reported that, along with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Turkey had established a secret base near the Syrian border to help direct vital military and communications support to Assad's opponents.
Rising Peacefully Together
Asia's two biggest powers see each other as a threat. But are China and India destined for conflict?
While China and India feel threatened by each other, cooperation seems like an increasingly attractive course. First, unlike past global powers such as Britain, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, whose rises were accompanied by the capacity to fight massive wars far beyond their borders, China and India cannot rise through expansion backed by military might. Although both countries are arming themselves -- India is now the world's largest arms importer -- their ability to project power is constrained by fundamental social and political challenges at home and by the presence of nuclear weapons in each other's hands and in the hands of several other powers. In short, China and India seek security and respect, not empire.
America's Top Officials Are Dangerously Clueless About The Military
My military colleagues reacted to the request with equal frustration: This guy was a fairly senior White House official, and he didn't understand why sensitive, expensive military assets couldn't instantly be moved from a war zone to foreign airspace with a simple phone call to a Pentagon acquaintance? If the president wanted to make this happen, he could call the defense secretary and direct him to have Centcom undertake such a move (though he'd be unlikely to do so without plenty of discussion at lower levels first), but the chain of command can't be accessed midway down and more or less at random. My military colleagues were insulted: How incredibly ignorant -- and arrogant! -- those White House people were.
The ensuing back and forth was tense and occasionally broke out into open expressions of anger and mistrust. At best, White House staff members considered their military counterparts rigid, reductionist, and unimaginative. At worst, they were convinced that the Pentagon was just being difficult -- that the military "didn't care" about Sudan or about atrocity prevention and was determined to flout the president's wishes by stonewalling and foot-dragging at every turn instead of getting down to work.
The military representatives involved in the discussions were equally exasperated. What was wrong with these civilians? Didn't they know what they wanted? Were they too naive -- or uncaring -- to understand that the potential mobilization of thousands of people and millions of dollars of equipment required greater specificity in terms of assumptions, constraints, and desired end-states? Without that specificity, the range of possibilities was endless. The United States could use nuclear weapons against the Sudanese regime; we could withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan and shift them to Sudan; we could do nothing whatsoever; and we could do a great many things in between. But unless the president wanted to move into crisis-planning mode, ginning up serious plans for any of these options would require months, not days or weeks, and planning for all of them just wasn't realistic.
Putin: NATO should stay in Afghanistan
It's not quite clear from the Reuters story why exactly Putin wants NATO to remain in Afghanistan, though from a strategic perspective, the allies' reliance on the Northern Distribution Network for supplies certainly gives Moscow some international leverage. Russian officials have also repeatedly urged the U.S. to pursue a poppy eradication strategy to wipe out Afghan heroin, which has helped fuel a growing drug epidemic in Russia.
Blog Posts of Interest
The Evening Blues - 8-3-12 by joe shikspack on DailyKos
Freaky Friday: Shelter from the Storm by Lady Libertine on DailyKos
Does a Corporation Have Buddha Nature? by One Pissed Off Liberal on DailyKos
Challenging Tradition by rserven on DailyKos
9 Real Economic Reforms by gjohnsit at DailyKos
Lost Among the Findings in Syria by emptywheel
98 years ago today... by Chico David RN on DailyKos
We Don’t Know How Many Foreclosures Have Happened by David Dayen on FDL News
The Swingle Singers - JS Bach
We are ready for some serious change. We are ready to take up the tools of a free and analytic press to peacefully undermine the stranglehold of the kleptocrats on our battered democracy. We are ready to expose and publicize their greed, lies and illegal machinations and hold their enablers in government and the media to account. Are you in?
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
~ Margaret Mead
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