Bye Bye Big Bird

Mitt Romney came not to kill Big Bird, but to pimp him out. At a campaign stop at Homer's Deli in Iowa today, the GOP android told a crowd of mainly old people that PBS should start running commercials aimed at the pre-school set, who are too lazy to pay taxes.  We just have to stop funding certain programs, he shrilled, even the ones we like. "Stop them! Close them! Turn them off!"

He went through some weird jerky up and down motions to counter his natural stiffness, like a lying Pinocchio trying to convince the audience he is an authentic real live boy. It was the Puppet vs the Muppet!

"You might say, I like the National Endowment for the Arts. I do!  I like PBS. We subsidize PBS. Look, I'm going to stop that. I'm going to say that PBS is going to have to have advertisement. We're not going to kill Big Bird, but Big Bird is going to have advertisements, alright?" 

(But just so you know, he is going kill ObamaCare dead. On Day One!  With no Congressional input and no ads and no borrowing money from China! Watch a blessedly shortened video clip of his hour-long harangue here.  Notice the Deli employees snickering in the background. Notice he lied by omission by not revealing that the federal government funds less than 5% of public broadcasting!)

This idea of defunding Sesame Street, by the way, is as stale and old and Scroogey as the Republicans who first suggested it last century. The Capitol Steps satire group even composed a song about the GOP wanting to privatize PBS, and put it on their "Whole Newt World" album. "This Big Bird can make you rich/In the right market niche" goes one verse to the tune of "Bye Bye Black Bird." The song suggests beer and cigarettes as some lucrative products for Marxist freeloader Big Bird to shill to the two-to-five-year-old demographic. (audio clip here). 

We all know, thanks to the fact that Gail Collins puts it in every one of her New York Times columns, that Mitt Romney is an animal abuser.  He once strapped the family Irish Setter, Seamus, to the top of his station wagon for a vacation to Canada. (Yeah, he was enclosed in a crate with his very own windshield, but the pooch became violently ill en route).  And now, it seems, Mitt doesn't care too much about the psyches of children, either.  According to the American Academy of Pediatrics,

Research has shown that young children—younger than 8 years—are cognitively and psychologically defenseless against advertising. They do not understand the notion of intent to sell and frequently accept advertising claims at face value. In fact, in the late 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held hearings, reviewed the existing research, and came to the conclusion that it was unfair and deceptive to advertise to children younger than 6 years.What kept the FTC from banning such ads was that it was thought to be impractical to implement such a ban. However, some Western countries have done exactly that: Sweden and Norway forbid all advertising directed at children younger than 12 years, Greece bans toy advertising until after 10 pm, and Denmark and Belgium severely restrict advertising aimed at children.

You can take the man out of Bain Capital, but you can't take Bain Capital out of the man.

New York Times Hacked?*

I just got an email from the New York Times, telling me they were sorry I had cancelled my subscription.  That is pretty funny, because I don't even have a subscription.  I get my endless 20 free articles a month by simply cleaning out my browser cache every time my quota runs out.  So at first I thought they had outed me as a cookie cleaning kook and were demanding payment.  After all, the Gray Lady is in a big financial hole.  She just sold a bunch of regional papers out from under the poor slobs who worked for them, and froze the pensions of foreign correspondents at the same time the CEO is leaving with a multimillion-dollar buyout.  Reporters and other staffers are apparently getting ready to storm the office of Publisher Pinch Sulzberger. You can read their open letter here.


Well, it seems that The Times email database of commenters and subscribers has been hacked, and that the emails about subscriptions are pure bogus spam. Or maybe even an inside job from a disgruntled past or present Times worker bee. No word yet if the hacktivist group Anonymous is behind the spoof, although this is the week they had vowed to hack websites of various and sundry oligarchs.  Here's the "Times" email:

Dear Home Delivery Subscriber, Our records indicate that you recently requested to cancel your home delivery subscription. Please keep in mind when your delivery service ends, you will no longer have unlimited access to NYTimes.com and our NYTimes apps.
We do hope you’ll reconsider.
As a valued Times reader we invite you to continue your current subscription at an exclusive rate of 50% off for 16 weeks. This is a limited-time offer and will no longer be valid once your current subscription ends.*
Continue your subscription and you’ll keep your free, unlimited digital access, a benefit available only for our home delivery subscribers. You’ll receive unlimited access to NYTimes.com on any device, full access to our smartphone and iPad® apps, plus you can now share your unlimited access with a family member.†
To continue your subscription call 1-877-698-0025 and mention code 38H9H (Monday–Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. E.D.T.).

Here's more.  The frantic Tweets of panic-stricken Times people are hilarious. And the Times Media Decoder section is running a front-page item online. It's a slow news week matched by a slow response from the newspaper. Here is my favorite reader comment, from Dawn of Princeton:

As a home delivery subscriber who received that e-mail I would like the Times to promptly let me and others know how this happened and most important if our personal information, such as credit card information on file for automated monthly payments, has been compromised. The fact that the Times has responded so slowly to this makes me want to actually cancel my subscription.

* Update, 4:30 pm: The Times now says a disgruntled worker sent out the mass email to 8 million people.  No spam, no hack, no credit card info stolen, no problem.  Martin Weiss of Mexico, MO ain't buying it: 

Keep moving. There's nothing to see here. Fatherland Security was just checking addresses of intellectuals and leftists. (Don't mention the news blackout on Obama signing the NDAA which eliminates the need for jury trials, allows the Army to hold Americans suspected of supporting insurgencies incommunicado indefinitely, and funds internment camps with a capacity of two million.) After all, NY Times staff are above the law and needn't worry about the hoi polloi. Just because the Argentine Junta disappeared over twenty thousand professors, journalists and labor leaders doesn't mean a right-wing fascist coup is in progress here. We don't need the Posse Comitatus or the Bill of Rights anymore, anyway, as government has become an impediment to profits. Are your papers in order?

Bravo, Martin!

Boxing Day Blogging


The USA has finally caught up with the UK and made Boxing Day a legal holiday!  Well, no: since Christmas fell on a Sunday this year, Monday is a day off for most government and higher wage, non-Walmart employees. No mail delivery means no more holiday cards, no packages, no bills. Sob.


Thanks to everyone for your contributions to the Christmas threads. Meanwhile, what other fun holiday stuff did we miss?  Here are a few inspiring yuletide snippets to wreak havoc with your joy bubbles:


It Don't Mean a Thing If You Got Too Much Bling:  Pope Benedict, his snowy pate snuggled inside his jewel-encrusted papal mitre, and his feet toasty warm in their red Prada loafers, announced to the world that there is too much commercialism in Christmas.  Ya think?  I don't know if he actually used the word "bling" in his global address to the globe; the AP translation had it as "glitter."

The King of Bling

I have tried in vain to find a monetary value for the Pope's couture.  When I Googled "Papal Bling" I came up with nada.  Except, of course, from Nextag, which promises to give us the lowest prices on the web for papal finery.  EBay is selling a papal crown replica for a starting bid of just three bucks. 
I did find out that the Catholic Church donated the real deal, the original priceless papal tiara, to the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, where it's on display.  This is the same mega-church where Tiffany Princess Callista Gingrich sings in the choir and where, presumably, the crown jewels of Il Papa are within her view and give her inspiration between shopping trips.  She and Newt. a Catholic convert, are huge fans of the pope, and their production company even made a DVD of the recently beatified John Paul.  Copies of their books are on sale in the Basilica gift shop, along with pope soap on a rope and other trinkets. 

The Papal Tiara

The hat is not for sale, not even to Callista. But here is some glittery glitz that you can buy in the Basilica of Bling Gift Shop.




Jewels for the Ladies




Gold Crucifix Money Clip for the Gents

  Which brings us to....


Yes Virginia, There Is a Virginia:  Santa Claus came early to the Old Dominion, which sensibly dumped both Newt and Rick Perry from its Republican "Super Tuesday" primary ballot, because face it, they just don't have enough fans. The response from Perry, who may have been in a Vicodin haze, was muted. He still respects Virginia, because of its "economic and military strength". But Newt is livid.  He has compared himself to the United States being bombed at Pearl Harbor.  Election rules blindsided him the same way the Japanese blindsided FDR.  Silly old rules, they should not apply to Newt.


Campaign Manager Michael Kroll took to Facebook:

“Newt and I agreed that the analogy is December 1941.We have experienced an unexpected set-back, but we will re-group and re-focus with increased determination, commitment and positive action. Throughout the next months there will be ups and downs; there will be successes and failures; there will be easy victories and difficult days - but in the end we will stand victorious.”

Kroll said he and Newt feel the whole process is just "too cumbersome".  But guess what -- Newt was not bombed.  He did bomb.  And he fell right into the Cumberland Gap. But maybe he will take root in his ditch with the help of his grassroots.  Don't forget that his entire campaign staff dumped him earlier this year when he and Callista dumped them for a Greek vacation.

Merry Christmas!

Feel free to share songs and links and stories.  Cheerfulness not required, humbug welcome.

I want to thank my readers for your kind thoughts and pithy commentary over the past year.  Here's hoping 2012 is good to all of you. 

Karen

Christmas Eve

By Jay - Ottawa

After a big, satisfying dinner exactly 100 years ago the publisher of the New York Times encountered a hungry man in the street. On that occasion the disparity between the two was recognized not just by the poor man but by the rich man as well, and thus was born the Times’ Neediest Fund. For all my irritation with the Times, I salute them for the Neediest Fund and hope that once great paper can bring such needs to the front page for another hundred years.

No philanthropist or charity can possibly meet all the needs of the poor in a nation of our size. However, the government of a big, rich country can come close to that goal -- when it makes the right choices. Today the richest people and their courtiers who run America have no intention of letting the government help its most needy. While neighbors starve in cold alleyways the elites continue to wear a warm smile and spend money, conspicuously, on their pets. (See Reuters photo, previous post.)

For Christians the Christmas story revolves – or should revolve -- around a child born in poor housing to parents barely scraping by. The growing discipleship of Ayn Rand will tell you that Mary and Joseph, like other irresponsible people of today, brought hardship down upon themselves by making poor life choices along the road to Bethlehem and Nazareth and Golgotha.

But why invest in biblical stories of dubious provenance? Moderns should trust in facts that are up-to-date and verifiable. Check reality with measures that stand up to scrutiny. Then chose to respond, somehow. Or not respond.

Thanks to a foreign newspaper I learned that the National Center for Homeless Families (NCHF) just published a report about homeless children in America. Here’s a Twitter-size executive summary: During the course of a calendar year a total of 1.6 million American children experience homelessness. That’s 1 in 45.

The NCHF has an interactive map that allows you to see the homeless child statistics for your state. Just possibly, in light of recent wheeling and dealing in Washington, the numbers will increase dramatically before next Christmas.

The number of homeless kids in my native New York is an embarrassment, despite all the efforts, public and private, to address the needs of poor children. Where does your state stand in the rankings?
http://www.homelesschildrenamerica.org/reportcard.php

There are many reasons to vote for or against certain candidates. I’m not a single-issue voter, but I, like others of you, will hold it hard against certain parties and candidates who have allowed that 1.6 million to suffer in the first place. Just about everything those same powers-that-be do lately tells us that the number of homeless children is sure to increase.

The end-of-year season puts us in mind to ask ourselves and each other, peaceably, how we are to conduct ourselves in the year ahead. By assenting once again to the lesser of two evils will we become increasingly bigger collaborators, despite what we say on the sidelines? To what measurable degree, if any, has the party of lesser evils slowed -- or hastened -- the progress of injustice, compared to the party "In opposition"? Is there a responsible Third Option?

(Ed. Note: In case you missed it, you can watch the excellent 60 Minutes report on homeless children here.)

Don't Spend It All in One Place

The only thing more annoying than media pundits shrilling about Republican intransigence over the payroll tax cut extension is media pundits shrilling about how great this kabuki disaster has been for the president's approval numbers.  It is so easy to round up the usual annoyances right around Christmas time, but this year we have a brand new one:  The White House, that most savvy of social media bastions, has rolled out its own new Twitter propaganda campaign even as it is trying to squelch the tweets of alleged Somali militants.


Since a failure to approve the can-kicking tax holiday will result in an average and immediate $40 deduction from the "typical" ($50,000/year) paycheck, the Obama people are asking "folks" just how they would spend those two missing twenties.  Actually, it is former campaign director turned G.E. millionaire lobbyist turned White House adviser David Plouffe who did the asking. The thing that ticks me off is how they are glossing over the fact that you have to be solidly middle class in the first place in order to "lose" the much-touted $1000 a year.


Thousands of folks have dutifully responded thus far, and the White House has published a few of the stories on its website.  Unfortunately, the stories they have chosen to share are from people who probably don't even come close to earning the $50,000 a year it takes to qualify to lose $40 the first pay period. The stories they have chosen to publish are from people who sound like they could easily qualify for food stamps, Medicaid, and home heating assistance. (They also sound like people who can stretch a dollar to magical proportions: a week of groceries for only $40?) People on the brink of poverty are being fooled into believing Tax Holiday Grinch Theater applies to them.  A few examples the Obama people are using to make their political points:

  
 After everything that comes out, including my mortgage my take home pay is $150.00 every two weeks. So minus forty would be $110.00. I can barely get by now, that forty bucks is my gas for my car to get to work. Taking forty away from my pay would, just about put me under.



A single mother of two, with no financial support from my children's father, 40 dollars means lunch money for my children at school. It means a tank of gas, and it means covering my weekly visit copays to the doctor.


That is almost 1 weeks of groceries for me or how much it costs to fill my gas tank for 1 1/2 weeks or medical copay at the specialist office. Which one am I to go without? This is going to hurt. Please don't let this happen.

Meanwhile, in what was meant to be a feel-good holiday photo-op, President Obama preemptively blew his own $40 on toys for Bo the Dog in PetSmart yesterday.  What a man of the common people.

(Reuters)

Also lost in the gimmickry is the fact that the payroll tax holiday would only be for one more year, and that we will go through this whole fake rigmarole again next Christmas, when the economy will still suck. Does anybody really believe we can make this thing temporary, and that the so-called holiday is not an underhanded plan to turn Social Security into a means-tested welfare program? The Beltway bubbleheads are already fond of calling it an entitlement, rather than an insurance, program -- and pretty soon they will get their wish. Bernie Sanders voted against this "holiday" in the Senate for just that reason. You don't get what you don't pay for. Garbage in, garbage out.

Conventional wisdom, however, is that one more year of tax holiday will do nothing to affect the solvency of the trust fund. And the Bush tax cuts were supposed to pay for themselves too, and they were supposed to expire, and the moon is made of green cheese.

Human Rights Watch Challenges Obama on Drone War

Nobel Peace Prize Winner #1: Mr. President, kindly justify your rationale for using an intelligence agency to wage war instead of the military. Why are you hiding behind the secrecy inherent in the CIA and not providing a full explanation for your targeted Drone strike assassinations in Pakistan and elsewhere? Where's the accountability?  What about international human rights law?  Defend yourself against the accusation that the USA is just another lawless rogue state.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner #2:  Silence.

Okay, so maybe Barack Obama hasn't had time to personally reply to the Dec. 19 letter from the Nobel-winning Human Rights Watch, demanding that he explain the legality of his targeted attack and assassination programs. He didn't reply to a similar letter he received from HRW last year, either. But his minions have repeatedly said such explanations must be kept secret because the CIA is conducting the operations.  And the CIA is a secret agency, you see, now conveniently headed by Iraq/Afghanistan War Gen. David Petraeus, and thus not publicly accountable as is the regular military.

In a statement released yesterday, the same day as the letter, Human Rights Watch said:

In the decade since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush and Obama administrations have engaged in a campaign of “targeted killings” – deliberate, lethal attacks aimed at specific individuals under the color of law. Estimates of the number of deaths of alleged al Qaeda members, other armed group members, and civilians from US targeted killings range from several hundred to more than two thousand.  Most of these attacks are believed to have occurred in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen using unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, armed with missiles and laser-guided bombs.
The lawfulness of a targeted killing hinges in part on the applicable international law, which is determined by the context in which the attack takes place, Human Rights Watch said. The laws of war permit attacks during situations of armed conflict only against valid military targets. Attacks causing disproportionate loss of civilian life or property are prohibited. During law enforcement situations, international human rights law permits the use of lethal force only when absolutely necessary to save human life. Individuals cannot be targeted with lethal force merely because of past unlawful behavior, but only for imminent or other grave threats to life when arrest is not reasonably possible.

Human Rights Watch Director Kenneth Roth, a former U.S. prosecutor, wrote to the president:

The US government should clarify fully and publicly its legal rationale for conducting targeted killings and the legal limits on such strikes. Your administration has yet to explain clearly where it draws the line between lawful and unlawful targeted killings.  The government should also explain why it believes that its attacks are in conformity with international law and make public information, including video footage, on how particular attacks comply with that standard. To ensure compliance with international law, the United States should conduct investigations of targeted killings where there is credible evidence of wrongdoing, provide compensation to all victims of illegal strikes, and discipline or prosecute as appropriate those responsible for conducting or ordering unlawful attacks.
We are particularly concerned about the expanded involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the targeted killings program. International humanitarian law does not prohibit intelligence agencies from participating in combat operations during armed conflicts. However, parties to an armed conflict have obligations to investigate credible allegations of war crimes and provide redress for victims. Because the US government routinely neither confirms nor denies the CIA’s well-known participation in targeted killings in northern Pakistan and elsewhere, there is no transparency in its operations.

Now that Congress has officially declared the entire globe, including the United States, to be an international battlefield in an open-ended war on terror, the lack of transparency about what we are doing, who we are killing, is downright scary.  Concluded Roth :

The CIA, like all US government agencies, is bound by international human rights and humanitarian law.  Unlike the US armed forces, the CIA has provided little or no information regarding the training and composition of its drone teams, or the procedures and rules it follows in conducting targeted killings.  Nor has the government provided information as to whether the CIA has conducted any investigations into possible international law violations and their outcomes.  As a result there is no basis for determining whether the US government is actually meeting its international legal obligations with respect to CIA targeting operations or providing redress for victims of unlawful attacks.  Repeated assertions by senior US officials that all US agencies are operating in compliance with international law – without providing information that would corroborate such claims – is wholly inadequate.

Human Rights Watch might as well be crying in the desert.  The mainstream media and the Democrats have not only given Obama a huge pass on his apparent flouting of international law: they have cheered the assassinations and drone strikes as "foreign policy successes."  Obama himself rankles at criticism that he is soft on terror. “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 other out of 30 top al Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement, or, whoever is left out there," he bragged at a news conference earlier this month.

It takes a tough man to listen to legal advice to tell a drone operator in a Nevada trailer to joystick his way into Pakistan and take out some human flotsam and jetsam in a surgical strike.

Collateral Damage