Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 10:02 am posted by Jeffrey Billman
I’ve found myself thinking quite a bit lately about the Senate and its arcane and undemocratic rules, and how a super-minority is essentially able to hold up and stymie any substantive progressive. For instance, health care. Scott Brown wins an election in Massachusetts, and suddenly it takes a herculean task to even bring a much-needed, long-overdue up-or-down vote to the Senate floor. Or there’s that son of a bitch Richard Shelby of Alabama, who placed a hold on hundreds of appointments to try to score his home state some sweet, sweet pork.
Jim Bunning, a Republican from Kentucky, is single-handedly blocking Senate action needed to prevent an estimated 1.2 million American workers from suddenly losing their unemployment benefits next month.
As Democratic senators asked again and again for unanimous consent for a vote on a 30-day extension Thursday night, Bunning refused to go along.
And when Sen. Jeff Merkely (D-Ore.) begged him to drop his objection, Politico reports, Bunning replied: “Tough shit.”
Bunning says he doesn’t oppose extending benefits — he just doesn’t want the money that’s required added to the deficit. He proposes paying for the 30-day extension with stimulus funds. The Senate’s GOP leadership did not support him in his objections.
And at one point during the debate, which dragged on till nearly midnight, Bunning complained of missing a basketball game.
It’s one thing to debate the propriety of the filibuster. Indeed, perhaps some changes should require extraordinary measures (but hell, even Robert Bork got an up or down vote; he just lost). But the fact that one guy — a backbencher on a minority party, no less — is able to fuck over more than 1 million Americans by himself, when even his own party doesn’t agree to his objections … that’s just nuts.
Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 7:36 pm posted by Holly Otterbein
In this week’s A Million Stories, we explored the messy Webcam scandal that’s going down at Lower Merion School District. The district insists that it only peered through students’ Webcams in order to find lost or stolen laptops, and did so using a security software called LANrev. Insanely enough, Douglas Young, the district’s spokesperson, told us that it wasn’t the only school district using such software: “The software feature isn’t just utilized in this school district,” says Young. “It’s utilized by other school districts and organizations.” (He said he couldn’t name any offhand.)
Dude wasn’t kidding. Young might be onto something. In the thoroughly creepy clip above from the PBS documentary Digital Nation, the assistant principal of Bronx’s middle school IS 339, Daniel Ackerman, shows exactly how he can watch kids through their Webcams — what software or application he does it with, though, is unclear. Just wait for the part where he says, “They don’t even realize that we’re watching.” Oy. Also: “I always like to mess with them and take their [Photo Booth] picture.”
Now, it’s unclear if Ackerman watches students from their homes, which is what Lower Merion is accused of doing, but still — the students don’t even realize he’s watching them? Seriously, he thought that was OK? Be sure to watch this clip on PBS’ site, too (it’s under part four). Not only is the doc great in general, but the reporter (whose face is obscured in the YouTube video) has an absolutely stunned, unamused look on her face as Ackerman is laughing about the whole thing.
UPDATE: I wasn’t clear enough earlier about whether or not Ackerman was using LANrev to view these students — indeed, from this clip, it’s impossible to know.
Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 2:00 pm posted by Jeffrey Billman
Keep this in mind if/when you’re watching the healthcare summit, and/or the coming budget debates. Conservatives give lip service to cutting costs, lowering taxes, etc.When it comes time to actually choose what to cut, however, the support evaporates (except for “foreign aid,” which is an insanely tiny proportion of the federal budget, and “welfare programs”).
Conservatives agree that the government spends too much. But ask them what to cut …
At last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty called on the attendees to imitate the wife of Tiger Woods: “We should take a page out of her playbook and take a nine iron and smash the window out of big government in this country.”
But there’s a problem for Pawlenty and the activists who cheered him: Rank-and-file conservatives actually like big government.
In 2008, the American National Election Study asked a national sample whether federal spending on 12 different programs should be increased, decreased or kept about the same.
As the graph above illustrates, the respondents who identified themselves as “conservative” or “extremely conservative” had little appetite for specific spending cuts.
Very few conservatives said they favored reducing (or cutting out altogether) spending on any program. The least popular program proved to be childcare — with a grand total of 20 percent of conservatives saying they’d slash it. The most popular is highways; only 6 percent want to cut spending there. Even bugaboos like welfare and foreign aid fare well, attracting the ire of only 15 percent of conservatives. Amazingly, the survey found that, on average, 54 percent of them actually wanted to increase spending.
Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 1:18 pm posted by Jeffrey Billman
The Inky has an interesting new twist on Webcamgate today (h/t to the Clog commenters for hipping me; I hadn’t read the paper this morning).
The vice chairman of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission could scarcely contain his scorn.
Before the commission was yet another appeal from a Philadelphia-area family, again seeking a break on unpaid electric and gas bills that by last year were closing in on $30,000.
This family lived in a $986,000 house on the Main Line. The breadwinner, until recently, had earned well more than $100,000 per year. Yet he and his wife were in hock to creditors, ranging from Uncle Sam to their former synagogue - and had regularly been stiffing Peco Energy for five years, breaking payment plan after payment plan.
“Our procedures,” the commission’s Tyrone J. Christy wrote in a Dec. 17 motion, “were not meant to allow customers living in $986,000 houses, with incomes in excess of $100,000 per year, to run up arrearages approaching $30,000.”
The debtors in question were insurance broker Michael Robbins and his wife, Holly, who now find themselves in the national spotlight after suing the Lower Merion School District, saying it allegedly spied on their child at home via a Web cam on a school-issued laptop.
What’s more, it seems the reason Blake’s computer may have been considered stolen — and hence, why the district may have snapped a picture of Blake, at home, popping Mike and Ikes or whatever the hell he was doing — is because the debt-ridden family declined to pay the $55 insurance fee that allows students to take their Macbooks home.
The Robbins’ attorney, Mark Haltzman, says these are questions newspapers shouldn’t be asking.
“I absolutely advised them, because I know the low level that newspaper people will go to for a story,” Haltzman said yesterday, “even if it has nothing to do with the merits of the case.”
[snip]
“Why does that matter?” Haltzman said when asked about the debts this week. “This is typical of any time someone stands up for their rights. Everyone tried to find a way to bring them down.”
Even so, it was the apparent failure to pay a fee - a $55 insurance payment to permit the Robbinses’ son Blake to take his laptop home from Harriton High School - that might have prompted the district to activate the Web cam.
Right. Because you get to accuse school officials of spying on their children in their homes — their bedrooms, even — and no one’s going to question your motives.
Doesn’t make the school district’s policy choices correct, but at least the pieces are starting to fall in place.
Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 11:42 am posted by Isaiah Thompson
C-Span
It’s on — and it’s kind of amazing. Whether you like President Obama’s health care plan or not — the spectacle of Obama leading the Congress in a live discussion (a debate, really) over health care is, I think, totally unprecedented.
I suggest checking it out, even if just for a few minutes.
Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 12:30 am posted by Jeffrey Billman
A weird, weird poll out of Franklin & Marshall tonight: According to f&m, less than three months out from the May primary, three of our Democratic gubernatorial candidates are tied … at 6 percent each. Seriously.
Oh, and no one’s really paying attention to any of the other races either:
So, let me get this right: In a choice between Specter, who’s been this state’s senator since, you know, forever, and Toomey, the former congressman/Club for Growth corporate whore who nearly knocked off Specter six years ago — hardly an unknown character — the winner is “I don’t know”? Or that, in the relatively high profile race involving a longtime Repub who switched parties and a Navy admiral who pissed off his own party to challenge him, more than 51 percent of the electorate hasn’t the slightest clue who they’ll support less than 90 days from Election Day? Or that, in the freaking race for the freaking governor of the freaking commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the most any Democrat can muster is 6 freaking percent (in a poll, I should mention, with a 4.5 percent margin of error)?
Either this poll is all kinds of screwy, or Pennsylvania’s voters are just ridiculously (and dangerously) uninterested and politically illiterate. If it’s the latter, it doesn’t bode well for our little experiment in democracy.
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 3:49 pm posted by Holly Otterbein
It looks as though the Army Corps of Engineers may — may — finally begin deepening the Delaware River this Friday, for realsies.
As we told you before, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network and four other environmental groups filed an appeal earlier this month with the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals to stop the deepening project; in response, the Army Corps agreed to not begin deepening until Feb. 26. The environmental groups then filed a stay-pending appeal to keep the deepening project from moving forward whatsoever before the court could consider their original appeal in full.
Well, Delaware Riverkeeper Maya van Rossum just informed the Clog that the court did not issue the groups a stay-pending appeal. Translation: It’s a go for the Army Corps.
This says nothing about the outcome of the appeal, but still. Coupled with the fact that the Army Corps awarded the deepening contract for “Reach C’ — an 11-mile segment of the 100-mile-long project — to Norfolk Dredging Co. yesterday at 5 p.m., and that the Army Corps said it would only hold off from deepening until Feb. 26, this means deepening is kinda definitely gonna start on Friday. But only kinda definitely. As Ed Voigt, the Philadelphia Army Corps’ chief of public and legislative affairs, put it in all its vague glory yesterday:
No actual, physical channel deepening work will begin before this Friday, Feb. 26, per our recent commitment to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Also, we will not commence actual deepening work until the project sponsor completes the purchase of all Emission Reduction Credits (ERC’s) needed for Clean Air Act conformity. (We anticipate that will also be wrapped up by the end of this week.) If we have the ERC’s by then and the 3rd Circuit does not direct us otherwise, deepening could — let me repeat, COULD — begin as early as this Friday.
This means that, theoretically, the Army Corps could deepen “Reach C” only to later be told by the court that it couldn’t finish the rest of the project. We’ll keep you posted.
The guys—Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and Chris Wink—are certainly good at getting their names out there: The trio appeared last spring at BarCamp Philly, a gathering of veteran journalists, to explain the virtues of their approach. And if that approach appears to be a combination of web links, brief stories and occasional interviews that skim the surface of the local scene—well, who’s to say that isn’t the future of media?
Technically Philly, coincidentally, is celebrating its first b-day at 7:30 p.m. tonight, at the University of the Arts (211 S. Broad St., Terra Building, Room 1107). It’s free, but you need to RSVP.
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 9:00 am posted by Isaiah Thompson
In my cover story last week (”Drill Baby Drill”), I described, among other things, the potential for wastewater spills from hydraulic fracturing, the process used to drill for gas in the Marcellus Shale.
In the latest news of contamination linked to drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale, a Pennsylvania driller has admitted to dumping some 200,000 gallons of drilling wastewater into an abandoned well just outside of Allegheny National Forest.
The story was reported today by Pro Publica, a non-profit dedicated to investigative journalism in the public interest:
As part of a plea agreement with the U.S. attorney for western Pennsylvania, part-owner Michael Evans, 66, of La Quinta, Calif., and John Morgan, 54, of Sheffield, Penn., admitted dumping 200,000 gallons of brine – salty wastewater that’s created in the drilling process – down an abandoned oil well. The maximum penalty for both Evans and Morgan is three years in prison, a fine of $250,000, or both. Sentencing will be June 24. Attorneys for both men declined to comment.
Swamp Angel Energy was drilling in the Allegheny National Forest, in McKean County in northwestern Pennsylvania, and the brine was dumped just outside the border of the federal land.
The company, Pro Publica reports, has 77 active, permitted wells in Pennsylvania, all in McKean county.
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 5:49 pm posted by Jeffrey Billman
They totally love him, so much more so than his “populist” Democratic competitors. He’s the “most pro-business,” after all, which means … tax cuts! Check out this invite to a big-money funder (written by a corporate lobbyist) obtained by, of all places, the Daily Kos (and check out the employers of the folks to whom this e-mail was addressed):
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 5:00 pm posted by Jeffrey Billman
The next time some right-wing, blithering idiot tries to tell you the stimulus did nothing and helped no one, except for Acorn, maybe — which Republican pols tend to say right before they try to score some sweet, job-creating stim money — show them this:
As it turns out, according to none other than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus package has saved or created somewhere between 1 million and 2.1 million full time jobs (and up to 3 million in “full-time equivalent employment,” whatever that means). Yeah, we have an unemployment problem. And sure, we can debate whether the stim was too small, or too big, or too whatever, or that we should have taken another approach. But no longer should this insidious, deceitful right-wing meme stand unchallenged; after all, now we have facts and data.
Of course, that presumes that facts and data matter to the right wing noise machine.
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 4:10 pm posted by Jeffrey Billman
The Utah legislature — 78 percent of whom are male, coincidentally — has just passed a law that will, in essence, make it a crime for a woman to have a miscarriage. Of course, that’s not what the bill’s backers say they want to do. Heavens no. Rather, they just want to crack down on women who pay men $150 to beat them up so they will miscarry, which has happened, you know, once. A scourge, truly.
But in their push to ban everything that even remotely resembles abortion but isn’t protected under Roe v. Wade, this Christianist crusade may well produce some unintended consequences. Actually, that’s not quite right. Does it still count as “unintended” if they know about them in advance, and don’t care? See, the bill criminalizes — we’re talking homicide charges, here — “a woman’s ‘intentional, knowing, or reckless act’ leading to a pregnancy’s illegal termination.”
In addition to criminalizing an intentional attempt to induce a miscarriage or abortion, the bill also creates a standard that could make women legally responsible for miscarriages caused by “reckless” behavior.
Using the legal standard of “reckless behavior” all a district attorney needs to show is that a woman behaved in a manner that is thought to cause miscarriage, even if she didn’t intend to lose the pregnancy. Drink too much alcohol and have a miscarriage? Under the new law such actions could be cause for prosecution.
“This creates a law that makes any pregnant woman who has a miscarriage potentially criminally liable for murder,” says Missy Bird, executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund of Utah. Bird says there are no exemptions in the bill for victims of domestic violence or for those who are substance abusers. The standard is so broad, Bird says, “there nothing in the bill to exempt a woman for not wearing her seatbelt who got into a car accident.”
Such a standard could even make falling down stairs a prosecutable event, such as the recent case in Iowa where a pregnant woman who fell down the stairs at her home was arrested under the suspicion she was trying to terminate her pregnancy.
Um… Utah? If every miscarriage is a potential homicide, how does Utah avoid launching a criminal investigation every time a woman has a miscarriage? And women have a lot of miscarriages: one in four pregnancies end in a miscarriage. And how is Utah supposed to know when a pregnant woman has had a miscarriage? You’re going to have to create some sort of pregnancy registry to keep track of all those fetuses, Utah. Perhaps you could start issuing “conception certificates” to women who get pregnant? And then, if there isn’t a baby within nine months of the issuance of a conception certificate, the woman could be hauled in for questioning and she could be indicted for criminal homicide if it’s determined that she intentionally or accidentally induced a miscarriage. Of course, lots of women miscarry before they even realize their pregnant… so Utah will have to pass another law, one that compels all sexually active women—actually, let’s just say all women, Utah, since some sexually active women claim they’re chaste—to come in for mandatory monthly pregnancy tests…
The bill is now in the governor’s hands. The governor is, of course, a man. And like the male-heavy Utah legislature — though, in fairness, the bill was sponsored by a woman in the Senate — he knows better than you little women what to do with your bodies. In the meantime, don’t fall down stairs, ladies.
Oh, by the way, Utah Dems tried to get that egregious “reckless” word out of the bill, because, you know, in theory, a preggo woman going back to an abusive spouse could qualify. Republican Sen. Margaret Dayton, the bill’s sponsor, patted them on the head, and said, without a hint of irony:
“I don’t think we want to go down the road of carefully defining the behavior of a woman.”
Of course, the Utahans have nothing on my former home state, where wingnut legislators want to not only ban all abortions, but send abortion docs to prison for life. Up yours, Roe v. Wade.
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 12:09 pm posted by Jeffrey Billman
Friend of the Clog Brian James Kirk is running an interesting series over on ex-Inky columnist Tom Ferrick’s Metropolis Web site this week, looking at the widespread use of surveillance video cameras by Philadelphia police. Check out part one here, and part two here. Part three, Brian tells me, should be up later today.
In any event, here’s a sample:
When it comes to fighting crime, Philadelphia is undergoing a video revolution. Within a few short years, the city is likely to be blanketed by a network of more than a thousand state-of-the-art, high resolution cameras, scanning high-crime areas, critical structures such as the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, SEPTA stops and inner city streets.
The sweeping program had a modest beginning.In 2007, Mayor John Street and the Philadelphia Police Department announced a $10 million initiative to install 250 surveillance cameras around the city. These are high resolution Unisys digital video cameras that, if perched on a street light, can pan, tilt and zoom into details, such as a person’s face or a license plate number, from a full city block away.
Today, 117 of the planned 250 cameras are in operation, perched above streets with their tell-tale blue lights blinking. Another 76 are covered by plastic bags awaiting network configuration.
But this is only the beginning. The number of cameras on the network is expected to expand exponentially in the near future. City officials are working on ways to link their Police Department operation with surveillance cameras used by such parties as SEPTA, local universities and private businesses to create a super-network of public space surveillance that can feed images back to the video monitoring room at Police Headquarters at Eighth and Race Sts.
These cameras, Brian writes, allow cops to zoom in on things like faces and license plates from up to a block away. Go take a read, it’s worth a few minutes of your time. While you’re at it, bear in mind that while the cops love taking pictures of you, they may well arrest you for reciprocating.
Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 4:03 pm posted by Andrew Thompson
Back in October, I wrote about simmering tensions between newcomers and old-heads in Point Breeze, the mostly derelict, violent, drugged-out, blighted neighborhood south of Washington Ave on the West side of Broad Street that had accrued such a reputation as to be designated for federal funds to make it slightly more livable. At that point, push-back to the newcomers was more of a tacit sentiment than a force with any organization.
Now, the latent antipathy has become at least as organized as a flier distribution program. The “Save Point Breeze” campaign, started by Concerned Citizens of Point Breeze, is perhaps the most visible sign of resident-rage yet at the prospect of wealthy white folk coming into the area and building condos and living with their dogs - dogs they will, undoubtedly, take for walks. The flier shows the Sidecar cafe at 22nd and Christian Streets as an example of doom that could potentially befall Point Breeze residents, raising their property values and and wreaking havoc on their idyllic Eden.
The link above gives a “list of demands” CCPB has for the Philly Planning Commission, among which is that Point Breeze residents have priority for jobs at the new Philly Live complex, to be built neighborhoods away. Also demanded is tax amnesty for old residents who may be kicked out of their homes and a strict prohibition on condos.
I think we can all agree that the best thing for Point Breeze is to keep it poor and segregated.
Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 12:20 pm posted by Jeffrey Billman
John Yoo, our favorite Bush administration torture apologist/Inky columnist, is back in the news. Last week, as reported by Newsweek, senior Justice Department officials overruled department investigators — who ruled that Yoo and Jay Bybee (now a federal judge), two lawyers in the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, had violated their ethical obligations as lawyers when they authored a 2002 memo that basically authorized the Bush administration to torture anyone they wanted, anytime they wanted, because why the hell not — and reported that Yoo and Bybee had indeed shown poor judgment, but had not committed professional misconduct.
While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.
In a follow-up, also from Newsweek, we learned precisely how insane Yoo’s outlook on executive authority is.
The chief author of the Bush administration’s “torture memo” told Justice Department investigators that the president’s war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be “massacred,” according to a report released Friday night by the Office of Professional Responsibility.
[snip]
At the core of the legal arguments were the views of Yoo, strongly backed by David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, that the president’s wartime powers were essentially unlimited and included the authority to override laws passed by Congress, such as a statute banning the use of torture. Pressed on his views in an interview with OPR investigators, Yoo was asked:
“What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? … Is that a power that the president could legally—”
“Yeah,” Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. “Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief’s power over tactical decisions.”
“To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?” the OPR investigator asked again.
“Sure,” said Yoo.
Yoo is depicted as the driving force behind an Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department memo that narrowly defined torture and then added sections concluding that, in the end, it essentially didn’t matter what the fine print of the congressionally passed law said: The president’s authority superseded the law and CIA officers who might later be accused of torture could also argue that were acting in “self defense” in order to save American lives.
Yoo, now a law professor at Berkeley, is a member of the State Bar in Pennsylvania. If you’re so inclined, you can sign a petition to have him disbarred here.
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