About time

This is something I think those of us who travel a lot want to hear almost daily. This from Time Magazine:

Kids will be kids, but one cranky 2-year-old was acting too much his age for a Southwest Airlines flight crew who kicked him off a plane getting ready to leave for San Jose.

Pamela Root says she was confident her son Adam's screams of "Go! Plane! Go!" and "I want Daddy!" would subside once the plane took off Monday in Amarillo, Texas.

But she says the plane taxied back to the gate and the pair was escorted off.

The 38-year-old stay-at-home mom wants an apology and compensation for the portable crib and diapers she had to buy for the extra night away from home.

Southwest spokeswoman Marilee McInnis says removing a crying child from a flight is unusual, but crews have leeway to resolve situations.

McInnis says the airline is looking into the incident.

50 Billion

The United States taxpayers spent about 50 billion dollars bailing out General Motors last year. Now the people own about 61 percent of the company, which seems like about the worst deal possible.

Banks that were bailed out last year have actually been paying back some of the money used to bail out their terrible investments and strange financial investment strategies.

Poor management in the giant businesses are the obvious targets for taxpayer anger. In fact, they are completely responsible for running banks and car makers into the ground. What is hard to understand is why we continue to bail out companies that are probably not really in a long range forecast. The world is changing and the problem with GM is that it is not trying to do anything for the future, it still remains focused on a time when gas was cheap and people drove everywhere.

The money wasted on GM and many of the banks too big to fail would have been better spent looking to the future and how to build the type of economy that will be profitable in that near future. Things we all know, the gas engine will become too expensive to run, so for starters, why not spend a billion or 2 on companies that are developing a future mode of transportation that is not based on a fuel source that is almost played out.

One thing I always find frustrating is when a city faces an expensive fix for a road or bridge, and here I am thinking of the "big dig" in Boston, the bridge in Minneapolis that fell into a river and the Viaduct in Seattle that is about to fall apart, and how these cities always choose to just build or rebuild the exact same car-centric travel option. Great cities that have been great for a long time and will probably be great for a long time have systems that transport thousands of people via train or metro. This serves a city in a variety of ways, not the least of which is keeping cars out of the core of the city. What are these city "leaders" thinking when they spend billions on rebuilding a failing road system?

One of the sad aspects of American thinking is always reacting in the face of tragedy or danger, and never thinking proactively before they face terrible choices. Example? 9-11 security. Only after planes started crashing into buildings did airports start getting serious about making sure passengers did not carry materials or weapons onto planes. Guess what? The next terror attack will be doubtfully involve planes. We reacted in an absurd manner to justify security that will no longer keep us any safer.

That same backward thinking is true in bailing out banks and car companies. First, the banks wounds were self inflicted. Idiocy and greed ruled the day and instead of letting these idiots suffer, the Bush administration decided that the too big to fail tag would justify hundreds of billions in short sighted bail outs. When it comes to GM there really is no justification for bailing out this ailing car company. The few jobs that were saved will be gone because the management and design teams in place will not be gone soon enough. The idiots are the same as the bankers, as long as they get bailed out they will not be forced to learn from the mistakes.

By the way, at the height of its profitability, General Motors was valued at 57 billion dollars. Which means, obviously, that when it was just about to go out of business, the American taxpayers paid top dollar and more for a company that can probably never turn itself around and become an industry leader. Think to yourself for a minute, when was the last time you considered a GM vehicle as a possible purchase? For me, I have never thought GM made a good car that I would be proud to own.

d o u c h e

Recovery at long last

Labor department is spinning the latest unemployment figures with the strangest language possible. "The number of people claiming jobless benefits for the first time dropped less than expected last week, evidence that the labor market remains weak even as the economy is recovering."

Dropped less than expected? So, experts expected more people to file for unemployment, but fewer did, and that is a signt he economy is turning around? "I was a little less pregnant than you may have expected, otherwise, I remain pregnant."

This jobless recovery every economist seemed to be yammering about is interesting. The economy is showing signs of life after months of record breaking foreclosures and a hardly breathing GNP. Here is what I think the economists from the ivory towers of New York City may not be aware of, a jobless recovery is no recovery at all. Sure, the people investing after the market fell below 6000 may be raking in profits, but the people who lost their homes and their jobs and are finding a jobless recovery means just that are not celebrating the billions in profit reported by Bank of America.

Jobless means all sorts of things, but if you describe yourself as jobless the very last thing you want to hear is that the national economy is celebrating you. These are getting to be desperate times for many people. The experts looking at real unemployment nationwide hovering around 10 percent and reporting that the economy is getting stronger are not living in the real world. You can not report one week that more people are homeless and going without meals and have no healthcare and then try to spin that story about how as long as bonuses are being dolled out on Wall Street, people just barely surviving should be smiling.

Health care joe

Found this explaination about senator Joe Liebermans latest betrayal to the democratic leadership. I think it fits the shmuck.

Back when establishment Democrats (like Obama!) were trying to convince us loony internet liberals not to campaign against Joe Lieberman, you heard a lot about how Lieberman is only a conservative on foreign policy, and not domestic issues. (How his full-throated support for any bombing campaign against any Muslims anywhere in the world is supposed to be not as big a deal as the fact that he doesn't want to publicly execute gays or whatever has always been beyond us, but that is what we were told.) Now he's pissed that distinction away.

We all know that Vinegar Joe Lieberman is a sanctimonious, thin-skinned, self-satisfied monster. And a pious, amoral scumbag. And a narcissistic, deluded underminer who represents everything that is wrong with the United States Senate. And a war-mongering, concern-trolling religious zealot. And, generally, a bastard. And probably a racist. But why would this weasel-human hybrid who is actually literally slowly receding into his own asshole a little bit every day suddenly pipe up on health care reform with a position at odds with most Connecticut residents and a vast majority of the Democrats he claims to represent?

Because no one had been paying attention to him! (And also because he is owned by the various insurance companies of Connecticut. Like he is literally Aetna's personal offensive Jeff Dunham puppet. Well, they have to share him with AIPAC.)

This is the thing, Joe. The opt-out public option is a conservative compromise. It is a compromise from a non-opt-out public option, which is a compromise from a non-opt-out public option tied to Medicare rates, which is a compromise from a non-opt-out public option tied to Medicare rates and open to everyone, which is a compromise fromsingle-payer. You would like a further compromise, to "no health care reform, at all, unless the Democrats all kneel down and blow me, as I will demand they do whenever they might need my vote, from now until I finally decide to caucus with the Republicans, which will only happen if the Republicans take the majority and the Democrats stop blowing me periodically."

And, obviously, his literal, stated objections to the bill are not based in any way on reality.

So the question basically is, what is his end-game here? What the fuck is he doing?

Whether Joe Lieberman will run for reelection in 2012 is currently a mystery. He has $1.4 million in the bank, which is a lot, but not as much as he had in 2006.

He also is polling rather terribly in Connecticut, where Democrats and independents both prefer real Democrats. He could run as a real Republican, but, as we said, those independent voters he needs to win do not like him, at the moment.

So our "what is Joe Lieberman doing" possibilities are:

• He is just following the golden path of his own of self-delusion, thinking he will be remembered as a mavericky hero who bucked the status quo once he retires in 2012.
• He's going all-in as a Republican in the desperate hope that a 2012 GOP landslide will win him one more term.
• He is just trying to sink health care completely for his insurance company friends, who will give him a lucrative post-Senate job.
• He is just trying to force Harry Reid to pay him fealty once again, because it makes him feel nice.
• He is just a prick.

Weirdly, Lieberman said he'd vote to bring the bill to the floor, and then he'd support a GOP filibuster. A GOP filibuster is decidedly not a sure thing, though it certainly moves one step closer to a sure thing every time Joe Lieberman opens his mouth. Christ, what an asshole.

How much does it cost?

Two House Democrats are planning to introduce amendments Tuesday to exempt small- and medium-sized companies from a key post-Enron reform. Consumer advocates and investor groups say that the proposed exemptions would severely undercut protection for investors and increase the chances for financial fraud.
Reps. John Adler of New Jersey and Carolyn Maloney of New York will attempt to amend the Investor Protection Act of 2009 -- a bill designed to beef up investor protection -- by adding in provisions that will undermine the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the 2002 law designed to increase investor confidence that was enacted after accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom rocked investors. The law was supposed to improve the accuracy, reliability, and transparency of corporate financial reporting by requiring firms to audit their financial statements and internal controls.
Adler, a member of the pro-business New Democrat Coalition, is proposing to exempt publicly-traded firms with market capitalization less than $700 million from a provision of Sarbanes-Oxley mandating an external audit of the firm.
Specifically, Adler's provision calls for "less stringent requirements" for these firms, and would require the Securities and Exchange Commission -- the federal watchdog overseeing the capital markets -- to develop rules that would ease the "burden" on these firms. But until the SEC developed those rules, firms worth less than $700 million would be completely exempt from mandated external audits.
"With the nation once again suffering the devastating effects of a financial scandal in which poor financial reporting played a significant role, investors should be able to trust that their representatives in Congress will pursue reforms that strengthen, rather than weaken, investor protections," wrote Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, in a letter to Adler obtained by the Huffington Post. In addressing Adler, Roper writes, "Your...amendment fails that test."
A former high-ranking official at the SEC was even more blunt.
"What Adler is really doing is dialing for dollars," said Lynn E. Turner, chief accountant for the SEC from 1998 to 2001. "He's got a job that he wants to keep, and he has to run for that job every two years. So this is probably a strong indication that Adler couldn't care less about investors, and cares much more about getting the money so he can keep his job."
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been fighting for just such a reprieve for its member companies for years, arguing that one such post-Enron provision -- requiring public companies and their independent auditors to publicly disclose the effectiveness of the company's internal controls -- has been implemented in a way that creates "extraordinary and unnecessary burdens that are disproportionate to identified benefits."

Feeling sick

Here is something to chew on. For the fourth time in 3 months I am back at the emergency room. First, this is a great hospital and the crew all seems very qualified. That is not the reason I am back here. What is interesting to me is that every time I have been here it has been because I actually needed to see a doctor pronto.

Except today. Today I am here for other reasons.

What is fascinating is the waiting room for the emergency room is packed. When people discuss the American healthcare system I think they fall into a couple of categories. One is the type of person with full coverage probably associated with a job that offers benefits. Those sorts of jobs are becoming increasingly less possible to find. The second group are people that believe the propaganda that America has the best healthcare system in the world. The final group are people without insurance and they find themselves in need of care. Right now I am surrounded by the last group.

First off, if you have great insurance then emergency room visits are likely hardly happening unless, you know, you have an emergency. What these overly insured people have are doctors who actually answer their phones, or have someone who does. So when they need a quick check up and medication, someone is there to handle it. These people think the system works like this for everyone. They are wrong. Then again, these are the same people who believe that the 700 billion spent on bailing out idiot bankers was justified, but 2 billion to pay people to turn in junk cars for new fuel efficient cars was a waste of government money.

America really does not have a great health care system by almost any standard. The doctors in most triage facilities are grossly overworked and underpaid. The doctors at the top levels are overly paid and pampered for no reason other than the luck of the draw. There is nothing wrong with these doctors, they are there to service the rich and insured. In their secluded little world the healthcare system really does work. They are wrong on a variety of levels.

The poor and uninsured are the ones who are in trouble. Not only have they not been raised to believe that doctors should respond to their needs, they have no expectations of any care. They get seriously sick and have no options for care. Want an example? A month ago I was in the emergency room after being beaten in the streets of Pittsburgh. In the room next to me a man and his wife were told that he needed surgery the next day, otherwise some sort of growth on his intestine could explode and leave him in a deadly spiral. The doctor left them to discuss the options. He, the man in need of surgery, told his wife that he could not afford the time off work. Her argument was that if this growth was to explode, he could die. Sadly, his personal economics won out and they both walked out of the hospital that night.

How did the richest country in the history of the planet get to the point that a necessary surgery is postponed because of finances? There is something seriously wrong with this sort of choice. While the fat cats and paid for politicians are debating public options and Medicare for everyone and anything in between, people are sick and desperate. Our legislators are bought and paid for by big business, the same business lobby that gets tax breaks for the wealthy and the richest corporations. No one lobbies for the poor and unnecessary. This is America.

Always looking

There is something enchanting about a college town. I was lucky enough to spend the last couple of days in two towns that are built around colleges. One in New York, one in Pennsylvania. One a huge college, one a charming small one set near mountains and fall beauty.

I used to have a fantasy about one day living in a college town. It just seemed, at the time, right for me. I like smart people, and for the most part, smart people go to colleges. Some teach there, some are students, it all worked for me. I also like the energy of a small town with smart people. Generally speaking, you can get good pizza and coffee in a decent college town. Plus, for the longest time, I seemed to only date college students. (Truth-engaged to a college student right now).

This trip to academia was a bit more eye opening than I had hoped. First, college students are not as sexy as they once were. Granted this could just be me, but seeing students at work and play pointed out some of the problems with our society today. One, tight jeans. I am a big supporter of tight clothes in general. I think people with hot bodies should be happy showing them off.

The problem is that people without hot bodies feel the same right, which I guess somewhere in the constitution, they are "allowed" to show off less than perfect bodies, but honestly, I could live without that particular amendment.

Second, and it has been a few years since I was a college student, this dirty look does nothing for me. Young men with facial hair and dirty shirts. Young women with long stringy oily hair? Seriously? Also, there seems to be a new generation of smokers. Who could that have happened? It shocks me that anyone smokes anymore, because really, a warning label on a product that promises to kill you and you are still paying 5 bucks a pack? Seriously?

On my way to college number two I encountered something that seriously upset me. First, I think I have been to a Denny's 3 times in my life, once because I was hungry during a terrible road trip and it was the only choice. Second I went with an ex who was skanky and stupid. And the third, yesterday, because the options were quite limited and my lifetime of experience of trying new breakfast places has almost always led to the understanding that breakfast can be a meal easily fucked up.

So at Denny's I was trying to see what the real America is all about, since there seems to be a Denny's in almost every American town. I was alone, so I sat at the bar, and watched. First, I noticed that parents who bring young children into a restaurant seem to care less how those kids act in public. Kids act out, which is why parents hardly ever should bring them to a place where adults are eating. McDonalds has made billions knowing what to feed these mongrel children, take them there.

It was right about this time that I noticed my waitress, who seemed to not care a bit if I had coffee or not, but that was her only problem. She was beautiful and sweet and sexy in that way that confident younger women can pull off without much effort. Then she turned around. To say she had junk in her trunk would be an insult to the trunk makers of the world. Then I looked around. All the workers were women, in varying degrees of aging. Most were young, a couple were getting past 30 and one or two were obviously pushing retirement.

All of them were pudgy, at least. So I focused. It may be the free food they get during breaks, or it may be the hiring pool that was available, but all the waitresses were overweight, some more than others. There was not a skinny one among them. Now, I had already noticed that my fellow eaters were all in one degree or another, fat. I looked in the mirror behind the pies and noticed I too was fatter than normal. I blamed that on the faulty mirror and kept eating my pancakes.

All of the waitresses appeared to be fattening up. This struck me as strange. America is fattening up, we are far from the days when Jane Fonda had women working out and looking fit and wearing tight little workout uniforms. What we have created is this group of people who are not only fat, but proud of it. Part of this probably comes from a couple of generations of parents who not only did not really raise their children (both parents work, children fed and raised in a cheap day care) and parents too tired to actually cook a meal or select something that is both edible and healthy.

You add the bad parenting aspect with the inability to ever be critical of a child anymore because were are focused more on self esteem that honesty, and you get a couple of generations of people who eat more than they should, exercise less than they should and wear clothes designed for models who eat less and exercise more (and do coke) and you get people who look terrible in whatever it is they are wearing.

What was shocking at Denny's was that the majority of the waitresses were cute and good looking. Yet, they were rather uninteresting because they all seemed to have given up on being healthier. It could just be me, but I find people who care for both their interior and exterior selves to be a lot more interesting. How has our society fallen so far in so few years?

Some advice. If you have children, raise them. In no other aspects of our lives would be take our most prized and loved possession (I know, children are not possessions) and allow someone earning minimum wage to control and care for them. Parents who hire day cares to raise their children are abdicating their most fundamental parental responsibility and for the most part, they are allowing someone who is disinterested in that child's long term health to have an impact on them at the most important part of their lives. How could that have become the norm?

Second, read the labels of the food you purchase. High fructose corn syrup is deadly and wrong. If you see it in the ingredients, do not purchase that product. Never use it. Never allow a child to have it. Also, get rid of soda in any form.

Third, love your children, but for gods sake, allow them to make mistakes and point them out. This self esteem centric form of parentings is ruining these people. Anyone with a real sense of pride, or shame, would never allow themselves to walk around in society with some sort of jelly roll hanging over their too tight pants.

Finally, get out and walk. My lord, being in a college town reminded me that there are two classes of people in this country, those who actually walk and smile and breath fresh air, and those who drive everywhere, waddle into fast food restaurants and waddle back to their huge cars. If you waddle anywhere, you are already dangerous obese and the very last thing you need to do is park as close as possible to the entrance and waddle in for more food.

This country is quickly becoming a slow, stupid and dangerous place to be. Too many dumb people, fat people and gun toting idiots. We may all been created equal, but once decisions start getting made, equality is tossed aside.

Financial report you say?

Look here.

The proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency took another step forward Thursday in the House, moving out of the Financial Services Committee -- albeit a bit weaker -- on its way toward the floor.

CFPA, which would be the first federal regulatory agency devoted solely to consumer financial protection, passed the committee 39 to 29. All but one of the assembled committee Republicans and two Democrats voted against the consumer protection bill, despite a series of compromises that included exemptions for favored industries and limits on tougher state regulation.

During the four days worth of amendments considered by the committee, Republicans consistently decried the proposed independent consumer watchdog, echoing bank lobbyists, as a threat to the overall "safety and soundness" of the financial services industry. Those complaints were undercut -- and the bill given a boost -- when top banks announced huge bonus payouts during the markup.

Republicans also argued, in debate and through a long list of proposed amendments, that existing banking regulators like the Federal Reserve were already capable of protecting consumers as well as the financial markets. Rep. Michael Castle (R-Del.) acknowledged that existing regulators failed to protect consumers, but, he added, "I think they're ready to do that now."

Democrats weren't convinced.

"What did the prudential regulators do to protect consumers? Nothing. Zero. Zilch. They didn't do a thing," Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) said, noting that the Fed has already had consumer protection powers since 1994 but that they went unused for 12 years. "I think enough has been said here in this committee about the markets. The markets. Always concerned about the markets. Well, you know what? Those markets caused trillions of dollars in losses to men and women who live on Main Street across this country."

Castle ultimately crossed the aisle to support the bill, while Democrats Travis Childers of Mississippi and Walt Minnick of Idaho opposed it.

A pillar of the Obama administration's proposed financial regulatory reforms, the CFPA is designed to protect Americans from abusive or deceptive loans, including credit cards and mortgages, that played a substantial role in the financial crisis.

However, committee chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) made it clear, via his own amendments and his support for certain exemptions proposed by other committee members, that the agency's regulatory power extends only to lending activity, not other retail purchases on credit. Frank also stressed that the bill is designed to target predatory practices, not necessarily particular professions.

"We have restricted the CFPA from what the administration proposed," Frank said Wednesday. The requirement that banks offer easily understandable "plain vanilla" financial products was out of the bill by the time the markup process began, and the committee quickly decided that community banks -- those with less than $10 billion in assets -- should be exempt from agency oversight. So are credit, mortgage and title insurers, plus lawyers, real estate brokers, cable companies, accountants and auto dealers.

Advertising in the new age

Gullible much?

Stupid is

I lived in Alaska and interviewed governors, senators, representatives and other elected and non-elected people and the one thing I often walked away with was this, those people are dolts.

Seriously. I can say this now because it's 20 years out and the vast majority of those in power then are not now.

I could tell countless stories of the idiots and morons and low lifes I would end up talking to, all of them serving the public good, in some form. There are many things about Alaska that amaze me and remind of a better place that we should all live in. Such as, leaving the keys in the car, windows down and being gone for an extended period of time. Try doing that almost anywhere else in America and at the very least you lose your car. In Alaska I got in the habit of never removing the keys to the car, it made life a lot easier and in all the time I lived there, nothing was ever taken from the car.

I was once on the phone interviewing a prominent state senator, who just happened to be far right leaning, but that was not my issue. What I found astounding is, and what is typical of these right leaners, was his utter love of all things military, without ever having served a moment himself. So, there we were, chatting away about some sort of military action in some far off country, and he says, I still remember when I returned home from Vietnam and there was no one at the airport and I felt my entire country had turned its back on me. Knowing that the good right wing senator had never been in the military, I was left a little speechless. As the gap in time began to grow I asked the only question that came to mind, "I did not know you served in the military during the Vietnam War" I said, both as a statement and a question. His answer? After a deep breath, "oh, I never served in Vietnam, but I do recall a trip there and feeling the weight of rejection when I returned." Again, I was still not sure what he was talking about. In the course of the rest of the conversation, I finally got it down to a trip he had taken to Vietnam in the 80's, about 20 years after the end of the war, and yet no one bothered to apparently pick him up at the airport when he flew home.

Yikes.

So last summer when Sarah Palin came stumbling out of the wilderness as the completely idiotic and unqualified vice presidential candidate, I kept thinking about all the politicians who I spoke with in Alaska and how often they would make my head spin with falsehoods, lies, misstatements and somewhat retarded propaganda.

How does this happen? Because the state is so small population wise, and yet so huge geographically. Small pockets of almost inbred populations send representatives to the state house with little or no education, little understanding of how elected branches of government work and often times a severe hatred of how government might work.

Yet I did speak with some politicians in Alaska who inspired me. An older woman was running for governor, I believe her name was Arlis Sterguleuski. We were talking via phone, a formal interview, as she was flying around the state campaigning. We talked about a variety of topics, some harder for her to dance around, some just regular political back and forth that journalists do with people running for office. At the end of a long interview, as we were saying goodbye to one another, before she hung up, she said, "may the sun find time to shine on you today."

I have loved the comment ever since, it comes up often, I say it to people and it was one of those moments in Alaska politics that I really thought that some wonderful and eccentric people run for office and have a chance of winning in this great big beautiful state.

Perp walks

Few things in life make me as happy as seeing a perp walk. Police in most cities do this to give photo opportunities to the local press. A good perp walk serves a variety of functions, not the least of which is police PR.

There is the old time shame factor involved in most perp walks too. When police force someone to do something so obvious and public, it has to be destined to bring a sane person to a feeling of shame, which just amps up the value of the perp walk.

Here we have a reality TV star being busted for selling pharmaceuticals in mass quantities. Anyone who was smart enough to see the massive potential for profits selling these sorts of painkillers, should have been wise enough to know that selling mass quantities of pain medications would get someones attention.

Anyway, this is a perfect perp walk. Great angles, some clever shots using reflection in windows, police giving a variety of angles for shots. Finally, the arrest reality TV guy does not look happy at all, which is really the money shot in these sorts of things. A perfect ballet in any form.

Morning coffee

Off to jail

I am heading to prison this morning, in West Virginia no less. A small number of people would probably say "about time" but today is not their lucky day. I am off to interview a person at the jail. Oh, I know, convict would have been more dramatic. Why do we need to demean the people we imprison?

Don't get me wrong, my sense is the vast majority of people in jails deserve to be there and are there by their own actions. We are a society of laws and expect those laws to have consequences. Much like the elderly using too much of the national budget for their own good and doing so because they vote as a block with self interest, I see prisons are one of those places where we could be doing something completely opposite of what we are actually doing and accomplishing something far greater.

First, the elderly. I think a great injustice is done in our society because we allow voting blocks to control the debate. Because children under the age of 18 do not vote, they do not get to control how funding is appropriated. Thus you get shitty schools and decent retirement villages. You get socialized medicine for older people and a discount on the medications developed to keep them alive way past their expected life cycle, and yet schools and yes prisons are filled and suffering. I know we want to reward the older people because they built this great country and all that, but at some point we have to realize that it is the non-voting children who will be sustaining and rebuilding this great country and it will be hard to do that when you were raised malnourished, deprived of even a basic education and never given opportunity that the riches of this country should be able to afford.

That said, prisons piss me off. We already spend way too much on prisons, some states are being bankrupted by the huge costs of locking up criminals. I think prisons could be a much better place to put people who do not respect the laws of the land. First though, we should get real about the laws of the land. I think we jail way too many people for crimes against nothing. Probation would be a good place for drug offenses, or rehab. A junkie does not need prison, he/she needs care. A pot salesman in Seattle needs taxing, not jail time. A pain killer abuser needs less radio time and more time in a facility to deal with the issues that force people to medicate themselves.

In short, clean out the prisons with non-violent lawbreakers. Sometimes we can change laws to fit reality. We are by far the most drugged society in the history of the world and at some point we need to step back and figure out why that is. Go to a pharmacy if you want to see junkies cue up for their fix.

I do think prisons should be filled with violent people. Killers, molesters, rapists and the like should be secured behind gates and fences and barbed wire. What I would also suggest is a reality check for these people too. Again, we could have prisons that are designed for lifers. If you kill someone, expect to spend your life in jail. No parole, nothing. If your crime is such that you spend 20 years in jail, and we all know that at some point you will be released, isn't it smart for society to work to make someone who is going to be released back into our law filled society the skills to survive? At this point it seems like we lock people up in boxes, feed them terrible food, do not allow any way to better themselves and expect by some sort of miracle that after serving time in such conditions a person will return to society and just be happy to be free.

Back to todays visit. I have interviewed people in jail before and it is never pleasant. Jails are scary places, populated by scary people, from the authorities who run places like that (what makes someone want to do such things?) to the people living in jails (same question.)

I'll write about my experience at some point.

Starting a business

CNN/Money has a new list. Generally I do not love these sorts of lists, having lived in Seattle at a time when almost daily some aspect of life there ended up on a list of something. Best pot? Seattle. Highest housing increase, same. Inability to act on major initiatives? Easy, Seattle.

So, CNN does a survey at this time in history where the world economy seems to continue to teeter on an edge that is both elusive and undefined. The survey, best places to start a business, has all sorts of obvious flaws, but what it does do is name Pittsburgh number 2.

I said this many months ago that Pittsburgh reminds me an awful lot what Seattle was like when I first moved there. At that time, my partner and I were able to buy a house for 45 thousand dollars. There were jobs and decent parks and a lot of homes that needed work, but you could afford.

So imagine my surprise when I moved to Pittsburgh and found that you could find a house for a decent price, there seemed to be a lot of work in the region and there is a lot of spaces available for starting a new business. Like any older city there are obvious problems in Pittsburgh, but there is also that intoxicating sense that this is a city on the rebound.

Pulsating vortex

Not only was pulsating vortex my porn name, but it is what they call this image.

Deregulating

Over the past 30 years the federal government has dismantled or deregulated almost all important financial rules that has allowed banks to run wild in the money filled streets and has repeatedly left investors wondering where their money went.

The current housing/financial crisis was caused by congress and presidents happily allowing the rules to be purchased by bankers who had no real understanding of the danger they were playing with.

So now congress is seriously (their word) considering new regulation. Except that the vast majority of congress has been bought and paid for by the banking industry. It is kind of like asking the candy seller to regulate sugar. It just can not be done. And it will not be done by this congress no matter how many times Barney Frank prances onto your TV screen and wimpers about how something my be done. Frank is the Elmer Fudd of congress and his Wascally Wabbit is financial reform. He talks about hunting, he plans to snare himself a wabbit, but in the end he is too incompetent and idiotic to actually accomplish anything.

This from todays New York Times:

CONGRESS began the work of reforming our troubled financial system last week, and a bill aimed at regulating derivatives passed the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday.Derivatives — contracts that theoretically protect buyers from unforeseen financial calamities but more often are used to fuel raw speculation — were, lest we forget, at the heart of the banking crisis.

Credit default swaps, Wall Street-style insurance contracts that let speculators bet against a company or debt issue, propelled theAmerican International Group off the cliff. Those swaps also linked millions of trading partners, creating a web in which one default threatened to produce a chain of corporate and economic failures worldwide.

And derivatives aren’t going away. In the right hands, they help parties manage risk. In the wrong hands, they are among the most destructive financial products ever invented. So reforming the $42 trillion market for credit swaps is crucial if taxpayers are to be protected from future rescues of institutions deemed not only too big but also too interconnected to fail.

The best aspect of the House bill is that it requires many swaps to be traded on exchanges just like stocks, subjecting them for the first time to the light of day. But elsewhere in the bill, known as the Over-the-Counter Derivatives Market Act of 2009, exceptions to this exchange-trading rule undermine its regulatory power.

Derivatives regulation has been on the nation’s financial reform agenda for months. Undoing the Clinton-era law that exempted swaps from oversight is seen as imperative, except perhaps by big banks that deal in the contracts. It’s worth noting that many members of the Clinton economic team, including Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithnerand Gary Gensler, now hold pivotal policy-making positions in the Obama administration.

In August, the White House sent its derivatives proposal to Congress, recommending that all standardized contracts trade on an exchange. But big banks dealing in swaps don’t want exchange trading, where pricing and the identities of participants would be more publicly transparent. Savvier swaps customers would soon pay less on their transactions and bank profits would fall.

Some swaps buyers also dislike exchange trading because it would require them to put up a cash cushion — or margin — before a transaction. This is to help prevent counterparty failures, but participants in the market prefer not to pay this freight. They’d rather taxpayers foot the bill for a possible collapse later on, as they did with A.I.G.

Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, dismissed criticism of the bill he is steering along, saying that it would create incentives to make exchange-traded swaps the norm. “We passed the bill to drive most of the swaps onto exchanges,” he said in an interview Friday. “End users will move in that direction to save money.” But Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law professor and an expert in derivatives, criticized the House bill. “While I know there was a good-faith effort to improve the regulation, the plain language of the legislation can only be read as a Christmas tree of decorative gifts to the banking industry,” he said. “And this is being done when people acknowledge the unregulated O.T.C. derivatives market was a principal reason for the meltdown.”

A SIGNIFICANT exception in the bill says that if a transaction involves a company that uses a swap to offset its commercial risks — the bill defines this entity as an end user — its trade does not have to be put on an exchange. This was intended to address complaints from swaps customers — like airlines or oil companies that hedge their commercial risks — that their costs would rise unnecessarily under the bill.

The problem is the bill’s lack of specificity about what an end user is. Indeed, what is to stop a hedge fund or private equity firm from setting up companies to meet the “end user” definition so their trades could escape scrutiny?

Another questionable exemption says that if a swap is to be exchange-traded, it must be deemed “clearable” by facilities known as clearinghouses. Some of these are partially owned by banks. If a clearinghouse decides that the swap can be cleared, then it can trade on an exchange.

Gee, do you think the banks might be a tad hesitant to punt a very lucrative line of business onto less profitable exchanges? Do you think they might have an incentive to say that the most profitable swaps simply aren’t clearable?

Conflicts posed by swaps dealers’ stakes in clearinghouses is no small thing. Those on the House committee who amended the bill recognized the problem and decided to restrict swaps dealers’ ownership of clearinghouses to 20 percent; the balance might go to public investors.

To be sure, the House bill is just the first step in what is likely to be a long road to reforming this huge and opaque market. And more oversight is surely better than none. The House Agriculture Committee, which oversees the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, will take up the matter now.

But the stakes for taxpayers who might have to take on yet another wave of financial bailouts in the future are even higher. And allowing the very institutions that imperiled our economy to weaken derivatives reform would be a grave insult to those whose rescue money is being used, even today, to generate bank profits and a recent round of outsize bonuses.

Pot psychology

"Can I Use My Old Vibrator With My New Partner?" from Pot Psychology on Vimeo.

Balloon boy

The stock market continues to climb as the world wonders why.

More dreaded foreclosures reported in the third quarter. Credit remains tight for existing and new businesses. Jobs are not coming back and people with jobs are being asked to do more for less. The healthcare debate rages, but no one is predicting real change we can believe in. The country is in a funk and if you read blogs and boards where the public posts comments you can see a lot of anger pointed at the president and business leaders.

I am never clear where this anger was during 8 years of Bush insanity. In fact, I remember talking to friends and wondering why people were not in the streets in protest of wars for profit, no-bod contracts to the vice presidents former employer, no movement on major issues, no new regulations for a corrupt and inept banking system. The answer I always got was protests don't do anything.

Which may be true, especially if you consider the racist and angry white people screaming all summer to leave our retarded healthcare system alone. It always makes me a little uneasy to see badly dressed white people screaming about injustice, whether it is at abortion clinics or healthcare debates. Who are the people? Where are they when real injustice is being done in their names?

Oh and Shepard Fairey admits he ripped off the AP for the above photo image of candidate Obama. Outrageous.

I like lesbians

The strange people of Washington are going to vote on whether the gays deserve somewhat equal rights. I say, let the commercials begin.

Artists films

Over the past few years I have done over 100 short documentary style films, the vast majority focused on artists and creative professionals.

Recently one of those artists won a MacArthur genius grant, but I am not allowed to post his film, so that will be all I say about him.

Today though, the photographer Mitch Epstein is featured in a New York Times piece on a new book of his.

I did a series of 14 short films on a variety of artists for the curatorial group ICI in New York City and one of the artists I filmed was Mitch Epstein. You can find a link to those films here.

Days like these

I took the splint off my finger so I could type.

A long time ago I learned that even at the worst of times there are good things that deserve focus. I will always remember February 14, 1995. I was at home with my two young children, we were all upstairs. The fire alarm went off downstairs and at first I figured I had probably left something on the stove. As I approached the stairs I could smell and see the smoke and as I looked down, I could see the flames.

A lot of personal drama ensued, from putting two young children on a snow covered roof to walking back into a burning home three times in an attempt to save a cat that at the time meant as much to me as, well, possibly, those two children who were already safely enclosed in a car.

It is what happened in the days after the fire that really woke me up. Good people, caring people came out of the woodwork and shared with us. One day I found a check in our mailbox. We had encamped at a local hotel while we looked for a rental home and insurance company employees tried to work out the value of a home that had disappeared in flames. It was tremendously sad, but I kept finding good things to focus on. The kindness of neighbors and our entire community made me realize how lucky I was. The two children who smile and shared optimism that all would be well. Complete strangers offers of help.

Before that time I had never helped people I did not know. It was beyond me to think that someone in a news story who had lost their home might need blankets. One day we returned to the hotel room and there was a note to come to the lobby. There we found bags and bags of donated items. Towels, clothes, toys and pretty much anything else you may need when moving into a home. It was shocking. I may have cried. I know I certainly felt that my life was changing and almost all of it was for the better.

In life we can often be hit by drama that brings us down. In the worst of times it seems impossible to find something positive to hold onto. My experience since then has been that even in the worst of times, the death of a parent, the brain damage from a bike crash, the beating by police, there is always something positive to focus on, that if done correctly will help you avoid demons and depression.

This recent police beating has been an interesting affair. The routine tests to find out if bones were broken (none) has led to doctors finding other things that could be an issue. A lesion was spotted on my liver, thanks to a scan done when I went to the emergency room after a night of batons on my body. A lesion? Could be bad, could be naturally occurring. More tests are set. What is amazing is the thought that I could have gone many more years with this lesion without anyone knowing about it. It is not as if I go to hospitals and request full body scans on a regular basis. In some ways, getting beaten up by the police may had added years to my life.

Peace

Let me get this straight, in 9 months in office the president has won the Nobel Peace Prize? For what exactly? Talking about nuclear weapons? Talking about bringing peace to the Middle East? Talking about working out a deal with the Israelis and Palestinians?

Talk? Talk wins the Nobel?

Is this the new America where talking about something makes you a person who accomplishes good things?

I recently saw a clip of this Jon Gosslin person who was once on a TV show with his bitchy wife and their unwanted children. The recent clip I saw this Gosslin person was being grilled by this bull dyke and she was blasting him about what a shithead he was and a public buffoon and how he was a terrible father. This little man with bad hair plugs and too much makeup for a non-tranny would not take such an insult. He "was" a good father, dammit.

You know why he is a good father? Because he says he is. We no longer need actions to judge anyone by, we just need their word, or the word of their publicist, which is even better.

Then we have a congressman from Florida who calls the republicans neanderthals and says the republican healthcare plan consists of a word to the sick, please die. He gets all sorts of press and he continues on this path, which is kind of a truth that is never to be spoken in politics, but he continues anyway. He will not apologize, because by god, he has the truth on his side. Which is all fine and dandy, except his team, the democrats, the ones with a majority in both houses and a president on their team, can not seem to muster the courage to actually do anything substantial about healthcare, except talk about minor tweaks and how bad the republicans are.

Talk is cheap. In the end we are all judged by actions. What have you actually accomplished, how have you actually lived this life. If you are a good father, then be an active part of your growing childrens lives, give up some of the parties and the skanks and raise children. You want to be a leader in congress? Quit moaning about the idiots in the other party and actually pass a single payer system that gives access to healthcare to all people in this country, not just the ones who can afford it. Finally, you want peace in the Middle East, less Nukes and Israel and Palestine to open a pizza shop together? Stop dithering and get something concrete done. You can not win a Nobel Prize just by talking a good game.

Wait, that last part is obviously not true.

Derivative

I have been lambasting the prancing on Capital Hill over the lack of reform regarding financial institutions and low and behold, the main prancer of Congress has done me even better. Barney Frank, getting his marching orders from the White House has a plan to regulate derivatives. Kind of. Bloomberg has the story.

"A plan offered by the Obama administration would subject all swaps dealers and "major market participants" to new regulations for capital, business conduct, record-keeping and reporting. [Representative Barney] Frank's version would exempt corporations from that definition if they use derivatives for "risk management" purposes.

While Frank's proposal is a "step in the right direction," its "ambiguous" definition of risk management may leave a large number of corporations unregulated, Henry T.C. Hu, director of the SEC's new division of risk, strategy and financial innovation, told the committee."

If there is one thing the gang on Wall Street understands is language that makes things impossible to enforce. TARP money anyone? How about paying it back? So, a plan that ambiguous is par for the course and exactly what should be expected from the spineless democrats and the do nothing republicans. While the financial situation of this country and indeed the world continues to teeter, people like Frank have misused their power to enforce the concept of see nothing, do nothing get reelected.

There is no shame on Wall Street and certainly none in DC. The elected morons are only a slight step ahead of the dopes who managed to bring the world to it's knees about a year ago and guess what? Both the idiots in Washington and the retards on Wall Street are still there, wearing fine suits, drinking expensive wine and laughing out loud at the inaction both parties continue to trumpet as reform.

Video entertainment

I promised to deliver entertainment while I can not type, and here is another gem. As you may know, the Washington state legislature passed a law giving gay people the basic rights that straight married people get when they tie the knot. This, of course, did not sit well with the people living outside Seattle. So a petition drive successfully got a repeal concept on the ballot and while Microsoft and others are pouring thousands of dollars into the "save the gay rights law" there are plenty of others who support Gods law.

Sacred Ground from Protect Marriage Washington on Vimeo.

Entertaining you

Continuing to not use my finger, and take a moment to think of all the ways you use your index finger and then imagine all the ways I am NOT using mine.

The list in endless. Or so it seems.

Until finger is functioning, more video.