Year: 2012

Yesterday’s post went up late and included a video you may not have had time to watch, so today I’m mostly just rerunning it to give you a chance to …

KETCHUP

Nutritionally the ideal food, it encompasses all four major food groups: FRUIT (tomatoes are fruits), VEGETABLE (tomatoes are vegetables), SALT, and SUGAR.  And now, writes David Bruce, “MIT has solved the problem of ketchup left in the bottle.”

MIT’s Freaky Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing

When it comes to those last globs of ketchup inevitably stuck to every bottle of Heinz, most people either violently shake the container in hopes of eking out another drop or two, or perform the “secret” trick: smacking the “57” logo on the bottle’s neck. But not MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith. He and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been held up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing this common dining problem. . . .

Who says America is losing her edge?

OK.  Yesterday’s post:

BOREF

This could be an interesting few weeks.  Borealis — parent of Chorus Motors which is parent of WheelTug — says it hopes to test an actual WheelTug system in the actual nose wheel of an an actual Boeing 737 the week of June 18 at the Prague Airport (an official WheelTug partner).  If it works, they would presumably have a video to show at the annual Farnborough International Airshow, July 9-15 — or, if they can get one for the purpose, perhaps even an actual airplane to drive around the air show.

I am working very hard to steel myself for snafus, delays, disappointments, or disaster of some kind.  But I think it’s now reasonable to allow for the possibility this is real, and that — just as all TVs now come with remote controls and many jets come with those “winglets” the industry resisted for so long — in a few years, most commercial airliners will be able to back out from their gates without waiting for a tug; taxi around the tarmac without having to run their main engines.  In an ideal (for me) world, it could mean $50,000 a year profit per plane from leasing the systems, times ten thousand planes.  That’s half a billion dollars a year in profit.  With its stock currently selling at $5, the company is valued at $25 million.

Not to say I’m being anything but wildly optimistic here.  I am.  Then again, I’ve assigned no value to the possibility that the Chorus Motor technology could find uses elsewhere. (Cars?)  Or to the possibility that any of the other Borealis alleged scientific breakthroughs, or their mineral holdings, could be commercialized.

So call this a lottery ticket where there’s still, say, a 50% chance we will lose every penny (did I mention that the company is legally headquartered in Gibraltar? that it used to be a Canadian mining stock?) . . . but perhaps a 50% chance of winning big.

CALL HIM HIM MISTER?  THE MITTSTER?

Joe Devney:  “You made a reference Thursday to ‘Governor Romney.’ This is a construction I come across in the news media and elsewhere, and want to raise my voice to object. There have been two ‘Governor Romneys’ in the past; there are none now. When someone leaves an office, they should leave their title as well. When the Komen Foundation was in the news a few months ago, a Komen employee in an interview kept referring to the CEO as ‘Ambassador Brinker.’ This seemed absurd: she doesn’t have diplomatic immunity.  I noticed on PBS’s News Hour today that, while the Republican spokesman referred to ‘Governor Romney,’ the News Hour people spoke of ‘former Governor Romney’ and ‘former President Clinton.’ I think that’s proper. And democratic.”

☞ Thanks, Joe. I wanted to show respect, but I guess I have been off-base, at least according to this.  (“There is only one Governor at at time, and it’s not respectful of the current office holder to refer to former office holders as it they were still in office. “) But former ambassadors? The same source seems to grant them more latitude. (“Former ambassadors are addressed with the honorific Ambassador at their preference … and most I’ve encountered to prefer to be addressed as such.”) And I’m all but certain it was okay to address Harland Sanders as “Colonel,” because his chicken was so good.

SOMETHING WORSE?

Because his campaign is so unashamedly deceptive, Rachel Maddow and others might call Mr. Romney something worse.  See her latest on this point, here (the full clip) or, minus 8 minutes of build-up, here:

Our democracy is in some danger not just because billionaires can now swamp the airwaves with a seven to one advantage (as in Wisconsin), but also because it’s entirely legal for those ads to be complete lies.

You can’t lie in ads about toothpaste — saying your brand reduces cavities  by 40% if it does not — but you can lie in political ads, saying anything. Entirely legal. No recourse.

Some years ago I put three tort reform measures on he California ballot, the central one being an initiative that the Stanford Research Institute estimated would lower auto insurance premiums by 40% even as it improved the pay-outs to most seriously injured accident victims.  At the behest of the trial lawyers whose income was threatened by this measure, Ralph Nader proclaimed in TV ads that, if passed, this measure would raise auto insurance premiums by 40%.  He had the number right — 40% — but had flipped the direction. It was as dishonest as George W. Bush claiming that “by far the vast majority” of his tax proposed cuts would go to people “at the bottom of the economic ladder.”  So the auto insurance reform lost and George W. Bush won.  And Mitt Romney may win, too.

But that would be a shame, because his economic vision — further tax cuts for the wealthy, austerity for everyone else — will lead, instead, to a depression and larger deficits.

He has embraced the draconian Paul Ryan budget.

He proposes deep cuts in investment in infrastructure, research, and practically everything else except the military.

So to those who wish this site were more about personal finance and less about politics, I’d suggest the two are tightly entwined.  Ask any college applicant hoping for a Pell grant.  Ask anyone still out of work because the Republicans refused to pass the American Jobs Act.  Ask any relative old enough to remember the last Depression.

If you care about your money, you will learn the facts (did you know that Mitt Romney had a poor jobs record as Governor of Massachusetts and left the state with the highest per capita debt of any in the nation?).

And you will get involved.

JOIN “THE TRUTH TEAM”

Here.  It is a portal to three web sites: attackwatch.com, where we debunk phony claims they make about us; keepingGOPhonest.com, where we debunk phony claims they make about themselves; and keepinghisword.com, where we note the promises that, in the face of unprecedented obstruction,the President has nonetheless kept.

Yesterday’s post went up late and included a video you may not have had time to watch, so today I’m mostly just rerunning yesterday’s post to give you a chance to catch up.

KETCHUP

Nutritionally the ideal food, it encompasses all four major food groups: FRUIT (tomatoes are fruits), VEGETABLE (tomatoes are vegetables), SALT, and SUGAR.  And now, writes David ruce:  “MIT Solves Problem of Ketchup Left in Bottle.”

MIT’s Freaky Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing

When it comes to those last globs of ketchup inevitably stuck to every bottle of Heinz, most people either violently shake the container in hopes of eking out another drop or two, or perform the “secret” trick: smacking the “57” logo on the bottle’s neck. But not MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith. He and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been held up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing this common dining problem.

Who says America is losing her edge?

Yesterday’s post:

BOREF

This could be an interesting few weeks.  Borealis — parent of Chorus Motors which is parent of WheelTug — says it hopes to test an actual WheelTug system in the actual nose wheel of an an actual Boeing 737 the week of June 18 at the Prague Airport (an official WheelTug partner).  If it works, they would presumably have a video to show at the annual Farnborough International Airshow, July 9-15 — or, if they can get one for the purpose, perhaps even an actual airplane to drive around the air show.

I am working very hard to steel myself for snafus, delays, disappointments, or disaster of some kind.  But I think it’s now reasonable to allow for the possibility this is real, and that — just as all TVs now come with remote controls and many jets come with those “winglets” the industry resisted for so long — in a few years, most commercial airliners will be able to back out from their gates without waiting for a tug; taxi around the tarmac without having to run their main engines.  In an ideal (for me) world, it could mean $50,000 a year profit per plane from leasing the systems, times ten thousand planes.  That’s half a billion dollars a year in profit.  With its stock currently selling at $5, the company is valued at $25 million.

Not to say I’m being anything but wildly optimistic here.  I am.  Then again, I’ve assigned no value to the possibility that the Chorus Motor technology could find uses elsewhere. (Cars?)  Or to the possibility that any of the other Borealis alleged scientific breakthroughs, or their mineral holdings, could be commercialized.

So call this a lottery ticket where there’s still, say, a 50% chance we will lose every penny (did I mention that the company is legally headquartered in Gibraltar? that it used to be a Canadian mining stock?) . . . but perhaps a 50% chance of winning big.

CALL HIM HIM MISTER?  THE MITTSTER?

Joe Devney:  “You made a reference Thursday to ‘Governor Romney.’ This is a construction I come across in the news media and elsewhere, and want to raise my voice to object. There have been two ‘Governor Romneys’ in the past; there are none now. When someone leaves an office, they should leave their title as well. When the Komen Foundation was in the news a few months ago, a Komen employee in an interview kept referring to the CEO as ‘Ambassador Brinker.’ This seemed absurd: she doesn’t have diplomatic immunity.  I noticed on PBS’s News Hour today that, while the Republican spokesman referred to ‘Governor Romney,’ the News Hour people spoke of ‘former Governor Romney’ and ‘former President Clinton.’ I think that’s proper. And democratic.”

☞ Thanks, Joe. I wanted to show respect, but I guess I have been off-base, at least according to this.  (“There is only one Governor at at time, and it’s not respectful of the current office holder to refer to former office holders as it they were still in office. “) But former ambassadors? The same source seems to grant them more latitude. (“Former ambassadors are addressed with the honorific Ambassador at their preference … and most I’ve encountered to prefer to be addressed as such.”) And I’m all but certain it was okay to address Harland Sanders as “Colonel,” because his chicken was so good.

SOMETHING WORSE?

Because his campaign is so unashamedly deceptive, Rachel Maddow and others might call Mr. Romney something worse.  See her latest on this point, here (the full clip) or, minus 8 minutes of build-up, here:

Our democracy is in some danger not just because billionaires can now swamp the airwaves with a seven to one advantage (as in Wisconsin), but also because it’s entirely legal for those ads to be complete lies.

You can’t lie in ads about toothpaste — saying your brand reduces cavities  by 40% if it does not — but you can lie in political ads, saying anything. Entirely legal. No recourse.

Some years ago I put three tort reform measures on he California ballot, the central one being an initiative that the Stanford Research Institute estimated would lower auto insurance premiums by 40% even as it improved the pay-outs to most seriously injured accident victims.  At the behest of the trial lawyers whose income was threatened by this measure, Ralph Nader proclaimed in TV ads that, if passed, this measure would raise auto insurance premiums by 40%.  He had the number right — 40% — but had flipped the direction. It was as dishonest as George W. Bush claiming that “by far the vast majority” of his tax proposed cuts would go to people “at the bottom of the economic ladder.”  So the auto insurance reform lost and George W. Bush won.  And Mitt Romney may win, too.

But that would be a shame, because his economic vision — further tax cuts for the wealthy, austerity for everyone else — will lead, instead, to a depression and larger deficits.

He has embraced the draconian Paul Ryan budget.

He proposes deep cuts in investment in infrastructure, research, and practically everything else except the military.

So to those who wish this site were more about personal finance and less about politics, I’d suggest the two are tightly entwined.  Ask any college applicant hoping for a Pell grant.  Ask anyone still out of work because the Republicans refused to pass the American Jobs Act.  Ask any relative old enough to remember the last Depression.

If you care about your money, you will learn the facts (did you know that Mitt Romney had a poor jobs record as Governor of Massachusetts and left the state with the highest per capita debt of any in the nation?).

And you will get involved.

JOIN “THE TRUTH TEAM”

Here.  It is a portal to three web sites: attackwatch.com, where we debunk phony claims they make about us; keepingGOPhonest.com, where we debunk phony claims they make about themselves; and keepinghisword.com, where we note the promises that, in the face of unprecedented obstruction,the President has nonetheless kept.

[UPDATE: THANKS FOR THE HELP MANY OF YOU SENT.  I WAS GOING TO WRITE TODAY’S COLUMN ON THE PLANE BUT FOUND MYSELF WATCHING ONE OF THOSE MOVIES WHERE THE GOOD GUYS’ CELL PHONES WORK PERFECTLY EVEN FROM INSIDE BANK VAULTS.  AS IF!  SO I’M LEAVING YESTERDAY’S POST UP INSTEAD. HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND.]

You saw that the Kochs et al are now budgeting $1 billion to swamp the elections with a likely 10-to-1 superPAC advantage and take over all three branches of government.

And you saw that — having refused to passed the American Jobs Act (“right away,” as the President exhorted in his address to that Joint Session of Congress last September) — the Republicans lick their chops at last month’s tepid jobs numbers, hoping that a weak economy will enhance Governor Romney’s chances.

The good news is that we can win.  Not just the White House, but Congress, too.

“All” we have to do is register and turn out millions of new voters (many of whom were 16 and 17 last time), as we did in 2008 – we know how to do this – and RE-register millions of existing voters the Republicans are working so hard to disenfranchise.

It’s an enormous, colossal, massive undertaking that requires thousands of field organizers to recruit, train, and motivate a million volunteers.

We got it done in 2008.  It’s an even bigger job this time.  But we’ve had a running start we didn’t have last time.  (It was not until June 4, 2008 – four years ago this past Monday — that Senator Obama clinched the nomination.  We’ve been building +this+ effort since last April!)  And we have a candidate whose capability can no longer be questioned: he has restored our standing in the world, decimated our #1 enemy, averted a depression, saved the auto industry, launched health care reform, doubled CAFE standards, tripled the representation of women on the Court, sextupled the number of stem cell lines available to researchers, and (among many other things) enhanced the sense of self-worth of millions — be they black kids or gay teens or Hispanics (did I mention that one of those Justices is Sotomayor?) — even as the other side blocks the Dream Act, opposes equal rights, and seeks to “take back America” by turning our President out of office, cutting taxes for billionaires and cutting investment in our future.

And now to the “auctions.”

The first is maybe a little off topic, but we all know people who plan to vote for Republican strictly over “taxes.” I want to offer a way you might engage them and, conceivably, bring them over to our side.  (I know, I know: but it’s worth a try.)

It’s one of Warren Buffett’s favorite riffs, so you may already have heard it.

Here’s what you might tell your Republican-because-of-taxes friends:

<< Imagine you are in the womb, about to be born.  And you are twins.  Identical.  Both brilliant, talented, good looking, healthy.  Just the way you are in real life today.  What a great life the two of you are about to have!  Except imagine that, just prior to your birth, you are told that one of you will be born in America and the other will be born in Somalia or Peru or Cambodia someplace – and it’s up to you who’s born where.  And because both of you express a preference for America, there’s going to be a little auction, based on the top marginal tax bracket you’d be willing to pay to be born here.  The bidding starts at 10% and both your little hands shoot up so fast they almost puncture the placenta.  So ask your Republican friends where +they+ would stop bidding in this situation.  At the 28% long-term capital gains rate we had when Reagan left office?  At the 70% top ordinary rate that prevailed from Kennedy thru Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter?  At Eisenhower’s 91% top rate? >>

It could get them thinking.

(If it’s “the debt” rather than taxes that lean them Republican, remind them that “tax and spend” Democrats +pay+ for what they spend.  “Borrow and spend” Republicans do not – hence the debt.  Reagan +quadrupled+ the National Debt, Clinton handed Bush a surplus.  Bush +doubled+ the debt and handed Obama a $1.5 trillion 2009 deficit baked into the books as of the start of the fiscal year, October 1, 2008, before he had even been elected President.)

Anyway, that’s the first “auction.”

Conceivably, it could pick up a vote or two.

Here is the second auction.  And in this one, YOU are the bidder:

What would you bid to have had Al Gore instead of George W. Bush from 2000 to 2008?  (No war in Iraq, no decimation of our national balance sheet, no tax incentives to buy Hummers, no Alito and Roberts and thus no Citizens United . . . all that.)

A hundred bucks?  Five hundred?  Five hundred thousand?  I know it’s awkward bidding against yourself, and I know that of course this is a preposterous hypothetical, but seriously (or at least semi-seriously): if it were up to you and you could turn back time and reverse the outcome of Bush v. Gore, how high would you go?

Got your number?

Okay . . .

Going once . . . (don’t forget that by accelerating rather than impeding stem cell research, a loved one might someday have caught, rather than missed, the wave and been spared) . . .

Going twice . . . (don’t forget that by leading rather than lagging on “climate change,” we’d be further along dealing with this species-threatening challenge) . . .

SOLD at whatever number you chose.

And you see where I’m headed with this.

You can’t roll back history and install Al Gore.  But you +can+ roll history forward.

You can help register the voters who will elect Barack Obama, hold the Senate, take back the House and state legislative chambers.

Whatever number you chose for Bush v. Gore — now Romney v. Obama — cut it in half, or by two-thirds, or even by 90% if you have to (I don’t expect you to give ALL your money), but give it now, here, by clicking this link.

If you do, I’ll see it and jump through the screen to say thanks.  (Stand clear.)

We have an amazing candidate with an amazing list of accomplishments.  All the more amazing when you adjust for the terrible hand he was dealt and a Republican opposition committed to his failure.  But planting seeds in October – just like trying to ramp up a voter registration effort in October – does not a bountiful harvest make.  NOW is the time to plant these seeds.  Click here.

(Or, for contributions under $100 — which I won’t see but that are the hugely welcome, crucial preponderance of the millions of contributions received to date — here.)

VERIO

This page has been up and down lately thanks to the bizarre workings of our host, Verio.  I often can’t even get their sales team on the phone, so their service must either be wildly popular (perhaps people like its unreliability) or they’ve pulled sales reps over to the crisis-management side of the call center or they’re just screwed up.

I’m sure they’re working hard to resolve their issues. In the meantime, I’m extending everyone’s subscription a month by way of recompense.

VERIZON

Not to be all grumpy — am actually having a great day — but are you familiar with this company?  Their wireless service is generally more robust than AT&T’s, at least in the places I roam,but they seem to have gone out of the copper-wire end of the business, based on my inability ever to get anyone on the phone to report that I have no dial tone. They are always “experiencing unusually heavy call volume” and are “busy assisting other costumers” and suggest calling back later.  One time I waited on music hold (calling from my Verizon cell phone) for 45 minutes before giving up.

As a Verizon shareholder since first suggesting it here six years ago,* I’m heartened by this, because I take it to be a graceful exit from the labor-intensive 20th Century “wire” phone model, as Verizon (and its competitors) come ever closer to being fully automated service providers each consisting of one highly paid CEO, one COO who interfaces with the outside legal team, and one guy watching to be sure that the self-generating software continues to write new code, as needed, to keep the network functioning and the automated customer signups, billing, and so forth, humming.

Eventually, no one else will be needed . . . which is why, long-term, we proponents and beneficiaries of capitalism are going to have to find better and less controversial ways to spread the wealth that technological progress and efficiency produce.

Which is a lot to think about, but try calling Verizon to report a problem, or cancel your account, and you’ll have plenty of time to ruminate.

*The stock is up only 18% but there have 5%-ish annual dividends along the way, so not bad, given the rocky road since 2006.

HATS OFF TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY OF CALIFORNIA . . .

. . . for contributing $1,140,909 to stand with Philip Morris against the American Cancer Society. Here’s the list of the main contributors on the two sides.

BUTT KICK

An update from Chris Brown (whose Aristides fund slipped less than 1% in May, versus the 6+% drop for the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000; up 8% year-to-date, net of fees, double and triple the other two):

The price of BKUTK makes no sense at all here. At a $340 ask, that’s less than 7x trailing earnings per share, and less than 0.54 times the tangible book value (adjusted for net unrealized gains on held-to-maturity securities) of $633. We added Friday and today. Dividend yield is 2.85%, but could easily be much higher given the level of earnings. Tangible common equity as a % of assets is absurdly high at approximately 16%. As long-term interest rates have fallen dramatically and the company’s average maturity of assets is short, they are going to face a choice of reinvesting capital at very low interest rates, or else buying back their stock. They should buy back stock. I don’t know whether they will, but they should. This is the most attractive value stock I am aware of.

It trades very lightly, but if you did buy some when first suggested, hold on. And if you put in a good-til-canceled order to buy 10 shares or 25 shares (or whatever) at some firm price ($340? $325? $360?) you might get it.

TODAY’S INFORMATION

In the last 27  months, we’ve added 4.3 million net new private sector jobs.  Not nearly as many as we’d like, but 60% more than George W. Bush added in his first 7 years and 8 months . . . that is, before the financial crisis hit.

Did you know that?

President Clinton made this point at two New York fundraisers last night.  Here is a recent blog along the same lines, based on data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Of course, the Obama jobs numbers would have been a lot higher still if the Republicans had not blocked the American Jobs Act, which the President urged a joint session of Congress last fall to “pass right away.” And if they had not shaken the economy with last year’s manufactured debt-ceiling crisis. And if they were not shaking confidence again now with threats of a new one.  But their goal from day one has been to see the Administration fail so they can retake power and resume cutting taxes for the best off.  Such as Governor Romney’s pledge to cut cut the estate-tax rate for billionheirs from 45% to 0%.

TODAY’S MISINFORMATION

From Politifact:

A TV ad running in eight states blames President Barack Obama for sending stimulus money overseas while Americans are out of work. . . . We checked all three examples — and found the ad incorrectly describes them all. . . . The ad strings together alarming-sounding tidbits about actual stimulus projects to create the impression of something else entirely — in a way that’s ultimately ridiculous. And that earns our lowest rating, Pants on Fire.

The details are fascinating.  And one more example of the $1 billion SuperPAC effort to confuse voters into supporting the interests of the Koch brothers, et al, rather than their own.

AN 82-YEAR-OLD WOMAN BLOGS . . .

[T]he Republicans are trying to get into my vagina again.  I wish I knew what was up there that they find so interesting.  . . . Goodnight can’t we just move on already?  We get it.  Republicans want to make sure that no woman anywhere for any reason can have an abortion.  Some even want a restriction on birth control of any kind.  Well I have a solution.  Republican men should refrain from having sex of any kind.  I bet the number of abortions would drop dramatically.  And on a side note, I imagine many women could finally get a good night’s sleep.

TODAY’S MOVIE

Four minutes on Mitt’s Massachusetts Miracle.  Where he took job creation from 37th out of 50 down to near-dead-last 47th.  (Under today’s Democratic governor, it’s somewhere around 11th.)

I have nothing against the Harvard Business School Class of 1975.  I sat in those same swivel chairs myself, albeit a few years earlier.  But having had one Republican member of the class of ’75 running the economy from 2001 to 2009, do we really want another from the same class, with many of the same advisers, proposing more tax cuts for the wealthy, running the country from 2013 to 2017?

Before you shout “Yes we do!” check out his record in Massachusetts.

YOURMORALS.ORG

I’m disgusting.  No, wait, strike that – I’m 2.4 on the scale of how easily disgusted I am – which is to say, more easily disgusted than most.  Yourmorals.org is a nonprofit, academic site on which you can take all kinds of morality surveys and see how you compare with others.

I liked the “disgust” survey in part because it offered a comments section in which to note or complain about questions you find unclear.  The “sacredness” survey (and I assume lots of the others) allowed no such comments, and that’s a bit frustrating. It asks, for example, whether you’d insult someone for being fat if, in return, you were given $10.  Or $1000.  Or $10,000 (getting tempted?).  Or $100,000 (that’s where I cracked).  Or $1 million.  Or “for no amount of money.”  (It also gives the option of $0 – “I’d do it for free.”)  Well, I’d do it for $100,000 — and probably should have answered $10,000, the more I think about it (you lard ass) — because I’d then tell the insultee why I did it and give him or her $1,000, or maybe more, to make sure he or she was happy I had done it.  But is this allowed?  Some of the questions make those boundaries clear (you insult your father and have to wait a year to explain why you did it) but in others, it is not.  I said I would kill a member of an endangered species for $1 million, but only because I would then give every penny to an organization that helps protect endangered species.  (Presumably, this is an endangered, not a “practically extinct” species.)  My calculation there being that not to do so would set that species back further than if I had.  No comments section to make this clear.  And also no way to adjust the scale for one’s personal circumstances.  Am I really more moral because I’d turn down $1 million others would not be able to resist?  I don’t think so – it’s just that I’m already so fortunate, I can afford the luxury of, in effect, “paying” $1 million not to go deaf for a year (one of your choices), sit in a tub of ice cubes for 10 minutes (another), or be confined to solitary for a month with nothing to read (a third).

Still: interesting stuff.

So Tom Delay, aka “The Hammer” — free on bail while appealing a three-year prison sentence — helped staff the “angry mob” that stopped the Florida recount.  That thuggish tactic gave us eight years of George Bush which gave us the Supreme Court that gave us the 5-4 Citizens United decision that allows the ultra-wealthy to buy elections in secret.  The Kochs are budgeting $1 billion to own the federal government six months from now — ten times what the left-leaning superPACs hope to raise (see yesterday’s post).

Watch this stunning Rachel Maddow clip to see how America is being transformed from a democracy to a plutocracy . . .

. . . and note that it’s even worse than it seems. Because not only may the Koch / Rove / Limbaugh crowd wind up controlling the White House and Congress — then tightening their grip on the Court even further — and not only can they work their same magic at the state government level (look at the 10-to-1 money advantage they’re giving Republican Governor Scott Walker in Tuesday’s Wisconsin recall vote) — there’s this: Without spending a dime, they can now tremendously influence legislation. All they have to do is threaten to dump millions into unseating a legislator next time out and, all too often, they will get the action (or inaction) they seek.

It’s not as though the wealthy and the corporate interests did not already wield outsize influence.  But now the game is close to being over.  A handful of right-wing billionaires may just win.

BECAUSE, FOR ONE THING, THEY CAN SAY ANYTHING

From Time:

Mitt Romney’s Ads: Still Wrong on the Stimulus

 by Michael Grunwald

I’ve been on leave writing a book about the stimulus, so I’ve let others judge the Pants-on-Fire ads and Four-Pinocchio attacks and Solyndra-related nonsense that Republicans have been peddling about the stimulus. It’s certainly created jobs for fact-checkers. But now that I’m back, I suppose it’s my duty to weigh in on Mitt Romney’s new stimulus-bashing ad–apparently part of a new stimulus-bashing campaign–because it’s not just a rehash of the same old bogus charges. It’s added a brand new bogus charge that perfectly captures the up-is-down stimulus debate.

Most of the ad is typical schadenfreude about Solyndra, along with three other stimulus-funded clean-energy companies that have run into problems. For the umpteenth time: Some of these companies will fail. That’s capitalism. That’s lending. That’s life. As one Obama aide told me: Some students who get Pell grants are going to end up drunks on the street. I’ve written about this before, and I’ll write about it again, but so far there have been fewer Solyndra-type failures than Congress expected. The Energy Department’s controversial loan program has billions in excess reserves. The stimulus did not just promote one company or one technology or one pathway towards a clean-energy economy; it invested in all kinds of alternatives to fossil fuels, so they could battle it out in the marketplace. And for what it’s worth, the Bush Administration was gung-ho about the Solyndra loan, too.

It was a line near the end of Romney’s ad that caught my attention: “The Inspector General said contracts were steered to ‘friends and family.’” That sounded like news. I’ve spent two years in stimulus-world, and I had no idea an inspector general had said that. I asked the Romney campaign for documentation, and it produced a Newsweek article asserting that Energy Department inspector general Gregory Friedman “has testified that contracts have been steered to ‘friends and family.’”Except that Newsweek article was an excerpt from the book “Throw Them All Out,” written by Peter Schweizer, a right-winger who has served as an adviser to Sarah Palin’s PAC, edited one of Andrew Breitbart’s websites, and written a slew of books portraying liberals as pond scum. Not exactly a disinterested source. And it turns out that the inspector general never testified that stimulus contracts were steered to friends and family. He said his office was investigating whether stimulus contracts were steered to friends and family. So far, it hasn’t confirmed that any were.

That’s the real news. The Department of Energy has handled $37 billion in stimulus money, more than its annual budget. Overall, the federal government has distributed over $800 billion in stimulus money. Where are the sweetheart deals? Where are the actual outrages that are provoking outrage? During the debate over the stimulus, experts warned that as much as 5% to 7% of the stimulus could be lost to fraud. But by the end of 2011, independent investigators had documented only $7.2 million in fraud, about 0.001%. As I’ve written, reasonable people can disagree whether the stimulus was a good thing, but it’s definitely been a well-managed thing.

That will still be true even if it turns out that one of over 200,000 stimulus contracts was in fact steered to somebody’s friend or family. And it will still be true even if another stimulus-funded company fails before Election Day. (A123 Systems has a lot of smart people, but I don’t think they were planning to lose $90 million last quarter.) There’s a legitimate debate to be had about the Obama Administration’s green industrial policy, but the current debate over “crony capitalism” is a debate over a fantasy stimulus. Even Congressman Darrell Issa, the GOP’s chief Solyndra investigator, admitted after a year of relentless digging that there was no there there. “Is there criminal activity? Perhaps not,” he said. “Is there a political influence and connections? Perhaps not.”Will that stop Romney and his fellow Republicans from spending the summer denouncing the stimulus as a modern Teapot Dome? Hopefully not. Did I mention that my stimulus book is coming out in August?

Watch Rachel’s clip.  And yesterday’s as well, if you missed it.  Have a great weekend.

MYLGF

Methylgene is split into 317 million shares, approximately none of which trade each day. I first told you about it at 37 cents a share. On those rare occasions when it does trade, shares go for only 20 or 25 cents these days.  Well, finally it’s caught the attention of an analyst, whose extensive write-up you’ll find here. He agrees it’s very risky — only to be bought with money you can truly afford to lose — but thinks it could be $1 in the next couple of years. If you buy or sell, be sure to use “limits”; the “spread” between bid and asked is very wide.

THUGS

From Chris Bowers in a Daily Kos email blast on the Wisconsin recall:

Andrew, our best bet to beat Scott Walker next week is high voter turnout, and in cities like Madison, LaCrosse and Milwaukee, turnout is indeed huge.

Supporters of Scott Walker are responding with tactics that are clogging up phone lines at Tom Barrett’s campaign headquarters:

The campaign headquarters of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was inundated Tuesday with outraged callers who received an anonymous text message accusing Barrett of being a “union puppet.”

The message, which came from WI@obamasaliar.com, said this:

“Tom Barrett is a Union Puppet who will give Union Thugs everything they want. Call & ask why 414.271.8050.”

That is the phone number for the main campaign office for Barrett, a Democrat running against Gov. Scott Walker in the June 5 recall election. For a short period Tuesday afternoon, the Barrett campaign number appeared to be out of service from the flood of calls.

It’s sadly typical that Republicans are trying to mess with Democratic efforts to get out the vote, but it also shows they know high turnout means trouble for Scott Walker.

Please contribute $3 to Tom Barrett to make sure every Wisconsin Democrat can vote to recall Scott Walker.

Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers

You have to wonder who the real “thugs” are here.

AND THEY ARE WELL FINANCED

According to Politico:

GOP groups plan record $1 billion blitz

Republican super PACs and other outside groups shaped by a loose network of prominent conservatives – including Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – plan to spend roughly $1 billion on November’s elections for the White House and control of Congress, according to officials familiar with the groups’ internal operations.

That total includes previously undisclosed plans for newly aggressive spending by the Koch brothers, who are steering funding to build sophisticated, county-by-county operations in key states. POLITICO has learned that Koch-related organizations plan to spend about $400 million ahead of the 2012 elections – twice what they had been  expected to commit.

Just the spending linked to the Koch network is more than the $370 million that John McCain raised for his entire presidential campaign four years ago. And the $1 billion total surpasses the $750 million that Barack Obama, one of the most prolific fundraisers ever, collected for his 2008 campaign. . . .

A KEY TACTIC: DISCOURAGE VOTING

What could be more thuggish?  More unAmerican?  But the Republicans work hard at it. Here is Rachel Maddow on the topic last night.  It’s not a small thing.  We may lose our democracy to Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and the Koch brothers over this.

“The truth about uncertainty,” write the editors of Bloomberg News, “is that it’s (mostly) untrue.”

When corporate executives are asked why they don’t spend more of their record profits by investing in their businesses and hiring workers, they offer this mantra: uncertainty, brought on by President Barack Obama.

. . .

Is the uncertainty plaint really just an excuse for inaction — and cover for lobbyists looking to build support for less regulation? Or is there substance to the anxiety? If so, what can be done about it?
. . .

Hiring is down because consumer demand remains low as households continue to deleverage. Employers are also using technology and other productivity enhancements to make do with fewer workers. And it’s worth repeating the obvious: Business investment hasn’t bounced back to pre-2007 levels because there’s still too much slack in the economy.

If you accept these explanations for the elevated jobless rate, as most economists do, it’s hard to see the connection to Obama’s economic policies or to blame him for uncertainty.

So who or what is to blame? Some of it stems from the European debt crisis, which is cutting into demand for American exports. At the same time, China’s growth is slowing down. And some of the blame rests with the banks. They are still restricting lending, in part out of fear loans won’t be repaid.

Much of the problem is self-inflicted by Congress. . . . [L]ast summer’s debt-ceiling fight almost derailed the recovery, and this year’s replay could be worse.

. . .

Those invoking the uncertainty principle fail to mention that inflation and interest rates are historically low. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has repeatedly pledged not to raise rates at least through late 2014 — a gold-plated certainty guarantee if we ever saw one.

The pledge may be showing up in an uncertainty index created by Steven J. Davis, a University of Chicago business professor, with two others. Using news searches, differences among economic forecasters and other tools, they have measured the level of uncertainty by month, back to 1985. Their research shows that monetary policy and taxes, not regulatory policy, are the biggest drivers of uncertainty.

The highest point, in August 2011, came when [the Republicans in] Congress [manufactured] the debt-ceiling debate and the U.S. lost its AAA credit rating. Since then, the index has declined steadily and is now at the August 2008 level, before the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

. . . You can blame Obama for many things, but uncertainty isn’t one of them.

I don’t buy that “you can blame Obama for many things” — at least not fairly blame him.  I think it was an easy way to give a little flourish to the last line of the piece, and that if one subjected most of those “many things,” whatever they are, to the same kind of balanced scrutiny they gave this “uncertainty” rap, one would find those charges to be equally basely, or largely so.  But it’s good to have this one debunked.  Hats off to Bloomberg for the analysis.

TWO PHOTOS

This one is columnist Jonathan Capehart’s “all-time favorite presidential photo” — the one where the President is leaning down to let a little black boy touch his hair.  Jonathan concludes his commentary: “Obama gets a bum rap for not talking more openly about race. What his critics don’t get — and what the Souza photo perfectly illustrates — is that the president addresses so much about race without ever opening his mouth.”

This one, which comes thanks to Andy Towle via Rex Wockner, shows a dog (who spells no better than you might expect), holding a sign in his mouth that says: “I AM A DOG.  I SUPPORT SAME-SEX MARRIAGE.  IT WOULD EFFECT ME AS MUCH AS IT EFFECTS YOU.”

MUD

If you enter “GLDD” in the search field at right, you’ll find we have a long-held fascination with sediment and an equally long-held shareholding in Great Lakes Dredge and Dock.  This write-up argues that the value of GLDD’s assets is more than double its current enterprise value (market cap plus debt).  One more reason to feel comfortable holding for the long term.

MITT

Art: “To the extent that he has documented his claim of creating 100,000 jobs through Bain, it appears that he believes we should count even those hired by Staples yesterday — years after he left.  Yet when counting jobs during the Obama administration, he believes the job losses attributable to Bush’s policies ended abruptly the day Obama was inaugurated.”

It’s as if Nixon, not Kennedy, deserves the credit for the moon landing because it happened shortly after he was inaugurated.

And by the way — those Staples jobs?  They came largely at the expense of jobs at competitors whom Staples put out of business.  Which is okay — I’m all for all for “creative destruction.” But if you’re going to count the Staples payroll as jobs Mitt Romney helped create, don’t you also have to count the perhaps even greater number of workers Staples displaced as an indication of how many jobs his efforts helped destroy?

He made a ton of dough for himself and investors — nothing wrong with that — and helped to make the office-supplies industry more efficient — definitely nothing wrong with that — but what does this have to do with our urgent need to boost employment?  As you know, given the chance to work his magic for four years, Governor Romney took the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from an already bad 37th-out-of-50 rank in job creation down to a near-rock-bottom 47th.

I’M CHRISTIAN UNLESS YOU’RE GAY

First Dan Pearce blogged about his closeted 27-year-old friend “Jacob.”  Then that blog post was assigned in a high school class. One of the kids’ mothers saw the assignment and forbade her 15-year-old son from participating.  He did anyway (from a safe undisclosed location) and emailed her the result.  Here, she tells the story — and shares her son’s essay.  All of which goes to show that in the ongoing tension between Christian intolerance and Christian love, love can still sometimes prevail.

MORE HOLY TERROR

From Mel White’s recent Huffington Post:

According to the Baltimore Sun, at a hearing on Maryland’s proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at American University, was requested to testify. At the end of his testimony, Republican senator Nancy Jacobs said, “As I read Biblical principles, marriage was intended, ordained, and started by God. That is my belief.” Raskin replied, “People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don’t put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible,” eliciting applause from some people in the room. . . .