Is Your iPhone Possessed By The Devil? October 31, 2014October 31, 2014 VOTE It’s showtime, kids. Tuesday at the latest, but why wait if you can do it today? TIM COOK SPEAKS OUT So the CEO of the world’s most valuable company (Apple’s $625 billion market cap is half again larger than Exxon’s) is gay. We knew that; but now, writing about it (beautifully) at BloombergBusinessweek, he is proudly and openly gay. In part: For years, I’ve been open with many people about my sexual orientation. Plenty of colleagues at Apple know I’m gay, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference in the way they treat me. Of course, I’ve had the good fortune to work at a company that loves creativity and innovation and knows it can only flourish when you embrace people’s differences. Not everyone is so lucky. While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven’t publicly acknowledged it either, until now. So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me. Being gay has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be in the minority and provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day. It’s made me more empathetic, which has led to a richer life. It’s been tough and uncomfortable at times, but it has given me the confidence to be myself, to follow my own path, and to rise above adversity and bigotry. It’s also given me the skin of a rhinoceros, which comes in handy when you’re the CEO of Apple. The world has changed so much since I was a kid. America is moving toward marriage equality, and the public figures who have bravely come out have helped change perceptions and made our culture more tolerant. Still, there are laws on the books in a majority of states that allow employers to fire people based solely on their sexual orientation. There are many places where landlords can evict tenants for being gay, or where we can be barred from visiting sick partners and sharing in their legacies. Countless people, particularly kids, face fear and abuse every day because of their sexual orientation. I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others. So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy. . . . . . . When I arrive in my office each morning, I’m greeted by framed photos of Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy. I don’t pretend that writing this puts me in their league. All it does is allow me to look at those pictures and know that I’m doing my part, however small, to help others. We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick. It’s tempting to challenge those who would kill or imprison or simply shun LGBT people — in these 10 countries, homosexuality is punishable by death — to recognize that Apple is possessed by the devil and make them choose: religious purity or their beloved iPhone. But snark — however righteous it may make us feel — is probably not the best way to reach people. I was struck by two lines this past week that counsel a different approach. Speaking to a black-tie audience of 3,500 at the Human Rights Campaign dinner in Washington last Saturday night, President Clinton said, softly and simply: “No human heart is immune to an honest outreach.” And speaking to a one-night-only audience Monday of many of the folks who’ve helped with bricks of their own, David Mixner (who persuaded Governor Ronald Reagan to oppose the Briggs Amendment and who got himself arrested in front of the Clinton White House protesting Don’t Ask Don’t Tell), said: “We need to try and get those who disagree with us to join us, not tell them off for not agreeing with us. They’re our neighbors.” In the meantime, though, we need to (lovingly) vote them out of office. Have a great weekend.
THE John Jackson? October 30, 2014 THE REPUBLICAN GAME PLAN: Keep African-Americans and Hispanics from voting. From a new report by Greg Palast: Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb . . . At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate Crosscheck program, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names. Officials say that these names represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election — a felony punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison. . . . If even a fraction of those names are blocked from voting or purged from voter rolls, it could alter the outcome of next week’s electoral battle for control of the U.S. Senate — and perhaps prove decisive in the 2016 presidential vote count. . . . . . . all it takes to become a suspect is sharing a first and last name with a voter in another state. Typical “matches” identifying those who may have voted in both Georgia and Virginia include: > Kevin Antonio Hayes of Durham, North Carolina, is a match for a man who voted in Alexandria, Virginia, as Kevin Thomas Hayes. > John Paul Williams of Alexandria is supposedly the same man as John R. Williams of Atlanta, Georgia. > Robert Dewey Cox of Marietta, Georgia is matched with Robert Glen Cox of Springfield, Virginia. . . . “Jr.” and “Sr.” are ignored, potentially disenfranchising two generations in the same family. . . . The search website PeopleSmart notes that 86,020 people in the United States have the name John Jackson. And according to the 2000 U.S. Census, which is the most recent data set, 53 percent of Jacksons are African-American. It’s an extensive report, but that’s the gist. Meanwhile, separately . . . A Georgia judge has denied a push from civil rights groups to force the state’s secretary of State to add 40,000 recently registered voters to the rolls, a setback for groups working to register minority voters that could have a big impact on Georgia’s hotly contested races next week. . . . The suit was brought by the groups after roughly one third of the more than 100,000 mostly minority voters they’d registered hadn’t appeared on the rolls, potentially disenfranchising thousands of mostly Democratic voters. The decision could lead to chaos next week as they try to vote and are forced to do so provisionally, and may well lead to additional legal challenges after the election. . . . . . . [Some] suggested the judge was playing politics. “A Republican-appointed judge has backed the Republican Secretary of State to deny the right to vote to a largely African-American and Latino population. It is outrageous that Georgians’ rights are being ignored,” Dr. Francys Johnson, president of the Georgia Conference of the NAACP, said in a statement. And the Ebola death toll — that has now stands at zero American lives . . . dominates the news. OH, NO WAY! It’s a flying car. A real one. Just watch and try not to crack your cheek bones smiling. (Not that you’d ever find me strapped into one of them.)
Ebola Update October 28, 2014 WAZE I’m probably the last one to know this — I don’t drive much — but waze is a great app that takes current traffic conditions into account in routing you to your destination. Check it out. EBOLA The death toll among American citizens — zero until recently — has now climbed to still zero. The nightmare continues — as does the criticism. Who can focus on anything else when everywhere you turn in America no one is dying from Ebola? Why put people to work rebuilding our infrastructure to get the economy where it should be and wages rising across the board . . . why impose the universal background checks on guns that even 73% of NRA members favor . . . when we could all be dead in a few weeks anyway? Today’s post is late because my Internet went down last night (and my Acela to Washington Saturday took three hours and twenty-two minutes because our infrastructure is crumbling), so I’ll keep this short. But when I hear on CBS This Morning how Democratic candidates are having to run away from the President’s record (because the other side has done such an effective job of making people think it’s bad — Mitch McConnell says that “by any standard” the President has been “a disaster” for the country), it makes me a little nuts. The President’s record — achieved in the face of unprecedented obstruction — includes an averted depression, a rescued automobile industry, a stabilized housing market, a dramatically reduced deficit, the National Debt shrinking relative to the economy, a strong dollar, 55 consecutive months of private-sector job growth, unemployment below 6% two years sooner than Mitt pledged he would get it there, record-low mortgage rates, a credit-card bill of rights, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that’s already helped consumers recoup billions, health care security for all who might ever develop a “pre-existing condition,” the lowest health-care inflation in decades, more affordable college loans, huge progress toward energy independence, record-high corporate profits, a nearly tripled Dow, replenished 401k’s . . . and that’s just the kitchen-table economic stuff. And the only reason it’s not much better still is the Republican refusal to allow a hike in the minimum wage . . . passage of the Senate’s bipartisan immigration bill . . . and passage of the American Jobs Act (to rebuild our infrastructure) . . . all three of which economists confirm would boost our economy for everyone. And their refusal to allow refinancing of federal student loans at today’s low rates (as homeowners refinance mortgages), which would provide yet another nice little boost. A boosted economy, needless to say, means, also, higher wages, higher profits, and greater prosperity. The Republican agenda these past six years has been to block — and then vote 52 times to repeal — access to affordable health care . . . reject federal dollars to expand Medicaid . . . block investments in infrastructure . . . shut down the government . . . make it harder for people to vote (decried now even by a famously conservative judge who once ruled in their favor) . . . and block the right of women and their doctors to make reproductive health care decisions without government interference and mandated vaginal probes. But we can change all that Tuesday.
Judy Garland, Thomas Jefferson, and Archie Bunker Walk Into A Bar . . . October 27, 2014 JUDY GARLAND Do you like Judy Garland? Do you like supper? Might you be in the New York area November 23? Click here. My friend Seth Sikes belts it out with a great band. THOMAS JEFFERSON Do you like wine? Did you collect coins? Do you know what kind of wine Thos. Jefferson favored? Click here. My friend Marc Emory’s novel has just come out. Or wait! It’s just $1.99 for the e-book. ARCHIE BUNKER Did you like All In The Family? Would you like to spend 19 intimate hours with Norman Lear, its creator, who at one point had 120 million Americans watching the various ground-breaking sitcoms he had on the air? And who founded People for the American Way? And who at 92 is sharper and more energetic than Archie ever was? Click here to have him tell you his amazing life story, Even This I Get To Experience. You could read it with your eyeballs, of course; but there’s something about the direct voice-to-brain experience that I find pretty great.
Deep Space October 24, 2014 MAGIC Either Harrison Ford is in on the trick or David Blaine is God. Ninety seconds. You do not want to miss this. NOT MAGIC According to this — and a letter signed by 70 scientists — a lot of the games being sold as “fitness programs for your brain,” like Luminosity, are not effective. Digital snake oil. Which is good news for me, because long-time readers know I’m an investor in Posit Science, whose brain fitness program has been shown in peer-reviewed studies to work well. MORE MAGIC Thanks to Tom Stolze for the link to this brief look into the outer reaches of space. It is one of those things I can’t begin to comprehend. To say that Earth is a speck of dust in the greater scheme of things is all but infinitely to overstate our physical presence — and makes our tiny space ship, and the nanosecond of geological time it has hosted us, all the more miraculous. What a responsibility to our forebears and offspring not to muck it up. Please vote! And have a great weekend.
No Shame October 23, 2014 KRYSTAL’S RANT Here is my pal Krystal Ball on Lena Dunham and women everywhere. (“Why does Lena Dunham scare conservatives?”) Watch. And if you have teenage daughters, share it with them. If you’re a guy, watch and see whether she’s talking to you. ELEANOR’S REPORT And here is my pal Eleanor Clift’s report on two all-female focus groups in the run-up to next month’s elections. If I weren’t so annoyingly upbeat all the time, it might have sent me into ululations of lamentation. Because if — as Thomas Jefferson apparently did not say but surely would have — “an informed citizenry is essential” to the proper functioning of democracy, what prayer do we really have? It’s not just the nation’s physical infrastructure that rates a D+ . . . though shouldn’t the Republicans stop blocking The American Jobs Act that would shift the economy into high gear tackling that problem? . . . it’s our collective knowledge of “current affairs,” as well. Bone up, kids. The exam’s November 4. You won’t find the answers on FOX.
Fear! October 22, 2014October 22, 2014 EBOLA With the cumulative U.S. death toll seeming to have peaked at “one” — or “zero” if you count only cases contracted here . . . and with the Obama Administration being blamed 24/7 for this state of affairs . . . Kyle Franks writes: “The Ebola patient who died in Texas was a poor black man without health insurance. Texs is one of the states that refused to expand Medicaid. Of course the hospital denies that Thomas Duncan was turned away for lack of insurance but that is not believable for me. (As you said, he had 103 temperature and intense abdominal pain). Another argument for universal health care.” OTHER THINGS TO BE FRIGHTENED OF: Zealots and literalists (of any religion), ideologues and extremists (of any political bent), getting your arm caught between two rocks and having to cut it off, that plant that killed the guy in Alaska when the river became impassable for months on end and he couldn’t make it back for treatment, stories that seem to good to be true (unless they emanate from companies nominally headquartered in Gibraltar), and — it turns out — peanut butter getting stuck to the roof of your mouth. (My own food fear is of accidentally swallowing an avocado pit because they’re so slippery.) Did you know that there’s a word for that peanut butter fear? Or at least a semi-fake word? Arachibutyrophobia. Or that you can eat avocado pits, which are high in vitamin C, if you cut them up first, or smash them? Other items on the phobia list, which is long, include atychiphobia, the fear of failure, brontophobia, one of several terms for fear of thunder and lightning, chaetophobia, fear of hair, pogonophobia, fear, more specifically, of beards, peladophobia, fear of bald people (missing, ironically, a term for the far more common fear of going bald), pteronophobia, fear of being tickled with feathers, and the timely samhainophobia, fear of Halloween. (In my own case, as I may have told you, Mrs. Oestreicher left the tail gate of the station-wagon down; and I, being the last one back in, rolled off onto the road as she accelerated, a five- or six-year-old ghost, lost forever to the backwoods of Westchester County, except that one of the other six-year-olds noticed and alerted Mrs. Oestreicher, who retrieved me.) And, and of course, consecotaleophobia and coulrophobia: the fears, respectively, of chopsticks and clowns. One thing not to be afraid of is our current projected $460 billion deficit. It sounds like a lot, but it represents just 2.7% of our National Debt (which quadruped under Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush; was tamed under Bill Clinton; was exploded by the second George Bush; and has now begun to moderate again under Barack Obama, as the deficit continues to fall). If the economy were to grow at 4.5% a year for the next 100 years — half from inflation, half from real growth — while the Debt grew by 2.5%, the economy would have grown more than 80-fold and the Debt less than 12-fold. It would thus be tiny relative to the economy as a whole, vaguely like a $120,000 mortgage on an $800,000 home. Indeed, if the deficit remained constant at $460 billion a year as the economy averaged 4.5% grown (again: half real, half inflation), the results would be more dramatic still. Our GDP would have grown to $1.4 quadrillion or so; our Debt, to a mere $63 trillion, or less than 5% of GDP. Like a $25,000 mortgage on a $500,000 home. As noted in Forbes, “The Capitalist Tool,” and previously linked, Barack Obama is arguably the best economic President in modern times. Now get out there and vote — Democrat — so we can get the economy back running on all cylinders, as it would be if only we passed the American Jobs Act to revitalize our crumbling infrastructure; passed the Senate’s bipartisan immigration bill; and hiked the minimum wage.
Plus Ca Change . . . October 21, 2014 ELEANOR’S TAKE Jim Burt: “I saw the following in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time, about FDR and Eleanor, and was reminded of current events. The paragraph describes a syndicated column Mrs. Roosevelt wrote recounting the reaction of congressional Republicans to FDR’s famous ‘Four Freedoms’ speech, in which he articulated the principles for which Europe’s democracies were fighting Hitler and in which he proposed Lend-Lease: In the column [that Mrs. Roosevelt] wrote the afternoon of the speech, she angrily observed that the Republicans had failed to applaud the president’s address. “It looked to me as though those men were saying to the country as a whole, ‘We are Republicans first. We represent you here in Congress not as citizens of the U.S. in a period of crisis, but as members of a political party which seeks primarily to promote its own partisan interest.’ This is to me shocking and terrifying.” “The Republican of today are still sitting on their hands in the face of popular proposals and obstructing the responses of our government to crises. Some things apparently never change.” ☞ Ah, but they do — if we take the time to vote. VEST OR VOTE Have you seen this ad urging African-Americans to vote? Did you know that on average one African American is killed by a cop, security guard, or vigilante every 28 hours? An interesting discussion follows the clip. THE DEATH TOLL Not counting the one American who contracted it abroad (Ebola aside, what kind of hospital sends someone home with 103-degree fever and intense abdominal pain?), the U.S. death toll has now climbed to zero and can be expected to continue to dominate the news.
Self-Driving Cars October 20, 2014October 19, 2014 My favorite self-driving car would be powered by a Chorus Motor — Chorus being a subsidiary of Borealis, the grandparent of WheelTug — but leave my childish fantasies aside. This video shows how far along driverless cars were even three years ago. And with benefits I hadn’t thought of. First, you save thousands of lives. (Thirty-three thousand are lost here each year to car crashes versus zero so far from Ebola contracted in America.) Second, of course, you can snooze, schmooze, or snack safely while speeding along. So far, so obvious. But third — all this a ways off, to be sure — self-driving cars will have faster reflexes and surer motor skills than the least-talented drivers for whom today’s roads are designed. Thus they will allow for slightly narrower lanes . . . and a little less space between each car . . . and higher speed limits . . . which could add perhaps 40% more capacity to existing highways, either to handle more vehicles or, if their count did not rise, eliminate traffic jams. Which would also save time and energy. (Until everyone had such cars, only something akin to the HOV lanes of certain highways might allow cars to travel safely when closer together. But eventually, driver-controlled cars might be outlawed in all but the slowest lane — and perhaps even there — just as horse-drawn carriages are now.) And you seriously don’t want to live forever to watch all this unfold? I do! I do! So I’d just as soon our country — and our species — not hurtle off the rails for lack of leaders who “believe in” science . . . and in compromise, diplomacy, enlightened regulation, and whatever else 7.2 billion people (up from 2.5 billion when I was born) might need to have a prayer of surviving on the tiny space ship they all share. So please get every young person you know to vote. And speaking of young people and the future . . . WEBSITE FOR YOUR KIDS OR GRANDKIDS Grandkids? You look much too young to have grandchildren between the ages of 15 and 30 — what’s you’re secret? But here it is anyway: a website for youth around the world who want to make that world better. It gets millions of hits from young people speaking 13 different languages. FOOTNOTES ON THE CAR THING > Nothing about driverless vehicles is great news for aspiring taxi and truck drivers. (Bus drivers might take on more of a flight-attendant role, providing peanuts. Limo drivers, more of a butler role, shaking martinis.) Delivery costs will fall. But as argued here (“Reductio Ad Absurdum”), increased productivity, for all its enormous benefits, poses challenges. > Traffic deaths peaked around 54,000 in 1974. That the number could have fallen by 40% even as our population increased by half is quite an achievement; and speaks to the value (I would argue) of such things as government (not Republicans’ favorite institution) and aggressive trial lawyers (with whom I have my differences, but who clearly serve an important function few Republicans are keen to acknowledge). Just sayin’. Only important if your loved one was one of the extra 48,000 or so fatalities that did not occur this year, in part because of government regulations and the work of the trial bar.
Our Two Greatest Threats – Averted! October 17, 2014October 17, 2014 With the nationwide Ebola death toll already up to one and possibly headed even higher, it’s no surprise most other news has been overshadowed. Even so, it’s worth noting that: 1. What many have long sought to portray as our greatest domestic threat — the deficit — has been averted. (See below.) THIS IS HUGE. And that: 2. What many have long sought to portray as the greatest threat to our democracy — voter identity fraud — has also been averted (by virtue of its not having significantly existed in the first place — or so concludes the conservative judge who ruled the other way until he reviewed the facts. See below.) THIS TOO IS HUGE. And all on the watch of Barack Obama, the best economic president of modern times, according to Forbes. So have a great weekend. # Or keep reading if you want the details. The Deficit Is Down and the Deficit Hawks Are Furious By Dean Baker Last week, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the deficit for the 2014 fiscal year that just ended was $460 billion, considerably lower than they had previously projected. This puts the deficit at 2.7 percent of GDP. At that level, the size of the debt relative to the economy is actually falling. Not only is the deficit down sharply from its levels of 2009 and 2010, when it was near 10 percent of GDP, it is below the levels that even the deficit hawks had targeted back in those years. . . . The way to reduce the deficit still further is to boost the economy by revitalizing our crumbling infrastructure; boost the economy by hiking the minimum wage; and boost the economy by passing the Senate’s bipartisan immigration bill . . . thereby initiating a virtuous cycle that would lead to higher wages, higher tax receipts, lower safety-net payments, and reduced deficits. Kind of like the virtuous cycle we had under Bill Clinton. (Remember?) All that stands in the way are the Republicans in Congress. Please vote. Which I hope you will be able to do without having to get ID you may not have. Judge Pens Plea to SCOTUS to Overturn His Own Landmark Voter ID Ruling By Ernest A. Canning and Brad Friedman . . .Joined by four other Seventh Circuit jurists last week, Posner has now written an extraordinarily powerful and compelling dissent [PDF] in Wisconsin’s photo ID voting case. The previously missing evidence is now in, as the judge meticulously details in the opinion. GOP claims that photo ID restrictions are needed to combat “voter fraud,” he writes, are “a mere fig leaf for efforts to disenfranchise voters likely to vote for the political party that does not control the state government . . .” There is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud, if there is no actual danger of such fraud, and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burdens. Posner’s carefully crafted dissent does more than establish why the US Supreme Court should sustain the district court’s finding that Wisconsin’s photo ID law is both unconstitutional and a violation of the Voting Rights Act. It obliterates the factual premise that had served as a pillar upon which his, and subsequently the Supreme Court’s, decision in Crawford were based. Polling place photo ID laws do not promote voter confidence in the integrity of elections, as Posner and the Crawford Supreme Court plurality had erroneously assumed. The assertion that they do was a “mistake” – Posner’s mistake! – and he now admits as much, with the support of devastating new data from recent studies to back him up. His powerful new dissent amounts to more than just a response to the Wisconsin GOP’s new photo ID voting law. It is an elegant plea that the US Supreme Court right a grievous wrong that he was personally responsible for. Posner presents an astonishing, airtight case for ruling that all “strict photo ID laws,” which, as he demonstrates, have only been enacted in states sporting GOP-controlled legislatures, must now be struck down as unconstitutional. . . . Click here to watch Chris Hayes’ report. Ralph Nader gave us George W. Bush who gave us the Supreme Court that gave us Citizens United and McCutcheon which gave the Koch brothers even more power over Congress and overturned key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed Republicans to make it harder for poor people and young people to vote — which is good, in their view, because young people and poor people tend to vote for Democrats, and Democrats (let’s call a spade a spade) favor policies for the middle class and those struggling to enter it, while the Koch brothers are in the top .000001%. So I say again: Please vote. And, again, have a great weekend.