The Justice Department will ask Congress to make it mandatory for Internet service providers to retain data on their users’ activity. Law enforcement officials can already ask for data to be preserved, but Justice would like to have more robust snooping capabilities in order to investigate and prosecute “almost every type of crime.” ISPs are required to make the records they do have available to law enforcement upon request, and many Internet providers, including cellular networks, telcos and cable companies, already retain data for government access. According to this CNET report, the Justice Department would like to force providers large and small to retain information. Not surprisingly, the push for mandatory data retention originated in the Bush administration.
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Japanese authorities aren’t waiting for test results, although it will takes days to cull the animals. A strain a flu was identified at a poultry farm, prompting a series of safety precautions. Related Entries January 24, 2011 Getting High on Bath Salts January 24, 2011 So Long, Jack LaLanne
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Apparently America’s latest drug craze is a chemical powder that is marketed as bath salt. AP reports the horrific story of one man who abused the substance and then attacked himself with a skinning knife. A quick Google search tells us this might not be the widespread phenomenon AP suggests, but we’ll keep our ears open. AP via Washington Post: Some say the effects of the powders are as powerful as abusing methamphetamine. Increasingly, law enforcement agents and poison control centers say the advertised bath salts with complex chemical names are an emerging menace in several U.S. states where authorities talk of banning their sale. From the Deep South to California, emergency calls are being reported over-exposure to the stimulants the powders often contain: mephedrone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone, also known as MDPV. Read more Related Entries January 24, 2011 Getting High on Bath Salts January 24, 2011 So Long, Jack LaLanne
Continue reading …While Toyota Is Barely Edging GM in Worldwide Unit Sales, AP Report ‘Forgets’ Its Revenues Are Over 50% Higher
January 25, 2011 No CommentIn a Monday Associated Press dispatch , reporter Tom Krisher virtually celebrated the idea that Government/General Motors “may be Number 1 again,” with happy talk of “dethroning” and “overtaking” the Japanese maker. Nowhere did Krisher mention the inconvenient fact that Toyota's revenues dwarf GM's to the point where comparing unit sales is an absurd waste of time. Specifically: Toyota's sales from its automotive operations for the first six months of its fiscal year (April through September, 2010) amounted to 8,863.6 billion yen (go to the segment information in the report), which translates to roughly $104 billion at an average exchange rate of 85 yen to the dollar. GM's revenues during those same two quarters were $67.2 billion . Thus, Toyota's auto operations are over 50% bigger than all of GM. We're supposed to be impressed that GM is close to selling the same number of cars? We wouldn't be if Krisher had chosen to report revenues, something any who follows business news would clearly have wanted to know. Here are a few paragraphs of Krisher's free advertising — er, report : Resurgent GM nips at Toyota's heels in sales race
Continue reading …Resolution Calling to Amend the Constitution Banning Corporate Personhood Introduced in Vermont
January 25, 2011 No CommentBy Christopher Ketcham, AlterNet On the anniversary of the Citizens United decision, Vermont politicians are moving to deny corporations the rights that humans enjoy. Related Entries January 24, 2011 Meat-Cleaver Budgeting January 21, 2011 Is America Too Corrupt to Keep Up?
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enlarge President Roosevelt – In 1944, a second Bill of Rights. Click here to view this media Continuing our survey of States of the Union past, here is President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivering a pre-recorded State of the Union address on January 11, 1944, owing to a bout with the flu that prevented him from delivering it in person to Congress. Since we were right in the middle of World War 2, concerns were naturally on how the progress of the war was going and how it was affecting life in this country during that time. There was optimism it would be over soon, as the tide on several fronts were changing in the Allies favor. Still, it was optimism with caution. This address has also been known as FDR’s “Second Bill Of Rights Speech”, since he outlines the aims of the Roosevelt administration for a post-war era. President Roosevelt: “As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education. All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.” In these particular times, it’s good to remember as our basic needs haven’t changed.
Continue reading …By Eugene Robinson Republicans who feign attacks of the vapors and fainting spells over the big, scary deficit would be more convincing if they didn’t begin with the insane premise that defense spending should be sacrosanct. Related Entries January 24, 2011 Because It’s Time to End the Afghanistan War January 24, 2011 U.S. Condemns Tyranny While Torturing Bradley Manning
Continue reading …Employers Are Screening Out The Long-Term Unemployed. Will We Need Legislation To Protect Them?
January 25, 2011 No CommentEven if the economy does bounce back sooner than expected, we’re still going to have to deal with all the ways employers will find to discriminate against the long-term unemployed . As I’ve written, when I was a recruiter during the 2000 recession, this was a real roadblock and getting all these Americans back will probably require protective legislation: From an employer’s standpoint, however, there could be some legitimate reasons for not hiring the unemployed, Morse said. “For any particular position in this dour economy, there are thousands of applicants,” he said. “People are looking for a way to narrow the field. They have pressure to put the best team on the field.” On top of employers’ perceptions of unemployed workers, many long-term jobless applicants lose self-confidence and hurt themselves walking into the interview already beaten, said Karl Ahlrichs, a human-relations consultant at Gregory & Appel in Indianapolis. “There can be a lot of comfort in playing the victim,” he said. “But it’s quickly picked up by the employer that that might carry through if you get hired.” On the other hand, if the candidates go in and point out the positives of long-term unemployment, it can work to their advantage. “The people that are currently working are pretty burned out. They have been over-tasked and under-motivated and scared for a long time and their reserves are probably pretty far down,” Ahlrichs said. “Somebody coming off the bench will be fresher.” Sitting the bench, however, hasn’t proved to be a positive for Henri Shenter. Since losing his job in construction sales 15 months ago, Shenter has been turned down for jobs nearly 50 times. He’s looking for another sales job and at 35 has 15 years experience, but as soon as they see his last date of employment, he said, it’s over. “They throw it in the trash,” said Shenter, of Greenwood. “There is absolute discrimination going on.” Whether that discrimination is legal is up for debate. “An employer that discriminates against the unemployed risks legal action,” said Michael Blickman, partner in the labor and employment group at Ice Miller, adding he is unaware of any legal precedent. The candidate could argue that filing for unemployment is a statutory right and that an employer’s policy not to hire the unemployed unjustly interferes with that right. Morse disagrees, arguing that the unemployed are not among the categories protected by discrimination laws. “The mere fact of you being unemployed for a period of time is not a protected characteristic,” he said. Categories like age, race and gender are. Still, a company like PMG Indiana that recently ran an ad for a production assistant that read: “Must have worked in the previous 12 months,” walks a fine line, Blickman said. “An employer should ensure that it has a solid business justification if it adopts that kind of policy or practice,” he said. “The employer also risks the loss of good will among its own employees, customers and the public with this kind of policy.”
Continue reading …Securing the border: Why a fence will never work until we reform the system
January 25, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media You could just about hear the heart attacks happening at Fox News — home of Republican nativists’ favorite rallying cry: ‘We have to secure the border before we can have immigration reform!’ — the other morning last week when documentary filmmaker Roy Germano — whose last movie, The Other Side of Immigration, is a must-see for anyone serious about the subject — came on to discuss a little clip he made recently. The clip, which he put up on YouTube , shows two American girls easily climbing over the border fence that Minutement, authorities and right-wing talk-show blowhards all seem to believe will keep out illegal immigrants. Obviously someone booked it at Fox because they thought it would demonstrate what a lousy job the Obama administration is doing on border security. But the clip itself actually made clear that the whole concept of using a fence to control immigration is a joke. As Germano put it: “I thought it revealed that the fence is quite absurd, it’s not doing the job it’s supposed to do, it’s a waste of money, and it also has a lot of unintended consequences.” And then he offered his thoughts on how to really make the borders secure — and as he explained, the only way we’re going to be able to do that is by having a rational system of immigration, instead of the outdated, xenophobic system we currently have in place. This, of course, is when the heart attacks started happening: GERMANO: If we are really serious about our border security, I think it’s in our interest to be monitoring and regulating the immigration flow that is inevitable. There is a multi-million-dollar — hundreds of million-dollar — industry out there of human smugglers that will try to smuggle people in. They will build tunnels under the fence, they will get people over the fence. So we should be investing in an immigration system that actually gives people the opportunity to enter the country legally. The typical Mexican has almost no way of entering the U.S. legally. So we should be expanding the number of visas we offer so that employers can hire the workers they need to meet the labor demand in our country. SCOTT: All right, y-you have just lit up our chat room, I’m sure, because there are lots of unemployed people in this country who would like to have jobs, and they say, ‘Why are we letting people in where there’s so much unemployment in America?’ GERMANO: But there are certain sectors of the economy where it’s the old, you know, ‘immigrants do jobs that Americans don’t want to do.’ I go to western New York state a lot and I visit family farms who have had ads in papers for 20 years and have never had a native-born speaker respond to that ad. And they depend on immigrant labor. But our H2A visa program, which is the farm worker visa program, only has less than 70,000 visas for 800,000 to 1.2 million jobs that need to be filled on our family farm. We’ve discussed this point quite a bit too. The only problem is that Americans are not only in denial about the numbers of unskilled-labor jobs their economy produces, but the willingness and ability of native-born Americans to actually fill them. Here’s the original YouTube clip from Germano:
Continue reading …In ‘Emergency,’ Rick Perry Wants To Force Abortion Patients To View Sonogram
January 25, 2011 No CommentI read an interview yesterday with one of the women who had an abortion at the horrible clinic that was shut down in Philadelphia. She said she’d tried to go to one of the well-known, respectable clinics — but she was scared off by the protesters. She went to the criminally-negligent clinic because someone told her there wouldn’t be any protesters. Women who are under the stress of an unwanted pregnancy have enough trouble just getting past the logistics (money, insurance, state waiting periods, etc.). To add the emotional coercion and financial demand of forcing them to undergo a sonogram — well, that’s just plain mean. As I keep reminding people, abortion is still legal in America, and a woman’s reason for choosing one is her own damned business. She shouldn’t have to jump through these hoops to exercise her right to the procedure: Gov. Rick Perry has fast-tracked legislation that requires physicians to show women a sonogram before they have an abortion. Perry this weekend added the issue to his list of emergency items, giving lawmakers the ability to consider such bills in the first 30 days of the session. “When you consider the magnitude of the decision to have an abortion, ensuring that the patient understands what’s truly at stake seems a small step to take,” Perry said in a statement.’ “When someone has all the information, the right choice – the choice of life – becomes clear. Now our legislature can take fast action on this important bill because we all know when it comes to saving lives, every second counts.” The list of emergency item this session has now grown to five. Other emergency items that Perry has set include establishing tougher eminent domain laws, abolishing sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants, requiring voters to present a photo identification at the polls and calling for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would require the federal government to have a balanced budget. The state faces a budget shortfall of between $15 and $27 billion. Critics have questioned the governor’s selection of such emergency items at a time when public education, higher education and health care are facing deep cuts.
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