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« Liberal Outrage: October 2011 | Main | Liberal Outrage: December 2011 » Liberal OutrageWho Needs Due Process Just chuck everybody in the clink and let things sort themselves out. Link The measure, part of the massive National Defense Authorization Act, was also opposed by civil libertarians on the left and right. But 16 Democrats and an independent joined with Republicans to defeat an amendment by Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) that would have killed the provision, voting it down with 61 against, and 37 for it. Even Rand Paul is against it. "It's not enough just to be alleged to be a terrorist," Paul said, echoing the views of the American Civil Liberties Union. "That's part of what due process is -- deciding, are you a terrorist? I think it's important that we not allow U.S. citizens to be taken." He's sharing similar views with the ACLU. The ACLU! Meanwhile, the proponents seem to be channeling a little McCarthy. "The enemy is all over the world. Here at home. And when people take up arms against the United States and [are] captured within the United States, why should we not be able to use our military and intelligence community to question that person as to what they know about enemy activity?" Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said. That doesn't sound totally paranoid and irrational or anything. At least Obama's come out saying he's going to veto it. But, really, how the hell did we come this far? Our Senate just voted to allow anyone to be detained forever and to hell with evidence or a trial by your peers or any of that silly stuff. Sixteen Democrats voted against the Udall amendment which would have killed this particular provision in the bill - Bob Casey (Pa.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Daniel Inouye (Hawaii), Herb Kohl (Wis.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Carl Levin (Mich.), Joe Manchin (W. Va.), Clair McCaskill (Mo.), Robert Menendez (N.J.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Jack Reed (R.I.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.). I'm not surprised to see Landrieu on the list, but my idiot Senator voted against the amendment, too. I suppose Menendez must have gotten an earful about it, though, because there's an update at the bottom of the article saying he asked to have his vote changed to be in favor of the amendment. Great. Thanks, Menendez. Mebbe next time you can vote the right way without a do over, huh? By min | November 30, 2011, 3:39 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1)| Link The Congressional bill Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate bill Protect IP Act (PIPA) are two bills that would essentially censor the web. Think China, except for copyrighted materials, not political dissent. The Motion Picture Association of America is one of the big backers of these bills. According to them, all this infringement going on of their materials is costing thousands of jobs. We've all heard this before. Pirated songs are taking money away from artists. In all fairness, someone who makes a product ought to get paid for it, but we all know it's not the artist who are losing money on this deal. That's a whole 'nother discussion. To give examples that affect just about everybody: What about a video of you/your kids/your niece singing a song? A copyrighted song? Or a video of you playing a song on your instrument? Or an image you scanned from a book you own? Better not put that up on Youtube or your blog or Facebook or anywhere because that could be considered "infringement" as far as SOPA and PIPA are concerned. And that suspicion of infringement is all that's needed to get you in trouble with the law. And that doesn't even cover the part where it just outright breaks the internet. According to Rebecca MacKinnon of the NYT: SOPA is still in committee and Nancy Pelosi has come out against it, but PIPA is ready to go to the Senate floor. Conyers (D-MI) is one of the co-sponsers which is pretty disappointing. Senator Wyden (D-OR) has promised to filibuster this bill by reading out the names of everyone who signs the petition against it. I think that's awesome. I wish our representatives had a little more Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in them.
By min | November 30, 2011, 8:45 AM | Liberal Outrage & Movies | Link
 By min | November 29, 2011, 12:35 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Two weeks ago, I heard about students at UC Davis who were pepper sprayed at point blank range while doing nothing more than sitting on the ground with their arms linked. I heard that the NYPD raided Zuccotti Park in the middle of the night, making sure the media couldn't cover it either by penning them far away from the park or arresting them. Three weeks ago, I heard about students at UC Berkeley who were beaten with batons by campus police in riot gear for standing with their arms linked. In Oakland, I heard that cops shot a guy with rubber bullets for filming the Occupy protest. Five weeks ago, I heard about Scott Olsen ending up with a fractured skull when Oakland PD used tear gas and rubber bullets on the protesters. What i haven't heard is a peep from anyone in our government saying anything against the excessive use of force on civilians. I was so pissed off about it that I wrote to my Senators and my Representative asking them wtf. I mean, all i wanted was a placating "The police overreacted. In America, our citizens have the right to express their opinions. We don't condone the violence and urge our officers to act in a way that will protect the members of the public." What i got was alot of nothing. I didn't even receive the automated "Thanks for writing to me. We'll get right back to you on that." email. Now I find out the Department of Homeland Security is involved with coordinating the crackdowns nationwide on Occupy protesters. In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces - pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS - to make war on peaceful citizens. Now the silence from my Senators and Representative is explained. Even if it's not a "everyone's in on it" conspiracy, the fact that the DHS was involved at all is a huge red flag. That all this violence against protesters is the result of their counseling is a serious problem because it means beating someone down because we don't like what they're saying or doing is the right response, the government sanctioned and recommended response. It means we have more in common with Egypt, Syria, and China than we should be comfortable with. By min | November 29, 2011, 11:26 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (4)| Link Simpson-Bowles is now the centrist position. By fnord12 | November 23, 2011, 9:33 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link
 18 November 2011 I'd provide the link for you to tell the Chancellor how you feel about her method of ensuring a "safe and welcoming environment" for the students, but it seems the outrage has already broken the site. Whoops. By min | November 19, 2011, 9:30 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Cause it really means 36mpg. But more on that later. First, the rant. It seems so obvious, i don't even know why we're discussing it. Technology is supposed to move forward. Things are supposed to improve over time. With the exception of cars and fuel efficiency, apparently. So, car manufacturers want us to believe that in 30 years technology is still not up to improving vehicle mileage from 27.5 to 54.5 mpg? Not only that, but it will continue to not be up to meeting this challenge 14 yrs from now. Really? C'mon. Really?? My phone is a computer. My music player is smaller than a deck of cards and holds 160Gb worth of songs. I can beam books onto my ereader from anywhere. You seriously want me to believe that given 44yrs, you can't figure out how to make cars run on less fuel? I'm calling Bullshit. AHA! Give me a dollar! "CAFE mpg still comes from the original pair of tests that are now widely viewed as bad predictors of real-world mpg. The 34.1 mpg CAFE target for 2016 is actually equal to only 26 mpg on a window sticker. The talked-about 2025 CAFE standard -- usually described as 54.5 mpg -- amounts to a figure of 36 mpg combined [highway and city driving] on a window sticker," writes Dan Edmunds, director of vehicle testing at Edmunds.com, on the company's detailed CAFE explainer. (The Edmunds.com site is widely recognized as the go-to place for investigating new and used cars and automotive technology.) So if you walk into a showroom in 2025 and see car with a sticker that says it gets 36 mpg "combined," it meets the CAFE 54.5 mpg requirement. Suddenly the new rules don't sound so difficult to attain. So, you see, it's really a fuel efficiency of 36mpg in the real world. It really doesn't sound all that impressive or daunting when you put it that way. And it just makes me more pissed off at the car industry who claimed that the only way to meet these standards was to pull up the average by increasing the number of electric cars in their fleet and nobody is going to want that many electric cars. Well, let me put it this way - I looked at the trend of increasing gas prices, and now I have a Prius. I get nearly 50mpg on it. Suck on that, automakers! By min | November 17, 2011, 3:26 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Bad for solar panel manufacturers, but good for the country: This was actually the reason Solyndra went out of business. Solar panels got too cheap for them to compete. It's a good thing in the long run. By fnord12 | November 17, 2011, 11:59 AM | Liberal Outrage
& Science | Link When i saw this chart at TPM... ...and then i saw this comment: I was like, "Yeah!" But then i saw this response: And i agreed with that, too! Of course, my congressman is a rocket scientist. Leaving my waffling aside, maybe that commentator is right and the 9% approval rating is basically by design. But if so, that illustrates a problem with our system. You'd think at least the supporters of the majority party would be pleased with their representatives. But our system has so many veto points and opportunities for gridlock that nothing ever gets done. So no one is happy. A government needs to be able to actually, you know, govern, so maybe the 91% that is unhappy with Congress can get together and push for a parliamentary system. By fnord12 | November 17, 2011, 11:44 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link It's so bad in Mongolia, they're proposing building an ice shield. That's right. I said "ice shield". Science fiction continues to invade reality. Although, "ice shield" is very B-level sci-fi, not like robots or lasers...or robots that shoot lasers. By min | November 15, 2011, 8:23 AM | Liberal Outrage
& Science | Link Tom Tomorrow, reminding us that it's all been said before. By fnord12 | November 10, 2011, 10:25 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Cops repeatedly ram students with batons at Occupy Cal at UC Berkeley today. What is it with cops and their love of beating down skinny teenagers? I've seen i before when fnord and i used to go to protests. It's not uncommon to see 3 beefy cops tackle a 19 yr old who prolly weighed all of 130lbs when wet. Is it the thrill of an opponent you know has no chance of fighting back, because if that's the case, i think we need better psychological criteria when deciding if someone should be allowed to carry around a weapon and use it at their discretion on the populace. By min | November 10, 2011, 7:38 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Not so much of a surprise to people with brains, actually. Link The findings are consistent with water samples the EPA has collected from at least 42 homes in the area since 2008, when ProPublica began reporting on foul water and health concerns in Pavillion and the agency started investigating reports of contamination there. Last year -- after warning residents not to drink or cook with the water and to ventilate their homes when they showered -- the EPA drilled the monitoring wells to get a more precise picture of the extent of the contamination. The Pavillion area has been drilled extensively for natural gas over the last two decades and is home to hundreds of gas wells. Residents have alleged for nearly a decade that the drilling -- and hydraulic fracturing in particular -- has caused their water to turn black and smell like gasoline. Some residents say they suffer neurological impairment, loss of smell, and nerve pain they associate with exposure to pollutants. The gas industry -- led by the Canadian company EnCana, which owns the wells in Pavillion -- has denied that its activities are responsible for the contamination. How could they possibly blame the fracking? I mean, c'mon. Whose water hasn't turned black and started smelling like gasoline every once in a while? It's a normal, everyday occurrence in Nigeria. Buncha whiners. By min | November 10, 2011, 5:58 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1)| Link In NYC, they set up this thing called "Sky Watch" and get all twitchy when questioned about its purpose ("it's cause of terrorists"). In Oakland, the cops shot a guy with a rubber bullet for filming the Occupy protest. We watched the military attacking protesters in several Middle Eastern countries during the Arab Spring, and our government officials released statements urging these governments not to use violence, claiming the moral high ground with certainty because the US allows its citizens to protest and would never attempt to stifle, much less use violence to silence, said protest. Well, they haven't rolled over anyone with a tank and nobody's been chased down by stick-wielding men on horses, so yay them. What's a little fractured skull and ruptured spleen compared to that? Afterall, nobody died. But don't worry. i'm sure the cops just need a little more practice before they get it just right. By min | November 8, 2011, 6:48 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link This case is important because some of the most profound questions relating to privacy in the 21st century turn directly on the handling of the information associated with mobile devices. When you add in mobile phones, it's not only information on your location, but any information stored on your phone - contacts, emails, calendar info, personal notes, etc. As pointed out in this article, legislation that is written keeps becoming obsolete very shortly after, if not before, it's passed. As anyone who has used the newest smartphones can attest, the Ohio State Supreme Court's 2009 statement that cell phones are "are still, in essence, phones, and thus they are distinguishable from laptop computers" now sounds quaint. The belief expressed in the October 2011 court ruling that cell site information only provides approximate location information is already becoming obsolete as wireless network providers continue to upgrade their networks with higher density, smaller cell sites to support increased data traffic. In areas of high population density, cell site information acquired using these emerging networks will often deliver location accuracy rivaling that of GPS. I know the current makeup of the Supreme Court is 4 crazies to 5 sane people, but i still worry that we might be screwed somehow. By min | November 8, 2011, 6:00 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2)| Link So, i read this: Ok, whatever. Disney and Google coming up with an idea that makes them both money. No big surprise there. But then the next line is what i thought was weird. Wait, what? Disney is going to sell advertising space and split the revenue with Youtube. That makes sense when they're posting their own videos. Exactly where do videos that other people have made and posted come into it? I'm sure there's no intention of splitting revenue with these amateur video makers. Are Disney and Youtube planning on making money off of other people's shit? Do these people want their videos on DIsney's site? Do they have a choice? Have they given up all rights to it by the mere act of using Youtube as a posting medium? What am i missing cause i'm totally ready to believe Disney's just being shady. By min | November 7, 2011, 3:15 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Click the image to see Calculated Risk's analysis, and the post above it as well. But instead i'm gonna quote this guy: As unemployment only indicates the number of people actively searching for a job, and many are dropping out of the labor force and giving up on finding a job, the unemployment rate tells us less and less. And if the population is growing faster than the number of jobs created, we are losing out. The employment-population ratio tells us the actual rate at which we are employing people. It is currently at 58.4 percent, the same it was in January 2011. But here's President Obama in the 2010 State of the Union giving the wrong message:Now, I know that some in my own party will argue that we can't address the deficit or freeze government spending when so many are still hurting. And I agree -- which is why this freeze won't take effect until next year -- (laughter) -- when the economy is stronger. That's how budgeting works. (Laughter and applause.) But understand -- understand if we don't take meaningful steps to rein in our debt, it could damage our markets, increase the cost of borrowing, and jeopardize our recovery -- all of which would have an even worse effect on our job growth and family incomes. By fnord12 | November 4, 2011, 3:04 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Oligarchy obfuscators. Just a point on this that i've made before: we're in a depression here. It's not really a good time to raise taxes on anyone. We can do that later, when unemployment isn't 9%. Now we need to create demand. We're only talking about raising taxes because certain people tried to pivot from economic recovery to deficit reduction. And if we need to reduce the deficit, then we need to tax the people who have all the money. They tried to use this economic crisis as an excuse to cut social programs, and it's backfired on them and now they're on the defensive. Thanks only to the Occupy Wallstreeters, not the Dem leaders. By fnord12 | November 4, 2011, 2:56 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1)| Link « Liberal Outrage: October 2011 | Main | Liberal Outrage: December 2011 » |
