Ahhh, free enterprise

Universities or Visa Mills? - San Jose Mercury News

Little-known and less-watched, a group of schools -- including San Jose's ITU, Sunnyvale's Herguan University and until recently Pleasanton's now-shuttered Tri-Valley University -- are building lucrative businesses by assembling student bodies comprised almost entirely of student-visa holders. Yet, the newspaper's investigation found none of the schools meet the criteria necessary to assist foreign students to come here: They are neither accredited nor do their credits transfer to recognized universities.

No. Really?

White House warns Congress not to play politics with debt | Reuters

Reuters stays on top of the news.

But can he negotiate?

Wait. Why would he have to negotiate?

(H/T UNDERNEWS)

But the proles will learn to love it in the end

Quote of the Day About the Debt Ceiling Negotiations : Mike the Mad Biologist

[In this whole deficit reduction circlejerk] it really is remarkable how there has been no discussion whatsoever of what trillions of dollars of cuts would mean for people's day to day lives. Because that's why budget deficits and reduction matter--it's not an arbitrary number to be reached for its own sake.

Main Street Americana

You can talk to me about this "green" thing some other time.

Weather report

It's hot in the house and it's hot in the sun but it's not bad at all in the shade.

So here's my advice, darlin': Find yourself a tree.

Some days it feels really, really good to be just another un-hip old guy

Facebook, Twitter obligations persist during vacations - The Boston Globe

As a full-time mother, Yara Marquez doesn’t have a boss. But when she goes on vacation, she has work to do beyond caring for her 1-year-old son. “If I’m not on Facebook, I don’t feel like I’m doing my job,’’ said Marquez, 22, of Waltham.

So tell me, Bunky...

The Great Evil - NYTimes.com

A report released Friday by the Pew Research Center found that the Republican Party has made tremendous gains in party affiliation among whites since President Obama took office. This would be understandable if the largest gains were among the wealthy, but they weren’t. They were among the poor, the young and less educated — many of the same people who would be adversely affected by G.O.P. policies.

...if I didn't have you to tell me this how would I know? 

On Main Street they're boarding up the windows, the factory moved to China, the bank came after my house and the price of gasoline is through the roof, groceries are more expensive, health care is more expensive, my kid's best teachers got laid off, the bridge is closed and on Independence Day there is no parade any more. Too expensive.

The Democrats have had three years to give me a hand with this. With some of this. With anything. And all I'm seeing is a temporary, few-percentage-point cut to the FICA tax on a job I don't have?

WTF?

And another thing

What is wrong with this sentence?

The Republican Party Can’t Say Yes - NYTimes.com

For days, the White House has infuriated its Democratic allies in Congress by offering House Republicans more and more in exchange for a deal to raise the debt ceiling and prevent default.

How did we get into this situation where we have to make a deal to pay the friggin' bills? And especially, how is it that this deal has to be made between one half and the other half of the same friggin' government? Who agreed to this situation to begin with?

And another thing.

The White House was willing to cut $1 trillion in domestic and defense spending and another $650 billion from Medicare, Medicaid and even Social Security.

Much of that savings would have come from raising the eligibility age for Medicare benefits and reducing the cost-of-living increases that elderly people depend on when receiving their health and pension benefits.

So Bunky, don't tell me it's the Republicans who want to cut Social Security and Medicare. It's the Democrats. It's Obama. And it sucks.

Read the whole thing at the link (above).

And you thought things were spooky yesterday

Exclusive: Anti-Tax Crusader Speaks Out Against Default "Experiment" | National Memo | Breaking News, Smart Politics

Norquist went on to say that “a ‘shutdown’ or ‘default’ or ‘wobbly walk around the rim of default’ would be, as my mother would say, ‘unhelpful.’ How unhelpful? I don’t know, [and I’m] not real interested in finding out. Let’s experiment on a smaller country.”

The numbers game

Undernews: Who holds America's debt?

Click to see the list.

So America owes foreigners about $4.5 trillion in debt. But America owes America $9.8 trillion.

Do House Democrats just not exist?

Debt talks raise angst with Democrats - The Boston Globe

WASHINGTON - President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner raced to nail down a last-minute deal yesterday...

Also, Boston Globe, just pointing out here, Senator Rand Paul (see your photo caption there) is not from Ohio. 

Obama: Don't make me back down any farther or I will

Obama tries to reassure public on debt talks during speech at University of Maryland

WASHINGTON - President Obama Friday assured an uneasy nation - and stock market - that he'd cut a deal with lawmakers to avoid a catastrophic credit default.

Is this the greatest tabloid headline of all time?

Headline writer retires.

Fixing a budget problem by spending less is un-American

Says Grover Norquist in this morning's NYTimes:

Read My Lips - No New Taxes - NYTimes.com

There is only one fix for a spending problem: spend less.

Says me: Horsepucky.

I can not think of one single American hero who ever solved a budget problem by spending less (even Newt got himself a charge account). Everyone, from bank robbers (Sundance!) to industrialists (Carniege!) to geeks (Gates!) to miscellaneous street urchins from all quarters balanced their budgets by getting more money. I can't think of a single American hero that balanced his budget by spending less (Hippies!).

If you have a beer budget and Champaign tastes, the solution is get more money (Lorelei Lee!). The solution is not spend less (Norquist).

Wait...

Couple Busted for Sex in Aquatic Park - Witnesses 'disturbed,' pool water recycled

Stunned kids and parents at an Indiana aquatic park were grossed out when a wet and wild couple decided to make love in a pool on Sunday, according to cops. The facility manager ordered the 33-year-old man and 40-year-old woman to break it up some 30 minutes after the action began.

...thirty minutes? Where is this pool, exactly?

Keep your eye on the pea

The Lesser Depression - NYTimes.com

The disappearance of unemployment from elite policy discourse and its replacement by deficit panic has been truly remarkable. It’s not a response to public opinion. In a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, 53 percent of the public named the economy and jobs as the most important problem we face, while only 7 percent named the deficit. Nor is it a response to market pressure. Interest rates on U.S. debt remain near historic lows.

Yet the conversations in Washington and Brussels are all about spending cuts (and maybe tax increases, I mean revisions). That’s obviously true about the various proposals being floated to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis here. But it’s equally true in Europe.

 

Communists for Fascism

Hullabaloo

Raynor said the group believes MoveOn.org is a communist front and said he would not stand for America becoming a fascist nation.

It's a tea party thing. I bet they have great parties.

I walked to the convenience store for a loaf of bread...

...and it felt almost exactly like walking though a bowl of hot soup. Not so tasty. But otherwise. It's 96º+ out there

This, kids, is exactly the day I dreamed about in February. It is a triumph of wishfulness, a deliverance from the sleet and freezing rain.

I plan to enjoy it while I can.

I'm sorry I looked

It's 96 degrees here. The heat index is 106. I don't believe in a heat index any more than I believe in wind chill—look, hot is hot, cold is cold, there's really no need to pile on. Ninety-six is hot. Ninety-six point three.

Today is the hot one, and tonight will be warm. Tomorrow the high temps will start creeping downward, slowly at first, but the nighttime temps will drop quite a bit and things will begin to cool off. 

As you know, July is the warmest month, so just a little bit longer now and everything will be, well, cool.

Momentum? We're talking about momentum here?

Jobless claims rise above expectations | Reuters

(Reuters) - The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose more than expected last week, pointing to a labor market that is struggling to regain momentum.

This is just a test, but...

The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia: "The shuttle rolled to a stop just before 6 a.m. Thursday at Cape Canaveral, Fla., closing an era of the space program."

...how do those guys on the space station get home now, public transportation?

Oh, wait...

Debt ceiling deadline approaches, woo woo!

Spare us. Please...

Atlantis has landed, ending NASA's shuttle era - Yahoo! News

Astronaut Barry Wilmore from Mission Control answered back, "We'll take this opportunity to congratulate you Atlantis, as well as the thousands of passionate individuals across this great space-faring nation...

Gulliver recalls

Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I remember being very puzzled at the idea that these people
were somehow "conservatives". My home town was intensely
conservative, in the straightforward sense of being much
attached to existing institutions and ways of life. But
the Teabaggers of 1965 were quite deracinated -- they
had nearly all come to SoCal from somewhere else, and
really had no stable matrix of social relations, apart
from the office, and no established folkways, apart
from driving in cars a lot. Their "conservatism" wasn't
a matter of clinging to what they knew and liked; it
seemed largely a matter of resenting what other people
were doing elsewhere -- a heavily mediatized engagement
with the great social spectacle as seen on TV.

It struck me then and strikes me now as a chimaera bombinans
in vacuo -- a sort of maelstrom of furious mental energy
expending itself without effect in railing at phantoms -- a titanomachia
taking place almost entirely in the memesphere.

 

Never look back

Robert Reich (The Shameful Murder of Dodd Frank)

One full year after the financial reform bill spearheaded through Congress by Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank was signed into law, Wall Street looks and acts much the way it did before. That’s because the Street has effectively neutered the law...

The law included a one-year delay, ostensibly to give regulators time to iron out these sorts of details. But the real purpose of the delay, it’s now obvious, was to give the Street time to expand the loopholes and fill the details with pablum — when the public stopped looking.

 

Questions, questions, always the questions

Holiday in Scambodia | Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy

We’re seriously talking about defaulting on our debt, and cutting Medicare and Social Security, so that Google can keep paying its current 2.4% effective tax rate and GE, a company that received a $140 billion bailout en route to worldwide 2010 profits of $14 billion, can not only keep paying no taxes at all , but receive a $3.2 billion tax credit from the federal government. And nobody appears to give a shit. What the hell is wrong with people? Have we all lost our minds?

Right, this'll take some getting used to

I installed Lion, Apple's newest incarnation of OS X, and while it has a whole bunch of new viewing options most of that seems pretty easy to adjust to, except they reversed the vertical scroll action. Makes me dizzy.

I get the idea: The scroll action on the iPad and the other iOS devices was already opposite so this just makes things uniform. But still. I'll be scrolling the wrong way for a while.

I wonder how many calories that burns?

Can you spell "corrupt"?

FBI: Pakistani spy agency secretly lobbied U.S. lawmakers | The Raw Story

Republicans and Democrats were the recipients of about $2 million in lobbying dollars secretly funneled into a U.S. nonprofit by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, U.S. law enforcement officials said in court documents filed Tuesday.

(How many of these guys are now telling me I have to tighten my belt? Just wondering.)

So not sales then?

Mortgage applications see biggest increase in 4 months: MBA | Reuters

(Reuters) - Applications for home mortgages surged last week, racking up the biggest increase in four months on a flood of refinancing demand as interest rates remained low, an industry group said on Wednesday.

Biting the hand

Auto industry fights fuel efficiency standards - chicagotribune.com

Two years after President Barack Obama and the country's carmakers embraced ambitious new gas mileage standards, the U.S. auto industry — rebounding after federal bailouts — is pushing back hard against higher efficiency targets for the next generation of vehicles.

An advertising blitz in seven politically important states starting Thursday will feature warnings against what the industry sees as overzealous government regulation and the threat of worker layoffs.

Summertime

NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory - Heat Wave Sweeps Across the U.S.

This animation shows the predicted daily high temperatures from NOAA's high resolution North American Model (NAM) from July 13-21, 2011.

Cut, cap, take the money, and run

Elected as Cost-Cutters, Freshmen Push Spending for Home Districts - NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — Freshman House Republicans who rode a wave of voter discontent into office last year vowed to stop out-of-control spending, but that has not stopped several of them from quietly trying to funnel millions of federal dollars into projects back home....

An examination of spending bills, news releases and communications with federal agencies obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shows that nearly two dozen freshmen have sought money for projects that could ultimately cost billions of dollars, while calling for less spending and banning pork projects.

Ice For a Hot Day

iPhone abstract: Phil Compton

This is it, right?

I'm thinking Hulu is some kind of massively secret experiment to figure out just how much pain people will voluntarily expose themselves to if the pain is free.

What else makes sense?

With help from WSJ

How Rupert Murdoch Dragged Media Into the Swamp | Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy

At long last, Rupert Murdoch has made it onto the Mount Rushmore of whiners.

Plastic world

Rupert Murdoch attacked in UK Parliamentary hearing | Reuters

(Reuters) - A man threw a plate of white foam over News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch during a committee hearing into the hacking scandal...

Awwww. Really? Foam? Would a little banana creme have been too much to ask? Or maybe this guy was from some sort of Save the Bananas group. I don't know.

100 percent

On the Tomatometer. How often do you see a thing like that? And how often do you see actors like these, old-timey actors doing their old-timey acting thing? Lana Turner, Kirk Douglas, Walter Pidgeon, Barry Powell, Dick Sullivan, Gloria Grahame, and all directed by Vincente Minnelli: The Bad and the Beautiful.

This is a 1952 movie. That year was in my Sci-Fi period, before the whole icky lovesick thing kicked in. So I didn't see it back when it was a big thing in the 50's. If you didn't, you should see it now. If you did, watch it again. It really is that good.

But if you're holding out for a movie made in this century, I'm saying Source Code is the one.

It's not hot, it's just...wait for it...

...humid. 

Right. It's about 80º here this morning (11:00 AM) both inside and out. That's not hot. I keep telling myself. Over and over and over.

OK, we have a hot week every year and this year, this is it. The plan is, do all the errands in the morning and in the afternoon, just sit around in my skivvies and sweat. Sorry. 

What's wrong with this picture?

Employer-Provided Health Insurance Taking a Bigger Bite - Truthdig

Newly published numbers from the Department of Health and Human Services show that American workers in 2010 paid average premiums of $4,940 for employer-provided health insurance to cover just themselves.

Give up? OK, how can you call something employer-provided if it costs you five grand a year? Really. 

And you were expecting what?

Special report: Banks continue robo-signing | Reuters

(Reuters) - America's leading mortgage lenders vowed in March to end the dubious foreclosure practices that caused a bruising scandal last year.

But a Reuters investigation finds that many are still taking the same shortcuts they promised to shun, from sketchy paperwork to the use of "robo-signers."

 

The Moneychangers

A novel about Wall Street and hanky-panky, Upton Sinclair's The Moneychangers was published in 1908 but could have been written last week. Sinclair, you will recall, also wrote The Jungle and Oil, both books that have appeared on our reading list in the past, and a lot of other books, most of them available free at Gutenberg.org.

Oops

Reporter who blew whistle on Murdoch found dead | The Raw Story

The reporter who blew open the phone hacking scandals now threatening to topple News Corporation has been found dead in his London home, according to a report in The Guardian.

Good question

Robert Kuttner: The End Game: Saving Obama From Himself

Obama and his advisers, weirdly, believe that his stance as "the only grownup in the room" who forces his own party to abandon its core principles for the sake of an austerity program will somehow win the gratitude of voters struggling with declining incomes and rising joblessness.

The unemployment may be stuck near ten percent, but good old Obama brokered a deal to balance the budget in 2021. So re-elect this man.

On which planet is this?

 

And they were really, really busy hours, dude

Activists pledge to withhold millions if Obama cuts entitlements | The Raw Story

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) delivered a petition with the signatures of 200,000 donors and volunteers to the president's re-election campaign headquarters in Chicago Friday....

During the 2008 presidential election, the group claims it donated $17 million and 2.6 volunteer hours.

(Yeah, sure, they've probably fixed it by now. You could always click and find out.)

Good thing he's got that good charge account

Gingrich campaign $1 million in debt from private jets, web developers | The Raw Story

Newt Gingrich (R) is the "luxury candidate," the Washington Post pointed out, driving his campaign into $1 million of debt already by flying in private jets and hiring three software and Internet companies to build a website, spending $800,000 in the process. His campaign expenditures exceed $1.8 million, including the $450,000 he has spent on a private jet service.

Woohoo!

From The Liquor Book

Riddle me this

Analysis: Ratings agencies rattle cages in U.S. | Reuters

Tension hit new highs on both sides of the Atlantic last week as Moody's and Standard & Poor's threatened to downgrade the United States' prized "triple-A" rating.

Is this so-called "prized triple-A rating" the very same prized triple-A rating these rating-agency bozos gave all that sub-prime mortgage backed security crap? That very same prized triple-A rating? Right. I thought it was.

Although this part is fun:

Now that the agencies are focusing their fire on the rich world, U.S. and European officials -- long proponents of seeing indebted nations "take their medicine" -- are crying foul.

Heh.

No! I'm not kidding!

Here we are, edging into what will likely be the hottest week of the year (air temperatures, remember, peak in July and then start slumping downward again toward the dismal cold), and this is the week the heating oil company picks to send a guy around to clean the boilers. This week. This very week. And so now, at 10:00 AM, with the temp heading into the 90's, I have warm radiators. The guy had to turn something on to test it, he said. I don't know what, I don't know how. 

The radiators will cool off in time, probably by September or October. But in the meantime, arrrrrgggggghhh.

Hanky-panky in Cicero...

Town of Cicero spent $500,000 on trinkets from board member’s firm - Chicago Sun-Times

Why did the Town of Cicero buy 250 rubber chickens?

...and we are shocked. We are totally shocked.

Healthy noodles

What a terrible idea. They taste like cardboard. Blah.

Down but not out: Voices of the long-term unemployed | The Lookout - Yahoo! News

You can read all the stats you want on America's long-term jobless crisis. More than 6.3 million Americans have been out of work for more than half a year. The average jobless stint now lasts longer than nine months. We could go on....

And a web site here.

Who could say no?

Longform.org's guide to castaways: six epic tales of tragedy and survival on the open seas. - By Max Linsky - Slate Magazine

Perfect storms, wicked riptides, and drunken dares

At first I thought it said drunken dames which would have been better, but drunken dares is still pretty good.

And you were asking why the government is corrupt?

Obama Has Early Fund-Raising Lead for 2012 Elections - NYTimes.com

President Obama recruited roughly 150 new elite donors, raising as much as a half a million dollars each, to help propel him to a large and early lead over his Republican opponents in the race for campaign cash, according to campaign filings released last week....

Thirty-one of his bundlers collected in excess of $500,000 each in contributions, according to the campaign....

The largest individual checks Mr. Obama raised — up to $30,800 per donor — went to a joint account with the Democratic National Committee, which can accept contributions far in excess of the $5,000 Mr. Obama may accept from any individual person over the course of his campaign.

The R's, of course, are just as bad or worse. But none of them have revealed their details yet.

Official: Warren dumped

Obama to nominate Cordray for consumer job | Reuters

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Monday will nominate former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the new consumer financial watchdog agency, White House officials said.

Try not to fall because if you do it could be quite a tumble*

British police arrest former Murdoch aide Rebekah Brooks: report | Reuters

(Reuters) - Police have arrested Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News Corp's British newspaper arm News International, Sky News reported on Sunday.

*From a ski instructor in Michigan.