Astronomy Pic of the Day

Description from the NASA Website:

What's lighting up nebula IRAS 05437+2502? No one is sure. Particularly enigmatic is the bright upside-down V that defines the upper edge of this floating mountain of interstellar dust, visible near the image center. In general, this ghost-like nebula involves a small star forming region filled with dark dust that was first noted in images taken by the IRAS satellite in infrared light in 1983. Shown above is a spectacular, recently released image from the Hubble Space Telescope that, although showing many new details, has not uncovered a clear cause of the bright sharp arc. One hypothesis holds that the glowing arc was created by a massive star that somehow attained a high velocity and has now left the nebula. Small, faint IRAS 05437+2502 spans only 1/18th of a full moon toward the constellation of the Bull (Taurus).

Quote of the Day

"Say nothing of my religion.  It is know to God and myself alone.  Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life:  if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religoin which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."

                                  -  Thomas Jefferson

Krugman Again

That Iraq Feeling

Government Outsourcing

Paul Krugman writes what I have been telling people for years - outsourcing government functions to private corporations is always worse than having government workers performing those functions.  Either it will cost more in the long run, or they will cut corners to enhance their profits.  Or, most likely, both.

Which is why charter schools are a bad, bad idea.  Of course, statistics are now showing that that is the case, but that didn't stop the Obama Administration from insisting on growing reliance on charter schools in the RTTT program.

The Republicans and Jobs

Come on - did anyone seriously think that the Republicans were telling the truth when they said they cared about people's jobs?

Just another example of how they say whatever it is they need to win, so that they can continue to enhance the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful.

ht/Atrios

The Oscars

It seems to me that most of the stories I have read today about the Oscars have been about the show, rather than, you know, who actually won.  When I signed on today (yahoo is my home page) I saw a number of stories about who was wearing what, and the expletives that inadvertantly flew, and about President Obama's cameo, but I had to click on 5 different stories before I found one that said which movie won best picture.  Isn't that, you know, the whole point of the event?

I never watch the Oscars anymore - a few years ago I did and I fell asleep in the first hour - so I missed Colin Firth's comment regarding the financial crisis:

Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.

Kudos to Mr. Firth.  And a hearty thanks to Joe Costello for pointing it out.  No, I haven't seen Inside Job yet, but I will keep looking for it to play in my area.

By the way, happy to see The King's Speech and Mr. Firth won.  To me it was the kind of movie I miss - no special effects, no monsters, no shoot-outs.  Just good old-fashioned drama.

The Establishment Press, Part 2

From Keith Obermann, on the continued decline of the New York Times:

Few news stories better spoke to the destruction of union solidarity and the realization that even those public employees collectively bargaining in Wisconsin were going to have to give something back, than the New York Times’ piece a week ago tomorrow titled “Union Bonds In Wisconsin Begin To Fray.”

The by-line was shared by no less than Arthur G. Sulzberger, the son of the publisher and official carrier of the Times’ family name. The piece ran prominently on the front page. Sulzberger himself interviewed the main ‘get’ in the piece. Beyond the mere reporting was the symbolism of the Times - even the sainted liberal media Times – throwing in the towel on the inviolability of unions, conceding that an American state could renege with impunity on a good faith contract with anybody, and that maybe the Right is right every once in awhile.

Problem is, A.G. Sulzberger’s featured disillusioned unionist interviewee…wasn’t in a union.

....

[T]he source, Rick Hahn, now admits that while he worked in union factories, he was never, you know, in a union per se. So why did the Diogenes of the Times, Mr. Sulzberger, believe he had found his honest union man? Because Hahn “described himself to a reporter as a ‘union guy.’”

And yes, Hahan/Hahn’s deception, intentional or accidental (and if you noticed the multiple spelling, yes, Mr. Sulzberger of the Times also got the guy’s name wrong) sat out there in the alleged newspaper of record for four days, during which nobody bothered to correct the sloppy, destructive reporting of the Family Heir. When they finally did, editors buried it inside.

 By the way, this is the first time I have seen KO's new blog, and I heartily recommend it.

The Establishment Press

Greenwald on the Raymond Davis affair.

The evolution of our press from independent newspapers, radio stations and television stations to national media conglomerates has destroyed its function as a check to power.  They are now an inherent part of the power structure.

This is just another example.

Astronomy Pic of the Day

Description from the NASA Website:

This is the mess that is left when a star explodes. The Crab Nebula, the result of a supernova seen in 1054 AD, is filled with mysterious filaments. The filaments are not only tremendously complex, but appear to have less mass than expelled in the original supernova and a higher speed than expected from a free explosion. The above image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is presented in three colors chosen for scientific interest. TheCrab Nebula spans about 10 light-years. In the nebula's very center lies a pulsar: a neutron star as massive as the Sun but with only the size of a small town. The Crab Pulsar rotates about 30 times each second.

Quote of the Day

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.  Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

                              - Mahatma Gandhi

Depressing

After reading Digby's latest post on the situation in Wisconsin, where she describes working class right wingers expressing scorn for the public employees there, I find myself suddenly depressed:

This is the result of the aristocracy's strategy since time began --- pitting the serfs against each other to fight over an ever shrinking piece of the pie --- while the nobles enjoy the fruits of their labor. In our democracy the way to do that is by exploiting the long standing resentments and cultural divisions that have been with us since the beginning. It's very effective as we can see.

I remember having a discussion about this very point with my brother several months ago.  We agreed that it has always been this way.  My view is that after 6,000 years of this crap, more than 2,000 years of Christianity preaching the evil of this system and more than 150 years of universal public education, you'd think we'd have found a better alternative by now.  I still think it's possible we will.

But maybe my brother is right.  It has always been thus, and it ain't gonna change.

Depressing.

Those Greedy Teachers!

Great story by Roy Edroso in the Village Voice about how conservative commentators are all denouncing the terrible teachers and other public employees in Wisconsin.

I especially love the reference to "international socialist labor unions."

And Brad Reed compares this to their reaction to the financial bailout and its aftermath:

Living high off the taxpayer teet is all well and good if you're one of our Productive Corporate Overlords. But if you think you deserve to have good health insurance just because you do something silly like teach children to read? Pfffft, get real hippie!

Republicans Just Can't Help Themselves

From A Taxing Matter - the same thing over and over:

 You might also want to catch the comments on Thoma's post of same at Economist's View, including this one from E Michael who notes that in Wisconsin Governor Walker's budget bill is a proviso for the sale of state-owned heating, cooling and power plants:

"16.896 Sale or contractual operation of state−owned heating, cooling, and power plants. (1) Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state−owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b)."

The bill would allow for the selling of state-owned heating/cooling/power plants without bids.  And E Michael quotes another blogger who notes that this is "like a highlight reel of all of the tomahawk dunks of neo-Gilded Age corporatism: privatization, no-bid contracts, deregulation, and naked cronyism. Extra bonus points for the explicit effort to legally redefine the term “public interest” as “whatever the energy industry lobbyists we appoint to these unelected bureaucratic positions say it is.”

This is the agenda initiated by Ronald Reagan--deregulation, privatization, tax cuts, and militarization--laid bare.  Remove power from ordinary people.  Put state assets in the hands of the already well-heeled through exercises of naked cronyism.  Cut taxes for big business and the wealthy even while cutting back on services for the middle class and poor and increasing taxes (sales taxes, payroll taxes) for those same groups.  The only part of the Reagan destructive agenda that Walker apparently isn't doing is increasing the military budget for ridiculous projects that line the coffers of the wealthy military-industrial complex. 

This is the Bush agenda run wild.  They have no problem with their corporate masters feeding at the public trough.  And they have no problem with poor and middle class taxpayers paying for it.

The Fiscal Mess

To me, this chart says everything you need to know about why the federal government is in the fiscal mess it is in.

Federal spending on defense and healthcare have both increased by two percentage points of GDP over the last 10 years.  The rest of the government has remained virtually stagnant (the slight rise over the last several years is increased spending brought on by the recession, including the so-called stimulus).

This plus the massive Bush tax cuts that nobody has the guts to let expire.

Case closed.

h/t Brad DeLong

The Head Spins

From today's column by Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times:

Here in Bahrain, we have been in bed with a minority Sunni elite that has presided over a tolerant, open and economically dynamic country — but it’s an elite that is also steeped in corruption, repression and profound discrimination toward the Shia population.

WTF?

How can anyone characterize a country "steeped in corruption, repression and profound discrimination toward the Shia population" (Shia comprise 65% of the population of Bahrain), as tolerant and open?

Am I missing something?

A Conservative's Argument Against Canadian Healthcare

Via Whiskey Fire, conservative commentator Austin Hill criticizes the Canadian healthcare system:

Yet how beautiful it is that in Canada, “the Doctor” just provides services, the patient just receives those services – as much as he or she needs – and the Doctor apparently doesn’t need to be paid. Or at least the patient doesn’t have to worry about it, right? Isn’t that the way it goes in Canada? Somehow, because of the magic of government, Doctors and nurses and everyone “at the hospital” in Canada just simply perform their jobs, patients just simply “get” what they need, and everybody’s happy. And Canadians don’t have to face that devastating threat of long-term medical bills.

This is criticism?

As Thers points out, 

"[N]ot 'everybody's happy' with their public healthcare. Only a piddling 86% of Canadians."

Astronomy Pic of the Day

Here is the description from the NASA Website:

      What drives auroras on Saturn? To help find out, scientists have sorted through hundreds of infrared images of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft for other purposes, trying to find enough aurora images to correlate changes and make movies. Once made, some movies clearly show that Saturnian auroras can change not only with the angle of the Sun, but also as the planet rotates. Furthermore, some auroral changes appear related to waves in Saturn's magnetosphere likely caused by Saturn's moons. Pictured above, a false-colored image taken in 2007 shows Saturn in three bands of infrared light. The rings reflect relatively blue sunlight, while the planet itself glows in comparatively low energy red. A band of southern aurora in visible in green. Inspection of many more Saturnian images may well lead to an even better understanding of both Saturn's and Earth's auroras.

Quote of the Day

I've been thinking a lot about religion recently.  Hence this week's quotes will have a religious theme.

Today's quote:

      "Of all religions, Christianity is without a doubt the one that should inspire tolerance most, although, up to now, the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men."

                                - Voltaire

Maybe it's the books I've been reading lately - Bernard Cornwell's Arthur Series.   I highly recommend these books (there are 3 in the series).

Robert Samuelson: The Budget Deficit is AARP's Fault

Unbelievable.

I'm always amazed at these kinds of pronouncements.  Couldn't be that this is what the majority of Americans want, could it?  I mean, even the most righty tea partiers want the government to keep their hands off their Medicare.

The biggest reason for the large deficits we have is our unwillingness to pay for the programs we want.  If FY2000, the recepts of the federal government were 20.6% of GDP.  In FY2010 they were 14.9% of GDP.  If total receipts for FY2010 were the same percentage of GDP as they were in FY2000, the budget deficit for that year would have been reduced by two-thirds.

But at no time in the foreseeable future are revenues ever projected to be that high.

Enough said.

The Latest From Libya

It looks like Kaddafi's days are numbered.  It looks he will follow Mubarak into exile, which can only be a good thing, right?

By the way, despite the way it is vilified by the American right, Al Jazeera is a great source for up to the minute developments on what is happening in the Middle East.

Based on conversations with people in my community, I think that for the most part Americans think democratization is a good thing, and think what's happening in Egypt, Libya and other countries is a positive thing.  But I bet you our leadership is quaking in their boots.  Up to now, they have been quite content with repressive governments keeping the oil flowing and their people in check, backed up by the weapons America sells to them.

The last thing they want to see is democracy spreading in the Middle East.

Happy Presidents Day!

Fun post by Jonathan Bernstein about Presidents Day.  I tend to agree it would be much better if we kept it as a celebration of Washington's Birthday and left it at that.

I did find this sentence most interesting though:

The consensus Three Greatest Presidents are Washington, Lincoln, and (Franklin) Roosevelt, and I wouldn't argue with any celebration of those three.

I think that a significant percentage of Americans think both Lincoln and Roosevelt were rotten presidents.

You can still find a lot of people in the old South who view Lincoln with revulsion for his role in destroying the confederacy and freeing the slaves.  And, of course, for the last thirty-plus years there has been a concerted effort by our economic elites to destroy the New Deal, which in slow, piecemeal fashion has been succeeding.

Even Bernstein's choice as the fourth greatest - Jefferson - is vilified by portions of the right.  Remember how he was removed from a list of important political philosophers from textbooks on world history by the conservative Texas State Board of Education last year? (They did reverse that decision later in the year after nationwide ridicule.)

The divisions of opinions on these presidents exactly match the political battlelines in our country today.

Perhaps there is a consensus among historians on the greatness of these presidents.  But I seriously do not believe there is a consensus among the citizenry.

Astronomy Pic of the Day

Here is the description from the NASA Website:

Cradled in cosmic dust and glowing hydrogen, stellar nurseries in Orion the Hunter lie at the edge of a giant molecular cloud some 1,500 light-years away. Spanning nearly 25 degrees, this breath-taking vista stretches across the well-known constellation from head to toe (left to right). The Great Orion Nebula, the closest large star forming region, is right of center. To its left are the Horsehead Nebula, M78, and Orion's belt stars. Sliding your cursor over the picture will also find red giant Betelgeuse at the hunter's shoulder, bright blue Rigel at his foot, and the glowing Lambda Orionis (Meissa) nebula at the far left, near Orion's head. Of course, the Orion Nebula and bright stars are easy to see with the unaided eye, but dust clouds and emission from the extensive interstellar gas in this nebula-rich complex, are too faint and much harder to record. In this mosaic of broadband telescopic images, additional image data acquired with a narrow hydrogen alpha filter was used to bring out the pervasive tendrils of energized atomic hydrogen gas and the arc of the giant Barnard's Loop.

You need to go to the NASA website to see the effect of sliding your cursor over the picture.  Here is the link.

Quote of the Day

"Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth."

                                               -- George Bernard Shaw

Trickle-Down v. Bubble-Up

A good article by Richard Wolff of the Guardian on the budget consensus in Washington.

I can remember when the mortgage crisis hit in late 2008 - when financial institutions were holding bad mortgages because the housing market had collapsed and people couldn't pay their mortgages.  And I remember thinking there are two ways to help the banks get through this.  One was to subsidize them directly to cover their losses.  The second was to subsidize homeowners so they could pay their mortgages. If the homeowners paid their mortgages, the banks wouldn't suffer their losses.  The second approach seemed to me to kill two birds with one stone.

This is the essence of Wolff's "trickle-down" v. "bubble-up" economic policies.  Approach 1 is trickle down, approach 2 is bubble-up.  In either way, the banks are helped.  So why did they, and so many others, insist that trickle-down was the only way to do this?

I have my own thoughts on this one, but I'd love to hear yours.

How Conservative Lies Are Made and Spread

From Jesse Singal of The New Republic:

Perhaps the best recent example is a chart that has been racing around the conservative blogosphere for the last few months. According to its findings, a one-parent family with two children making $14,500 a year has more disposable income than an identical family making $60,000 a year; a family making just $3,625 a year doesn’t quite do as well as the one making $60,000, but it comes close. Those who publish the chart claim it shows that it pays to be poor in America because of government largesse, courtesy of Obama and the Democrats, that the middle class doesn’t have access to.

Problem is, the chart is full of errors. I traced it back to the man who made it, a newspaper publisher in Mississippi, and found that the math, methodology, and logic he used to generate the chart, as well as an op-ed he wrote to accompany it, are wholly unsound. To make matters worse, despite the chart’s cringe-worthy flaws, very few outlets on the Internet, from small-scope blogs to a handful of forums hosted by major national publications, bothered to fact-check it.

Read it and weep.

Quote of the Day

I'm not a big fan of Kissinger, but I do agree with him on this:

Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Astronomy Pic of the Day

Here is the description from the NASA Website:

Would the Rosette Nebula by any other name look as sweet? The bland New General Catalog designation of NGC 2237 doesn't appear to diminish the appearance of this flowery emission nebula. Inside the nebula lies an open cluster of bright young stars designated NGC 2244. These stars formed about four million years ago from the nebular material and their stellar winds are clearing a hole in the nebula's center, insulated by a layer of dust and hot gas. Ultraviolet light from the hot cluster stars causes the surrounding nebula to glow. The Rosette Nebula spans about 100 light-years across, lies about 5000 light-years away, and can be seen with a small telescope towards the constellation of the Unicorn (Monoceros).

More on the Budget

The only portion of the Budget that untouchable:  Defense spending.  Brett Arends reports.

I particularly like his conclusion:

Empires always go bankrupt. And when they do, the last thing to go is always the empire itself. 

We certainly seem to be heading in that direction.

The Real Budget Battle

An interesting thought on the Obama budget from Andrew Leonard at Salon:

I'm going to have much more on this later today, but first, a quick observation: Obama's budget is irrelevant. Obama's last budget was never passed by Congress -- and that was with large Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. This one -- at least in the form it is now -- will certainly never get passed either, now that  Republicans are in firm control over the House.

The government is currently operating under the terms of a temporary "continuing resolution" that will expire on March 4. The only budget battle that matters is the fight over what kind of "compromise" the White House cuts with Republicans to get the continuing resolution extended.

I agree with this analysis.  He goes on to say that House Republicans may be willing to play hardball and shut down the government if they don't get what they want by March 4. 

I find myself of mixed views as to the likely outcome.  The last time the Repubs forced a shut-down of the government, it was a public relations disaster for them.  Hopefully, once the social security checks stop coming people will come to their senses. 

What To Do With Mubarak

Great post by Booman.  Let's hope our leaders remember the mistakes we made with the Shah.

I'm actually kind of hopeful on this point, because I think that up to now Obama has handled the situation relatively well.  His reaction to the Mubarak speech last Friday was spot on.

But I think its more likely than not we'll screw this one up too.

I'm Back

And I hope to stay here regularly from now on....