This (http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/) is an animated illustration of how Facebook has been increasingly defining your personal data as “open to everyone”.
Category: law
-
A fantastic visual response to “Show us your papers” in AZ…
An editorial cartoon responding to the Arizona immigration law From the cartoonist Lee Judge ( http://media.kansascity.com/images/cartoons/judge/04-2010/judge_04272010_700.jpg)
-
How to Lie with the Truth — and how to counter it
A meme spreading like wildfire throughout the rabid right is that “47% of Americans don’t even pay federal income tax.” Clearly it’s time for another tax cut for the uber-wealthy in the interest of “fairness”.
David Leonhardt wrote a piece in today’s New York Times exploring this. Short version: The number is true… and meaningless. The working class pays far more in total taxes (once payroll, state, and sales tax is included). People aren’t getting a free ride. The article is worth a read, if only as an example of a calm, fact-based response to overheated breathless propaganda.
-
16,500 : a “mistake” so egregious as to be a lie
Where did the rabid right get the figure of 16,500 new “IRS agents” that (they claim) will be required to enforce the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act?
They made it up.
Really. It came from nowhere. In fact, the IRS will add few or no agents, and perhaps hardly any staff at all. There’s a really nice dissection of this ludicrous claim over at factcheck.org. Basically, the number was invented based on a bad estimate, inflated through dubious assumptions, and then just hand-waved into fact.
Just remember, the next time someone quotes to you some scary scary provision of the ACA: There’s a non-negligible chance that they are lying or repeating a lie.
-
Health care reform passes
So, against all expectation, the Democratic Party managed to hang together and finally pass the comprehensive health care bill.
As a lifelong Democrat, I am flabbergasted. I was certain they’d find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and fumble on the proverbial one-yard line. I’m glad to be disappointed, but this long, ugly process has exposed disturbing trends in this nation. It’s still possible that this will be the high-water mark of a great republic.
Though their target is incorrect, the Tea Partiers ironically have a point: the Republic does face a crisis. It’s not driven by phantasmical jackbooted insurance inspectors breaking into homes and dragging Grandma off to mythical death panels. It stems from the unholy matrimony among a slick ideological establishment; sensationalist, irresponsible, and manipulative 24 hour “news” media; and an angry, incoherent, willfully-ignorant populace. Though these people claim to revere the Founders, they in fact stand opposed to the core of Enlightenment democracy that was bequeathed to us: an informed and educated citizenry engaged in reasoned debate — with passion, to be sure, but never abandoning reason and never so cocksure as to assume that opponents must be enemies.
Considering that the Tea Partiers have labeled rule by majority vote “tyranny”, it’s hard to see how anything resembling the United States of America could survive their rage. Their unifying feature is anger and it will burn everything it can reach. And the Republican Party stands on the sideline and feeds it, a mixture of cynical arsonist and maniacal six-year-old.
How can a deliberative legislature — how can a functioning democracy — endure when one side has abandoned argument and evidence? When one side decides that anything their opponents say must be untrue? If one side locks itself in its own fantasy world and declares invalid any source that might challenge its funhouse-mirror self-reality?
-
The rising threat to music of the home taping phenomenon
This video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3jkUhG68wY&feature=player_embedded) is a hilarious take-down of the music publishing industry’s allegation that personal filesharing is “killing” music. Part of the fun is figuring out the early 1980s references. Also, I would totally buy a flag that had that cassette-and-crossbones logo…
Also, remember that according to former MPAA chief Jack Valenti,
[T]he VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.
Not that the content cartels would ever condone the use of overblown and hyperbolic language to frighten lawmakers into writing into law special rights to protect their outmoded business models…
-
David Brooks is disingenuous, delusional, or an idiot
Today, David Brooks had a column on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. It’s pretty much a standard Brooks piece, bemoaning the lack of civility in Washington today. It is wrong on its facts and wrong on its interpretations and laughably wrong on its understanding of politics.
- Ezra Klein takes it down analytically.
- Jonathan Chait takes it apart with the devastating mockery it so richly deserves.
The health care debate has revealed not only how dysfunctional our national politics is. It’s exposed how vapid and worthless the self-appointed pundits and intelligentsia have become.
(I also have to say how taken aback I am at how nakedly the professional punditry is willing to scoff at such a radical principle as “rule by simple majority”, which Brooks derides in no uncertain terms. Isn’t rule of the majority more or less what we mean by democracy?)
-
Reconciliation, in 90 seconds or less.
This video gives an explanation of the process of reconciliation vis a vis the health care bill. It’s brief, lucid, and informative. Needless to say, it won’t get airplay or attention. *sigh*
-
Our (Even More) Broken Senate
News comes that Senator Richard Shelby has placed a blanket hold on Obama administration appointments, apparently as part of a plan to extort pork for his state. With Scott Brown having been seated, the chance of cloture on these holds seems remote. So the Senate is even more broken. The danger is that this will accelerate our move towards government by other means, including increased use of recess appointments.
Oh, and what the heck is a hold? David Waldeman explains.
Also: a pretty funny reimagining of the note that Shelby must have given Harry Reid and the President.
-
A well-deserved smack-down on trials of terrorists
Adam Serwer at TAPPED has a nice response to Richard Cohen’s latest hyperventilating bed-wetting over the upcoming trial of several terrorists. I’m disappointed that NYC has successfully lobbied to have the trials held elsewhere, though I’m glad that the main reason seems to be that the extra security would be overly disruptive to city life and not that we are afraid the city would be attacked. (As if Al Qaeda needs another reason…)
But I simply cannot abide the weak-kneed wimps who think that “the paramount civil liberty is a sense of security”. How absolutely bat-crazy stupid do you have to be to write something like that? Note that it’s not even that the ultimate right is actual security — it’s only that we have a sense of security. So apparently, in order that Richard Cohen can sleep at night without worrying about the monsters under his bed, we should sacrifice legal standards, integrity, freedom itself. It turns out I wrote my rebuttal of his argument about two and a half years before he even wrote his article, and I stand by it:
We are stronger than that.
We are smarter than that.
We are better than that.