Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
We chat about our lives, our health, our families, our social circles, our pets, etc. We welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, etc.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Good Morning!
Four Leaf Clover, Photo Credit: cygnus921
May you alway walk in sunshine.
May you never want for more.
May Irish angels rest their wings right beside your door.
-- Irish Blessing
News
Irish Times:
Scorned male fruit flies find consolation in . . . booze
THEY WERE young males on the make and they struck out not once, not twice, but a dozen times with a group of attractive females hovering nearby. So they did what so many men do after being repeatedly rejected – they got drunk using alcohol as a balm for unfulfilled desire.
And not one flew off in search of a rotting banana. Fruit flies apparently self-medicate just like humans do, drowning their sorrows or frustrations for some of the same reasons, scientists have reported. Male flies subjected to what amounted to a long tease – in a glass tube, not a dance club – preferred food spiked with alcohol far more than male flies that were able to mate.
Was St Patrick of the tall tales a tax exile and a spin doctor?
NOT ONLY did he introduce Christianity to Ireland in AD 432. If a new study is correct, St Patrick also pioneered another tradition, by becoming the first British celebrity to move here as a tax exile.
Where he differed from writers and rock stars, the Cambridge University research suggests, is that it wasn’t payment of tax he needed to avoid – not primarily. His problem, as a Roman patrician, was being expected to serve as a tax collector, or “decurion”. The role had been prestigious. But by the fifth century, with Roman Britain in decline, it was a thing to be avoided. According to Dr Roy Flechner, of Cambridge’s department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, Patrick’s father only escaped it by becoming a clergyman, exploiting a “bailout” clause of Roman law.
Irish Independent:
Scoop of support for gay marriage
US ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's is supporting gay marriage in Britain by repackaging an apple pie flavour as Apple-y Ever After.
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When Vermont passed such a law two years ago, the ice cream company celebrated by briefly repackaging its Chubby Hubby flavour as Hubby Hubby.
In Britain, Ben & Jerry's is relabelling its Oh My Apple Pie flavour, which is not available in the United States.
St Patrick's Day around the world
[Picture gallery]
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Is this the
cutest picture? (Girls skipping down the sidewalk on St. Patrick's Day in Dublin).
Leaning Tower of Pisa going green for St Patrick's Day
Greening famous attractions is part of a promotional campaign that Tourism Ireland has been involved in over the past three years.
But the leaning tower of Pisa and Niagara Falls are new additions to this year's campaign.
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New York's Chrysler Building and the London Eye are among the famous attractions getting involved.
Staff Sgt. Robert Bales named as suspect in Afghan massacre
TACOMA, Wash. — U.S. military officials on Friday finally named the suspect in the massacre of 16 Afghan civilians as Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, according to multiple news reports, and Bales was being brought to a military detention center in the United States to face murder charges.
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In the complex portrait that emerged from public records and Internet postings Friday following the release of his name, Bales was hurt about being passed over for a military promotion, and as a civilian had brushes with the law and spent time in anger management. [ ... ]
The family was getting ready to move that summer 2011 and hoped that the Army would allow them some say over where they went. The couple was hoping to be stationed in Germany, Italy, Hawaii or Kentucky to "be near Bob's family" or Georgia "to be a sniper teacher," she wrote.
Records in Pierce County, Wash., show that Bales and his wife Karilyn listed their home in the Lake Tapps area for sale four days ago, on March 12.
NPR and NYT on Americans v. Afghans
Yes, “obviously”: the angry protests in American streets over the killing of these Afghan civilians were scary indeed. Unlike in Afghanistan, where they really don’t seem to mind, almost every American city was engulfed this week by turmoil and disruption as infuriated Americans took to the streets to rail against the ongoing slaughter by their government of civilians in Afghanistan. Indeed, “people’s sense of revulsion at this act” in civilized, life-cherishing America is “far greater” than in Afghanistan: Americans are just up in arms about it, besides themselves with rage, just like they always are when their government yet again extinguishes the lives of innocent civilians.
New Details Show Panetta Was at Risk in Attack
WASHINGTON — An Afghan interpreter in a speeding truck tried to run down a top American commander and his British deputy, forcing the two and others to scatter as Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta’s plane taxied toward them at a military base in Afghanistan, defense officials said on Friday.
The latest account of what apparently was a suicide attack shows there was a greater security risk to Mr. Panetta than defense officials originally admitted. American military officials had at first played down the episode, which occurred on Wednesday at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, and they did not immediately disclose important details.
It was not until Friday that defense officials said that Mr. Panetta had already landed when the attack occurred, although they did not say how close his plane came to the speeding truck. But one of the officials acknowledged that if the attack had occurred five minutes later, it was “possible” that Mr. Panetta would have been on the tarmac and in the path of the speeding truck along with the commanders, who had been waiting for him as part of a welcoming party.
Judge rejects UC Davis pepper-spray report secrecy
The report on the November pepper-spraying of students and protesters at UC Davis likely will be ordered released today, although a potential court appeal may delay public release until at least April 2.
In a tentative ruling issued late Thursday, an Alameda Superior Court judge indicated he was not swayed by arguments from an attorney for the campus police involved in the incident that releasing the report with officers' names is illegal under state law.
Commentary: Where is the outrage over war on terror tactics?
Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. – from the 14th Amendment
Spin it any way you want. Justify it, rationalize it, chalk it up to the exigencies of war. And at the end, the fact remains:
A United States citizen is dead and the United States government killed him. Without trial. Without due process. Without hesitation. And many of those who loudly deplored George W. Bush for smaller excesses seem content to allow Barack Obama this larger one.
Pro Publica:
Our Super Fly, Super PACs Song
Poof! They're gone.
Four Whistleblowers Who Sounded the Alarm on Banks’ Mortgage Shenanigans
Buried in the sweeping mortgage settlement with banks, for which final documents were filed this week, are five whistleblower cases that shed light on the litany of foreclosure abuses by the banks.
According to one suit, Bank of America allegedly passed bad loans on to the Federal Housing Administration. According to another, the bank allegedly denied qualified homeowners access to HAMP, the government's loan modification program.
The suits were all settled as part of the overall $25 billion mortgage deal. They were filed under the False Claims Act, which provides incentives for whistleblowers to come forward in cases in which someone has defrauded the government. Whistleblowers can net up to 25 percent of the total settlement from False Claims suits, and in some of these cases, the reward is in the millions.
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We've laid out the details of each case.
Barofsky: Don't Believe Hype About $25B Mortgage Settlement
March 15 (Bloomberg Law) -- The $25 billion mortgage settlement between lenders and state attorneys general won't help nearly as many people as its touted to, Neil Barofsky, the former Special US Treasury Department Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), tells Bloomberg Law's Lee Pacchia. He's joined by Matthew Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Insitute, who says the government and banks delayed filing details of the settlement to give investors less time to challenge the deal in court.
The Hot Spot for the Rising Tech Generation
The inconspicuousness was part of the attraction, said Jasmin Arneja, 42, who bought the two-bedroom house with her husband Gagan, 40, a software engineer at a networking start-up. "It's the antithesis to these outrageous bizarre Gordon Gekko-esque houses. It just incorporates so much of our values," said Ms. Arneja, who runs a philanthropic advisory firm.
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Real-estate agents say it's a cultural shift. The new generation of Internet executives—younger than the last generation of dot-commers—eschews the trappings and responsibilities of expensive properties. They want to bicycle, walk or take public transportation. They like living near food trucks and dive bars.
Rotating villain?
Senate Bill Could Roll Back Consumers’ Health Insurance Savings
This summer, health insurance companies may have to pay more than a billion dollars back to their own customers. The rebate requirements were introduced as part of the 2010 health-care reform law and are meant to benefit consumers. But now an insurer-supported Senate bill aims to roll back the rebate requirements.
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Last month, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., introduced a bill that would change what costs companies can include in the 15 to 20 percent they are allotted for overhead, salaries and marketing. The bill, similar to a House bill introduced in March 2011 that has yet to come up for a vote, focuses on payments to insurance agents and brokers. Traditionally, these commissions are bundled into the administrative costs when making the final calculation. But insurance regulators have argued that fees paid to insurance agents and brokers shouldn’t count.
Such a change could mean big savings for insurance companies — and much smaller rebates for consumers.
Gah! It's about freaking time!
The inequality trap
With income inequality on the rise again, economists are linking income concentration to macroeconomic problems.
Washington, DC - As evidence mounts that income inequality is increasing in many parts of the world, the problem has received growing attention from academics and policymakers. In the United States, for example, the income share of the top one per cent of the population has more than doubled since the late 1970s, from about eight per cent of annual GDP to more than 20 per cent recently, a level not reached since the 1920s.
While there are ethical and social reasons to worry about inequality, they do not have much to do with macroeconomic policy per se. But such a link was seen in the early part of the twentieth century: Capitalism, some argued, tends to generate chronic weakness in effective demand due to growing concentration of income, leading to a "savings glut", because the very rich save a lot. This would spur "trade wars", as countries tried to find more demand abroad.
From the late 1930's onward, however, this argument faded as the market economies of the West grew rapidly in the post-World War II period and income distributions became more equal. While there was a business cycle, no perceptible tendency toward chronic demand weakness appeared. Short-term interest rates, most macroeconomists would say, could always be set low enough to generate reasonable rates of employment and demand.
Now, however, with inequality on the rise once more, arguments linking income concentration to macroeconomic problems have returned. The University of Chicago's Raghuram Rajan, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, tells a plausible story in his recent award-winning book Fault Lines about the connection between income inequality and the financial crisis of 2008.
Free-trade blinders
I began the class by asking students whether they would approve of my carrying out a particular magic experiment. I picked two volunteers, Nicholas and John, and told them that I was capable of making $200 disappear from Nicholas' bank account - poof! - while adding $300 to John's. This feat of social engineering would leave the class as a whole better off by $100. Would they allow me to carry out this magic trick?
Those who voted affirmatively were only a tiny minority. Many were uncertain. Even more opposed the change.
Clearly, the students were uncomfortable about condoning a significant redistribution of income, even if the economic pie grew as a result. How is it possible, I asked, that almost all of them had instinctively favoured free trade, which entails a similar - in fact, most likely greater - redistribution from losers to winners? They appeared taken aback.
Krugman on oil. Great column but I do disagree with one thing. U.S. oil policy could affect prices in one way -- if we used our regulating power more effectively on speculators. But I don't think that is the kind of policy Krugman was talking about.
Natural Born Drillers
Thus Mitt Romney claims that gasoline prices are high not because of saber-rattling over Iran, but because President Obama won’t allow unrestricted drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Meanwhile, Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal tells readers that America as a whole could have a jobs boom, just like North Dakota, if only the environmentalists would get out of the way.
The irony here is that these claims come just as events are confirming what everyone who did the math already knew, namely, that U.S. energy policy has very little effect either on oil prices or on overall U.S. employment. For the truth is that we’re already having a hydrocarbon boom, with U.S. oil and gas production rising and U.S. fuel imports dropping. If there were any truth to drill-here-drill-now, this boom should have yielded substantially lower gasoline prices and lots of new jobs. Predictably, however, it has done neither.
Libya gunmen attack Benghazi autonomy rally
One demonstrator killed and at least five injured after armed group charges crowd calling for division of country.
Thousands of Libyan protesters rallying in the eastern city of Benghazi to press for an autonomous region came under attack by armed men wielding rifles and knifes, witnesses said.
"One person was killed and at least five others were wounded," Basma Mohammed, a local medical official, told the AFP news agency.
[ ... ]
The marchers gathered after Friday prayers and went to Freedom Square, where Ahmed Zubeir Senussi, who is calling for autonomy in the oil-rich east of the country, delivered a speech.
Senussi and the demonstrators were showing their support for a declaration by tribal leaders and militia commanders in the eastern Barqa state to create an autonomous region. Barqa makes up almost half of Libya.
After all of the reassurance in Washington...
Netanyahu is preparing Israeli public opinion for a war on Iran
Since his return from Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has mainly been preoccupied with one thing: Preparing public opinion for war against Iran.
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According to polls published last week, this is the position of most of the Israeli public, which supports a U.S. strike on Iran, but is wary of sending the IDF to the task without the backing of the friendly superpower.