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 welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, news, 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.
|
Good Morning!
Within 24 hours, two butterflies found the new butterfly bush. July, 2012 by joanneleon
Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne
Mogwai - Earth Division (from Occupy this Album)
|
Drop in
any time
day or night
to say hello.
|
News
You have to go see these photos!
Moon between Olympic rings makes for breathtaking London photographs (GALLERY)
A full moon made for a beautiful sixth Olympic ring on Friday night, when a Reuters photographer snapped a breathtaking picture of the moon positioned between a large set of Olympic rings hanging from the top of London's Tower Bridge.
The shots were an instant hit on Twitter, with fans retweeting them thousands of times within an hour of posting.
Andy Stern Responds to Critics of His Post-SEIU Career
Stern recently accepted a paid position on the board of directors of the biochemical company SIGA, owned by billionaire Ron Perelman’s private equity firm MacAndrews & Forbes. Stern also recently accepted an endowed position at Columbia University as a Ronald O. Perelman Senior Fellow at the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy. [ ... ]
Stern has also taken an unpaid position on the board of directors of the Broad Center, which critics allege is hostile to teachers’ unions. (Along with Stern, the center's board also includes former Obama economic advisor Larry Summers, former Democratic Congressman turned bank lobbyist Harold Ford Jr., and former Louisiana state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek, who is infamous for using the devastation from Hurricane Katrina as a means of converting public schools to charter schools and pushing voucher programs.)
[ ... ]
After the election of Barack Obama and the appointment of teachers-union foe Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, Broad told the Wall Street Journal that his vision of education reform was possible because "the unions no longer control the education agenda of the Democratic Party.”
[ ... ]
The Broad Center trains people with no background in education to be school superintendents in six weekend courses spread over a 10-month period. The program is considered an alternative to regulations in many states that require superintendents to have years of training and experience in education.
[ ... ]
“I think it’s again the latest indication that his true interest is in being a junior member of the corporate ruling class,” says John Borsos, secretary-treasurer of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) [ ... ] He always wanted to be a mover and shaker in corporate America, which is why he was such an accommodationist. Now he is showing what his true intentions were. He ran the union to accommodate corporate America and now he is cashing in.”
[ Emphasis added. ]
Great news... unless this means he is going to be the next Obama appointee to SCOTUS.
Great News: Cass Sunstein Leaving Government
Regardless of what happens in November, we are guaranteed to have a much more functional federal government in the near future. That’s because Cass Sunstein is taking his boot off the neck of the federal regulatory state and leaving government. I couldn’t be happier.
[ ... ]
There has been almost nobody over the past four years who has been as destructive as Cass Sunstein, with massive implications for the environment, food safety and public health. The Administration centralized regulatory policymaking in the White House under OIRA, and the results were catastrophic.
[ ... ]
Of course, the Hill article offers this ominous take: Sunstein would be on the short list of Supreme Court replacements, if any came up. My response to that is: be afraid.
James Hansen.
Climate change is here — and worse than we thought
My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.
In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.
This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.
[ ... ]
Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate (up about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century), the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide.
Anthony Bologna, NYPD Cop Who Pepper-Sprayed Occupy Protesters, Will Get No Help From City In Lawsuit
Anthony Bologna-- the NYPD Deputy Inspector caught on video pepper-spraying two women Occupy Wall Street protesters in Union Square last fall-- could have to dig into his own pockets to pay for the damages in the women's civil lawsuit against him. New York City has opted not to defend Bologna in court, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The decision indicates the city finds the 29-year NYPD veteran's defense of his actions inadequate, and is a stark contrast from NYPD spokesman Paul Browne's initial remarks on the incident in September.
In France, socialist Hollande makes the wealthiest pay
Although the 75 percent tax on earnings over $1.23 million a year, up from a previous top marginal rate of 48 percent, is more a political symbol than an economic measure — because it raises too little money to make a dent in France’s funding needs — analysts say it will help give Hollande political cover to cut government spending and open the labor market, making France more competitive with its neighbors. Parliament approved a one-off wealth tax on people whose assets total more than $1.6 million, and new taxes will raise $8.7 billion this year alone.
“From a strictly economic point of view, I wouldn’t recommend these policies. But that’s not what this is,” said Elie Cohen, an economist who has advised Sarkozy and Hollande. “This is clearly designed to create some kind of consensus in this country for structural reforms” — the kinds of measures otherwise known as austerity.
JPMorgan's "London Whale" was prodded to boost valuations - WSJ
(Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase concluded that a trader nicknamed "London whale" was urged by his boss to put higher values on some positions than they might have fetched in the open market at the time, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the probe.
JPMorgan's conclusion is based on a series of emails and voice communications in late March and April, as losses on trader Bruno Iksil's bullish credit-market bet mounted, the Journal said.
The bank believes emails and voice communications show the executive, Javier Martin-Artajo, pushing Iksil to adjust trade prices higher, the Journal said, citing people close to the bank's investigation.
B. of A. receives subpoenas related to Libor probe
The nation's second-largest bank by assets said in its Form 10-Q filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission late Thursday it received "subpoenas and information requests' from the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the United Kingdom Financial Services Authority tied to a probe by regulators into how banks set the London Interbank Offered Rate, a key interest rate for bank lending, "and European and other interbank offered rates."
We Don’t Know How Many Foreclosures Have Happened
Matt Stoller has a superlative article today in Salon picking up on a central frustration of everyone trying to decipher housing policy. The truth is that the data is truly terrible. We have a vague idea of the number of mortgages and foreclosures, and we can identify trends. But in reality, there is no central, comprehensive, reliable number on these metrics and that makes it impossible to create decent housing policy.
[ ... ]
This is the kind of article that should put most housing analysts out of business. They are making their determinations by reading incomplete data sets and adding some guesses. Nobody really knows the answer to these questions. And the efforts to remedy these questions haven’t worked. Even though Dodd-Frank mandated that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development create a national foreclosure database, Congress never appropriated the funding mechanism that would allow them to set it up. So this is a catastrophic failure of policy. And it’s in part by design: if nobody has the data, then nobody can be held accountable.
Little Girl Gets 3D-Printed Robotic Arm
Stratasys released a case study demonstrating how 3D printing helped 4-year old Emma Lavelle overcome the limitations of a congenital disorder, allowing her to use her arms for the first time.
Using a Dimension 3D printer, researchers at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Philadelphia were able to create what Emma calls her “magic arms.” The device is a custom-designed robotic exoskeleton that enables her to conquer greatly limited joint mobility and underdeveloped muscles.
Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset, talking about a one-state solution in the Sunday
New York Times. I will excerpt but it is a piece that requires reading in full.
Israel's Fading Democracy
The winds of isolation and narrowness are blowing through Israel. Rude and arrogant power brokers, some of whom hold senior positions in government, exclude non-Jews from Israeli public spaces. Graffiti in the streets demonstrates their hidden dreams: a pure Israel with "no Arabs" and "no gentiles." They do not notice what their exclusionary ideas are doing to Israel, to Judaism and to Jews in the diaspora. In the absence of a binding constitution, Israel has no real protection for its minorities or for their freedom of worship and expression.
If this trend continues, all vestiges of democracy will one day disappear, and Israel will become just another Middle Eastern theocracy. It will not be possible to define Israel as a democracy when a Jewish minority rules over a Palestinian majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea - controlling millions of people without political rights or basic legal standing.
This Israel would be much more Jewish in the narrowest sense of the word, but such a nondemocratic Israel, hostile to its neighbors and isolated from the free world, wouldn't be able to survive for long.
[ ... ]
A long-overdue constitution could create a state that belongs to all her citizens and in which the government behaves with fairness and equality toward all persons without prejudice based on religion, race or gender. Those are the principles on which Israel was founded and the values that bound Israel and America together in the past. I believe that creating two neighboring states for two peoples that respect one another would be the best solution. However, if our shortsighted leaders miss this opportunity, the same fair and equal principles should be applied to one state for both peoples.
Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset, is the author of "The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise From Its Ashes" and the chairman of Molad, the Center for Renewal of Democracy.
Blog Posts of Interest
The Hoosegow Express - Pre-Woodstock, 1969 by One Pissed Off Liberal on DailyKos
Freaky Friday: Shelter from the Storm by Lady Libertine on DailyKos
Swing voters want their Social Security, Medicare and good government by Joan McCarter on DailyKos
Lurking Around Monterey Bay ( w dkos image notes) by divineorder on DailyKos
Mogwai - Take Me Somewhere Nice