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The Canary Islands Government Allowed "Fast & Furious 6" To Destroy Their Highway With a Tank

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 24 May 2013 22:43:42 +0000

Fast & Furious 6
Universal Pictures
130 minutes

Hands down, Fast & Furious 6 is by far the best movie ever made to feature Ludacris and Tyrese trapped in a Jeep dangling inches off the ground from an imperiled cargo plane.

And there is so, so much more to cherish about the film.

The Fast & Furious franchise has become genuinely fascinating over the last couple of years. One of the most fascinating things about the series is the addition of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as the ultra-brawny Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs, a character who seemingly cannot go ten minutes without torturing somebody for information. Another fascinating thing is that after a long stretch of churning out barely passable B-movies, the series somehow managed to produce critically acclaimed entertainment, starting with 2011's Fast Five. (The sixth film has received similarly high marks.) Credit for the newfound critic-and-crowd-pleasing goes to Taiwanese-born American filmmaker Justin Lin, who initially demonstrated the full extent of his directorial talents with the stereotype-subverting independent film Better Luck Tomorrow in 2002.

But the single most fascinating thing about the series so far is the enormous tank in Fast & Furious 6. The tank is arguably the main character in the movie.

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Obama's Drug Czar Cites Useless Stat to Dismiss Legalizing Pot

Gavin Aronsen — Fri, 24 May 2013 19:05:24 +0000

Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), dismissed calls for pot legalization on Thursday, citing a recent study by his agency to claim that marijuana is the drug most commonly linked to crime. During an Urban Institute panel discussion, while calling for a "21st century approach to drug policy reform," Kerlikowske rejected legalization as a "bumper-sticker approach." But the study (PDF) doesn't actually show a causal relationship between pot and crime: Marijuana is far and away the most commonly used illegal drug, so it stands to reason that it would show up most often in drug tests.

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Friday Cat Blogging - 24 May 2013

Kevin Drum — Fri, 24 May 2013 18:55:00 +0000

It's probably time for another round of quiltblogging, but that will have to wait until next week. Why? Because this week I got my lovely new Mother Jones T-shirt and Domino immediately curled up on it.

I'll bet you didn't know I was a union thug, did you? Well, I am—though, disappointingly, I've never received a union card. Domino, however, misunderstood when I told her California wasn't a right-to-work state, figuring that this meant it must be a right-to-not-work state, which exempts her from paying union dues. Probably all for the best. The discipline of a picket line is not for her.

Today in Grandstanding Senators

Kevin Drum — Fri, 24 May 2013 18:29:02 +0000

The Economist's Jon Fasman reports on the latest political pandering from a member of the Greatest Deliberative Body On Earth:

On Wednesday David Vitter (pictured), a Republican senator from Louisiana, proposed—and the Senate agriculture committee accepted—an amendment to the farm bill that would, in Mr Vitter's words, "prohibit convicted murderers, rapists and pedophiles from receiving food stamps." It's not hard to see why this amendment passed. All Mr Vitter needed to do was propose it []. Then the tacit question arises: Does anyone in this chamber want to stand up and say that taxpayers should feed murderers, rapists and pedophiles? No? Of course not.

This is revolting. It obviously has no fiscal impact worth mentioning, and just as clearly does nothing to reduce the future rate of murder, rape, or pedophilia. It's just pure political grandstanding from a guy who knows an amendment like this will play well with the rubes back home. It's a mindless glorification of barbarism for the sake of a few votes.

If you think the current sentencing standards for murder, rape, and pedophilia are too lenient, then lobby to change them. Until then, though, anyone who's released from prison is someone who's done their time and paid their debt. Their punishment at the hands of the justice system is sufficient. They don't deserve more at the hands of every showboating senator with his next election on his mind.

NASA: We've Made Progress on Obama's Asteroid-Lasso Initiative

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 24 May 2013 17:35:11 +0000

In April, the Obama administration unveiled its 2014 budget proposal, which included $145.8 billion for agriculture, $520 million for the International Trade Administration, and a bunch of other stuff. It also included a $105-million initiative to lasso an asteroid, tow it toward Earth, place it into the moon's orbit, and claim the space rock for the United States of America. The idea is to eventually have astronauts travel to the asteroid to conduct mining operations, test technology for missions to Mars, and research strategies for deflecting future world-ending asteroids.

On Thursday, NASA chief Charles Bolden got a good look at the progress being made. The Associated Press reports (emphasis mine):

Bolden checked on...the mission, which may eventually cost more than $2.6 billion. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and Glenn Research Center in Ohio are developing a thruster that relies on ion propulsion instead of conventional chemical fuel...NASA is under White House orders to fly humans to an asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars. Instead of sending astronauts to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, as originally planned, the space agency came up with a quicker, cheaper idea: Haul the asteroid close to the moon and visit it there..."If you can't get to the asteroid, bring the asteroid to you," Bolden said.

President Obama had previously established a goal of landing astronauts on a near-Earth asteroid by 2025. This plan bumps the date up to 2021. Last month, an administration official with knowledge of the mission filled in some of the details. For one thing, the ambitious lasso-the-asteroid proposal would not increase NASA's budget; the agency would simply redirect existing funds to the project. And if the audacious-sounding mission goes through, NASA would make a point to only drag small asteroids toward Earth and into lunar orbit. That way, if something does go horribly wrong, the relatively small size of the target asteroid would ensure that the rock is harmless to our planet. Lest there be any confusion: Barack Obama is not going to accidentally throw a killer asteroid at mankind.

Asteroids have enjoyed some time in the political spotlight lately. In March, a Senate panel grilled scientists about the consequences of an asteroid striking earth and the best ways to fight back against ruinous asteroid aggression. That was in response to two high-profile events—an asteroid the size of a city block coming sorta, kinda, maybe close to smashing into Earth, and a truck-sized meteor exploding over Russia's Chelyabinsk region and injuring roughly 1,500 people.

On a related note, here's the trailer for Asteroid, a 1997 NBC miniseries about the president of the United States and a FEMA director scrambling to stop asteroids from destroying America:

See How Citigroup Wrote a Bill So It Could Get a Bailout

Erika Eichelberger — Fri, 24 May 2013 17:19:22 +0000

On Friday, the New York Times reported on the front page that Citigroup drafted most of a House bill that would allow banks to engage in risky trades backed by a potential taxpayer-funded bailout. The Times notes that "Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill." Special-interest lobbyists often play a role in writing legislation on the Hill, but such sausage-making is rarely revealed to the public. In this instance, members of Congress and a band of lobbyists have been caught red-handed, and Mother Jones has obtained the Citigroup draft that is practically identical to the House bill. As you can see in the side-by-side comparison below, the lobbyists for Citigroup really earned their pay on this job.

The bill, called the Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act, was approved by the House financial services committee in May and is headed for a vote on the House floor soon. It would gut a section of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act called the "push-out rule." Banks hate the push-out rule, which is scheduled to go into effect on July 13, because this provision will forbid them from trading certain derivatives (which are complicated financial instruments with values derived from underlying variables, such as crop prices or interest rates). Under this rule, banks will have to move these risky trades into separate non-bank affiliates that aren't insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and are less likely to receive government bailouts. The bill would smother the push-out rule in its crib by permitting banks to use government-insured deposits to bet on a wider range of these risky derivatives.

Here is the key section of the legislation that Citigroup cooked up compared to the same section of the final bill:

The bill is sponsored by Republican and Democratic members—Randy Hultgren (R-Ill.), Jim Himes (D-Conn.), Richard Hudson (R-NC), and Sean Patrick Mahoney (D-NY)—and its passage would be great news for Citi and other financial titans. Five banks—Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo—control more than 90 percent of the $700 trillion derivatives market. "The big banks support [the bill] because it means that they'll get to keep the public subsidy"—FDIC insurance and the implicit promise of a taxpayer bailout—"to their derivatives-dealing business," explains Marcus Stanley, the policy director at Americans for Financial Reform.

The origins of the Citigroup proposal date back to 2011, when several large banks fought to repeal the push-out rule entirely. When it became clear that full repeal couldn't pass, Citigroup pitched an alternative: allow banks to use FDIC-insured money to bet on almost anything they wanted. It proposed letting banks keep most types of derivatives trading in-house, requiring only that derivatives based on certain pools of assets, such as mortgages, be moved into separate entities. Citigroup was not able to get the measure passed before the end of the last Congress, but its allies on Capitol Hill reintroduced it this year.

Citi's move to expand the types of derivatives it can trade comes as banks have increasingly been shifting derivatives out of their investment banking divisions (which aren't backed by FDIC insurance) and into taxpayer-backed entities. "The rule is needed more than ever," says Mike Konczal, an expert on financial reform at the Roosevelt Institute. The financial services committee passed the Citi-written bill on a 53-to-6 vote; all the no votes came from Democrats.

This is certainly not the first time that the financial industry has shaped financial reform laws for Congress. Citigroup was a central player in the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era law called the Glass-Steagall Act that forced banks not to engage in investment activities. Its lobbyists flooded Capitol Hill for that fight. "Citigroup was of course the bank that administered the coup de grace to Glass-Steagall," says Stanley.

Citigroup's drafting of the anti-push-out measure fits into "a long history of things being written by industry—and that generally has not worked out very well," says Konczal. "This is very bad news."

See how the Citigroup proposal allows more risky dealings by taxpayer-backed banks:

Chart of the Day: Sequester Cuts Are Starting to Bite

Kevin Drum — Fri, 24 May 2013 17:07:23 +0000

The number of people who are feeling the effect of the sequester continues to rise. It's now up to 37 percent, and unsurprisingly, that's affecting what people think of it:

More Americans continue to disapprove than approve of sequestration, now by 56-35 percent — again, a view influenced by experience of the cuts. Eight in 10 of those who report serious harm oppose the cuts, as do about two-thirds of those slightly harmed. But the majority, which has felt no impacts, divides exactly evenly — 46 percent favor the cuts, vs. 46 percent opposed.

Further, this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, finds that 39 percent overall “strongly” disapprove of the cuts — but that soars to 66 percent of those who say they’ve been harmed in a major way.

Despite these results, I'll stick to my earlier prediction: this isn't enough to affect Congress. Overall, disapproval of the sequester has gone up only three points since March, and by the time that number gets much higher, September will be here and the dumb sequester cuts will be gone. Congress will replace them with more targeted cuts in the FY2014 budget, and those targets will be selected to minimize the yelling from interest groups they care about. Republicans may need to gut things out a bit this summer, but they'll manage to hang on.

Sadly for Republicans, Obamacare Not Likely to Be a Train Wreck

Kevin Drum — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:35:58 +0000

Is Obamacare fated to be a "train wreck"? Matt Yglesias says no, but warns us of what to expect as it rolls out:

You have to remember a few basic facts about ACA implementation coverage over the next 18 months. One is that the media has a large negativity bias. The other is that the aspirations of the law are quite high, and the status quo is quite bad. That means any time the situation improves but doesn't improve as much as the Obama administration wanted things to improve, that will tend to be covered as "bad news for Obamacare." That tendency will be re-enforced because Republicans will be eager to trumpet Obamacare's shortcomings (to make Obama look bad), and advocates for the poor will also be eager to trumpet Obamacare's shortcomings (to build pressure for improvement). So you'll hear lots of completely accurate stories about things not working quite as well as proponents had hoped. Just recall that this is always how things go.

Obamacare will suffer from what I call the "big country problem": in a big country, even a tiny percentage is a big absolute number. This means that even something rare can be made to look common. Obamacare is a classic case: it's a gigantic, bureaucratic program that affects tens of millions of people, and that means it will inevitably run into lots of problems. A 99 percent success rate, after all, would still mean hundreds of thousands of horror stories. This is going to give the Fox News set plenty of opportunities to insist that the sky is falling.

But it probably won't be. Obamacare will have plenty of growing pains, and on a broader scale it will have unintended effects that genuinely need to be addressed. This will be harder to do than usual since Republicans are rooting for failure and will be generally unwilling to tweak the law to improve it. Hopefully this will change over time as constituent pressure mounts, but we'll have to wait and see about that.

In the meantime, if you want to know where the "train wreck" metaphor came from in the first place, and how it's been mangled beyond recognition over the past few months, Dave Weigel has you covered.

Leaks and the First Amendment

Kevin Drum — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:02:42 +0000

I hate to say this, but the media is losing me. I'm mostly on their side when it comes to subpoenaing journalists' phone records, but the level of outrage and special pleading has gotten so palpable that I'm starting to waver. Aren't they supposed to at least feign objectivity, even when the subject is something that affects the press?

It's worse in some places than others. Roger Ailes, for example, released a histrionic statement yesterday about "the administration's attempt to intimidate Fox News." Sure, Roger. Other places it's only slightly more subtle. This morning's LA Times, for example, greeted me with the headline on the right. If the subject were, say, wiretaps on organized crime rings, would the Times have written a headline about "spying on mafia dons"? I don't think so.

I'm not sure what precisely has caused the big increase in leak investigations during the Obama administration. Maybe it's because electronic communication makes it easier to investigate them. Maybe it's because electronic communication makes it easier to leak in the first place, so there are more leaks. And certainly some cases are more troubling than others. The harassment of Thomas Drake, for example, is hard to defend. Conversely, the prosecution (though not always the treatment) of Bradley Manning is entirely justified.

The two cases that have everyone exercised at the moment mostly seem to be justified. As Cheryl Rofer points out, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim basically acted like an idiot, apparently leaking information to James Rosen without even quite realizing how damaging it was. There's no government in the world that would tolerate that kind of behavior from someone in a sensitive position who knew the rules. We know less about the AP case, but it certainly seems to have involved the release of information (the existence of an Al Qaeda mole) that the government had a legitimate reason for keeping secret.

Does this mean the government should be able to pursue these cases by getting warrants for reporters' phone records? I think the bar should be very, very high for that. Should the government be able to prosecute reporters for publishing classified information? I'd say the bar should be almost insurmountable for that. Even making the suggestion in a warrant application, as they did in the case of Rosen, is going too far for my taste.

Nevertheless, the government has an obvious interest in trying to keep its intelligence operations secret. The existence of an Al Qaeda mole and the existence of high-level sources within North Korea are both classic cases of this. There's no whistleblowing or government misconduct here. When those kinds of secrets are blown, the feds legitimately want to know which nitwit is doing it. Sometimes that may justify getting a warrant to look at journalists' phone records. The rules for this ought to be more stringent than they are, but the First Amendment isn't a magic pass here.

Progess on Chemical Regulation, At Last?

Kate Sheppard — Fri, 24 May 2013 15:23:33 +0000

A bit of positive news this week may have gotten lost in the shuffle. On Wednesday, two senators announced bipartisan legislation to fix our nation's outdated and ineffective chemical regulations. New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg and Louisiana Republican David Vitter announced an agreement to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), a 37-year-old law governing the use of tens of thousands of hazardous chemicals. I've written before about how the law's failures have left dangerous chemicals largely unregulated.

That these two lawmakers agreed on the new legislation, dubbed the Chemical Safety Improvement Act of 2013, is a big deal. Lautenberg has made strengthening TSCA one of his legacy issues in the Senate, from which he is retiring in 2015. Vitter is known as a industry booster how has blocked progress on chemicals in the past.

The bill would, for the first time, require the EPA review the safety of all chemicals used in products, whereas TSCA grandfathered in a lot of chemicals without testing their safety. It would also make it harder for companies to claim "confidential business information" as an excuse for not disclosing what's in their products. TSCA reform advocates will note that this latest bill is not as tough as the Safe Chemicals Act that Lautenberg had previously championed. The Environmental Working Group slammed the proposal as "unacceptably weak" and listed the areas where it falls short.

But others see the agreement as movement in the right direction. As Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, told Energy & Environment Daily:

"I've worked for a number of years trying to improve a statute and a program that is hamstrung at every turn by that statute," Denison said. "My reference point is whether this bill improves EPA's ability to work relative to current TSCA. And there's no question that it does.

"If one measures it against an ideal, the kind of bill I'd write if I were king, then this doesn't meet all the criteria," he added. "But this bill has a higher likelihood of passing."