LA City Council Proposes a Ban on Free Speech on the Public Airwaves

LOS ANGELES (CBS) — City Council members took a step closer on Wednesday to becoming the first in the nation to adopt a resolution condemning certain types of speech on public airwaves.

Councilmember Jan Perry introduced legislation that would call upon media companies to ensure “on-air hosts do not use and promote racist and sexist slurs” on radio and other broadcasts.

Members of Black Media Alliance, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Korean-American Bar Association, American Indians in Film and Television were on hand to voice their support for the proposal.

The resolution — which was also supported by Councilmember Bernard Parks and Council President Herb Wesson — called attention to the recent uproar over comments by KFI 640 AM talk show hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou.

Kobylt and Chiampou were suspended after they called the late pop singer Whitney Houston a “crack ho” three days after her death in February.

The proposal cites a “long history of racially offensive comments as well as deplorable sexist remarks, particularly towards women and Black, Latino, and Asian communities” at KFI 640 and calls for parent company Clear Channel Communications to hire a more diverse workforce to offset the trend.

“It is easy to become desensitized to what other groups find intolerable which ultimately fosters an environment where negative comments can go unchecked and corporate guidelines and policies are no longer being enforced,” the resolution reads.

Remarks from syndicated talk show host Rush Limbaugh referring Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and a “prostitute” for testifying on Capitol Hill about women’s access to contraception were also cited in the proposal.

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(Reuters) – Scott Kluth has a love-hate relationship with his new Fisker Karma luxury electric sedan.

The 34-year-old car lover bought the plug-in hybrid electric Karma in December for $107,850, but five days later the car’s battery died as he was driving in downtown Chicago. While the car he affectionately calls a “head turner” was fixed in a recall, Kluth remains uncertain how much he will drive it.

“I just want a car that works,” Kluth said. “It’s a fun car to drive. It’s just that I’ve lost confidence in it.”

The Karma’s problems — one vehicle died during testing by Consumer Reports this month — follow bad publicity arising from a probe of General Motors Co’s Chevrolet Volt and weak sales of the car, and the closure or bankruptcy of several electric vehicle-related start-ups.

The unrelenting bad news has led to questions about the readiness of electric cars and raises fresh doubts about a technology that has been around since the late 1890s but is still struggling to win over the public.

Whether electric vehicles can find an audience beyond policymakers in Washington and Hollywood celebrities depends on lowering vehicle prices without selling cars at a loss, analysts and industry executives say, while extending driving range to make the cars competitive with their gasoline-powered peers.

“It’s going to be a slow slog,” said John O’Dell, senior green car editor at industry research firm Edmunds.com. “Maybe there’s too much expectation of more and quicker success than might realistically be expected of a brand new technology.”

He also questioned whether priorities will simply change for whomever is U.S. president after the November election. Electric vehicles could lose tax breaks — currently worth $7,500 a vehicle for buyers — particularly if a Republican ends up in the White House.

Edmunds expects pure electric cars and plug-in hybrids to make up only 1.5 percent of the U.S. market in 2017, compared with 0.1 percent last year, and O’Dell said that may be optimistic. Consumers charge all-electric cars by plugging into an outlet, while hybrid versions include a gasoline engine.

President Barack Obama’s administration has been a strong proponent of electric vehicles like the Volt and set a goal of getting 1 million battery-powered vehicles on the road by 2015. Lux Research estimates that number will actually be fewer than 200,000. Both the Volt and Karma’s development were supported by low-interest federal loans.

That has not dissuaded automakers, many of which plan to launch electric vehicles to join the Volt and Nissan’s all-electric Leaf in a bid to meet rising fuel efficiency standards. Toyota has begun selling a plug-in Prius, and EVs from Ford, Honda, BMW and Fiat will join the fray this year, along with cars from start-ups Tesla and Coda Automotive.

HENRY FORD’S WIFE

Electric cars aren’t a new concept. Henry Ford bought his wife, Clara, at least two electric cars in the early 1900s offering at best 50 miles driving range and top speeds of about 35 miles per hour, according to the Henry Ford Museum.

But analysts said automakers have not done a good enough job getting the costs down and explaining the technology to win over anyone beyond early adopters like actor Leonardo DiCaprio, pop idol Justin Bieber, comedian Jay Leno and former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

“You can do all the advertising and promotion you want, but if people don’t buy into the message the needle’s not going to move,” said George Cook, a marketing professor at the University of Rochester’s business school and a former Ford executive.

The Volt, at almost $40,000 before federal subsidies, is seen as too expensive by many critics. Fiat-Chrysler Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne, a long-time EV skeptic, has said Chrysler will lose more than $10,000 on every battery-powered Fiat 500 it sells.

And even with rising gasoline prices — topping $4 a gallon in parts of the country — EVs are just not competitive, according to the Lundberg Survey. Gasoline prices would have to rise to $8.53 a gallon to make the Leaf competitive and hit $12.50 for a Volt to be worth it, based on the cost of gasoline versus electricity, fuel efficiency and depreciation, the survey said.

Obama’s vision, which he laid out at a Daimler truck plant in North Carolina this month, includes a car battery that costs half the price of today’s versions and can go up to 300 miles on a single charge. The industry is far from achieving that.

Since last fall, there has been a run of bad news for EVs, starting with the late November news that U.S. safety regulators were investigating the Volt for possible battery fires.

While the federal investigation was closed with the conclusion there was no defect and the car did not pose a greater risk of fire than gas-powered vehicles, weak demand led GM to halt production for five weeks and temporarily lay off 1,300 workers at the plant that builds the car. GM, which strengthened the structural protection of the Volt battery, has repeatedly said the car is safe, and some said the safety probe should have never occurred.

The Karma that died during testing by Consumer Reports magazine was another blow following a recall of more than 200 of the cars last year and the halting of sales in January for a software issue. Fisker, which builds the Karma in Finland, also suspended work last month at its U.S. plant scheduled to make another car, the Nina sedan, while it works to renegotiate a $529 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Fisker spokesman Roger Ormisher said problems can arise with new technologies and a new company but added Fisker had gone “beyond the call of duty” in instituting a system to respond to customer issues and had plenty of satisfied owners. CEO Tom LaSorda in a letter to Karma owners last week said Fisker was committed to giving customers “complete peace of mind” and he had created a “SWAT team” of 50 engineers and consultants to identify issues with the car.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTDvHNyV4Lg&feature=g-all-u&context=G212a205FAAAAAAAADAA

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Arends: The little-known fund manager with eye-popping returns has 50% of his portfolio in one stock. Will it pay off?

Should you invest half your money in the same stock?

Most financial planners would tell you that’s a crazy idea, that you need to be more “diversified.” But that’s what Allan Mecham at Arlington Value — aka the 400% Man — has just done.

Mecham, whose stellar returns were highlighted in the March edition of Smart Money, tells his investors that last year he levered up the fund and has invested half the money in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

“Able to borrow at around 1.5%, we levered (Berkshire) into a 50%+ position,” he wrote in his annual letter to shareholders. “Though not advocates of leverage, we believe the low cost and modest amount, combined with [Berkshire’s] iron-clad safety and cheap price, makes our action sensible.”

There is some method to the madness. Mecham, a long-term Buffett disciple, argues that Berkshire Hathaway stock, on its own, “provides ample diversity, with exposure to disparate businesses (more than 70), sectors, and asset allocations.” Berkshire’s assets include a ton of cash-generative businesses, a book of blue-chip public stocks valued at more than $75 billion, and nearly $40 billion in cash, he says.

Short-term gains are irrelevant, but Mecham built up the huge Berkshire Hathaway position before the announcement, last September, that Berkshire would start buying back stock.

Since then stock has zoomed about 16%, from around $105,000 to $122,000.

No one is suggesting you should follow suit — even if you could borrow at 1.5%. But Mecham’s track record makes his moves worth noting. He’s trounced the market since launching Arlington in 1999, posting gains of more than 400% after costs. Arlington’s five-year return through 2011 averages 18.7% net of fees, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 has lost ground.

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If men could do this, I don’t think obesity in men would be a problem…

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Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor

Women may not need a guy, a vibrator, or any other direct sexual stimulation to have an orgasm, finds a new study on exercise-induced orgasms and sexual pleasure.

The findings add qualitative and quantitative data to a field that has been largely unstudied, according to researcher Debby Herbenick, co-director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University. For instance, Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues first reported the phenomenon in 1953, saying that about 5 percent of women they had interviewed mentioned orgasm linked to physical exercise. However, they couldn’t know the actual prevalence because most of these women volunteered the information without being directly asked.

Since then, reports of so-called “coregasms,” named because of their seeming link to exercises for core abdominal muscles, have circulated in the media for years, according to the researchers.

“Despite attention in the popular media, little is known scientifically about exercise-induced orgasms,” the researchers write in a special issue of the journal Sexual and Relationship Therapy released in print this month.

Pleasure at the gym

Herbenick and her colleagues used online surveys to gather their data, which included answers from 124 women who had experienced exercise-induced orgasms and 246 women who reported exercise-induced sexual pleasure. Most of the women, ages 18 to 63 and an average age of 30, were in a relationship or married and 69 percent said they were heterosexual.

The researchers found that about 40 percent of both groups of women had experienced exercise-induced pleasure or orgasm on more than 11 occasions in their lives. Most of the women in the “orgasm” group said they felt some level of embarrassment when exercising in public places.

The “orgasm” group mostly said during the experiences they weren’t having a sexual fantasy or thinking about someone they were attracted to.

Of the women who had orgasms during exercise, about 45 percent said their first experience was linked to abdominal exercises; 19 percent linked to biking/spinning; 9.3 percent linked to climbing poles or ropes; 7 percent reported a connection with weight lifting; 7 percent running;  the rest of the experiences included various exercises, such as yoga, swimming, elliptical machines, aerobics and others. Exercise-induced sexual pleasure was linked with more types of exercises than the orgasm phenomenon.

Abdominal exercises may be best

Answers to open-ended questions in the survey revealed some interesting details, the researchers found. For instance, the abdominal exercises tied to orgasms seemed to be particularly associated with the exercise in which a person supports their weight on their forearms on a so-called captain’s chair with padded arm rests and then lifts their knees toward their chest.

The open-ended questions also revealed the orgasms tended to occur after multiple sets of crunches or some other abdominal exercise rather than after just a couple repetitions; they also seemed to happen after the woman had really exerted herself.

“Many of these women talked about it happening even as children,” Herbenick said during a telephone interview, adding that some indicated an experience at age 7 or 8.

“We had at least one woman in the study who was a virgin, and she really loved that she could have these experiences at the gym,” Herbenick said.

The researchers aren’t sure why certain exercises lead to orgasm or sexual pleasure, though Herbenick hopes to tease out the trigger in ongoing research.

“It may be that exercise, which is already known to have significant benefits to health and well-being, has the potential to enhance women’s sexual lives as well,” Herbenick said, adding that it isn’t clear whether these exercises could actually enhance women’s sexual experiences.

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Markets pared mid day losses to give them up at the close. A true samich (sic) day!

DOW DOWN 44

S&P DOWN 2.5

NASDAQ UP  1.5

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd3rA89VhtA 450 300]

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No wonder the recent secondary…..

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[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWd9prCFP-s 450 300]

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“WASHINGTON — Two economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve have published findings that indicate that Wall Street speculation is responsible for 15 percent of the increase in oil prices over the past decade, a finding with significant implications for the recent sharp rise in gas prices.

While politicians have little ability to alter the price swings of commodities like oil, regulators have both the authority and policy tools to do so. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is responsible for overseeing the financial market for oil. The 2010 Wall Street reform bill gave the CFTC new power to limit excessive speculation, but the rule will not go into effect until later this year.

According to St. Louis Fed economists Luciana Juvenal and Ivan Petrella, speculation in oil markets was the second-biggest factor behind the past decade’s price run-up, behind increased global demand for oil, which accounted for 40 percent of the increase.

“Speculation was the second-largest contributor to oil prices and accounted for about 15 percent of the rise,” the economists wrote. “The effect that speculation had on oil prices over this period coincides closely with the dramatic rise in commodity index trading — resulting in concerns voiced by policymakers.”

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“Among the controversial issues discussed by the remaining GOP candidates, all find it necessary to protect themselves from the ever present threat of glitter bombs. All candidates but one.

Ron Paul is the only Republican presidential hopeful who doesn’t find it necessary to spend tax payers’ money on fancy luxuries such as Secret Service protection, comforting other GOP candidates: Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.

In an interview with Jay Leno, Paul added that employing Secret Service is a “form of welfare.”

“You know, you’re having the taxpayers pay to take care of somebody,” Paul said.

“I’m an ordinary citizen and I would think I should pay for my own protection, and it costs, I think, more than $50,000 a day to protect those individuals,” Paul told Jay Leno on Tuesday when he appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show.

The twelve-term Congressman received a standing ovation last night as he walked on to discuss where he stands on the issues and discuss how the other candidates change their stance on matters as long as it appeases their crowd.

But it seems Romney and Santorum have no issues spending Americans tax money for their own well-being.

To Doctor Paul Romney is a “flip-flopper” and Santorum is a “fake conservative,” but to Secret Service they are known as “Javelin” and “Petrus” respectively….”

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The toilet tax being proposed in Nassau County NY is certainly and idea from the cesspool… 

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David Tice seems to be in the Bob Janjuah camp…

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Loopholes…

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“Signs that crude futures may hit much higher levels are converging, say oil traders and analysts, some of whom predict that Brent [LCOCV1  124.22    0.10 (+0.08%)   ] crude could reach $200 a barrel within the next 12 months.

Mark Lennihan / AP

The biggest issue, they say, is that global crude supply remains uncommonly tight — a scenario that’s unlikely to be alleviated any time soon.

Even though Libya’s oil has largely returned online after the political disruptions that took it off the market last year, and Saudi Arabia is generating its highest output in three decades, the available crude is just barely meeting demand. The summer driving season in the U.S., which begins in April, could put further pressure on prices.

 

The cash, or physical price, of crude — which refers to what’s paid for the commodity when it’s shipped from a producer to a buyer — has largely exceeded the price of Brent futures since mid-February (a situation referred to in oil trading as “backwardation.”).

The effect on the home front is already being felt: In the U.S., gas prices are at $3.86 per gallon, according to OPIS, a stone’s throw from the $4 mark that created big concerns last year.

Still, it’s unclear that releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a maneuver the White House made last June 23 in hopes of easing prices at the pump, will be much of a fix.

Gas prices were roughly $3.60 when the drawdown occurred, and were depressed for only a few days before climbing back over $3.70 a month later. Because of that, many traders tend to dismiss the recent chatter in Washington about releasing more oil from the SPR as bad politics.

“The seaborne oil market is extremely tight,” says one bullish hedgie. “As much as the politicians love blaming speculators, if the market was up on speculation and not fundaments, the physical market would be trading at a discount.”

Goldman Sachs [GS  126.07    0.05  (+0.04%)   ] commodities analysts agree with him, at least on the first part.

“We expect fundamentals will continue to tighten during 2012,” the firm said in a March 14 report, “pushing prices toward our 2013 Brent crude oil price target of $130 [per barrel]. With OPEC spare capacity and inventories low, the balance of risk to crude oil prices remains skewed to the upside.”

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“This morning, Goldman made tons of noise with a call saying that now is a generational opportunity to rotate from expensive Treasuries into stocks, and ride a wave of growth and portfolio rebalancing to higher profits.

Well, leave it to SocGen’s uber-bear Albert Edwards to come out with basically the exact opposite argument in his new note: As good as it gets.

With bond yields breaking out to the upside and the equity bull run continuing, investors are back to their same old hopeful habits. Many are thinking that if we have seen the all-time lows on bond yields investors will be forced into equities. We already can observe leading indicators rolling downwards in exactly the same way as they did in 2011. Expect new lows on bond yields by Q3 and this equity rally to turn to dust – just as it did in 2011.

We retain our heavy overweight in 10y+ government bonds. We have been overweight bonds now since the end of 1996 and conversely underweight global equities. This stance has served us well. Despite having retained this stance for 16 years, let me say that I do not think being long 10y+ government bonds is a good idea on a 5-10 investment horizon. Indeed, I see it as a very bad idea. But, in the near term, while global de-leveraging continues apace, we feel comfortable that we remain in an Ice Age investment environment.

So why is he so negative (other than the fact that he’s always negative)?

Here are a few key points:

• Chinese data is worse than expected.
• US corporate profits are rolling over.
• Analysts are getting super-bullish again.
• The 3-month change in the Conference Board leading indicators (excluding the yield curve) is turning down again.
• The economy and markets look exactly like it did in 2011.

As for recent history repeating, Edwards writes:

Have investors already forgotten that, in the mini-recovery at the end of 2010, bond yield surged from 21⁄4% to 31⁄2%. Then too there was a touching level of investor confidence that we had moved into a self-sustaining recovery and that the multi-year bull market in bonds had ended. Only a few funds thought otherwise and remained committed to The Ice Age. These funds saw 30%+ returns in 2011.

Now see Goldman’s bullish argument here >“

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