ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Woody’s probably spinning in his grave, but you too can buy 10 Woody Guthrie-inspired pencils, engraved with “This machine kills fascists,” the same remark Guthrie wrote on his guitar from time to time, for US$22. In a fancy box even.

Internet

Danny Sullivan, writing for search engine land, reports the Texas attorney general has launched an antitrust investigation into Google’s search rankings. The concept of “search neutrality” is an assessment of whether or not Google manipulates search rankings to improve its business at the expense of competitors. According to Claire Cain Miller, writing for the New York Times, “Some companies worry that Google has the power to discriminate against them by lowering their listings in search results or charging higher fees for their paid search ads.” Sullivan notes four vertical search companies—Foundem, SourceTool, TradeComet, and myTriggers—have filed allegations against Google. Google confirmed to Sullivan that the investigation began in July 2010.

Politics

In a last self-serving move of desperation to stop the new federal healthcare law and keep his face in the media as a potential 2012 presidential candidate, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has issued an executive order instructing state agencies to funnel their federal grant requests through his office. Pawlenty’s move could cost the state US$1 billion or more in federal healthcare funds according to Josephine Macrotty and Rachel E. Stassen-Berger, writing for the Star Tribune. Pawlenty has already refused more than US$1 billion in grants offered to expand Medicaid coverage in the state; US$68 million for the Minnesota Comprehensive Health Association (MCHA), the state’s high-risk insurance pool; US$1 million for an insurance exchange; and US$850,000 for teenage pregnancy prevention. Just about the only federal grant Pawlenty has accepted is US$500,000 for a abstinence-only sex education program that requires US$350,000 in matching funds from the state. Meanwhile, only 37% of likely voters in Minnesota would vote for Pawlenty in his presidential bid.

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Today Apple streamed its media event, announcing new versions of its iOS for its mobile devices, evolutionary iPods, and a new version of iTunes that contains Ping, a “social network for music.” As Dan Gillmor writes in his Salon piece, anyone who believes that “probably expected Amazon to remain just an online bookstore.”

The difference that makes a difference with Ping, compared to all of the other social media networks, is nothing short of astounding: Apple already has the credit-card numbers of 160 million verified users. It’s easy to explain why the record companies haven’t done something like this (their brains were small and, like the dinosaurs, they died). But it’s incomprehensible why Amazon wasn’t the first-mover here. As Gillmor writes, “... Amazon, which has been leagues ahead of everyone else on so many things, and which has had all the pieces in place for years now to create a transformative social/community operation, never tried.”

Apple has never done network products or social media well, but Ping may be different. Early reports are that Ping has an API (or will have) but Apple requires approval of the integration code.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, announced that iTunes 10 with Ping was available “now.” It’s not. And still no Beatles music in Apple’s iTunes Store.

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Should illegal immigrants with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) receive the dialysis treatments they need to survive? Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital has been struggling with that question for several years after the community’s safety-net hospital closed its dialysis clinic to show Atlanta’s philanthropists how fiscally responsible it is.

Without dialysis or a kidney transplant, end-stage dialysis patients die, sometimes within as little as two weeks.

While Grady receives direct appropriations from both Fulton and DeKalk Counties, it remains Atlanta’s hospital of last resort and has been losing money for years.

Kevin Sack and Catrin Einhorn, writing for the New York Times, report the closing of Grady’s dialysis clinic “displaced about 60 uninsured illegal immigrants who depended on free thrice-weekly treatments at the clinic to survive.” Grady offered to pay to ship the illegal immigrants to other states or their home countries and three months of dialysis. Thirteen took the offer; five died.

After a patient lawsuit and media attention, Grady contracted with Fresenius Medical Services for one year that expired this week.

Under a new agreement, Fresenius, DaVita, and Emory University would take a small number of illegal immigrants as charity and Grady would contract with Fresenius to treat the rest. As Sack and Einhorn write, “The patients in Atlanta have gambled that American generosity, even at a time of hostility toward illegal immigrants, would prove a surer bet than uncertain care in their home countries. Several said that the fates of those who returned home had reinforced their fears about leaving Atlanta.”

The agreement does nothing to resolve the issue of how to care for illegal immigrants, for whom health insurance is banned by the federal government under the new healthcare law. Similarly, the agreement (and the federal healthcare law) do nothing to resolve the issue of how to pay for hospital emergency room visits in which hospitals must treat patients under federal mandate.

As Jim Galloway writes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “If you’re a preacher stuck for a Sunday sermon topic, look no further. You can’t make up a moral dilemma like this one.”

Sack and Einhorn also report, “Fresenius and DaVita are the country’s largest commercial dialysis providers, with combined net income of more than US$1.3 billion last year.”

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Business

Businesses have been sending their products to “celebrities” forever. It’s one of the oldest public relations and marketing strategies and must work because they keep doing it. So, logic would dictate that the inverse—sending competitors’ products to those “celebrities” you don’t want tainting your brand should also work, right? Apparently so, because businesses are starting to do it. Calling it “unbranding,” according to Adam Fusfeld, writing for the Business Insider.

Amy Goodman, writing for truthdig, uses the salmonella-infected egg recall and associated problems in the US to revive the “growing movement to amend the U.S. Constitution, to strip corporations of the legal status of “personhood,” the concept that corporations have the same rights as regular people.” Other developed parts of the world don’t have chicken egg-related salmonella problems because they vaccinate their hens.

When you drive a car that’s nearly 20 years old, you keep at least a passing interest in the US automobile market. I like to keep a running list of two or three cars I’d consider in my head. Just in case. Until today the Volkswagen Jetta topped that list. Well, actually, the Cooper Mini topped my list, but my wife said absolutely not. But today I found out that the 2011 Volkswagen Jetta has been retooled for American audiences. Volkswagen has made the misstep of deciding to compete with the Japanese on—wait for it—price. Turns out, not many in the US are willing to pay extra for a entry-level European sedan. But torsion beam rear suspension and rear drum brakes? You’ve got to be joking.

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In an article co-published with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Sabrina Shankman and Tom Jennings of Frontline, Brendan McCarthy and Laura Maggi of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and AC Thompson of ProPublica report that New Orleans police were told they could shoot looters after hurricane Katrina. The journalists source the story from present and former members of the New Orleans police department and report that “it’s not clear how broadly the order was communicated” and that some officers refused to carry it out.

A police lieutenant provided a partial videotape of a police captain relaying the order: “We have authority by martial law to shoot looters,” the journalists report being able to hear Captain James Scott tell officers on the videotape. The lieutenant who shot the video refused to provide the complete recording. The report notes Captain Harry Mendoza “told federal prosecutors last month that he was ordered by Warren Riley, then the department’s second-in-command, to ‘take the city back and shoot looters.’” A police lieutenant under Mendoza told the reporters he’d testify to hearing the same order. Riley denies issuing the order to shoot looters. Scott refused to comment but his attorney said “that a fuller version of the videotape places his remarks in a different context.” Three unnamed sources corroborate Mendoza’s account or Riley’s order; one named source “did not recall Riley explicitly saying that officers could shoot looters.”

Universal standards for the use of deadly force, up to this incident, allow police to shoot only to protect themselves or others from an imminent physical threat—“great bodily harm.” And, as the reporters note, martial law does not constitutionally exist in Louisiana. Nonetheless, then-Mayor Ray Nagin called for martial law in meetings with Riley and used the phrase on the radio. Nagin, like Scott, refused to comment.

The team reports that it remains unclear with whom the orders originated or “whether they were heard by any of the officers involved in shooting 11 civilians in the days after Katrina.”

What everyone agrees on is that Riley did order his captains to “take back the city.” Samuel Walker, professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and author of 13 books on police, civil liberties, and criminal justice told the reporters such a statement is “absolutely wrong, [a] complete invitation to disaster.”

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