It's hard to beat a person who never gives up.

Babe Ruth, Historic Home Run Hitter
And he wasn't even thinking about Jihads in those days but I am thinking Jihads these days

Target Corp. has publically announced that Men may now use the Women’s restroom (and vice versa), no questions asked ---
Signs on Target Store Restrooms
http://constitution.com/read-sign-posted-outside-target-bathroom-thats-outraged-customers-video/
Jensen Comment
The problem is not a gender neutral bathroom where one user can lock the door to the entire room. The problem arises with rooms that have multiple stalls. It's a special problem if cameras can be held across the top or under the separation bottom of a stall from an adjoining stall.
A lot of bottom lines are at stake, including Target's bottom line from boycotting customers who now refuse to shop at Target.

Target Stocks Sink by $2.5 Billion in 10 Days as over 1 Million Americans pledge to Boycott them ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3426290/posts
Jensen Comment
Assuming Target now will quickly move to totally separate stalls from floor to ceiling it remains to be seen whether this alone will appease boycotters. Chances are that Target will have to eventually spend millions on major rennovations that create gender-neutral private bathrooms complete with sinks and the elimination of stalls in a single room..

What this shows the accountancy profession (yet again in a big way) is that so much of value rides on intangibles and contingencies that accountants have never been able to measure or account for in a meaningful way.

Election Gaming "Fraud" in Primary Elections in the USA:  Making Sure Your General Election Opponent is a Real Loser
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudulentElections.htm

Table of Contents

Funding Losers

 Communications Juggernauts in Crossover Voting Frauds

Funding Opponent Scandals

Top Republicans are working hard to help Bernie Sanders ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/gop-works-hard-to-help-bernie-sanders-2016-1
This is possibly one of the reasons Sanders is beating Clinton in Red States like Wyoming.

Is Donald Trump a Democratic secret agent?
Anthony Zurcher --- http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35066940 

Historically, the ocean has been a bit too powerful to harness wave energy successfully. Oscilla Power has come up with a new approach designed to withstand the forces of the ocean and generate electricity cleanly, meaningfully, and endlessly ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-12/this-device-could-provide-a-third-of-america-s-power?cmpid=BBD041216_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=

Trump part of conspiracy to ensure Clinton presidency ---
Jeb Bush --- http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/dec/8/jeb-bush-suggests-donald-trump-part-of-conspiracy-/
Jensen Question
Is such a conspiracy necessary given the slate of losers running as GOP candidates for President in 2016?

The Black Panther: Newspaper of the Black Panther Party ---  https://libcom.org/history/black-panther-newspaper-black-panther-party

"How university students infantilise themselves," by an infantile Jonathan Zimmerman, AEON, April 15, 2016 ---
https://aeon.co/opinions/how-university-students-infantilise-themselves?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f9a2b533d4-Weekly_Newsletter_15_April_20164_15_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-f9a2b533d4-68951505

. . .

Asking administrators to solve every problem infantilises students, even as it contributes to the top-heavy bloat of our universities. Our students need to grow up, in the most political way, by wresting control of the educational process from an administrative bureaucracy that wields way too much authority already.

Jensen Comment
This is tantamount to letting the inmates run the asylum. Such a university controlled by students would soon become an anarchy that achieves little other than chaos. A good analogy is the Venezuelan prisons that are now run by prisoners who carry their own guns, share cells with prostitutes, get high on cheap drugs, and come and go from prison as they please. No wonder Venezuela is the most crime-ridden nation in the Western hemisphere.

The first rules of business on a student-controlled democratic campus are no more homework and no more grades. The second rule of business is nude cocktail lounges in all the dorms. Free booze becomes a budget priority.

More seriously power would shift to gangs like it has in Venezuelan prisons ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Venezuela
Complete democracy is unworkable  Gangs gel into power structures. Power structures clash with other power structures. Eventually a powerful dictator like Castro emerges to restore order. Free beer might survive as a way of placating the masses. Castro provides for beer in ration cards available to all Cubans. This prevents rioting in the streets.

"The Five Dumbest Things in the U.S. Energy Bill," MIT's Technology Review, April 22, 2016 ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601323/the-5-dumbest-things-in-the-us-energy-bill/#/set/id/601321/

Jensen Comment
The only "dumb thing" I disagree with is the argument that there is no need for more funded research on net metering. Yes I understand that most existing research is positive and that consumers love the combination of government subsidies to invest in solar panels and the personal benefits of net metering using such subsidies. But there are still many unanswered questions, including the tradeoffs of net metering pricing on top of elimination of taxpayer subsidies. There are also unanswered questions regarding impacts of net metering on grid capacity needs from alternative sources ---
http://policyintegrity.org/files/publications/ManagingFutureElectricityGrid.pdf

As distributed energy generation is becoming increasingly common, the debate on how a utility’s customers should be compensated for the excess energy they sell back to the grid is intensifying.  And net metering, the practice of compensating for such energy at the retail rate for electricity, is becoming the subject of intense political disagreement.  Utilities argue that net metering fails to compensate them for grid construction and distribution costs and that it gives rise to regressive cost shifting among its customers.  Conversely, solar energy proponents argue that the compensation should be higher than the retail rate to account for other benefits that distributed generation systems provide, such as the resulting climate change and other environmental benefits, as well as the savings resulting from not needing to build new installations to provide additional capacity.  This ongoing debate is leading to significant changes to net metering policies in many states. 

This Article provides a thorough analysis of the benefits and the costs of distributed generation and highlights the analytical flaws and missing elements in the competing positions and in all the existing policies.  We propose an alternative approach that properly recognizes the respective contributions to the electric grid of utilities on the one hand and of distributed generators on the other.  We show, however, that this policy is second-best as a result of certain constraints on how electricity can currently be priced.  For the longer run, when these constraints might no longer be present, we discuss the need to consider net metering as part of a more comprehensive energy reform that would ensure the efficient integration of all distributed energy resources into the electricity grid. These reforms are needed to secure our Nation’s clean energy future.

Also see QA:  Bill Gates ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601242/qa-bill-gates/#/set/id/601321/

"History of a Climate Con:  Al Gore had a revelation: Energy taxes would be a loser for Obama," by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., The Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2016 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/history-of-a-climate-con-1460502164?mod=djemMER

How’s this for an irony? As state attorneys general gin up a fake securities-fraud case against oil companies over climate change, starting with Exxon Mobil Corp.

the Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a real securities-fraud investigation of the nation’s biggest solar power company. SunEdison allegedly exaggerating its amount of cash on hand to resist an impending bankruptcy.

A little history is in order to appreciate the cynical nadir of climate politics in the U.S. You wouldn’t know it from media coverage, but the closest the U.S. Congress came to passing a serious (if still ineffectual) cap-and-trade program was during the George W. Bush administration in early 2007. Then, within days of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Al Gore announced a revelation: the “climate crisis” no longer required such unpleasant, de facto energy taxes. The problem could be solved with painless handouts to green entrepreneurs.

Hooray! Everybody loves a handout. The activist duo Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus noted that the shift in Mr. Gore’s thinking was “highly significant.” “He knows that cap-and-trade, and most any new regulation, would raise energy prices—a political nonstarter during a recession.”

A proposed oil tax swiftly disappeared from the Obama transition website. With control of all three branches of government in hand, the imminent climate threat to humanity suddenly appeared not so urgent after all—passing a “signature” health-care law did.

Democrats, it turned out, were in favor of climate root canal only when Republicans were in charge.

OK, this is old hat, but what should be striking is how thoroughly the climate lobby has played along. Its main function today has become stringing up apostates as a distraction from Democratic unwillingness to propose policies costly enough that they would actually influence the rate of increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Take the Exxon prosecution, promoted by the attorneys general of New York and California and a host of their Democratic brethren. Though the case is never meant to be adjudicated in a courtroom, suppose it were and suppose a jury somehow found for the plaintiffs. How would Exxon pay a securities-fraud judgment? By selling oil and gas.

Attacking Exxon is not climate policy making; it’s a distraction. Its purpose is to foster an atmosphere conducive to the Gore-Obama green pork-barrel strategy.

Or take Sheldon Whitehouse, the U.S. senator who has gained notoriety lately by urging the Justice Department to launch a RICO investigation of climate skeptics. He doesn’t urge his Rhode Island constituents to adopt the life-style sacrifices that would actually reduce fossil-fuel consumption. Mr. Whitehouse’s devotion to understanding climate science at all is so microscopic that, in his latest letter of complaint to the Journal, the only science he cites is a Gallup poll.

Or take Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times insisting that if you don’t vote Democratic this fall, the planet is doomed. The colossal unmentionable is that climate activism today exists to promote the Democratic agenda, whatever it may be this week. One thing it isn’t, though, is advocacy of, or even mention of, policies that might actually alter the course of climate change.

The president’s power-plant rules, even if climate models are accurate, would affect global temperature a century hence by 0.03 degrees Celsius. His fuel mileage rules, though costly to Detroit and a life-support for Tesla, would have even less effect.

The renewable subsidies that SunEdison exploited so recklessly that it may soon be in chapter 11 are good for killing birds. The non-binding Paris agreement Mr. Obama signed in December explicitly stipulates that India and China, the two fast-growing emitters, will keep on emitting as if no agreement had been signed.

We could go on—not that, under any circumstances, a serious whack at global greenhouse emissions was ever in the cards.

Continued in article

"Climate Crowd Ignores a Scientific Fraud:  A defective radiation-risk standard holds back our most important low-carbon energy source," by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., The Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2016 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-crowd-ignores-a-scientific-fraud-1460758426?mod=djemMER

Green activists, some masquerading as attorneys general of New York and California, want to prosecute Exxon XOM -0.54 % as a climate heretic. Its sin? Saying impeccably true things about climate science: The range of uncertainty is high. Climate models are not the climate, and show themselves to be unreliable guides to future warming. There is a cost-benefit test that policy must pass, and it doesn’t.

The AG case is a spinoff of “investigative” journalism by the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News, which we now learn was directly underwritten by climate activists at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller Family Fund.

“It’s about helping the larger public understand the urgencies of finding climate solutions. It’s not really about Exxon,” explained a Rockefeller official about a January meeting to coordinate the legal and journalistic attack.

The journalists involved in this travesty, we’re sorry to say, are of the dumber sort—confused about what science is. But their clottedness comes at a poignant moment.

Honest greens have always said nuclear power is indispensable for achieving big carbon reduction. James Hansen, the former NASA scientist who has been chaining himself to fences since the first Bush administration, was in Illinois last week lobbying against closure of a nuclear plant. Ditto activist Michael Shellenberger. We might also include Bill McKibben, the Bernie Sanders of the climate movement and shouter of Exxon accusations, who told journalist William Tucker four years ago, “If I came out in favor of nuclear, it would split this movement in half.”

Nuclear (unlike solar) is one low-carbon energy technology that has zero chance without strong government support, yet is left out of renewables mandates. It’s the one non-carbon energy source that has actually been shrinking, losing ground to coal and natural gas.

What keeps nuclear costs high? Why do so many opponents misread the Fukushima meltdown, where 18,000 deaths were due to the earthquake and tsunami, none to radiation exposure, and none are expected from radiation exposure? Why has the U.S. experience of spiraling nuclear construction costs not been matched in South Korea, where normal learning has reduced the cost of construction?

The answer increasingly appears to be a real scientific fraud. In a series of peer-reviewed articles, toxicologist Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows how a cabal of radiation geneticists in the 1940s doctored their results, and even a Nobel Prize acceptance speech, to exaggerate the health risk from low-level radiation exposure. At the time, Hermann Muller, their leader, was militating against above-ground atomic-bomb testing. “I think he got his beliefs and his science confused, and he couldn’t admit that the science was unresolved,” Mr. Calabrese told a UMass publication.

Data developed to show high-dose effect on fruit flies, Muller claimed, showed a proportional low-dose effect. Thus was born LNT—the “linear no-threshold” model of radiation risk that has become the world’s go-to standard for nuclear safety, source of repeated (and unfulfilled) forecasts of thousands of cancer deaths from Chernobyl or Fukushima. LNT is why nuclear plants shoulder huge costs not to protect against accidents, but to protect against trivial emissions. Coal-plants, which don’t have to meet U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules, actually put out thorium and uranium far in excess of what nuclear plants are allowed to emit.

We detailed some of the health evidence in a December piece about efforts to wake up the NRC. The New York Times wrote a similar piece last September looking at Japan’s foolish evacuation of thousands of Fukushima residents against a nonexistent radiation threat.

Dr. Carol Marcus, of the UCLA medical school, and two other nuclear-medicine specialists last year petitioned the NRC to re-evaluate its standards. Now the Environmental Protection Agency and several green groups have filed defenses of LNT, which since the 1950s has been adopted not only as Washington’s unscientific model of radiation risk, but as the EPA’s unscientific model of chemical risk. It shouldn’t be overlooked that, for these green groups and the EPA, nuclear is also anathema because it competes with solar and wind.

OK, science seldom fares well in high-stakes political controversies, but it’s bizarre to watch green campaigners attack anybody who questions their thinly based climate predictions, then attack anybody who questions the thinly based science that keeps down our best carbon-free energy choice.

An environmental reporter with an ounce of independence would actually be doing his or her green friends a favor. Pushing the greenies to confront their nuclear contradictions is probably the best possible way right now of making progress on the climate conundrum.

The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground," Pew Research Center, December 9, 2015 ---
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/

. . .

The biggest winners since 1971 are people 65 and older. This age group was the only one that had a smaller share in the lower-income tier in 2015 than in 1971. Not coincidentally, the poverty rate among people 65 and older fell from 24.6% in 1970 to 10% in 2014.13 Evidence shows that rising Social Security benefits have played a key role in improving the economic status of older adults.14 The youngest adults, ages 18 to 29, are among the notable losers with a significant rise in their share in the lower-income tiers.

The economic status of adults with a bachelor’s degree changed little from 1971 to 2015, meaning that similar shares of these adults were lower-, middle- or upper-income in those two years. Those without a bachelor’s degree tumbled down the income tiers, however. Among the various demographic groups examined, adults with no more than a high school diploma lost the most ground economically.

Winners also include married adults, especially couples where both work. On the flip side, being unmarried is associated with an economic loss. This coincides with a period in which marriage overall is on the decline but is increasingly linked to higher educational attainment.

Gains for women edged out gains for men, a reflection of their streaming into the labor force in greater numbers in the past four decades, their educational attainment rising faster than among men, and the narrowing of the gender wage gap.15

Among racial and ethnic groups, blacks and whites came out winners, but Hispanics slipped down the ladder. Although blacks advanced in income status, they are still more likely to be lower income and less likely to be upper income than whites or adults overall. For Hispanics, the overall loss in income status reflects the rising share of lower-earning immigrants in the adult population, from 29% in 1970 to 49% in 2015. Considered separately, both U.S.-born and foreign-born Hispanics edged up the economic tiers.

Continued in article

"Schumer’s Self-Detonating Confirmation Demand," by Joseph A. Grundfest, The Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2016 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/schumers-self-detonating-confirmation-demand-1461531681?mod=djemMER

Are senators sometimes too smart for their own good?

President Obama has nominated Lisa Fairfax, a Democrat, and Hester Peirce, a Republican, to fill two vacancies on the Securities and Exchange Commission. New York Sen. Charles Schumer demands that the nominees promise—in writing—that if the SEC ever considers a rule requiring publicly traded corporations to disclose political contributions, the nominees will support it.

The nominees haven’t done so, and on April 7 Mr. Schumer lambasted them for “fence-sitting” and for feeding him a bunch of “gobbledy gook.” So spurned, Sen. Schumer, joined by fellow Banking Committee Democrats Elizabeth Warren, Robert Menendez and Jeff Merkley, announced that they will oppose the nominees. The confirmation process has now ground to a halt.

Are these senators striking a powerful blow for disclosure of campaign-finance reform, or are they merely shooting themselves in the foot? There’s every reason to believe that these senators will end up limping out of the hearing room.

The law is clear that when it comes to adopting a rule, SEC commissioners must be open to persuasion based on public comment. If a commissioner has an “unalterably closed mind”—as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit put it in a 1980 decision—then she can’t participate.

What better evidence is there of an unalterably closed mind than a nominee’s written promise to support a senator’s policy no matter what? Any nominee who agrees to such a demand effectively disqualifies herself from participating in the rule-making that the senator so ardently desires. By demanding the promise, Mr. Schumer and his colleagues destroy her ability to deliver on the promise. It also transforms the nomination process into a scene from the theater of the absurd: “I promise to support a policy position that I won’t be able to vote on because I am making this promise.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
We can only imagine how the Senate may extend this confirmation power to abuse of the separation of powers doctrine in the USA system of division of power between Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court. For example, the Senate dictate how a Supreme Court nominee votes on the most controversial cases. Eventually the Supreme Court would not longer be needed for such cases since the Senate really pre-determines the vote.

Michael Lewis --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lewis
Especially note his impressive list of books exposing frauds and deceptions

"The Book That Will Save Banking From Itself," by Michael Lewis, Bloomberg, May 5, 2016 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-05/the-book-that-will-save-banking-from-itself?cmpid=BBD050516_BIZ&utm_campaign=&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter

Women ranked a favorable social status for their partner more highly in 2008 than in 1939. Interestingly, men rated a woman’s desire for home and children and good cooking and housekeeping more highly over time — perhaps because these qualities were no longer taken for granted in a wife.
"What men and women wanted in a spouse in 1939 — and how different it is today," by Ana Swanson, The Washington Post, April 19, 2016 ---
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/19/what-men-and-women-wanted-in-a-spouse-in-1939-and-how-different-it-is-today/

Jensen Comment
This falls into my "How to Mislead With Statistics" Department. The reason is that marriage in 1939 is not the same as marriage in 2008 --- largely due to the important impact birth control had upon living relationships between males and females. For example, it's now common for "significant other relationships" to lead to marriage relationships only when the couple elects to start having children. Thus, it's really not surprising that a woman's "desire for home and children" increased in importance as a marriage condition in 2008 relative to 1939. In other words a couple in a long-term unmarried relationship has less incentive for marriage in 2008 until they plan to have children.

My point is that comparing a "marriage" in 2008 with a "marriage" in 1939 is a lot like comparing apples and lemons. They are not the same.

"GM Cancels Plan to Build Small Cadillac at Orion Plant in Michigan:  Auto maker scraps additional $245 million investment, as vehicle to be built in Kansas instead," by John D. Stholl, The Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2016 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/gm-cancels-plan-to-build-small-cadillac-at-orion-plant-in-michigan-1460405140?mod=djemCFO_h

Jensen Comment
I mention this because Kansas Governor Sam Brownback received a lot of criticism in the liberal press because his sizeable 2013 tax cuts did not appear to have the desired impact on economic growth in Kansas ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-leachman/kansas-economic-growth-continues-to-lag_b_8684454.html

What many biased analysts opposed to trickle down economics neglect to disclose is that tax cut impacts have lag time, sometimes very long lag time, in bringing home economic growth. The classic example is when the President Reagan tax cuts took so long that it was President Bill Clinton who managed to balance the Federal budget due in large measure to the Reagan tax cuts.

After at Ten Year Court Fight Google just scored a major victory against US authors ---
http://qz.com/652744/google-just-scored-a-major-victory-against-us-authors/

A ten-year long case against Google has finally seen its end.

Today, the US Supreme Court announced it had declined to hear Authors Guild v Google, a pivotal case that pitted book authors’ rights against the tech giant’s desire to build a massive digital library. In doing so the court quietly sided with Google, agreeing with previous rulings that its massive book scanning project is legal.

In 2005, the Authors Guild, an advocacy group for authors’ rights, sued Google for its book scanning initiative, then called the Google Books Library Project. The digital giant had scanned 20 million books and released them online without permission from their authors, with the goal of making books more findable and searchable. At the time, Google also ran ads on the scanned pages (they’ve since stopped); the guild argued that Google was infringing on writers’ copyright and depriving them of potential income.

Though Google removed its ads, the case continued, changing dramatically from a dispute about monetary compensation to one about how to treat creative work in a time of mass digitization. Ten years later, in 2015, a court of appeals ruled again against the authors, saying that the book scanning project was protected under “fair use”—by digitizing, Google Books had transformed the books, and therefore was not in violation of copyright:

Google’s making of a digital copy to provide a search function is a transformative use, which augments public knowledge by making available information about Plaintiffs’ books without providing the public with a substantial substitute for matter protected by the Plaintiffs’ copyright interests in the original works or derivatives of them.

Current US law protects works based on pre-existing works, if they add something or make something new out of the original. But an amicus brief filed in February by big-name writers like Margaret Atwood, J.M. Coetzee, and Malcolm Gladwell argued that “the internet was not anticipated” when fair use was defined in 1976. Today, derivative works, no matter how transformative, may spread to millions in an instant, all while trading heavily on someone’s creative ideas without compensation.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on the DMCA are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright

From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on April 20, 2016

VW nears deal on diesel-car crisis
Volkswagen AG is preparing to offer a buyback to U.S. owners of some diesel-powered vehicles and payments to others, ahead of a Thursday court deadline to address cars it has long known violate air pollution rules. But VW is no longer alone in this particular problem. Mitsubishi Motors Corp. said employees improperly manipulated fuel-economy data on at least 625,000 vehicles, the latest self-inflicted wound for a company with a history of scandal.

A Non-Invasive Sleeping Aid That's Too Heavy to Remove from the Bedroom
The SEC's 340-page concept release on disclosures ---
http://blogs.wsj.com/cfo/2016/04/14/sec-takes-first-step-in-disclosure-rule-revamp/ 

The Dark Side of Disclosure: Evidence of Government Expropriation from Worldwide Firms
SSRN, May 4, 2016
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2602586
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 7254

Authors

Tingting Liu, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia

Barkat Ullah, Rhode Island College

Zuobao Wei, University of Texas at El Paso

Lixin Colin Xu, World Bank - Development Research Group (DECRG)

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of voluntary accounting information disclosure through auditing on firm access to finance, exposure to corruption, and sales growth. Relying on a data set of more than 70,000 firms in 121 countries, the analysis finds that disclosure can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, audited firms exhibit a slightly lower level of financial constraints than unaudited firms. On the other hand, audited firms face a significantly higher level of corruption obstacles. The net effects of voluntary information disclosure on firm growth are negative, which can largely be explained by the fact that most of the countries in the sample are developing countries where institutions are weak. The beneficial effect of disclosure increases as a country?s property rights protection improves. The qualitative results are robust to considerations of the endogeneity of auditing and to alternative measures of corruption and financial constraints. The findings reveal the dark side of voluntary information disclosure: exposing firms to government expropriation where institutions are weak.

Jensen Comment
Usually professors praise accounting transparency and disclosures with recognition that there are costs of discovery and risks of information overload. However, in my case I overlooked the risk that the added disclosures contribute to fraud and corruption, especially in nations rampant with such dark sides of government behavior. In other words there are sometimes protections in accounting opaqueness and secrecy.

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm 

What ABC, NBC, and CBS Won't Disclose
"Women’s Soccer Plays a Phony Pay Game:  Complaints about an alleged pay gap are a public-relations ploy to get a sweetened union contract," by Allysia Finly, The Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2016 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/womens-soccer-plays-a-phony-pay-game-1461623962?mod=djemMER 

. . .

But data released last week by the U.S. Soccer Federation show that the top women’s players make nearly as much as the highest-paid men’s players. Since 2008, six national-team men and six women have earned more than $1 million from the Federation. And according to ESPN, 14 of the 25 highest-earning national-team players over the past four years have been women, whose compensation averaged $695,269. That’s 2.2% below the average for men. Women also receive benefits that men don’t, including maternity leave and severance pay if they get cut from the team. Women get paid if they’re sidelined with an injury; men don’t.

Women on the U.S. national soccer teams aren’t paid less than men. They’re paid differently because the collective-bargaining agreements they have negotiated emphasize income- and job-security. Women players earn annual salaries of $72,000; the men get paid by how many games they play. The men’s roster is more fluid, and the head coach can call players to camp for one game.

Nearly 50 men’s players appeared in games for the U.S. national squad last year, but only three played more than 13 games. The women’s team fields about half as many players.

Players on the women’s team receive smaller bonuses than the men: Women are awarded $1,350 for each win, while the men get $5,000 for each game they’re on the national roster and are paid $6,250-$17,625 for each victory, depending on their opponent’s ranking.

Another significant disparity: The U.S. women’s team received $2 million from the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) for winning the World Cup last year, while the men’s team landed $9 million merely for advancing to the round of 16.

How could that be? Simple: Men’s soccer is much more popular than women’s soccer world-wide. Historically, men’s soccer has also been a bigger draw in the U.S. Between 2011 and 2015, men played in 53 home games with attendance averaging 35,536. During that period, women played 50 games in the U.S., drawing an average attendance of 16,559. In 2014, when the men’s team was in the World Cup competition, their revenues were roughly four times that of the women’s team. Last year, when the women’s team was competing for the World Cup, their revenues ($23.5 million) beat the men’s team’s ($21 million) for the first time.

Most men’s soccer players earn more from their club teams than women do from the embryonic National Women’s Soccer League, which the Federation launched in 2012 to provide female players who don’t make the national team with a venue to showcase their talent. But the Federation isn’t responsible for how professional soccer leagues pay their players.

The players on the women’s team might not have a persuasive legal case about unequal pay, but that hasn’t stopped them from going public with their complaints. Maybe they’re hoping Hillary Clinton will work the refs.

Why we need the FASB to reduce the risk that Washington lobbyists will set accounting rules

"Schumer’s Self-Detonating Confirmation Demand," by Joseph A. Grundfest, The Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2016 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/schumers-self-detonating-confirmation-demand-1461531681?mod=djemMER

Are senators sometimes too smart for their own good?

President Obama has nominated Lisa Fairfax, a Democrat, and Hester Peirce, a Republican, to fill two vacancies on the Securities and Exchange Commission. New York Sen. Charles Schumer demands that the nominees promise—in writing—that if the SEC ever considers a rule requiring publicly traded corporations to disclose political contributions, the nominees will support it.

The nominees haven’t done so, and on April 7 Mr. Schumer lambasted them for “fence-sitting” and for feeding him a bunch of “gobbledy gook.” So spurned, Sen. Schumer, joined by fellow Banking Committee Democrats Elizabeth Warren, Robert Menendez and Jeff Merkley, announced that they will oppose the nominees. The confirmation process has now ground to a halt.

Are these senators striking a powerful blow for disclosure of campaign-finance reform, or are they merely shooting themselves in the foot? There’s every reason to believe that these senators will end up limping out of the hearing room.

The law is clear that when it comes to adopting a rule, SEC commissioners must be open to persuasion based on public comment. If a commissioner has an “unalterably closed mind”—as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit put it in a 1980 decision—then she can’t participate.

What better evidence is there of an unalterably closed mind than a nominee’s written promise to support a senator’s policy no matter what? Any nominee who agrees to such a demand effectively disqualifies herself from participating in the rule-making that the senator so ardently desires. By demanding the promise, Mr. Schumer and his colleagues destroy her ability to deliver on the promise. It also transforms the nomination process into a scene from the theater of the absurd: “I promise to support a policy position that I won’t be able to vote on because I am making this promise.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
We can only imagine how the Senate may extend this confirmation power to abuse of the separation of powers doctrine in the USA system of division of power between Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court. For example, the Senate dictate how a Supreme Court nominee votes on the most controversial cases. Eventually the Supreme Court would not longer be needed for such cases since the Senate really pre-determines the vote.

From an accounting perspective, we might encounter a situation where the SEC has no say in the issue of convergence of US GAAP and IFRS.

 88%
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) today publicly released its audit report of the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) methods of addressing taxpayers who take business tax deductions for activities not engaged in for profit. TIGTA found that the IRS can improve its methods for identifying high-income taxpayers who may be offsetting their income with “hobby losses” from unprofitable business activity.
TIGTA: IRS Mischaracterizes 88% Of Hobbies As For-Profit Businesses, Allowing Billions In Improper Loss Deductions
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/05/tigtairs-misses-88-of-hobby-loss-cases-.html

Insurers have begun to propose big premium increases for Obamacare coverage next year under the 2010 health law, as some struggle to make money in a market where their costs have soared.
Louise Radnofsky and Anna Wilde Mathews
http://www.wsj.com/articles/health-insurers-struggle-to-offset-new-costs-1462404298

The doctor shortage in the US will soon hit crisis levels ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-doctor-shortage-getting-worse-2016-4