vendredi 30 novembre 2007
Mountbatten Hotel, Haymarket Sydney
I had an intense craving for a hamburger the other day: a real burger with a thick beef pattie sandwiched between a toasted sesame seed bun, served with a token salad and a huge pile of golden crunchy chips.The traditional burger flipper at your Aussie milk bar is a dying breed (and almost extinct in the CBD) but thankfully the humble hamburger can still be found at your local corner pub. And so
Imagine how the Giulianis will blow through federal money
Imagine Judith "Evita" Nathan Giuliani as First Lady of the entire country, with a whole White House staff and Secret Service at her beck and call, if this is what she got as the New York city mayor's goumah:
Meanwhile, outside of the Land of IOKIYAR, former New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi was forced to resign last year after it came out that he was using a state employee to provide security detail for his mentally ill wife and drive her to doctors' appointments -- without reimbursing the state. But that was different. He was a Democrat. And after all, getting a sick woman to doctors isn't anywhere near as important as getting the would-be Queen Judith I of America to her shopping and lunch dates with her friends.
The revelations continue in the case of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the security detail for Judith Nathan, his one-time mistress who is now his wife.
Did Nathan misuse the city police detail that Giuliani assigned to protect her?
At the dawn of 2001, Nathan was Giuliani's good friend and was receiving a blanket of police protection.
It was an unusual circumstance. His wife, first lady Donna Hanover, was still living at Gracie Mansion with their children.
But the mayor was unapologetic, citing security concerns.
"If you had any concern for people's safety, you'd have the decency to leave it alone. You should be ashamed of yourselves," the former mayor said back in 2001.
Six years later, presidential candidate Giuliani is facing questions about that security. A source involved with the mayor's operations at the time tells CBS 2 HD that Nathan took flagrant advantage of that police car and driver.
The source says Nathan forced police to chauffeur her friends and family around the city -- even when she wasn't in the car.
That set off alarms with ethics watchdogs.
"The rules are clear, you can't use city resources for private reasons," said Gene Russianoff of the New York Public Interest Research Group. "And if you're using a city car, a police driven car to chauffeur around relatives, unless they're explicitly protected and their deemed to be the subject of potential security threats, it's just wrong."
Nathan's detail was approved by the NYPD after a stranger made an unspecified threat to her. The commissioner at the time was Bernard Kerik, who was recently indicted on tax fraud charges in an unrelated matter.
"It wasn't about her being the mayor's girlfriend," Kerik said. "The person spoke to her by name and made comments to her."
On Friday, Giuliani avoided reporters' questions about the security for Nathan back then. He told reporters off camera "we've explained it."
Giuliani's press secretary, Maria Comella, angrily denounced the use of an unnamed source in this story.
But she did not deny the assertion that Nathan used her police detail to ferry around friends and family.
Meanwhile, outside of the Land of IOKIYAR, former New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi was forced to resign last year after it came out that he was using a state employee to provide security detail for his mentally ill wife and drive her to doctors' appointments -- without reimbursing the state. But that was different. He was a Democrat. And after all, getting a sick woman to doctors isn't anywhere near as important as getting the would-be Queen Judith I of America to her shopping and lunch dates with her friends.
The best blog entry about weight that you will ever read
Kate Harding on The Fantasy of Being Thin.
And don't skip the comments. If you think that for thosse of us who have fought this battle all our lives, it's just a question of eating romaine with no dressing instead of candy bars, maybe it'll be an eye-opener. If anything, it's both sad and heartening that the experience of spending your life dieting/gaining/dieting/gaining is so universal.
And don't skip the comments. If you think that for thosse of us who have fought this battle all our lives, it's just a question of eating romaine with no dressing instead of candy bars, maybe it'll be an eye-opener. If anything, it's both sad and heartening that the experience of spending your life dieting/gaining/dieting/gaining is so universal.
No terrorist acts in the U.S. since 9/11? What the hell do you call this?
Holy shit:
More later, including the inevitable wingnut ranting that the Clinton campaign did this themselves.
UPDATE: They are SO predictable. The Nation wades into the fetid swamp so I don't have to:
See what we have to look forward to if Hillary is the nominee? It's going to be a long, long year.
A man took people hostage at a New Hampshire campaign office for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton, police said Friday.
The man claimed to have a bomb strapped to him when he walked into the office in Rochester, WHDH-TV reported.
Police said they believe two hostages were being held and that the man had released an adult and a child.
Bill Shaheen, chairman of Clinton's campaign in New Hampshire, said the hostages were two volunteers. "Hopefully, they're going to negotiate this so no one gets hurt," Shaheen told WMUR-TV.
WMUR-TV quoted a woman, Lettie Tzizik, saying she spoke to someone who said she had just been released by the man.
"A young woman with a 6-month- or 8-month-old infant came rushing into the store just in tears, and she said, 'You need to call 911. A man has just walked into the Clinton office, opened his coat and showed us a bomb strapped to his chest with duct tape.'"
Police surrounded the building, evacuated the immediate area and placed other buildings, including a nearby school, under lockdown.
Clinton, who was scheduled to campaign in Virginia on Friday, was not at the office.
More later, including the inevitable wingnut ranting that the Clinton campaign did this themselves.
UPDATE: They are SO predictable. The Nation wades into the fetid swamp so I don't have to:
As the hostage situation at Hillary headquarters in New Hampshire unfolds, right-wing message boards like Free Republic are lighting up with sarcastic, conspiratorial, and even celebratory commentary.
Many Freepers joked that the hostage taker, a man claiming to have a bomb, was really a Clinton "plant." A few examples of conservative "humor:"To: raccoonradio
Is it Keith Kerr?
4 posted on 11/30/2007 10:33:20 AM PST by Antoninus (Republicans who support Rudy owe Bill Clinton an apology.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ]
To: raccoonradio
Recruiting questioners?
19 posted on 11/30/2007 10:35:10 AM PST by Don Corleone (Leave the gun..take the cannoli)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ]
To: NonValueAdded
Too late. Billary has had them implanted. ( Haven't you noticed the deeper voice and the 5 o'clock shadow? )
29 posted on 11/30/2007 10:35:42 AM PST by Leisler (RNC, RINO National Committee. Always was, always will be.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies ]
Another Freeper invoked the tawdry, fabricated rumor of a lesbian affair between Hillary and staffer Huma Abedin:To: coloradan
Is Huma with Hillary today? probably
34 posted on 11/30/2007 10:36:04 AM PST by txflake (Yes there were WMDs)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 18 | View Replies ]
And what would a Freeper thread be without some reference to Bill Clinton's sexual dalliances?To: raccoonradio
Has Bill got Ms. Willey cornered again?
See what we have to look forward to if Hillary is the nominee? It's going to be a long, long year.
Friday Cat Blogging
OK. You all know that I love cats. I'm nutty about cats. Cats offer the perfect confluence of elegant and silly. But now my cranium just combusted again, because after actually going to a link advertised on WWRL, the New York Air America affiliate that was nestled among the ads for work-at-home scams, ambulance-chasing attorneys, profit-from-foreclosure cassettes, and build-your-marriage programs, was an ad for this:
Sounds good, right? The name "Lifestyle Pets" ought to set off alarms right there, but if you read further, you find this:
Weird, perhaps, and you have to wonder what kind of unintended consequences there might be from this kind of Frankenfeline, but still...
Then you cut to the chase:
$28,000???? For a CAT? And I thought I was crazy for spending $150 for a cat condo to replace Maggie's window perch because her annoying habit of launching from it onto the bookcase was loosening the window sill.
I'm sorry, but if you have $28,000 to spend on a cat you have entirely too much money. Far better to find one here.
LIFESTYLE PETS has produced the world's first scientifically-proven hypoallergenic cats. These cats allow some of the millions of people with feline allergies to finally enjoy the love and companionship of a household pet without suffering from allergic symptoms.
Sounds good, right? The name "Lifestyle Pets" ought to set off alarms right there, but if you read further, you find this:
Starting with proprietary genetic testing technologies*, the LIFESTYLE PETS team began by focusing on the particular gene that produces the Fel d 1 glycoprotein. The process uses gene sequencing to detect naturally occurring genetic divergences in cats. LIFESTYLE PETS then targeted those divergences that could potentially produce kittens with a change in the structure of the Fel d 1 allergen produced by the gene. Using sophisticated bioinformatics to manage feline breeding programs, the final stage resulted in cats with a divergent gene that produces a different version of the Fel D 1 protein - and a GD cat that no longer triggers the autoimmune system of people allergic to cats.
Weird, perhaps, and you have to wonder what kind of unintended consequences there might be from this kind of Frankenfeline, but still...
Then you cut to the chase:
For 2008, LIFESTYLE PETS will introduce a new hypoallergenic breed, the CHAKAN GD, based on the Siamese (priced at $11,950) and the ASHERA GD, a hypoallergenic variant of its exotic ASHERA (priced at US$28,000). CHAKAN GD and ASHERA GD kittens can be ordered now for delivery in late 2008.
$28,000???? For a CAT? And I thought I was crazy for spending $150 for a cat condo to replace Maggie's window perch because her annoying habit of launching from it onto the bookcase was loosening the window sill.
I'm sorry, but if you have $28,000 to spend on a cat you have entirely too much money. Far better to find one here.
And this is the problem with Barack Obama
I'll defend Barack Obama against those who are trying to brand him as some sort of terrorist mole because his father was Muslim. I won't, however, defend him against what's increasingly evident -- his alarming tendency to adopt "bipartisanship" by framing policy in right-wing talking point terms. We've seen what "reaching across the aisle" does when dealing with an intractable, rigid Republican party with a sense of entitlement. I've been concerned about Obama's alarming tendency towards conciliation-by-capitulation ever since his mentorship by Joe Lieberman during the first months of his terms. And now, after buying the Republican frame that Social Security is in crisis, he's now buying their frame on universal health care.
I'm not crazy about the idea of mandatory purchase of health insurance either -- at least not as insurance is currently structured, where insurance is provided by for-profit entities with a greater responsiblity to keep costs in check and provide profits for stockholders than to provide coverage for medical expenses. Americans who receive insurance coverage as an employment benefit are largely insulated from the actual cost of such insurance -- until they lose their jobs and get stuck with the entire premium under COBRA. My own excellent plan, which has a sizable network of quality physicians and an 80% out-of-network reimbursement after a reasonable deductible of $350 per year per person, costs my employer over $13,000/year, of which I pay about a third. Premiums are on a sliding scale based on salary -- a method which caused much hue and cry when first implemented this year, but which I think is eminently fair. If I lose my job, however, then we go to Mr. Brilliant's plan, which uses the HMO "primary care doctor" model in which you must have a referral to see a specialist. But if we had to spend five figures for health coverage, we, like most Americans, would balk.
The mandate is troublesome in both the Clinton and Edwards plans, but the Edwards plan's nonprofit Health Care Markets (assuming the concept works) at least has a built-in element of risk-sharing, which is of course how insurance is supposed to work; along with a "public plan", which is a first step towards universal, single-payer health care coverage. The one question mark, of course, is just how much this health coverage will cost, and how families with little money left over after paying for rent/mortgage, car insurance, food, clothing, and spiralling utility costs, will be able to pay for such coverage.
But Barack Obama insists on playing nice with Republicans by adopting their framing, as Paul Krugman notes today:
Obama may regard this adoption of right-wing framing as a gesture of "conciliation". But he's mistaken if he doesn't think the opposition will use this as a cudgel with which to beat him senseless if he is the eventual nominee.
I'm not crazy about the idea of mandatory purchase of health insurance either -- at least not as insurance is currently structured, where insurance is provided by for-profit entities with a greater responsiblity to keep costs in check and provide profits for stockholders than to provide coverage for medical expenses. Americans who receive insurance coverage as an employment benefit are largely insulated from the actual cost of such insurance -- until they lose their jobs and get stuck with the entire premium under COBRA. My own excellent plan, which has a sizable network of quality physicians and an 80% out-of-network reimbursement after a reasonable deductible of $350 per year per person, costs my employer over $13,000/year, of which I pay about a third. Premiums are on a sliding scale based on salary -- a method which caused much hue and cry when first implemented this year, but which I think is eminently fair. If I lose my job, however, then we go to Mr. Brilliant's plan, which uses the HMO "primary care doctor" model in which you must have a referral to see a specialist. But if we had to spend five figures for health coverage, we, like most Americans, would balk.
The mandate is troublesome in both the Clinton and Edwards plans, but the Edwards plan's nonprofit Health Care Markets (assuming the concept works) at least has a built-in element of risk-sharing, which is of course how insurance is supposed to work; along with a "public plan", which is a first step towards universal, single-payer health care coverage. The one question mark, of course, is just how much this health coverage will cost, and how families with little money left over after paying for rent/mortgage, car insurance, food, clothing, and spiralling utility costs, will be able to pay for such coverage.
But Barack Obama insists on playing nice with Republicans by adopting their framing, as Paul Krugman notes today:
The central question is whether there should be a health insurance “mandate” — a requirement that everyone sign up for health insurance, even if they don’t think they need it. The Edwards and Clinton plans have mandates; the Obama plan has one for children, but not for adults.
Why have a mandate? The whole point of a universal health insurance system is that everyone pays in, even if they’re currently healthy, and in return everyone has insurance coverage if and when they need it.
And it’s not just a matter of principle. As a practical matter, letting people opt out if they don’t feel like buying insurance would make insurance substantially more expensive for everyone else.
Here’s why: under the Obama plan, as it now stands, healthy people could choose not to buy insurance — then sign up for it if they developed health problems later. Insurance companies couldn’t turn them away, because Mr. Obama’s plan, like those of his rivals, requires that insurers offer the same policy to everyone.
As a result, people who did the right thing and bought insurance when they were healthy would end up subsidizing those who didn’t sign up for insurance until or unless they needed medical care.
In other words, when Mr. Obama declares that “the reason people don’t have health insurance isn’t because they don’t want it, it’s because they can’t afford it,” he’s saying something that is mostly true now — but wouldn’t be true under his plan.
Mr. Obama, then, is wrong on policy. Worse yet, the words he uses to defend his position make him sound like Rudy Giuliani inveighing against “socialized medicine”: he doesn’t want the government to “force” people to have insurance, to “penalize” people who don’t participate.
[snip]
I recently castigated Mr. Obama for adopting right-wing talking points about a Social Security “crisis.” Now he’s echoing right-wing talking points on health care.
What seems to have happened is that Mr. Obama’s caution, his reluctance to stake out a clearly partisan position, led him to propose a relatively weak, incomplete health care plan. Although he declared, in his speech announcing the plan, that “my plan begins by covering every American,” it didn’t — and he shied away from doing what was necessary to make his claim true.
Now, in the effort to defend his plan’s weakness, he’s attacking his Democratic opponents from the right — and in so doing giving aid and comfort to the enemies of reform.
Obama may regard this adoption of right-wing framing as a gesture of "conciliation". But he's mistaken if he doesn't think the opposition will use this as a cudgel with which to beat him senseless if he is the eventual nominee.
If Rudy Giuliani were a Democrat, this would be called "caught in a lie"
But because he's a Republican, it's "backtracking":
Frankly, I really don't much care about this particular scandal where Giuliani is concerned. That Giuliani is a scumbag who spent taxpayer money to go visit his goumah out in the Hamptons shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who saw him announce his separation from Donna Hanover via press conference. Those self-righteous Republicans who have already managed to twist themselves into pretzels to justify supporting Giuliani even if/though his behavior flies in the face of what they fancy to be their own personal morality are probably not going to care much about this. In fact, Giuliani ought to be grateful that the furor over this scandal is obscuring what in a sane world would be the far more damaging one, and that's the fact that he'll associate with anyone -- even those who harbor people we know are terrorists -- if it means cold hard cash in his pocket.
In case you haven't read the Village Voice article yet or don't want to plow through it, Keith Olbermann spoke with the piece's author, Wayne Barrett, the other night:
Giuliani's entire national campaign is based on his so-called toughness on terror. Even when asked a question about how we can heal our image in the Muslim world at the debate Wednesday night, his answer was essentially that we do this by continuing to bomb the hell out of them.
It's both appalling -- and indicative of the level of American idiocy and shallowness that the only scandals the populace seems to understand, and the only ones to which they respond, are of the sexual kind. This is how we had a president nearly brought down by a lie about a sexual liaison, while a president who took the nation to war on lies remains to wreak havoc for another fourteen months.
(UPDATE: What, were Nagourney and Bumiller off today? How else can we explain the fact that the New York Times actually does its job today and quietly and factually eviscerates the entire Giuliani lying-ass mythos?)
Joe Lhota, a deputy mayor in Giuliani's City Hall, told the Daily News Wednesday night that the administration's practice of allocating security expenses to small city offices that had nothing to do with mayoral protection has "gone on for years" and "predates Giuliani."
When told budget officials from the administrations of Ed Koch and David Dinkins said they did no such thing, Lhota caved Thursday, "I'm going to reverse myself on that. I'm just going to talk about the Giuliani era," Lhota said. "I should only talk about what I know about."
The embarrassing backtrack comes as Giuliani rushed to network airwaves to defend himself against allegations his administration deliberately attempted to conceal the taxpayer cost of his NYPD protection while he engaged in secret Hamptons liaisons with Nathan, his then-mistress and current wife.
In interviews on CBS, ABC and CNN, Giuliani portrayed the allegations as a political "hit job" and "dirty trick" unleashed hours before a big Republican debate. The story was first reported Wednesday on the Politico.com Web site.
Frankly, I really don't much care about this particular scandal where Giuliani is concerned. That Giuliani is a scumbag who spent taxpayer money to go visit his goumah out in the Hamptons shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who saw him announce his separation from Donna Hanover via press conference. Those self-righteous Republicans who have already managed to twist themselves into pretzels to justify supporting Giuliani even if/though his behavior flies in the face of what they fancy to be their own personal morality are probably not going to care much about this. In fact, Giuliani ought to be grateful that the furor over this scandal is obscuring what in a sane world would be the far more damaging one, and that's the fact that he'll associate with anyone -- even those who harbor people we know are terrorists -- if it means cold hard cash in his pocket.
In case you haven't read the Village Voice article yet or don't want to plow through it, Keith Olbermann spoke with the piece's author, Wayne Barrett, the other night:
Giuliani's entire national campaign is based on his so-called toughness on terror. Even when asked a question about how we can heal our image in the Muslim world at the debate Wednesday night, his answer was essentially that we do this by continuing to bomb the hell out of them.
It's both appalling -- and indicative of the level of American idiocy and shallowness that the only scandals the populace seems to understand, and the only ones to which they respond, are of the sexual kind. This is how we had a president nearly brought down by a lie about a sexual liaison, while a president who took the nation to war on lies remains to wreak havoc for another fourteen months.
(UPDATE: What, were Nagourney and Bumiller off today? How else can we explain the fact that the New York Times actually does its job today and quietly and factually eviscerates the entire Giuliani lying-ass mythos?)
jeudi 29 novembre 2007
Philippine rebels surrender after army raid
This is a post about media accuracy. Let me begin by saying Agence France-Presse is one of the most accurate sources out there...usually.
I happen to have inside information on this one.
Let's start with the headline. It was the police SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) and not the army who raided the building. The army had provided a large number of personnel, but they were there if needed and they weren't.
Philippine troops stormed a Manila hotel [It was in Makati City. It's joined at the hip with, but separate from, Manila.] in a flurry of gunfire [The bursts of gunfire happened before any police officer entered and came from inside the building.] and tear gas Thursday, forcing the surrender of a band of renegade soldiers [I don't believe a Catholic priest and cardinal would be described as "renegade soldiers". The 30 people mentioned included many non-military supporters.] who were demanding that President Gloria Arroyo step down.
The rebels, who seized and occupied a luxury hotel [The rebels did not seize and occupy a luxury hotel. They occupied a second floor functions room.] to drive home their criticisms of the Arroyo government, gave themselves up after a dramatic confrontation broadcast live on television screens around the world.
After the rebels ignored an army deadline to surrender, two armoured personnel carriers rammed into the building [There was one armoured personnel carrier which didn't ram the building, but broke down the front doors to the lobby.] and elite troops poured into the interior, which was awash in tear gas and the sound of bursts of gunfire.
So they got only a few things wrong, but we bloggers are suspect at all times.
The real story isn't quite as dramatic as "renegade soldiers" occupying a luxury hotel and the army bursting in under heavy gunfire.
Note: The picture is great. It shows an armoured personnel carrier the same as the one which is, at this point, in the hotel lobby. And if you look in front of the palm tree you can see the tear gas smoke floating out of the lobby. At this point the police have entered the building. The army personnel are just laying back if needed.
Via AFP.
Nope. No bias here.
Actual Washington Post headline:
This is how it works, folks. Wingnuts put something "out there" -- Obama is a Muslim spy. Hillary is fucking her female Arab assistant. John Edwards had an affair. It doesn't have to be true; it doesn't even have to have anything to it other than what's pulled out of wingnut ass. All Republicans have to do is put something "out there" and out-and-out lies become just an "alternative view" deserving of equal time to facts. Because as Stephen Colbert said, facts have a liberal bias.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani DOES have ties to terrorists by having a government that harbored Khalid Sheikh Muhammed as a business client, and it's nowhere to be found in either the Washington Post or the New York Times.
This is the kind of campaign journalism we're going to get until November 2008: Republicans good. Democrats bad. Rumors true. Facts false.
(h/t: Digby)
Since declaring his candidacy for president in February, Obama, a member of a congregation of the United Church of Christ in Chicago, has had to address assertions that he is a Muslim or that he had received training in Islam in Indonesia, where he lived from ages 6 to 10. While his father was an atheist and his mother did not practice religion, Obama's stepfather did occasionally attend services at a mosque there.
Despite his denials, rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim, a "Muslim plant" in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran, rather than a Bible, as did Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the only Muslim in Congress, when he was sworn in earlier this year.
In campaign appearances, Obama regularly mentions his time living and attending school in Indonesia, and the fact that his paternal grandfather, a Kenyan farmer, was a Muslim. Obama invokes these facts as part of his case that he is prepared to handle foreign policy, despite having been in the Senate for only three years, and that he would literally bring a new face to parts of the world where the United States is not popular.
This is how it works, folks. Wingnuts put something "out there" -- Obama is a Muslim spy. Hillary is fucking her female Arab assistant. John Edwards had an affair. It doesn't have to be true; it doesn't even have to have anything to it other than what's pulled out of wingnut ass. All Republicans have to do is put something "out there" and out-and-out lies become just an "alternative view" deserving of equal time to facts. Because as Stephen Colbert said, facts have a liberal bias.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani DOES have ties to terrorists by having a government that harbored Khalid Sheikh Muhammed as a business client, and it's nowhere to be found in either the Washington Post or the New York Times.
This is the kind of campaign journalism we're going to get until November 2008: Republicans good. Democrats bad. Rumors true. Facts false.
(h/t: Digby)
Around the blogroll and elsewhere: Republican Debate Hangover edition
Sorry, folks -- no pithy analysis here. My forehead is still raw from its recent run-ins with the icepick, and I was just not up to inflicting any more pain. So I waited to read the transcript this morning.
Here are the questions CNN chose:
Guns, God, Brown People, Jesus, cutting programs, and how to punish the evil unchaste temptresses who won't keep their legs closed. Nothing about health care. Nothing about how long they plan to stay in Iraq. Nothing about the impending attack on Iran. Nothing about Middle East policy in general. Nothing about energy policy. Nothing about education. Nothing about the mortgage mess. And of course, nothing about how they would restore Constitutional law.
As Cenk Uygur opined this morning, these are not only guys you wouldn't want to be president, you wouldn't want to be in the same ROOM with them; because this is the most backward, fearmongering, death-centered bunch of guys ever assembled in one place.
And the only thing standing between us and one of this bunch of utterly batshit crazies is a Democratic Party that seems to want to lose.
Others weigh in:
Richard Blair asks, what part of the confederate flag question (video also there at All Spin Zone) seems incongruous in a Republican debate.
Michael Scherer at Salon put on his hip boots and waded in to liveblog it in just two screens. Walter Scherer has the analysis.
Every time he thinks he's out -- they pull him back in: John Cole liveblogged it.
TBogg couldn't face it either, but he cites a postmortem from an interesting source.
UPDATE: Whatever It Is I'm Against It has arguably the best wrapup of all.
Here are the questions CNN chose:
- A question about whether as president Giuliani will continue to "aid and abet the flight (sic) of illegal aliens into this country."
- A question about amnesty for illegal immigrants.
- A question that sounds right out of the Republican playbook about H-2b guest workers (the questioner frames guest workers as saving his own job).
- A question about whether Huckabee would give illegal immigrants greater discounts for college than children of military personnel get.
- A question for Ron Paul about whether he believes in the conspiracy by the Council of Foreign Relations to merge the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
- A question about how these candidates will tackle the national debt.
- A question about which three federal programs the candidates would cut to reduce federal spending.
- A question about whether the candidates favor replacing the federal income tax with a federal sales tax.
- A question about who will eliminate the federal farm subsidies.
- A question about keeping unsafe toys out of the country.
- A question about gun control.
- A "mine's bigger" test about what guns they all own.
- A question about black-on-black crime.
- A question about what the punishment should be for women who get abortions and the doctors who perform them.
- A question as to what Jesus would do about the death penalty.
- A question whether they take the Bible literally.
- A question about what the U.S. should do to repair our image in the Muslim world (which Giuliani answers by saying we need to kick some more terrorist ass)
- A question about waterboarding. (Interestingly, Romney brings up Khalid Sheikh Mohammed without mentioning the Giuliani connection)
- A question (?) in support of permanent bases in Iraq.
- A request of Rudy Giuliani to answer if he is running on 9/11.
- A question as to whether they'll give their vice president as much power as Dick Cheney has.
- A general (who it turns out later on is a Hillary supporter) asks about don't ask don't tell.
- A question about how they plan to repay the Social Security trust fund.
- Who's willing to spend the money to put a man on Mars by 2020.
- A question about why they think black Americans with conservative values don't vote Republican.
- A question about repairing infrastructure.
- Ron Paul is asked about whether he's going to run as an independent.
- A question about how Rudy Giuliani could betray the Yankees by supporting the Red Sox in the post-season.
Guns, God, Brown People, Jesus, cutting programs, and how to punish the evil unchaste temptresses who won't keep their legs closed. Nothing about health care. Nothing about how long they plan to stay in Iraq. Nothing about the impending attack on Iran. Nothing about Middle East policy in general. Nothing about energy policy. Nothing about education. Nothing about the mortgage mess. And of course, nothing about how they would restore Constitutional law.
As Cenk Uygur opined this morning, these are not only guys you wouldn't want to be president, you wouldn't want to be in the same ROOM with them; because this is the most backward, fearmongering, death-centered bunch of guys ever assembled in one place.
And the only thing standing between us and one of this bunch of utterly batshit crazies is a Democratic Party that seems to want to lose.
Others weigh in:
Richard Blair asks, what part of the confederate flag question (video also there at All Spin Zone) seems incongruous in a Republican debate.
Michael Scherer at Salon put on his hip boots and waded in to liveblog it in just two screens. Walter Scherer has the analysis.
Every time he thinks he's out -- they pull him back in: John Cole liveblogged it.
TBogg couldn't face it either, but he cites a postmortem from an interesting source.
UPDATE: Whatever It Is I'm Against It has arguably the best wrapup of all.
Financial Doomsday watch for Thursday, November 29
Ah, what's another 7% drop in home values among friends?
This one comes to us via Sam Seder:
This is, quite simply, a bloodbath. And if you, like me, bought at the bottom of the market and refinanced your way into a below 5% fixed rate during the interest rate cut years, that's cold comfort. It isn't so much the evaporation of paper gains, for those gains are illusory until and unless you sell anyway. It's that when you have a tsunami of human misery the likes of which we're going to see as states and towns are starved of revenue and over a million people will lose not just their homes, but the only asset they have, it's going to be too horrible for even the mildest form of schadenfreude.
We are in for some very scary times indeed, folks.
This one comes to us via Sam Seder:
An escalating mortgage crisis will push another 1.4 million U.S. homes into foreclosure and drive nationwide property values lower by 7 percent next year, according to a report released on Tuesday by a group representing city mayors.
The report, released by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, predicts states and cities will be left scrambling to make up for lost property tax revenue, particularly in markets such as California and Florida where home values had soared.
[snip]
"Not that long ago economists said housing was the backbone of our economy," Trenton, New Jersey Mayor Douglas Palmer said in a statement.
"Today the foreclosure crisis has the potential to break the back of our economy, as well as the backs of millions of American families, if we don't do something soon," said Palmer, a Democrat, who serves as president of the mayors group.
The Global Insight report forecast U.S. homeowners would see property values fall by $1.2 trillion in 2008, with almost half of those overall losses coming in California.
California property values are expected to drop by 16 percent in 2008, the report said, costing the most populous state almost $3 billion in property taxes.
The report said the weakening U.S. property market would have knocked some $676 billion from home values, but another $519 billion in losses could be tied directly to the financial problems facing borrowers unable to meet escalating monthly mortgage payments.
During the property boom of 2004 and 2005, thousands of borrowers with riskier, or subprime, credit took out adjustable rate mortgages that had very low "teaser" interest rates for the initial two years before resetting at much higher rates.
As those interest rates have started to reset, home foreclosure rates have jumped, especially in once-hot real estate markets like Nevada, California and Florida.
In Detroit, home to the depressed U.S. auto industry and the venue of Tuesday's conference, residential foreclosure rates have been running at almost five times the national average.
That has further depressed property values in an already poverty-torn city that has lost more than half its population in the past 30 years, leaving whole blocks abandoned.
As similar problems spread, the report forecast that the U.S. economy would grow by just 1.9 percent in 2008 with hiring and consumer spending both curtailed.
This is, quite simply, a bloodbath. And if you, like me, bought at the bottom of the market and refinanced your way into a below 5% fixed rate during the interest rate cut years, that's cold comfort. It isn't so much the evaporation of paper gains, for those gains are illusory until and unless you sell anyway. It's that when you have a tsunami of human misery the likes of which we're going to see as states and towns are starved of revenue and over a million people will lose not just their homes, but the only asset they have, it's going to be too horrible for even the mildest form of schadenfreude.
We are in for some very scary times indeed, folks.
mercredi 28 novembre 2007
Menu for Hope 2007: Call for Prize Donations
Could you help us feed the world's hungry? It's almost December and that means it's time for our annual Menu for Hope fundraising campaign, originally devised by Chez Pim. In 2006 food bloggers and their readers raised a phenomenal US$62,925.12 in support of the United Nations World Food Programme.How does it work?This international campaign relies on the generosity of food bloggers sourcing or
What constitutes "expressing discontent"?
I wonder if writing a blog like this one, or having a copy of Greg Palast's book Armed Madhouse or Edwards for President bumper stickers, or the program from Yearly Kos constitutes "expressing hate or discontent with the United States" in the eyes of the Department of Homeland Security?
Because that's one of the criteria that fire fighters in major cities are being trained to look for when they enter people's homes without a warrant, as they are allowed to do:
Firefighters in major cities are being trained to take on a new role as lookouts for terrorism, raising concerns of eroding their standing as American icons and infringing on privacy.
Unlike police, firefighters and emergency medical personnel don't need warrants to access hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings each year, putting them in a position to spot terrorist activity or planning.
But there are fears that they could lose the faith of a skeptical public by becoming the eyes of the government, looking for items such as building blueprints or bomb-making manuals or materials.
Mike German, a former FBI agent who is national security policy counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union, said the concept is dangerously close to the Bush administration's 2002 proposal to have workers with access to private homes -- such as postal carriers and telephone repair workers -- report suspicious behavior to the FBI.
"Americans universally abhorred that idea," German said.
About the training program
The Homeland Security Department is testing a program with the New York City fire department to share intelligence information so firefighters are better prepared when they respond to emergency calls. Homeland Security also trains the New York City fire service in how to identify material or behavior that may indicate terrorist activities. The government intends to expand the program to other metropolitan areas.
As part of the program, which started last December, Homeland Security gave secret clearances to nine New York fire chiefs, according to reports obtained by the Associated Press.
[snip]
When going to private residences, for example, they are told to be alert for a person who is hostile, uncooperative or expressing hate or discontent with the United States; unusual chemicals or other materials that seem out of place; ammunition, firearms or weapons boxes; surveillance equipment; still and video cameras; night-vision goggles; maps, photos, blueprints; police manuals, training manuals, flight manuals, and little or no furniture.
So what constitutes this "expression of discontent"? Opposition to Bush policies? Opposition to having firefighters go looking through your bookcase noting down that you also have a copy of Valerie Wilson's book Fair Game? If you are Muslim, does having a copy of the Koran count? Suppose you are a college student studying comparative religion. Does that count as "expressing discontent"?
Do you still think we're not headed towards a police state? Here are 10 of the 14 steps to fascism as outlined by Naomi Wolf. Shoe, fits, etc.
(UPDATE: Jesse Wendel explains why this is a really, really bad idea.
If we had anything resembling news media, this would be the end of Giuliani
Can you imagine if a Democratic presidential candidate had as a business client someone who harbored Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, otherwise known as "the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks"?
Well, if Rudy Giuliani wants to run as the candidate who knew since the 1993 World Trade Center attack that a single network was behind it; as the only candidate with the knowledge and toughness to keep Americans safe from terrorists, he has some 'splainin' to do about why, when there's cash involved, he's perfectly OK with doing business with those who harbor terrorists.
This article by Wayne Barrett in the Village Voice this week ought to be the beginning of the end for Rudy the Saint of 9/11:
More here.
It's no wonder that there's a growing perception of Giuliani as the Bush family-approved successor. His campaign is loaded with neocons that are even further to the right of those surrounding George W. Bush; he's even more of a secretive authoritarian, AND he has the required connection with terrorists so as to make a good tag-team to keep Americans afraid.
While lunatics like this one are obsessing about Hillary Clinton's aide Huma Abedin and whether she is a Saudi agent (or if it's just about their fantasies of hot Hillary-on-Huma action), they're strangely silent about Rudy Giuliani's business partnership with the protectors of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. But then, they were also silent about the Bush family's connection with the Bin Ladens, and didn't see anything odd about the president's father meeting with the family of the alleged power behind the attacks AS THEY WERE TAKING PLACE.
Because even when it comes to associating with those who are, or those who protect terrorists, the IOKIYAR rule always applies.
UPDATE: And there's more Rudy messiness, via Joe Sudbay.
And this is the guy with the highest poll ratings among Republicans? This is the law-and-order, anti-terror guy? Yeesh.
Well, if Rudy Giuliani wants to run as the candidate who knew since the 1993 World Trade Center attack that a single network was behind it; as the only candidate with the knowledge and toughness to keep Americans safe from terrorists, he has some 'splainin' to do about why, when there's cash involved, he's perfectly OK with doing business with those who harbor terrorists.
This article by Wayne Barrett in the Village Voice this week ought to be the beginning of the end for Rudy the Saint of 9/11:
Three weeks after 9/11, when the roar of fighter jets still haunted the city's skyline, the emir of gas-rich Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifah al-Thani, toured Ground Zero. Although a member of the emir's own royal family had harbored the man who would later be identified as the mastermind of the attack—a man named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, often referred to in intelligence circles by his initials, KSM—al-Thani rushed to New York in its aftermath, offering to make a $3 million donation, principally to the families of its victims. Rudy Giuliani, apparently unaware of what the FBI and CIA had long known about Qatari links to Al Qaeda, appeared on CNN with al-Thani that night and vouched for the emir when Larry King asked the mayor: "You are a friend of his, are you not?"
"We had a very good meeting yesterday. Very good," said Giuliani, adding that he was "very, very grateful" for al-Thani's generosity.
[snip]
The contradictory and stunning reality is that Giuliani Partners, the consulting company that has made Giuliani rich, feasts at the Qatar trough, doing business with the ministry run by the very member of the royal family identified in news and government reports as having concealed KSM—the terrorist mastermind who wired funds from Qatar to his nephew Ramzi Yousef prior to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and who also sold the idea of a plane attack on the towers to Osama bin Laden—on his Qatar farm in the mid-1990s.
This royal family member is Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani, Qatar's minister of Islamic affairs at the time, who was later installed at the interior ministry in January 2001 and reappointed by the emir during a government shake-up earlier this year. Abdallah al-Thani is also said to have welcomed Osama bin Laden on two visits to the farm, a charge repeated as recently as October 10, 2007, in a Congressional Research Service study. Abdallah al-Thani's interior ministry or the state-owned company it helps oversee, Qatar Petroleum, has worked with Giuliani Security & Safety LLC, a subsidiary of Giuliani Partners, on an undisclosed number of contracts, the value of which neither the government nor the company will release.
More here.
It's no wonder that there's a growing perception of Giuliani as the Bush family-approved successor. His campaign is loaded with neocons that are even further to the right of those surrounding George W. Bush; he's even more of a secretive authoritarian, AND he has the required connection with terrorists so as to make a good tag-team to keep Americans afraid.
While lunatics like this one are obsessing about Hillary Clinton's aide Huma Abedin and whether she is a Saudi agent (or if it's just about their fantasies of hot Hillary-on-Huma action), they're strangely silent about Rudy Giuliani's business partnership with the protectors of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. But then, they were also silent about the Bush family's connection with the Bin Ladens, and didn't see anything odd about the president's father meeting with the family of the alleged power behind the attacks AS THEY WERE TAKING PLACE.
Because even when it comes to associating with those who are, or those who protect terrorists, the IOKIYAR rule always applies.
UPDATE: And there's more Rudy messiness, via Joe Sudbay.
And this is the guy with the highest poll ratings among Republicans? This is the law-and-order, anti-terror guy? Yeesh.
A post you MUST read
Arthur Silber may not be as prolific as some bloggers, but what he writes is always not only worth reading, but mandatory reading. Today he explains (accurately, I think) why the Democrats will never, ever, ever impeach this president, and why they will persist in making seemingly head-scratching decisions like confirming Michael Mukasey (hint: it's about not putting themselves in a situation where they have no choice but to impeach).
(h/t: John Amato)
(h/t: John Amato)
TRex leaves the nest
The fabulous and fabulously snarky TRex has left the Firedoglake nest to stake his own homestead in Blogtopia(™Skippy). Please join me in giving a big Brilliant hug to our latest blogrollee, I Am TRex. And no, he's not blogging about composite decking).
When the spouses are more interesting than the candidates
Perhaps it's just how political coverage in this country has evolved, but it seems to me that despite the fact that all of the Democratic candidates for president are intelligent, qualified people (yes, even Hillary -- it's not her intelligence that bothers me), their spouses are the ones who are the most interesting?
We'll see during the general election campaign if the notion that the first spouse still has to be of the Nancy Reagan mode -- gazing adoringly at her supposedly more-accomplished spouse in public no matter who's actually running things behind the curtain. Theresa Heinz Kerry probably wasn't the best example of the Accomplished Spouse and certainly had no gift for dealing with the media. But even leaving aside the former president who's the most gifted sheer politician of his or perhaps any generation, the Democratic spouses are at least as interesting, and sometimes more so, than the actual candidates.
Elizabeth Edwards is the Stealth Soccer Mom -- a ferociously intelligent and energetic woman whom everyone forgets was a damn good attorney herself before deciding to devote her energies to her family. Having had the privilege of hosting a fundraiser for her husband in which she was in attendance, I can tell you that you could drop her off at the Kohl's store in Ramsey, NJ and no one would even recognize her, so completely would she blend in with the rest of the store's clientele. But if you saw her eviscerate Ann Coulter on national television, you too know that this is not someone you want to push around.
Today Rebecca Traister in Salon focuses on Michelle Obama, and after reading this article, I found myself wishing that she, instead of her careful, cautious, Let's Play Nice with the Republicans husband, was the candidate:
"Like us." In IOWA, of all places. What's so mindblowing about this article is partly that at least in Iowa, Obama's race appears to not even play into people's considerations. That we have lived long enough for Iowans to say that a black couple is "just like us" is gratifying, if long overdue. But it's also that in Michelle Obama, we have a woman who goes in front of crowds and does what SHE wants -- not what handlers want, or not what she thinks the Fox News crowd won't object to. She's a "This is me, take it or leave it" kind of gal.
I only wish her husband was more like her.
We'll see during the general election campaign if the notion that the first spouse still has to be of the Nancy Reagan mode -- gazing adoringly at her supposedly more-accomplished spouse in public no matter who's actually running things behind the curtain. Theresa Heinz Kerry probably wasn't the best example of the Accomplished Spouse and certainly had no gift for dealing with the media. But even leaving aside the former president who's the most gifted sheer politician of his or perhaps any generation, the Democratic spouses are at least as interesting, and sometimes more so, than the actual candidates.
Elizabeth Edwards is the Stealth Soccer Mom -- a ferociously intelligent and energetic woman whom everyone forgets was a damn good attorney herself before deciding to devote her energies to her family. Having had the privilege of hosting a fundraiser for her husband in which she was in attendance, I can tell you that you could drop her off at the Kohl's store in Ramsey, NJ and no one would even recognize her, so completely would she blend in with the rest of the store's clientele. But if you saw her eviscerate Ann Coulter on national television, you too know that this is not someone you want to push around.
Today Rebecca Traister in Salon focuses on Michelle Obama, and after reading this article, I found myself wishing that she, instead of her careful, cautious, Let's Play Nice with the Republicans husband, was the candidate:
In her first address, she flatly notes that one of her husband's proudest achievements was passing ethics reform. A beat. "In Illinois." Ba-dum-bum. The line gets a good laugh, because Iowans know Chicago's history of corruption, and that Ilinois' most recent ex-governor is in federal prison. But apparently, Obama is not satisfied. In later versions, she more thoroughly explains herself, noting that "Illinois doesn't do ethics really well."
Obama's staff tells me about a couple of lines that have been dropped from the speech -- one about how when she met her husband, she thought, "No one lives in Hawaii!" and one about how she first realized that she could go to Princeton after her brother got in, because "I'm smarter than him!" But as with many gifted comedians, most of the mirth is in the take-my-husband-please Borscht Belt delivery. Obama has laid off a lot of the domestic complaints since her run-in with Dowd, but comes closest to the kind of "emasculating" riffs that made MoDo sniff when she tells one crowd, "I didn't marry [Barack] for all his degrees. Certainly he's made less money over the years, as my mother has pointed out."
Then there is the steady drumbeat of discontent about the process she's living through. "I'm not doing this because I'm married to him," she tells listeners again and again. "Because truly, this process is painful. If you have a choice, America, don't do this! Teach! Do something else. I tried to [tell] Barack -- there are so many ways to change the world. Let's do them!" In another version, she says, "I [didn't] want to run for president! Life was comfortable! It was safe! Nobody was takin' pictures of us!" This sing-it-sister refrain goes over well, in part because it's something with which everyone in her audience can relate. Who the hell would want to live this way? To give up their privacy, security, routine, all in a bid to watch their mate get attacked for a living and take on the most high-pressure, all-consuming job on the planet? It doesn't matter if Obama is black, if she is a Harvard Law grad, if she is wearing Jimmy Choos. She is communicating to her audience a reluctance that makes good common sense to them.
These moments of relatability give ballast to her big sell, that when push came to shove, she shelved her trepidation. "I took off the Michelle Obama hat," she says, "the selfish hat, the one that says 'no,' and put on my citizen hat, my hopeful hat, and realized that I want Barack Obama to lead me ... Even if it's inconvenient. We have to be bold."
Fifteen years after Bill Clinton rattled the country by announcing that thanks to his marriage to a policy wonk, it would be getting "two for the price of one," Michelle hits a similar note on her own behalf. If the nation elects Barack, she says, "I can guarantee you that you won't be disappointed. Not only will you get to hang out with me -- cause I'll be there; I'll go to the White House with him -- but we have a chance to fundamentally change this country."
At the senior center in Davenport, they're thrilled to hear about hanging out with her. She receives a chorus of affirmative "Uh-huhs" after nearly every statement, and when she's finished, the crowd of geriatric fans swarm her, putting her on the phone with their loved ones, having her pose with toddlers, the arm of a stuffed monkey draped around her neck. Sixty-two-year-old Mary Anderson, retired from Ford Motor Credit, tells me, "She reminds me of Jackie Onassis. She's a dignified, high-class lady."
[snip]
Ron Hughes, a small business owner in Dubuque, tells me that he's a Biden man through and through, and his wife, next to him, is totally apathetic about the political process. "She just comes for the socializing," Hughes assures me. But as Obama begins the most rollicking rendition of the stump speech that I will see on this visit, Hughes leans in to me and acknowledges, "I do like her sense of humor."
By the time Obama gets into the part about how fear is used to bully and divide us, Hughes' purportedly apathetic wife is nodding in assent, and leans in to her husband to say, "She's right on."
Tonight, Obama lingers on the cowardice of her husband's opponents in their votes for the Iraq war, arguing that Barack, though he was not yet in the Senate to cast a vote of his own, acted courageously by coming out against the invasion during his tight Illinois primary race. "That race looked a lot like this race," she says. "He wasn't supposed to win. He had a funny name, he was too young. We've heard it! Been there! Done that! But even in the middle of all that, he said no, the war was a bad idea."
She remains insistent -- despite the flak she's received for minimizing her husband's deity-like status -- on being realistic. "It's not that we're going to elect a president who will deliver us from evil," she tells the Jochum fundraiser. "We are our own evil. We have to be engaged and passionate." Without courage, she says, we will never get anywhere.
"I think I found my candidate," says Hughes' wife, 59-year-old Suzette, a retired physical therapist, as Obama receives a standing ovation. "I hadn't felt the need to make a decision until tonight. I hadn't been moved until tonight."
The next morning, Michelle is about an hour north of Dubuque, in a restaurant that overlooks a broad, sinuous Mississippi River. She's taking a fresh dig at George Bush as she discusses her husband's respect and passion for the Constitution, "something that would be nice in a president these days." The crowd is nodding enthusiastically at her.
While Michelle is hugging after the speech, I overhear a group of four women gossiping about the Clintons, speculating rather ungenerously about why Hillary might be running for president. One of the women, who is wearing a precinct captain button, boils down the differences between the former first family and the Obamas: "Michelle and Barack are like us," she says.
"Like us." In IOWA, of all places. What's so mindblowing about this article is partly that at least in Iowa, Obama's race appears to not even play into people's considerations. That we have lived long enough for Iowans to say that a black couple is "just like us" is gratifying, if long overdue. But it's also that in Michelle Obama, we have a woman who goes in front of crowds and does what SHE wants -- not what handlers want, or not what she thinks the Fox News crowd won't object to. She's a "This is me, take it or leave it" kind of gal.
I only wish her husband was more like her.
Financial Doomsday Watch for Tuesday, November 28, 2007
Yesterday the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller National Home Price Index came out and showed the biggest home price drop in twenty years during the third quarter of the year at 4.5%. Obviously this isn't consistent across the country; the bubbliest areas like California, Florida, and the Las Vegas areas, are going to be hit the hardest. But even the New York metropolitan area is down 3.4% -- not all that far behind.
It hasn't hit my town all that badly yet. Houses are still moving if they're priced right, though one aggressively-priced house in my neighborhood went under contract within two weeks of being listed only to have the "under contract" sign removed this week and now it's showing up at Realtor.com again. Obviously the buyer wasn't able to get a mortgage after all. The current owners moved out yesterday. Now the realtor has to sell it as an empty house. Another house, of the type known in places like the New Jersey Real Estate Blog as a "POS Cape", closed at $440K in mid-November -- not too shabby, but down around $20K from what it would have sold for last year.
I live in one of those neighborhoods in which everyone has been either remodeling, adding levels, or tearing their houses down and replacing them with big, ugly stucco boxes with teeny-tiny windows. Last year a developer bought a POS cape on a 100 x 100 lot (oversized for this neighborhood) for $420K that looked like it had been sold by an elderly person who had never done any updates. He tore off the roof, tore it down to the four walls, added out to the side, and slapped up an ugly, vinyl-sided box in record time. The inside, from what I hear, is nicely finished with mid-range finishes. The original listing price was just over a million dollars, and now it's under $900K after six months on the market -- and still not moving. Another spec house a few blocks away is being sold directly by a developer who hasn't even bothered to put in a driveway or landscaping. It's an attractive house, on a deep property, but no one's biting there, either.
At least some of the problem is that with the demise of the no-documentation and the bad-credit-no-problem mortgages, few people can qualify for jumbo mortgages of over $417,000 anymore. "Competition" from foreclosures hasn't really hit here yet either, though I suspect that will change. I wonder sometimes how some of the people who have been using their house as a piggybank not just for additions and new "gourmet" kitchens and home theaters, but also for new SUVs and vacations, will fare as the value of their homes drops. If we see a Wall Street bloodbath, as I suspect we will, northern New Jersey bedroom communities will feel the pain, adding further to the problems of a state that has been grossly mismanaged for over a decade.
Yesterday I posted about how 45,000 Citigroup employees are likely to lose their jobs because Charles "40 Million Severance Man" Prince steered the company onto an iceberg.
Today it's Wells Fargo:
The scariest aspect to the ripples from the end of the housing bubble is that Americans are out there shopping, whipping out the plastic, and seem to be still largely oblivious. You don't have to understand exactly how mortgages are packaged into securities and traded like stocks to look at the numbers coming out of these financial firms and wonder when the whole thing is going to collapse. When you have a Republican presidential candidate alleged to have said MORE THAN ONCE that he would not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet (and whose defenders are doing so by questioning the veracity of the -- you guessed it -- Muslim interviewer in the first instance), and another who takes foreign policy advice from Norman ("Bomb Iran Now") Podhoretz and who is even more bellicose towards Islam than George W. Bush, the silence surrounding the purchase of a sizable chunk of one of the largest financial firms in the country by Abu Dhabi is baffling.
If the U.S. is a giant shopping mall, then it's a mall whose anchor store is at the edge of a very steep cliff. And after you leave that anchor store, with the doors back to the mall now locked, there's nowhere to go but over the precipice.
It hasn't hit my town all that badly yet. Houses are still moving if they're priced right, though one aggressively-priced house in my neighborhood went under contract within two weeks of being listed only to have the "under contract" sign removed this week and now it's showing up at Realtor.com again. Obviously the buyer wasn't able to get a mortgage after all. The current owners moved out yesterday. Now the realtor has to sell it as an empty house. Another house, of the type known in places like the New Jersey Real Estate Blog as a "POS Cape", closed at $440K in mid-November -- not too shabby, but down around $20K from what it would have sold for last year.
I live in one of those neighborhoods in which everyone has been either remodeling, adding levels, or tearing their houses down and replacing them with big, ugly stucco boxes with teeny-tiny windows. Last year a developer bought a POS cape on a 100 x 100 lot (oversized for this neighborhood) for $420K that looked like it had been sold by an elderly person who had never done any updates. He tore off the roof, tore it down to the four walls, added out to the side, and slapped up an ugly, vinyl-sided box in record time. The inside, from what I hear, is nicely finished with mid-range finishes. The original listing price was just over a million dollars, and now it's under $900K after six months on the market -- and still not moving. Another spec house a few blocks away is being sold directly by a developer who hasn't even bothered to put in a driveway or landscaping. It's an attractive house, on a deep property, but no one's biting there, either.
At least some of the problem is that with the demise of the no-documentation and the bad-credit-no-problem mortgages, few people can qualify for jumbo mortgages of over $417,000 anymore. "Competition" from foreclosures hasn't really hit here yet either, though I suspect that will change. I wonder sometimes how some of the people who have been using their house as a piggybank not just for additions and new "gourmet" kitchens and home theaters, but also for new SUVs and vacations, will fare as the value of their homes drops. If we see a Wall Street bloodbath, as I suspect we will, northern New Jersey bedroom communities will feel the pain, adding further to the problems of a state that has been grossly mismanaged for over a decade.
Yesterday I posted about how 45,000 Citigroup employees are likely to lose their jobs because Charles "40 Million Severance Man" Prince steered the company onto an iceberg.
Today it's Wells Fargo:
Wells Fargo & Company, the nation’s second-largest mortgage lender, after Countrywide Financial, said yesterday that it would take a $1.4 billion fourth-quarter charge for losses it anticipated in connection with home loans.
The bank said that it would continue to provide home equity financing directly to customers, but that it would not originate or acquire home equity loans through indirect channels. Wells Fargo will also not originate home equity loans through third parties when the combined loan-to-value ratio of the first and second mortgages is over 90 percent or where the second mortgage is not behind a Wells Fargo loan.
The bank is putting $11.9 billion into a special liquidating portfolio. The bank’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said that the figure is 3 percent of its total loans outstanding, but that it represents the riskiest element of the $83.4 billion in its National Home Equity Group portfolio. The loans are generally clustered in areas of the country that are having the greatest decline in retail prices.
R. Scott Siefers, an analyst who follows Wells Fargo for Sandler O’Neill, said: “It is unfortunate certainly because Wells Fargo has had an aura of invincibility. Over the last few years, it has not gotten involved in a lot of the issues that have caused so much pain for the group. It is one of the largest mortgage lenders in the country so this is going to be painful for everybody."
The scariest aspect to the ripples from the end of the housing bubble is that Americans are out there shopping, whipping out the plastic, and seem to be still largely oblivious. You don't have to understand exactly how mortgages are packaged into securities and traded like stocks to look at the numbers coming out of these financial firms and wonder when the whole thing is going to collapse. When you have a Republican presidential candidate alleged to have said MORE THAN ONCE that he would not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet (and whose defenders are doing so by questioning the veracity of the -- you guessed it -- Muslim interviewer in the first instance), and another who takes foreign policy advice from Norman ("Bomb Iran Now") Podhoretz and who is even more bellicose towards Islam than George W. Bush, the silence surrounding the purchase of a sizable chunk of one of the largest financial firms in the country by Abu Dhabi is baffling.
If the U.S. is a giant shopping mall, then it's a mall whose anchor store is at the edge of a very steep cliff. And after you leave that anchor store, with the doors back to the mall now locked, there's nowhere to go but over the precipice.
mardi 27 novembre 2007
And this is only the beginning
While former Citigroup chairman Charles Prince got a $40 million severance package for mismanaging the company in subprime mania and billions of dollars in losses, up to 45,000 more employees of the financial services giant may be paying a higher price -- their jobs:
You know as well as I do that it isn't top executives -- those who actually make the decisions -- who will pay the price, other than a few hundred million less in bonus money this year. But when you consider the amount of money lost in this mortgage disaster, these 45,000 likely layoffs at Citigroup are only the beginning. That's 45,000 more people pounding the pavement looking for jobs that will be next to impossible to find because every other company that might hire them will be cutting back as well. So they'll be looking for whatever work they can scrounge up in the retail and service industries where the only real job growth in the Bush years has taken place -- eventually joining the very undocumented immigrants the Republicans have told them to look at in an ever-faster race to the socioeconomic bottom.
This is capitalism in America. Mission accomplished.
Thousands of jobs could go at Citigroup (NYSE:C) as part of the bank's cost-cutting programme aimed at rebalancing its books after having to write down 16.9 bln usd worth of subprime assets, the Telegraph says without citing sources.
The cuts could eclipse those made by the bank in April, when then CEO Charles Prince said that he would slash 17,000 jobs.
The bank did not confirm job cuts, but did say it was looking at ways of saving cash.
'We are engaged in a planning process in anticipation of our new CEO, and our business heads are planning ways in which we can be more efficient and cost-effective to position our businesses in line with economic realities. Any reports on specific numbers are not factual,' the paper was told.
You know as well as I do that it isn't top executives -- those who actually make the decisions -- who will pay the price, other than a few hundred million less in bonus money this year. But when you consider the amount of money lost in this mortgage disaster, these 45,000 likely layoffs at Citigroup are only the beginning. That's 45,000 more people pounding the pavement looking for jobs that will be next to impossible to find because every other company that might hire them will be cutting back as well. So they'll be looking for whatever work they can scrounge up in the retail and service industries where the only real job growth in the Bush years has taken place -- eventually joining the very undocumented immigrants the Republicans have told them to look at in an ever-faster race to the socioeconomic bottom.
This is capitalism in America. Mission accomplished.
Of course this won't dissuade Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel one bit
Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emmanuel are the Democratic Party leaders who still think it's 1992 and they still think that Bill Clinton's win was attributable to triangulation and caving into Republicans, rather than Clinton's being the most gifted politician of his generation, and one of the most gifted in history. Relying on a public perception of "Bill will be the real president anyway", similar to the delusion that many Bush voters had in 2000 that "the old man will be really running things anyway", the Democratic party hackocracy has been pushing to nominate Hillary Clinton.
Or maybe they just WANT to lose.
The latest Zogby poll indicates that a Hillary Clinton nomination will do just that. In the latest (11/26 poll, Hillary Clinton loses to John McCain 38%-42%, to Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney 40%-43%, to Mike Huckabee 39%-44%, and to Fred Thompson 40%-44%.
Barack Obama defeats John McCain 45%-38%, Rudy Giuliani 46%-41%, Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee 46%-40%, and Fred Thompson 47%-40%.
And John Edwards, the candidate the Democratic Hackocracy wants to stop at all costs, the candidate who is receiving zero news coverage and many voters don't even know who he is, also defeats all the Republicans, albeit by smaller margins. Imagine if he received some news coverage not involving his hair or his house.
Now in fairness, Gallup has Clinton polling more strongly, but the Gallup poll is intersesting in that it has seemingly written John Edwards out of the race entirely.
It's disheartening that there is still a fairly consistent 40% of the population that still wants a Republican president at all, let alone one of this particular batch of nimrods and nutjobs. But I think we can chalk up at least ten percent of this to the fact that the Democratic Party as a whole has so far shown itself to be unable to stand up for anything, crumpling more quickly than a Yugo at the slightest threat of We Will Say Mean Things About You. Perhaps Hillary Clinton IS the fighter she claims to be, but it's hard to imagine her fighting for anything that doesn't benefit her corporate supporters once elected. Fighting back against the right wing smear machine may be enough to get her elected, but it doesn't make her the leader that will roll back decades of Republican plunder, aided and abetted by her own husband's DLC strategy of capitulation.
It's equally disheartening that the media have already decided who your "real" choices are by choosing to cover only the two candidates whom they believe make the best story. I wonder what these numbers would look like if John Edwards were given a fair shake in the media.
Regardless of who gets the nomination, the question still must be asked: Have the Democrats become so accustomed to being at the short end of the stick that they are more comfortable losing? And another question must be asked: Can this country be fixed?
UPDATE: Pollster.com has some questions about Zogby's methodology.
Or maybe they just WANT to lose.
The latest Zogby poll indicates that a Hillary Clinton nomination will do just that. In the latest (11/26 poll, Hillary Clinton loses to John McCain 38%-42%, to Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney 40%-43%, to Mike Huckabee 39%-44%, and to Fred Thompson 40%-44%.
Barack Obama defeats John McCain 45%-38%, Rudy Giuliani 46%-41%, Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee 46%-40%, and Fred Thompson 47%-40%.
And John Edwards, the candidate the Democratic Hackocracy wants to stop at all costs, the candidate who is receiving zero news coverage and many voters don't even know who he is, also defeats all the Republicans, albeit by smaller margins. Imagine if he received some news coverage not involving his hair or his house.
Now in fairness, Gallup has Clinton polling more strongly, but the Gallup poll is intersesting in that it has seemingly written John Edwards out of the race entirely.
It's disheartening that there is still a fairly consistent 40% of the population that still wants a Republican president at all, let alone one of this particular batch of nimrods and nutjobs. But I think we can chalk up at least ten percent of this to the fact that the Democratic Party as a whole has so far shown itself to be unable to stand up for anything, crumpling more quickly than a Yugo at the slightest threat of We Will Say Mean Things About You. Perhaps Hillary Clinton IS the fighter she claims to be, but it's hard to imagine her fighting for anything that doesn't benefit her corporate supporters once elected. Fighting back against the right wing smear machine may be enough to get her elected, but it doesn't make her the leader that will roll back decades of Republican plunder, aided and abetted by her own husband's DLC strategy of capitulation.
It's equally disheartening that the media have already decided who your "real" choices are by choosing to cover only the two candidates whom they believe make the best story. I wonder what these numbers would look like if John Edwards were given a fair shake in the media.
Regardless of who gets the nomination, the question still must be asked: Have the Democrats become so accustomed to being at the short end of the stick that they are more comfortable losing? And another question must be asked: Can this country be fixed?
UPDATE: Pollster.com has some questions about Zogby's methodology.
Chat Thai, Haymarket Chinatown
Mu Bhing $1.50 eachSkewered and chargrilled lean pork marinaded in galangal, lemongrass and garlicserved with a dressing of nam jim jeawYou know you're getting old when you start getting cagey around your birthday. How old are you? everyone asks. How old do I look? I reply, instead.But birthdays do bring a whole week's worth of dinner outings with family friends, even if the joy is always
lundi 26 novembre 2007
The War May be the Least of Our Problems: Suicide in the Military; CBS Reports
Despite the best efforts of the department of defense, stories of a surge in veteran and active duty, in country, soldier suicides have plagued this war since we settled in for our long, long stay. Many have been presented as anecdotal, even though they really represented an alarming trend in what amounts to lack of treatment and understanding of what the problems of soldiers are going to be as this war winds on. Most Americans cant seem to focus for long on much these days, and the inability to view even a people magazine article as an indicator of a trend, leaves most regular people unprepared for the real sacrifices that are going to be necessary and the ground work being laid. Surely the care of thousands of depressed and PTSD citizens is not part of the grand budgeting for this war.
In this new world, where we are told to go shopping rather than make any vague sort of sacrifice, where we are not allowed to see even photographs of caskets being offloaded from military transports, where most communities are ill-prepared for their damaged brothers and sisters return to normal life, something is gonna have to give.
Now comes word that CBS has done that rare thing which we see so seldom these days from our media conglomerates; they actually did some research and dug up some information ...and then even reported a real story. So odd was this phenomenon that the method is part of the story, in that they first took the numbers from the states, then took the military numbers...then...then...Its all very fascinating and I hope that it gets huge ratings so that other M$M reporters might look up from their daily briefing from the White House, get off their asses, and look critically at some independent statistics.
According to Alternet CBS has uncovered some hidden statistics that the counters would prefer that we not know in this time of "the surge is working," (if you don't count the "crime" shootings in the front of the head, or was that the sectarian shootings in the back of the head?) Our brave soldiers are committing suicide at an alarming rate. We are talking about 120 dead per week, which is an average of 17 every day!
Anyone that has ever dealt with mental illness of any sort; PTSD, depression, or suicidal ideology, can tell you that an attempted or completed suicide comes from a place of complete and utter pain, such despair and desolation, a break from reality, and that it is not a situation usually where someone hasn't at least tried to get some relief in other ways. Blame it on the anti-malaria drug, the war, or any number of factors, the numbers are going up and regardless of the cause, its a problem that belongs to us all.
The fact that the veterans administration is not prepared for the physical injuries that this war has wrought is well documented, but the real rub here is going to be the numbers of psychologically damaged soldiers returning on top of those that are here already, that are not being treated properly, if they can be treated at all, and who are going to overwhelm a system that is unprepared for this. With the VA backlog already in the millions, how is this problem going to play out in our cities and towns? There is no money for this...there are not enough trained professionals at the ready, there is a lack of mental health care on the ground in Iraq, when some of this could be caught early, and the line snakes around the corner and back again.
The hot career path of the future may well be in mental health, folks. This is not the stuff of take a Prozac and feel better. This is not social anxiety like on the commercials. Its debilitating and disabling, and the cure is not simple. The numbers are bad enough right now, but the stories of the government propping up and shipping out anyone who isn't actively cutting their wrists on their way to the airport, are troubling, to say the least.
Meanwhile, many of those who are able to get enough help to at least document their problems, are dismissed as having "personal problems" rather than any reaction to the war, violence, long deployments and redeployment's, and a different type of percussive head injury that is probably not fully understood yet. I could also imagine that anyone in the position of having volunteered as a reservist and then realized that they were going into war, untrained for the most part, unequipped, and that the tours have been extended and are going to be repeated, might feel quite a bit of helplessness and despair. Add to that the ongoing grind of an ill conceived war that has had our forces clearing one area and then moving on, only to have to come back to the same area again...in other words, there are not enough forces there to hold any part of what they are able to clear.The frustration of risking your life every day for a policing operation that never ends, is some sort of nightmare; you roll the boulder up the hill and it rolls back down...forever...At some point it must be nice to be someone who can embrace the talking points and follow orders blindly, but it must be pretty damned hard for anyone over there right now not to see whats happening on the ground.
We can only extrapolate from CBS's numbers that many, many active duty soldiers are feeling really badly...and I mean that in a dangerous sense. How many depressed and suicidal soldiers are out there as important parts of squadrons on patrol? How many armed veterans are walking around at home with unaddressed despair?
Our unpreparedness and obvious inability to treat the epidemic of PTSD and depression in the military is not only inhuman treatment of society's bravest members, but it is actual torture. What are we going to do when the military, lacking resources to deal with this problem, is flooded with returnees? What of the outsourced army who definitely have the same sorts of problems? What are we gonna do?
c/p RIPCoco
In this new world, where we are told to go shopping rather than make any vague sort of sacrifice, where we are not allowed to see even photographs of caskets being offloaded from military transports, where most communities are ill-prepared for their damaged brothers and sisters return to normal life, something is gonna have to give.
Now comes word that CBS has done that rare thing which we see so seldom these days from our media conglomerates; they actually did some research and dug up some information ...and then even reported a real story. So odd was this phenomenon that the method is part of the story, in that they first took the numbers from the states, then took the military numbers...then...then...Its all very fascinating and I hope that it gets huge ratings so that other M$M reporters might look up from their daily briefing from the White House, get off their asses, and look critically at some independent statistics.
According to Alternet CBS has uncovered some hidden statistics that the counters would prefer that we not know in this time of "the surge is working," (if you don't count the "crime" shootings in the front of the head, or was that the sectarian shootings in the back of the head?) Our brave soldiers are committing suicide at an alarming rate. We are talking about 120 dead per week, which is an average of 17 every day!
Anyone that has ever dealt with mental illness of any sort; PTSD, depression, or suicidal ideology, can tell you that an attempted or completed suicide comes from a place of complete and utter pain, such despair and desolation, a break from reality, and that it is not a situation usually where someone hasn't at least tried to get some relief in other ways. Blame it on the anti-malaria drug, the war, or any number of factors, the numbers are going up and regardless of the cause, its a problem that belongs to us all.
The fact that the veterans administration is not prepared for the physical injuries that this war has wrought is well documented, but the real rub here is going to be the numbers of psychologically damaged soldiers returning on top of those that are here already, that are not being treated properly, if they can be treated at all, and who are going to overwhelm a system that is unprepared for this. With the VA backlog already in the millions, how is this problem going to play out in our cities and towns? There is no money for this...there are not enough trained professionals at the ready, there is a lack of mental health care on the ground in Iraq, when some of this could be caught early, and the line snakes around the corner and back again.
The hot career path of the future may well be in mental health, folks. This is not the stuff of take a Prozac and feel better. This is not social anxiety like on the commercials. Its debilitating and disabling, and the cure is not simple. The numbers are bad enough right now, but the stories of the government propping up and shipping out anyone who isn't actively cutting their wrists on their way to the airport, are troubling, to say the least.
Meanwhile, many of those who are able to get enough help to at least document their problems, are dismissed as having "personal problems" rather than any reaction to the war, violence, long deployments and redeployment's, and a different type of percussive head injury that is probably not fully understood yet. I could also imagine that anyone in the position of having volunteered as a reservist and then realized that they were going into war, untrained for the most part, unequipped, and that the tours have been extended and are going to be repeated, might feel quite a bit of helplessness and despair. Add to that the ongoing grind of an ill conceived war that has had our forces clearing one area and then moving on, only to have to come back to the same area again...in other words, there are not enough forces there to hold any part of what they are able to clear.The frustration of risking your life every day for a policing operation that never ends, is some sort of nightmare; you roll the boulder up the hill and it rolls back down...forever...At some point it must be nice to be someone who can embrace the talking points and follow orders blindly, but it must be pretty damned hard for anyone over there right now not to see whats happening on the ground.
We can only extrapolate from CBS's numbers that many, many active duty soldiers are feeling really badly...and I mean that in a dangerous sense. How many depressed and suicidal soldiers are out there as important parts of squadrons on patrol? How many armed veterans are walking around at home with unaddressed despair?
Our unpreparedness and obvious inability to treat the epidemic of PTSD and depression in the military is not only inhuman treatment of society's bravest members, but it is actual torture. What are we going to do when the military, lacking resources to deal with this problem, is flooded with returnees? What of the outsourced army who definitely have the same sorts of problems? What are we gonna do?
c/p RIPCoco
Trent Lott is resigning
Before the end of the year, apparently. Are they really expecting that much carnage next year? Health? Scandal?
What IS marriage, anyway?
The fact that gay marriage isn't at the forefront of this year's presidential campaign is only to the good -- unless you're gay and are no closer to having the same rights as hetero people have when you commit to the person you love than you did a year ago. The lack of focus on gay marriage is keeping wingnut homophobia under wraps, to be sure, but it's also pushed the issue to the back burner, while gay Americans are still being denied spousal rights when it comes to illness, homeownership, adoption, and a host of other things many of us take for granted.
I don't think anyone is advocating forcing churches to perform gay marriages, but if we separate out the church component of marriage from the state component, what we have is in effect a civil union.
When Mr. Brilliant and I married, we had a short secular ceremony done by a Presbyterian minister who was a friend of my parents. We were adamant about a secular ceremony, and he complied only because of the family friendship factor. No church or religious structure sanctions the institution in which we've been living for over 21 years, only the state of New Jersey, where the piece of paper is filed.
Religious traditions may have their reasons for not opening marriage to gays, but the state has none. So why is the state in the marriage business anyway?
Stephanie Coontz writes in the New York Times today:
It seems like a simple solution, doesn't it? So where's the problem?
I've said more than once that the reason we cannot acknowledge differences among groups in this country is because we seem unable to recognize differences without ranking them according to worth -- and traits or characteristics or benefits that white Christian males have always seem to rank higher on the worth scale than those of other groups, because it's white Christian males doing the ranking. This is why it's unlikely that we'll ever see the states getting out of the marriage business -- because if you take marriages like mine -- secular unions without children -- or marriage between gays and lesbians -- and call them civil unions, it won't be regarded by the Guys Who Make the Rules as the same as their Jeebus-sanctioned unions blessed by some guy in a robe. It'll be somehow second- or third-best and everyone will know that it's not the same.
But maybe that's what we need to do in order to show the utter ludicrousness of this unholy partnership (if you'll pardon the expression) that currently exists when state interests collide with belief in a story passed down through generations.
I don't think anyone is advocating forcing churches to perform gay marriages, but if we separate out the church component of marriage from the state component, what we have is in effect a civil union.
When Mr. Brilliant and I married, we had a short secular ceremony done by a Presbyterian minister who was a friend of my parents. We were adamant about a secular ceremony, and he complied only because of the family friendship factor. No church or religious structure sanctions the institution in which we've been living for over 21 years, only the state of New Jersey, where the piece of paper is filed.
Religious traditions may have their reasons for not opening marriage to gays, but the state has none. So why is the state in the marriage business anyway?
Stephanie Coontz writes in the New York Times today:
Using the existence of a marriage license to determine when the state should protect interpersonal relationships is increasingly impractical. Society has already recognized this when it comes to children, who can no longer be denied inheritance rights, parental support or legal standing because their parents are not married.
As Nancy Polikoff, an American University law professor, argues, the marriage license no longer draws reasonable dividing lines regarding which adult obligations and rights merit state protection. A woman married to a man for just nine months gets Social Security survivor’s benefits when he dies. But a woman living for 19 years with a man to whom she isn’t married is left without government support, even if her presence helped him hold down a full-time job and pay Social Security taxes. A newly married wife or husband can take leave from work to care for a spouse, or sue for a partner’s wrongful death. But unmarried couples typically cannot, no matter how long they have pooled their resources and how faithfully they have kept their commitments.
Possession of a marriage license is no longer the chief determinant of which obligations a couple must keep, either to their children or to each other. But it still determines which obligations a couple can keep — who gets hospital visitation rights, family leave, health care and survivor’s benefits. This may serve the purpose of some moralists. But it doesn’t serve the public interest of helping individuals meet their care-giving commitments.
Perhaps it’s time to revert to a much older marital tradition. Let churches decide which marriages they deem “licit.” But let couples — gay or straight — decide if they want the legal protections and obligations of a committed relationship.
It seems like a simple solution, doesn't it? So where's the problem?
I've said more than once that the reason we cannot acknowledge differences among groups in this country is because we seem unable to recognize differences without ranking them according to worth -- and traits or characteristics or benefits that white Christian males have always seem to rank higher on the worth scale than those of other groups, because it's white Christian males doing the ranking. This is why it's unlikely that we'll ever see the states getting out of the marriage business -- because if you take marriages like mine -- secular unions without children -- or marriage between gays and lesbians -- and call them civil unions, it won't be regarded by the Guys Who Make the Rules as the same as their Jeebus-sanctioned unions blessed by some guy in a robe. It'll be somehow second- or third-best and everyone will know that it's not the same.
But maybe that's what we need to do in order to show the utter ludicrousness of this unholy partnership (if you'll pardon the expression) that currently exists when state interests collide with belief in a story passed down through generations.
Lucy yanks the football away again
I'm not in the least bit surprised at this, are you?
Can't win, don't try. Taking your party philosophy from Bart Simpson isn't exactly the way to lead.
What Levin and the other cowardly Democrats in the Senate don't have the guts to say outright, though the fact that they are admitting that withdrawing funding "undercuts the military" alludes to it, is that we have an out-of-control, insane Commander-in-Chief of the military who WILL leave the troops in Iraq whether they are funded or not. And that being the case, why won't they just come out and say it?
Nov. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin said Democrats won't cut funding for U.S. troops in Iraq even as attempts to set a goal for a withdrawal are blocked by Republicans.
``We're going to fund the troops,'' Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said today on the ``Fox News Sunday'' program. ``No one's trying to undercut the military.''
Two Republican supporters of the current strategy in the war, Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona, accused Democrats of ignoring military commanders and the success brought about by the addition of about 30,000 U.S. troops earlier this year.
Democrats on Nov. 16 fell seven votes short of the 60 necessary to move forward with a $50 billion funding measure that would have set goals for removing U.S. troops from Iraq. With President George W. Bush threatening to veto any legislation that would put restrictions on the U.S. presence there, Democratic leaders said they may wait until next year to act on military funding requests. Bush is seeking about $190 billion to pay for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Levin said Senate Republicans opposed to setting any troop withdrawal goal are sending ``exactly the wrong message to the leaders of Iraq, that somehow or other, we're not going to put pressure on them to do what they promised to do.''
Can't win, don't try. Taking your party philosophy from Bart Simpson isn't exactly the way to lead.
What Levin and the other cowardly Democrats in the Senate don't have the guts to say outright, though the fact that they are admitting that withdrawing funding "undercuts the military" alludes to it, is that we have an out-of-control, insane Commander-in-Chief of the military who WILL leave the troops in Iraq whether they are funded or not. And that being the case, why won't they just come out and say it?
samedi 24 novembre 2007
I am an overnight sensation at 67
That's Rep. Barney Frank, who made a persuasive appeal on Charlie Rose's show last night for a promoting a liberal, populist agenda in '08. In Frank's talk about wage stagnation, it was pretty easy to make a connection between that & the scapegoating that fuels the immigration debate, although Rose didn't pick up on it. Just as well, probably. Scapegoating is the most reliable diversionary strategy in the reactionary playbook.
The video isn't up yet at Charlie Rose website. Democratic presidential candidates should be listening to Frank. He's hardly a radical leftist. He's endorsed Hillary.
Why did Democrats win in the 2006 congressional elections? Partly the war, and partly because the Republicans stressed the economy, in their words a very healthy and robust, growing economy. But reality is that 95% of the population has had no growth in real income over the last 6 years. When people feel they are not receiving their fair share of a steadily growing economy, and not just that but losing their investments, their pensions, and their health care, they start to ask where is all that growth going?Frank also hit on the need for unionization:
The greatest growth in jobs has been and will be in services, occupations that are not generally protected by unions. They should be unionized and can be because they cannot be outsourced; nobody in Mumbai can make the hotel beds in Peoria. That’s another big difference between the parties, Democrats support unions and Republicans try to destroy them.He means all the lower tier "dirty" jobs that are largely done by immigrants, legal or not. Republicans have not been able to explain just exactly who will be cleaning nursing home bathrooms if a substantial portion of the labor force disappears, or why unionizing these occupations would be a bad thing if they expect native-born Americans to be doing that work.
The video isn't up yet at Charlie Rose website. Democratic presidential candidates should be listening to Frank. He's hardly a radical leftist. He's endorsed Hillary.
vendredi 23 novembre 2007
I know it's 1912 all over again, but this is ridiculous
We really ARE repeating the so-called Gilded Age:
A small, historic cruise ship with an imperfect security record was listing dangerously after it struck ice in Antarctic waters today, with 154 passengers and crew members evacuated in a flotilla of lifeboats and inflatable boats, the cruise operator and coast guards said.
Late into the day, the small red and white ship - named the Explorer but known affectionately as "the little red ship" - was listing dangerously to starboard in steely gray waters below a low sky. The vessel - on an expedition to trace the doomed route of the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton - sent out a distress signal in the middle of the night (5:24 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time) after it began to take in water through "a fist-sized hole," said Dan Brown, a spokesman for G.A.P. Adventures, the Toronto-based tour operator that owns and operates the ship. He said the "running assumption" is that it hit an iceberg. Water began to trickle into a cabin and eventually flooded the engine room, causing the ship to lose power.
The accident occurred well north of the Antarctic Circle in an island chain that is part of the Antarctic peninsula, which juts close to South America and has seen sharp warming of temperatures in recent years.
As the satellite distress signal was being picked up by coast guard stations in Britain; Norfolk, Va.; and Ushuaia, Argentina, the ship's 100 passengers - 14 of them American, 24 British, 17 Dutch, 12 Canadian and a smattering of other nationalities- were awakened and told to don warm clothes and life preservers, said Mark Clark, a spokesman for Britain's Maritime and Coastguard Agency, which was one of the first authorities to receive the distress signal. They clambered down ladders on the ship's side to board lifeboats.
Clark said they were taken aboard a small research vessel, the National Geographic Endeavour, that was nearby, before they were transferred to a Norwegian cruise liner, the Nordnorge. But Brown said open lifeboats bobbed in the frigid waters for four hours before the Nordnorge could help them.
You KNOW what these poor folks were thinking about, right? Now aren't you glad they have lifeboat drills on cruise ships? And modern radios? And satellite distress signals instead of bottle rockets? Still...it seems that the basic methodology of handling a ship in distress has changed very little.
Glad everyone is OK.
It isn't just land lines, folks.
If you think that making cell phone calls will keep the government from sweeping up your call data, guess again:
Legal protections? You mean we still have any?
Federal officials are routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects, according to judges and industry lawyers.
In some cases, judges have granted the requests without requiring the government to demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe that a crime is taking place or that the inquiry will yield evidence of a crime. Privacy advocates fear such a practice may expose average Americans to a new level of government scrutiny of their daily lives.
Such requests run counter to the Justice Department's internal recommendation that federal prosecutors seek warrants based on probable cause to obtain precise location data in private areas. The requests and orders are sealed at the government's request, so it is difficult to know how often the orders are issued or denied.
The issue is taking on greater relevance as wireless carriers are racing to offer sleek services that allow cellphone users to know with the touch of a button where their friends or families are. The companies are hoping to recoup investments they have made to meet a federal mandate to provide enhanced 911 (E911) location tracking. Sprint Nextel, for instance, boasts that its "loopt" service even sends an alert when a friend is near, "putting an end to missed connections in the mall, at the movies or around town."
With Verizon's Chaperone service, parents can set up a "geofence" around, say, a few city blocks and receive an automatic text message if their child, holding the cellphone, travels outside that area.
"Most people don't realize it, but they're carrying a tracking device in their pocket," said Kevin Bankston of the privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Cellphones can reveal very precise information about your location, and yet legal protections are very much up in the air."
Legal protections? You mean we still have any?
We have learned nothing.
Enron. Tyco. The dot-com crash. No matter how many times we go through this, the business community never learns, and the public is bamboozled every time.
Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations of the "invisible hand" -- that an individual pursuing his own self-interest tends to also promote the good of his community as a whole. He believed the ridiculous notion that each individual maximizing revenue for himself maximizes the total revenue of society as a whole. It's not even saying "What's good for General Motors is what's good for the country." It's saying "I have a shitload of money. So what are you complaining about?", or in the vernacular, "I got mine and fuck you."
George W. Bush used to brag about the high percentage of people who were now homeowners. Now many of those "homeowners" are finding themselves losing those homes through foreclosure; with a stain on their credit records that will damage their ability to gain a toehold in the economy for years to come.
The business community couldn't have handled it better if they had set out to cut these people off at the knees and kicked them out of the middle class.
Paul Krugman, today:
In a direct sense, the carnage on Wall Street is all about the great housing slump.
This slump was both predictable and predicted. “These days,” I wrote in August 2005, “Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn’t seem like a sustainable lifestyle.” It wasn’t.
But even as the danger signs multiplied, Wall Street piled into bonds backed by dubious home mortgages. Most of the bad investments now shaking the financial world seem to have been made in the final frenzy of the housing bubble, or even after the bubble began to deflate.
In fact, according to Fortune, Merrill Lynch made its biggest purchases of bad debt in the first half of this year — after the subprime crisis had already become public knowledge.
Now the bill is coming due, and almost everyone — that is, almost everyone except the people responsible — is having to pay.
The losses suffered by shareholders in Merrill, Citigroup, Bear Stearns and so on are the least of it. Far more important in human terms are the hundreds of thousands if not millions of American families lured into mortgage deals they didn’t understand, who now face sharp increases in their payments — and, in many cases, the loss of their houses — as their interest rates reset.
And then there’s the collateral damage to the economy.
You still hear occasional claims that the subprime fiasco is no big deal. Even though the numbers keep getting bigger — some observers are now talking about $400 billion in losses — these losses are small compared with the total value of financial assets.
But bad housing investments are crippling financial institutions that play a crucial role in providing credit, by wiping out much of their capital. In a recent report, Goldman Sachs suggested that housing-related losses could force banks and other players to cut lending by as much as $2 trillion — enough to trigger a nasty recession, if it happens quickly.
Beyond that, there’s a pervasive loss of trust, which is like sand thrown in the gears of the financial system. The crisis of confidence is plainly visible in the market data: there’s an almost unprecedented spread between the very low interest rates investors are willing to accept on U.S. government debt — which is still considered safe — and the much higher interest rates at which banks are willing to lend to each other.
How did things go so wrong?
Part of the answer is that people who should have been alert to the dangers, and taken precautionary measures, instead blithely assured Americans that everything was fine, and even encouraged them to take out risky mortgages. Yes, Alan Greenspan, that means you.
But another part of the answer lies in what hasn’t happened to the men on that Fortune cover — namely, they haven’t been forced to give back any of the huge paychecks they received before the folly of their decisions became apparent.
Around 25 years ago, American business — and the American political system — bought into the idea that greed is good. Executives are lavishly rewarded if the companies they run seem successful: last year the chief executives of Merrill and Citigroup were paid $48 million and $25.6 million, respectively.
But if the success turns out to have been an illusion — well, they still get to keep the money. Heads they win, tails we lose.
Not only is this grossly unfair, it encourages bad risk-taking, and sometimes fraud. If an executive can create the appearance of success, even for a couple of years, he will walk away immensely wealthy. Meanwhile, the subsequent revelation that appearances were deceiving is someone else’s problem.
If all this sounds familiar, it should. The huge rewards executives receive if they can fake success are what led to the great corporate scandals of a few years back. There’s no indication that any laws were broken this time — but the public’s trust was nonetheless betrayed, once again.
It's interesting that Fortune only started caring about the carnage when it began hitting the banks. When the housing bubble was actually going on, and even when it started to collapse and middle-class Americans were being affected, the business community didn't care. But now that it's hitting the banks, and the people who make huge sums of money may not get their obscene bonuses this year, suddenly it's a problem. It's also interesting that the Fortune article doesn't even mention the compensation these guys receive for running these companies into the ground while middle-class Americans are ruined.
jeudi 22 novembre 2007
Preznit no giv turkee
He's really good at giving the troops "the least he can do":
President Bush, who visited troops in Iraq on Thanksgiving after the U.S. invasion in 2003, called several servicemen and women Thursday to extend best wishes and say it was “the least I can do.”
Three of those receiving holiday greetings are in the Army, two are Marines, three are in the Air Force, two serve in the Coast Guard and two in the Navy. The troops called are serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and aboard ship, said White House press secretary Dana Perino.
[snip]
The president asked for God’s blessings on the members of the military, Perino said. He said he was thankful to be commander in chief of the finest military ever assembled and told them, “calling you is the least I can do because I admire the military so much.”
The president was celebrating the holiday at Camp David with his wife, Laura, and their twin daughters, who have a birthday this weekend. Also present were daughter Jenna’s husband-to-be Henry Hager, some of the president’s brothers and sisters with their families, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Isn't it nice that the Bush family was able to get together today with all their children and their children's spouses and intendeds -- and not one of them is in Iraq today? Because after all, real patriotic Americans don't do the dirty work of fighting, right? They make show phone calls while the baby brides and the children who don't remember what their fathers look like and the parents who worry that their son won't get back from his third deployment alive eat their turkeys and try to pretend their lives are normal.
Thankful for kittehs
The Return of the Zombie Missing White Women
The lead-in stories on MSNBC at 10:00 AM today:
1) The arrests in the disappearance TWO FUCKING YEARS AGO of blonde nubile ripe luscious (sic)...and (sick) fantasy-object teenager Natalee Holloway
2) Some story about another guy named Peterson who probably killed his wife. She's missing too. She's white too.
3) A young black woman who's been missing for a week. I guess they took their bad press seriously last time a young black woman disappeared and they said nothing
4) 10 explosions in the Green Zone in Iraq today.
And we wonder how anyone can think Rudy Giuliani is somehow a leader?
Not even Keith Olbermann is enough to redeem MSNBC for crap journalism like this. Dan Abrams, when you fire that asshat Tucker Carlson, take yourself off the air, and put on a one-hour panel news show featuring Sam Seder, Marc Maron, and Rachel Maddow every night, then we can talk.
1) The arrests in the disappearance TWO FUCKING YEARS AGO of blonde nubile ripe luscious (sic)...and (sick) fantasy-object teenager Natalee Holloway
2) Some story about another guy named Peterson who probably killed his wife. She's missing too. She's white too.
3) A young black woman who's been missing for a week. I guess they took their bad press seriously last time a young black woman disappeared and they said nothing
4) 10 explosions in the Green Zone in Iraq today.
And we wonder how anyone can think Rudy Giuliani is somehow a leader?
Not even Keith Olbermann is enough to redeem MSNBC for crap journalism like this. Dan Abrams, when you fire that asshat Tucker Carlson, take yourself off the air, and put on a one-hour panel news show featuring Sam Seder, Marc Maron, and Rachel Maddow every night, then we can talk.
Onward Christian Soldiers
How do YOU like your tax dollars going to fund a Christian crusader's army? Well, that's what the U.S. military is becoming. If you think fears of a president regarding himself as God's Anointed Architect of the Rapture are overblown, go read this Mother Jones article on how the Christofascist Zombie Brigade is quietly and behind the scenes turning the U.S. military into armies for Christ.
Well, I guess that's the end of it then
If Rudy says so, that should be enough, right? Who needs oversight? Why do we need to know anything about Rudy's business dealings? Shouldn't we take his word for it? After all, he IS the Saint of 9/11, right?
Uh...maybe it's because of your long association and business partnership with that thug Bernie Kerik, who is now under federal indictment? Maybe it's because your firm represents a billionaire with ties to Kim Jong-Il? Maybe it's because your firm provides security for a state-run petroleum company in Qatar and your law firm opened an office in Doha? Maybe it's because:
Maybe it's because we've had enough secrecy in our presidents for one lifetime?
Rudy Giuliani has nothing to hide about his business dealings. Or, rather, he wants everyone to know that if the press finds what he's hiding, everyone will agree that everything's been "totally legal, totally ethical."
Every time reporters press Giuliani on his work with Giuliani Partners, his booming consultancy (Guiliani took home $4.1 million last year and his stake is worth anywhere from $5 million to $25 million), he's got the same answer: I'm not telling, but you should ask the firm. Then the reporter diligently calls over to Giuliani Partners to get the brush-off from its spokeswoman. That's what happened to The Wall Street Journal when the paper had questions about the firm's contract with Qatar. The Chicago Tribune got the same treatment when it asked about the firm's work for a developer's casino resort in Singapore.
When the AP asked him in an interview earlier this month if he'd disclose his client list, he responded that the business was "totally legal, totally ethical," "very ethical and law-abiding" and that there's "nothing for me to explain about it. We've acted honorably, decently." It was unfair to even ask, he said, employing the deft logic that since no one has found anything wrong, people shouldn't even ask the question:
Uh...maybe it's because of your long association and business partnership with that thug Bernie Kerik, who is now under federal indictment? Maybe it's because your firm represents a billionaire with ties to Kim Jong-Il? Maybe it's because your firm provides security for a state-run petroleum company in Qatar and your law firm opened an office in Doha? Maybe it's because:
Giuliani Partners and its units have repeatedly become entangled in petty deals that seem unworthy of someone with national aspirations. It has accepted fees from companies with over-the-counter penny stocks, made alliances that have gone nowhere or made little financial sense and engaged with businesses and individuals who have come under scrutiny by regulatory and law enforcement officials. Such associations are astonishing for this tough, Brooklyn-born prosecutor who nailed gangsters like Paul Castellano and white-collar felons like Marc Rich, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken. It's the sort of carelessness that suggests either poor judgment or inattention. "We do this very careful due diligence," says Hess. "We would never get involved in anything that is at all shady or risky or questionable."
Maybe it's because we've had enough secrecy in our presidents for one lifetime?
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