Saturday Reads

Posted: November 27, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 86 Comments

President Obama after being injured while playing basketball

Good Morning!! You probably heard the top story on all the commercial and cable networks last night. President Obama got a split lip from a flying elbow while playing basketball Friday, and needed 12 stitches.

The White House has identified the person whose elbow injured President Barack Obama during a pickup game of basketball on Friday as Rey Decerega, who works for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.

Decerega had better watch his back. He did manage to do a little public sucking up:

The White House also released a statement from Decerega, NBC News said: “I learned today the president is both a tough competitor and a good sport. I enjoyed playing basketball with him this morning. I’m sure he’ll be back out on the court again soon.”

Perhaps that will help. Good Luck Ray Decerega!

U.S. officials are freaking out over the upcoming release of diplomatic documents by Wikileaks. According to The Independent:

Frantic behind the scenes wrangling was under way last night as US officials tried to stem the fallout from the expected release of up to three million confidential diplomatic communiques by the Wikileaks website.

Over the past 48 hours, American ambassadors have had the unenviable task of informing some of the country’s strongest allies that a series of potentially embarrassing cables are likely to be released in the coming days….

Downing Street yesterday confirmed that the US ambassador in London had already briefed the Government on what might be contained in the files. Similar meetings were also reported in Turkey, Israel, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Australia.

[MABlue here]
abc has more on the “Big Freakout”. there must really be some unsavory stuff in that report. Apparently, most of the stuff comes from Bradly Manning.
Bracing for WikiLeaks’ Release of Diplomatic Documents, State Department Warns Allies

Senior U.S. officials warn that the next round of WikiLeaks documents would be considerably more damaging than the two previous WikiLeaks document dumps.

“This is outrageous and dangerous,” a senior U.S. official told ABC News. “This puts at risk the ability of the United States to conduct foreign policy. Period. End of paragraph.”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff also weighed in today, telling CNN he hoped these kinds of leaks will eventually be plugged.

According to op-ed commentator Jerome Taylor: This is a public airing of Washington’s dirty linen

What makes the release of diplomatic cables so potentially explosive is that they could cover a vast spectrum of information that America and her allies would like to keep secret. Cables are the diplomatic equivalent of dirty linen that no country wants to see aired in public. “Diplomatic cables might talk about political instability inside the country – there could be information about secret deals, weapons agreements, talks with dissidents, all sorts of things,” explains Yossi Mekelberg, an expert on Israel-US relations at Chatham House. “But cables are not policy papers. When I read cables I’m often surprised at how gossipy they can be.”

The informal nature of such missives has the potential to cause some serious red faces in capitals around the world.

The U.S. has now been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Union was.

The last Red Army troops left Feb. 15, 1989, driven out after nine years and 50 days by the U.S.-backed Afghan fighters known as mujahedin, or holy warriors. Ragtag yet ferocious, they were so spectrally elusive that the Soviet forces called them dukhi, or ghosts. A fitting term, perhaps, for a country that has been called “the graveyard of empires.”

Aren’t you proud to be an American? And our empire hasn’t even collapsed like the USSR’s–yet.

And history twists back on itself. In the Soviets’ war, the United States armed and aided the mujahedin; in this one, Russia is increasingly cooperating with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Moscow agreed this month to let the Western military alliance take armored vehicles through its territory. Last month, Russian counternarcotics agents went along on a joint NATO-Afghan drug raid.

It’s all so pointless…and yet it’s destroying us.

And what about Korea? Is our Nobel Peace Prize-winning President going to get us involved there too? It doesn’t look good:

The joint military exercises the US will conduct with South Korea’s navy on Sunday, off the Korean peninsula in the Yellow Sea, are taking on added significance as a message-bearer to North Korea, following Pyongyang’s shelling of the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong on Tuesday.

The Pentagon is quick to point out that the naval exercises are “defensive in nature” and that similar events have been held frequently. But US commanders also acknowledge that this joint exercise is a pointed reminder to the North of US military strength and America’s allegiance with South Korea. The US announced the exercises after the artillery barrage of Yeonpyeong, home to South Korean military bases and a small civilian population.

George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen has an article in the Washington Post in which he argues that the TSA’s naked body scans and “enhanced pat down” searches are unconstitutional. Interestingly, he cites a 2006 decision by then circuit court judge Samuel Alito:

…Alito stressed that screening procedures must be both “minimally intrusive” and “effective” – in other words, they must be “well-tailored to protect personal privacy,” and they must deliver on their promise of discovering serious threats. Alito upheld the practices at an airport checkpoint where passengers were first screened with walk-through magnetometers and then, if they set off an alarm, with hand-held wands. He wrote that airport searches are reasonable if they escalate “in invasiveness only after a lower level of screening disclose[s] a reason to conduct a more probing search.”

As currently used in U.S. airports, the new full-body scanners fail all of Alito’s tests. First, as European regulators have recognized, they could be much less intrusive without sacrificing effectiveness. For example, Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, the European airport that employs body-scanning machines most extensively, has incorporated crucial privacy and safety protections. Rejecting the “backscatter” machines used in the United States, which produce revealing images of the body and have raised concerns about radiation, the Dutch use scanners known as ProVision ATD, which employ radio waves with far lower frequencies than those used in common hand-held devices. If the software detects contraband or suspicious material under a passenger’s clothing, it projects an outline of that area of the body onto a gender-neutral, blob-like human image, instead of generating a virtually naked image of the passenger. The passenger can then be taken aside for secondary screening.

Rosen concludes:

…there’s good reason to believe that the machines are not effective in detecting the weapons they’re purportedly designed to identify. For U.S. courts, that’s yet another consideration that could make them constitutionally unreasonable.

Broadly, U.S. courts have held that “routine” searches of all travelers can be conducted at airports as long as they don’t threaten serious invasions of privacy. By contrast, “non-routine” searches, such as strip-searches or body-cavity searches, require some individualized suspicion – that is, some cause to suspect a particular traveler of wrongdoing. Neither virtual strip-searches nor intrusive pat-downs should be considered “routine,” and therefore courts should rule that neither can be used for primary screening.

The only question is whether the Supreme Court will stand up for individual rights or continue to accede to the executive branch’s demands for more Presidential power.

I’m going to end with a funny, but pretty realistic, satirical piece from The Onion: Frustrated Obama Sends Nation Rambling 75,000-Word E-Mail

The e-mail, which was titled “A couple things,” addressed countless topics in a dense, stream-of-consciousness rant that often went on for hundreds of words without any punctuation or paragraph breaks. Throughout, the president expressed his aggravation on subjects as disparate as the war in Afghanistan, the sluggish economic recovery, his live-in mother-in-law, China’s undervalued currency, Boston’s Logan Airport, and tort reform.

According to its timestamp, the e-mail was sent at 4:26 a.m.

“Hey Everyone,” read the first line of the president’s note, which at 27 megabytes proved too large for millions of Americans’ in-boxes. “I’m writing to you because I need to clear up some important issues. First and foremost, I want to say that this has nothing to do with the midterm elections because I was going to send an e-mail regardless of the outcome. However, I guess one could argue that, in the end, the midterms are an important measure of a president’s overall success, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call the results a referendum. Legislatively, I feel I’ve had a lot of success that I think history will judge quite favorably. I mean, pretty much every modern president has seen his party lose seats during a midterm, you know?

Go read the whole thing. It’s really funny, in an lolsob kind of way. Oh…and Fox News published the Onion story on their website without identifying it as satire.

[MABlue’s Saturday picks] It’s all about real life crime and investigation.
From Vanity Fair: The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went cold. But when the victim sued the Airport Regency, the hotel’s private detective, Ken Brennan, became obsessed with the case: how had the 21-year-old blonde disappeared from her room, unseen by security cameras? The author follows Brennan’s trail as the P.I. worked a chilling hunch that would lead him to other states, other crimes, and a man nobody else suspected.

Apparently, the Chandra Levy case is not resolved: Reasonable doubt in the Chandra Levy case

How reliable is the conviction of Ingmar Guandique for the 2001 murder, when the key evidence is a disputed prison confession?

There’s a debate going on about the goodness of religion between Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens. By all accounts, Hitch won the 1st round yesterday.
Hitchens defeats Blair in Canadian religion debate

What are you reading this morning?

Simpson Strikes Again

Posted: November 26, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Surreality, Team Obama, The Bonus Class, WE TOLD THEM SO | Tags: , , , , , , | 37 Comments

Alan Simpson, Co-chair of President Obama’s Catfood Commission has opened his mouth again, attacking seniors:

…because they are unhappy with his ideas for reducing the deficit by cutting Social Security benefits while reducing corporate taxes.

“I’ve never had any nastier mail or [been in a] more difficult position in my life,” Simpson told Jeremy Pelzer at the Casper Star-Tribune. “Just vicious. People I’ve known, relatives [saying], ‘You son of a bitch. How could you do this?'”

[….]

“We had the greatest generation,” Simpson said. “I think this is the greediest generation.”

Maybe you all have heard about this already–I wasn’t following the news too closely yesterday–but I just had to frontpage it. The nerve of this man! And why isn’t President Obama responding to his ugly slurs of elderly people who paid into Social Security for their entire lives? Why should we take cuts in Social Security so that rich people like Simpson can take more money for themselves?

From TPM:

The problem, Simpson explained, is the “polarized” country we live in, and the media that exemplifies it. He then to reeled off the media figures ruining America for deficit commissioners like him.

“You don’t want to listen to the right and the left — the extremes,” he said. “You don’t want to listen to Keith Olbermann and Rush Babe [Limbaugh] and Rachel Minnow [sic] or whatever that is, and Glenn Beck. They’re entertainers. They couldn’t govern their way out of a paper sack — from the right or the left. But they get paid a lot of money from you and advertisers — thirty, fifty million a year — to work you over and get you juiced up with emotion, fear, guilt, and racism. Emotion, fear, guilt, and racism.

Simpson refers to Rachel Maddow as “that.” Is that because she’s a lesbian or because she’s a woman or both?

At FDL, Jon Walker writes: Is Simpson an Obama-Appointed Bully or Sexist?

While I don’t know former Republican Senator Alan Simpson personally and can’t say definitively whether or not he is a sexist, his behavior says a lot about him. He’s repeatedly behaved and spoken in a manner completely consistent with sexists who have strong disdain for intelligent women. His schoolyard attempts at bullying women, the strange terms he uses, and his incredibly childish attempts at demeaning women who dare criticize with name calling are all trademarks of a sexist.

Walker ends with this:

I could care less about Simpson’s behavior if it weren’t for the fact that President Obama appointed him co-chair of the bipartisan President’s Deficit Commission. It’s disconcerting that Obama tolerates this sexist behavior. Why would he appoint Simpson and stay silent as Simpson used the perch Obama gave him to lash out in such a childish manner and pointedly against women?

The fact that President Obama has not yet countered any of the ugly words that have come out of Simpson’s mouth strongly suggests that Obama himself agrees with Simpson’s views. And Obama dares to call himself a Democrat?

But should Jon Walker or anyone else really be surprised? Obama is the same person who during the primaries in 2008 characterized Hillary Clinton’s experiences as First Lady as drinking tea with foreign ambassadors. He’s the same guy who suggested that Hillary’s “claws come out” if you “challenge the status quo,” and that when Hillary “is feeling down” she “periodically launches attacks.”

No one should be surprised at Obama supporting attacks on the elderly or gays either. Here at Skydancing, we can easily cite the many previous examples of President Obama’s disrespect for seniors and gays.

Alan Simpson is simply saying aloud in very crude language what the President of the United States apparently believes in his heart–if he has one.

If the Turkey didn’t put you to sleep …

Posted: November 26, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: The Great Recession, U.S. Economy | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Economics doesn’t take holidays.  It’s probably why we economists are so grim.  Just in case you need a good nap, here’s some of my pointy head friends with bow ties discussing things economic.  I was going to try to spare you out of holiday cheer, but Mark Thoma reeled me in and now I must share.

I’ve mentioned recently how absolutely baffled I am by the number of “conservative”  (i.e. radical) Republicans who keep buying into economic fallacies that even conservative (i.e. authentically conservative) economists can’t support.  I mentioned Nobel Prize winning and father of the Monetarists Milton Friedman’s huge study on the Great Depression.  His thesis was that very poor Fed policy made the Great Depression.  In 2002, Bernake even agreed and apologized to him for the FED’s errant ways. Friedman was a consummate free marketer and wrote pop books and pop Newsweek columns during his heyday as a conservative icon. I’m sure he would not be suffering these fools were he alive today.

Thoma points to two recent columns by two former Reagan Team economists.  One article is from Martin Feldstein who is probably the closest thing remaining to Milton Friedman in terms of conservative, free market, economic thought.  The other is from Bruce Bartlett who was one of the fathers of Supply Side economics during the Reagan years but has since repented.  He’s really adapted the Friedman statement “We’re all Keynesians now”.  Both economists are intent on stopping this current batch of policy nincompoops from recreating The Great Depression.

The first Thoma thread references Feldstein who writes on the QE2 at Project Syndicate.  Feldstein was Chair of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors and was President of the NBER.  You  may recall that NBER dates business cycles for the country.  I want to hit his bottom line first so those of you that are using this for nap material can see that it’s ludicrous to think the QE2 is wild-eyed and out-there policy experimentation.

In short, the Fed’s policy of quantitative easing is likely to accelerate the rise of the renminbi – an outcome that is in China’s interest no less than it is in America’s. But don’t expect US officials to proclaim that goal openly, or Chinese officials to express their gratitude.

China is experiencing inflation.  We are experiencing deflation.  The reason this is good for both countries is that it will offset each of these pressures.  Feldstein explains the goal of the QE2 in terms of US policy first.  I’ll cover that quote.  You’ll need to go read the explanation for the China side of the equation too.

The United States Federal Reserve’s policy of “quantitative easing” is reducing the value of the dollar relative to other currencies that have floating exchange rates. But what does the new Fed policy mean for one of the most important exchange rates of all – that of the renminbi relative to the dollar and to other currencies?

The effect of quantitative easing on exchange rates between the dollar and the floating-rate currencies is a predictable result of the Fed’s plan to increase the supply of dollars. The rise in the volume of dollars is causing the value of each dollar to fall relative to these currencies, whose volume has remained constant or risen more slowly.

The Fed’s goal may be to stimulate domestic activity in the US and to reduce the risk of deflation. But, intended or not, the increased supply of dollars also affects the international value of the dollar. American investors who sell bonds to the Fed will want to diversify the dollars that they receive from it. One form of that diversification is to buy foreign bonds and stocks, driving up the value of those currencies.

The result of this move will be to make our exports more competitive abroad and to make every one else’s exports–including those countries that have pegged their currencies to the dollar in an unfair manner–less competitive. We are simply turning the tables on the beggar-thy-neighbor growth policy China and others have adopted. The Fed is doing this because there is no will on the part of domestic policy makers to stimulate the demand in our country for consumers or government.  There are 4 major parts of GDP.  If fiscal policy doesn’t stimulate Consumption or Government demand, then there remain Investment and Exports.  Investment is the least reliable form of demand and is rather small compared to the rest of the economy.  The Fed is trying to tackle the  aggregate demand shortage as best it can in response to the laws that compel it to act when unemployment is high.

Which brings me to the Bruce Bartlett thread.  Bartlett has a piece today up at The Fiscal Times called ‘Starve the Beast: Just Bull, not Good Economics’.  As some one who is currently suffering from a governor who has selectively adopted the policy as a path to the White House, I personally can tell you that it is very much Bull and causes a lot of undue suffering.  It is ideology chosen over fact, logic, and above all, compassion.  Bartlett goes straight to the heart of Voodoo Economics by using data to show that Dubya  Bush’s embrace of  of tax cuts in his first term as president did nothing to further economic growth and did everything to drive us in to unnecessary deficit spending.

It ought to be obvious from the experience of the George W. Bush administration that cutting taxes has no effect whatsoever even on restraining spending, let alone actually bringing it down. Just to remind people, Bush inherited a budget surplus of 1.3 percent of the gross domestic product from Bill Clinton in fiscal year 2001. The previous year, revenues had been 20.6 percent of GDP, spending had been 18.2 percent, and there had been a budget surplus of 2.4 percent.

When Bush took office in January 2001, we were already well into fiscal year 2001, which began on Oct. 1, 2000. He immediately pushed for a huge tax cut, which Congress enacted. In 2002 and 2003, Bush demanded still more tax cuts, even as the economy showed no signs of having been stimulated by his previous tax cuts. The tax cuts and the slow economy caused revenues to evaporate. By 2004, they were down to 16.1 percent of GDP. The postwar average is about 18.5 percent of GDP.

Spending did not fall in response to the STB decimation of federal revenues; in fact, spending rose from 18.2 percent of GDP in 2001 to 19.6 percent in 2004, and would continue to rise to 20.7 percent of GDP in 2008. Insofar as the Bush administration was a test of STB, the evidence clearly shows not only that the theory doesn’t work at all, but is in fact perverse.

There is nothing better than an addict who has fought their demons and comes out the other side to explain exactly why the demon should die.  Bartlett succinctly explains why the Republicans continue to support the ideology and the drivel despite evidence that everything they believe is quite false.

Nor was Bush’s budgetary profligacy limited to programs that could be justified, however loosely, on national security grounds. As I detailed last week, he and a Republican Congress created a massive new entitlement program, Medicare Part D, to buy the votes of seniors and buy themselves reelection in 2004. Among those voting for this monstrosity were many Republicans still in Congress today who are unjustly considered to be staunch fiscal conservatives, including incoming Speaker of the House John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan.

Because of its obvious ridiculousness, one seldom hears conservatives say openly that tax cuts automatically reduce spending. But it still underpins the entire Republican budget strategy — tax cuts never have to be paid for, no meaningful spending cuts are ever put forward, earmarks and foreign aid are said to be the primary sources of budget deficits, and similar absurdities.

Both of these men have written tractable–albeit, tough–reads on policy decisions that people really need to understand.  I know there is a tendency this time of year to wallow in football games, shopping binges, and short term feel good embrace of childhood memories, but really, there is a lame duck congress in session and an incoming group of Congressional morons with a President in office who wants to play Let’s Make a Deal with them.

If you can awake from tryptophan dreams long enough to read these two articles thoroughly, please do so.  We can’t afford any more Voodoo policy mistakes.

Black Friday Reads

Posted: November 26, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , | 63 Comments
Good Morning!

Well, be thankful for the food in your belly!!!  Did you move a size up this morning?  According to the U.N. and the NYT the  ‘World is “Dangerously close” to a Food Crisis’.

Global grain production will tumble by 63 million metric tons this year, or 2 percent over all, mainly because of weather-related calamities like the Russian heat wave and the floods in Pakistan, the United Nations estimates in its most recent report on the world food supply. The United Nations had previously projected that grain yields would grow 1.2 percent this year.

The fall in production puts the world “dangerously close” to a new food crisis, Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, said at a news conference last week.

Rising demand and lower-than-expected yields caused stocks of some grains to fall sharply and generated high volatility in world food markets in the latter half of the year. Prices for some commodities are approaching levels not seen since 2007 and 2008, when food shortages prompted riots around the world.

Got that backyard farm started yet?

At the moment, the only prices that appear to be rising on the national level are gas prices.  The Dallas Fed breaks down inflation as measured by the PCE for you.

Apart from yet another sharp increase in the price of gasoline, inflationary pressures in October were as muted as we’ve seen in quite some time. Both the core PCE price index and the trimmed mean registered essentially zero inflation rates in October, each posting annualized rates of just 0.1 percent.

The 12-month core rate fell 0.3 percentage points to 0.9 percent, and the 12-month trimmed mean rate, which had been fairly stable around 1 percent for the past six months, ticked down to 0.8 percent.

To be sure, the headline PCE price index did increase at a 2.0 percent annualized rate in October, but about 90 percent of that gain is accounted for by the price index for gasoline, which jumped 4.7 percent from September to October (or about a 73 percent annualized rate of increase).

So, gasoline aside, are we seeing a downshift in the underlying trend in consumer price inflation? While today’s release certainly points in that direction, one never wants to make too much out of any one month’s numbers. In inflation updates over the past few months, we’ve stated our view that the underlying trend in inflation was stable, albeit at an extremely low level. That view evolved only with the accumulation of several months worth of data. Going forward, we’ll again be looking for patterns that are sustained over multiple months worth of data.

They have a list of things that “leading progressives” are thankful for over at New Deal 2.0. You just have to go look.  Really.  I mean REALLY.   I’m going to stick with Dean Baker Bill Black, and James K. Galbraith  because economists have to stick together. You can  figure out what to do with the media personalities on your own.

“I’m grateful that we won’t have Larry Summers to kick around anymore.” – James K. Galbraith, author of The Predator State and Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin

…

“I am grateful to Social Security, which made it possible for our family to avoid economic disaster when my father died of a second heart attack when he was 41. I am grateful to a nation in which I could be a serial whistle blower, exposing the misconduct of two presidential employees, the Speaker of the House James Wright, and the ‘Keating Five’ — and survive. And I am grateful to the Ancients, who faced a vastly crueler world and recognized that the key was for each of us to try to repair it, and whose advice has led generations to make those repairs, rather than accepting cruelty, greed, exploitation, and indifference as the natural state. I am thankful for all who came before and worked to make things better.” – Bill Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and white-collar criminologist

…

“I am thankful for the Web. It is an enormous potential equalizer in giving progressives without money comparable input into public debate as the right-wingers with lots of money. In this vein, the Huffington Post’s webhits are going up. The Washington Post’s circulation is going down.” – Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research

Here’s some interesting news on Net Neutrality from The Hill.

Seeking to weaken potential regulations, AT&T is actively working to complicate the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) renewed effort to broker a compromise on net neutrality.

Industry and Hill sources said that an AT&T official made public last week that the agency has quietly undertaken a new round of negotiation. The sources stressed that they had obtained this information through AT&T channels.

The delicate FCC effort is aimed at resolving one of the most fractious issues in tech policy. The hope was to quietly consult with industry and public interest stakeholders while insulating the negotiations from the noisy politicking the question stirs on both sides.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski invited industry and public interest sources to help shape a possible compromise, giving AT&T a major seat at the table. Public advocates are concerned about how much Genachowski appears to be listening to AT&T, with one saying he has practically given them “veto powers.”

Ex parte filings show that AT&T officials consulted frequently with the agency this month. Policy executive Jim Cicconi met with Genachowski’s office the day before the new net neutrality effort became public.

Politico had a story up about lesbian Air Force Major Margaret Witt who was discharged under DADT.   This is another incidence involving the Obama administration’s legal stance on DADT which appears at odds with what the President says.  The Air Force may seek stay of order to block Witt’s reinstatement.  Her case is being followed by the ACLU.

“We foresee no problem about Major Witt getting reinstated,” Doug Honig of the ACLU’s Washington state chapter said Wednesday. “Once we discuss this with the Air Force, present evidence meeting the nursing hours requirements, and Major Witt passes the physical – all of which will happen – we would be shocked if the Air Force were suddenly to seek to stay her reinstatement.”

The Obama administration’s legal stance is likely to come as a disappointment to gay rights advocates, who took the decision not to seek a stay as an indication that the administration may no longer be mounting a full-court press to uphold the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy written into law by Congress in 1993. Obama has pledged to repeal the law, but the Justice Department has continued to defend it, citing a tradition of Executive Branch defense of most Congressional enactments.

Regardless of whether a stay is sought, the Justice Department is appealing Leighton’s ruling, just as it is appealing another judge’s recent order that the “don’t ask” policy is unconstitutional on its face.

HuffPo is reporting that Elizabeth Warren convinced President Obama to stop the bill that would make foreclosures easier and enshrine robosigning into law.  Let’s hope she’s replaced Larry Summers as the economic ear of the President.

The decisive way in which she labored behind the scenes to stymie a bill that would have eased requirements for documentation in the foreclosure process underscores how her arrival has altered the administration’s relationship with major banks.

The bill, which passed both houses of Congress and awaited President Obama’s signature to become law, essentially would have compelled notaries to accept out-of-state notarizations, regardless of the rules in those states.

State officials across the country–who have been pursuing probes looking into wrongdoing within the foreclosure process– feared that those jurisdictions with lax standards could have become hotbeds for foreclosure documentation fraud. Lenders and mortgage companies could have used those states as central clearing houses to produce bogus foreclosure paperwork, and then export those documents to other states with more stringent regulations–an expedient bypass around the strictures.

South Korea has ordered troops to move to a “front line island” and the U.S. sends an air craft carrier to the Yellow Sea.

Despite warnings from North Korea that any new provocation would be met with more attacks, Washington and Seoul pushed ahead with plans for military drills starting Sunday involving a nuclear-powered U.S. aircraft carrier in waters south of this week’s skirmish.

The exercises will likely anger the North — the regime cited South Korean drills this week as the impetus behind its attack — but the president said the South could little afford to abandon such preparation now.

“We should not ease our sense of crisis in preparation for the possibility of another provocation by North Korea,” spokesman Hong Sang-pyo quoted President Lee Myung-bak as saying. “A provocation like this can recur any time.”

At an emergency meeting in Seoul, Lee ordered reinforcements for about 4,000 troops on the tense Yellow Sea islands, along with top-level weaponry and upgraded rules of engagement that would create a new category of response when civilian areas are targeted.

Great!  Yet another excuse for more military spending!

I’m still trying to recover from three plus days of not having potable water.  If you hear a scream emanating from a laundry room some where south of you, it’s undoubtedly me.   Thank goodness I decided to eat out for Turkey Day!!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

The Wikileaks begin: breaking news and live blogging

Posted: November 25, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News, Diplomacy Nightmares | Tags: | 46 Comments

Some of the Wikileak documents related to U.S. diplomacy are begining to show up in Newspapers throughout the world.  I just read in the Jerusalem Post that there is evidence that Turkish citizens smuggled weapons to al-Qaida.

Wikileaks is planning to release files that show Turkey has helped al-Qaida in Iraq, according to London-based daily Al-Hayat. The newspaper also reported that the US helped the PKK, a Kurdish rebel organization.

One of the documents, a US military report, reportedly charges Turkey with failing to control its borders, because Iraqi citizens residing in Turkey provided al-Qaida with supplies to build bombs, guns and ammunition.

Minkoff Minx found this in the Ottawa Star.

Canada’s official lips were sealed tight on the matter, except to confirm dual overtures from Washington — David Jacobson, the U.S. ambassador to Ottawa, gave a head’s up to Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, while the Canadian embassy in D.C. is “currently engaging” with the State Department.

Sources in Ottawa acknowledged on background that even after the U.S. briefings the scope of what’s coming remains unclear. “We are not privy to the full contents of documents which may be leaked,” foreign affairs spokesperson Alain Cacchione said in an email to the Star.

I’m watching tweet after tweet of status updates from Wikileaks like this one:

wikileaks WikiLeaks
Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd briefed by Hillary Clinton on Wikileaks, according to SMH
The last country mentioned is Norway. I’ve seen Canada, Denmark,  and even the NYT being briefed!!  I’m beginning to feel like the “War against Terrorism” has met its Daniel Ellsberg.
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