Monday Reads
Posted: December 6, 2010 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: unemployment, Wikileaks 70 Commentsgood morning!! 
There’s another Wikileaks release on BP, Gitmo, and BOA on deck. I’m dying to get my hands on the BP and the Bank of America data drop. Right now, they’ve been sorted out to various people to publish should Assange disappear or meet some other bad end. This has all the stuff of a real good IRL thriller and I’m just gleeful about it all.
That’s probably going to hit some time this week and will shoot to the top of the news.
The military papers on Guantanamo Bay, yet to be published, believed to have been supplied by Bradley Manning, who was arrested in May. Other documents that Assange is confirmed to possess include an aerial video of a US airstrike in Afghanistan that killed civilians, BP files and Bank of America documents.
We will do a live blog as the information becomes available. You can also find a teaser on Fox News. Additionally, there’s an interesting bit up at the UK Guardian on the Chinese Government hacking Google. Both of these come via Memeorandum.
The hacking of Google that forced the search engine to withdraw from mainland China was orchestrated by a senior member of the communist politburo, according to classified information sent by US diplomats to Hillary Clinton’s state department in Washington.
The leading politician became hostile to Google after he searched his own name and found articles criticising him personally, leaked cables from the US embassy in Beijing say.
That single act prompted a politically inspired assault on Google, forcing it to “walk away from a potential market of 400 million internet users” in January this year, amid a highly publicised row about internet censorship.
The explosive allegation that the attack on Google came from near the top of the Communist party has never been made public until now. The politician allegedly collaborated with a second member of the politburo in an attempt to force Google to drop a link from its Chinese-language search engine to its uncensored google.com version.
There’s more interesting tidbits up at the Daily Mail.
UK firm Rolls-Royce lost out on a £200million contract to supply helicopter engines to Spain after the U.S. lobbied Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero in Madrid. The deal was eventually signed by American company GE.
And European Union President Herman Van Rompuy told a U.S. ambassador that European troops were still in Afghanistan only ‘out of deference’ to America.
I’m sure the mothers and fathers and wives and husbands and sons and daughters of those dead European Troops certainly appreciate the ‘deference’ statement. Whoa!
Here’s a really interesting link at The Economist. I have to admit that I have a fairly limited attention span for management professors since I’m of the school that says you either got it or your don’t, but Henry Mintzberg who is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University had me reading from the headline forward.
Too many corporate “leaders” have trashed their enterprises, taking with them America’s legendary sense of enterprise. The scorekeepers cannot fix that. To understand the basis for such a sweeping claim, add up the stories you have heard about the goings on in so many of the largest American enterprises. Then you may get it.
Get it, not just about the scandal of executive compensation, but also about its destructive consequences. Any chief executive who accepts a compensation package that so singles him or herself out from everyone else in the company is not a leader. Leadership is about conveying signals that engage other people in the company. How many leaders are left among America’s large enterprises? There is an Israeli expression that a fish rots from the head down. So too does an enterprise.
Many economists and journalists see the CEO as the be-all and end-all of corporate success. The worst CEOs believe it. They thus allow themselves to be paid accordingly to “shareholder value”, which is a fancy term for increases in the price of a company’s stock.
There are two basic ways to increase the price of the stock: by exploring and by exploiting. Explorer companies achieve this by doing better research, making improved products, and offering superior service. This is hard work, and it takes time. Exploiter companies have it easier: they depreciate the brand, cut investments in research, confuse the customers with bamboozle pricing, and stay as close as possible to the letter of the law while lobbying politicians to reduce its level. These behaviors can raise the price of the stock long enough for the executives to cash in their bonuses and run, as have so many in the large American companies.
It’s typical management professor talk, but the point that he makes that CEOS are way too often part of the problem and not part of the future or solutions is true. They are still way over compensated for wrecking companies.
So, here’s a suggestion from the NYT: Cleopatra’s Guide to Good Governance. Hey, I’m willing to look at Cleopatra as
a role model. Cleopatra as the ultimate central banker?
Egypt’s economic affairs were dismal when Cleopatra ascended to the throne. She devalued the currency by a third. She issued no gold and critically lowered the value of her kingdom’s silver. And she ushered in a great innovation: she introduced coins of various denominations. In an early prefiguring of paper currency, the markings rather than the metal content determined their value. A coin might feel light in the hand, but if Cleopatra said it was worth 80 drachmae, it was worth 80 drachmae. The arrangement was both lucrative to her and encouraged an export-driven economy.
Oh, well, back to the present and our central banker. I’m not sure if you caught the 60 Minutes segment on Ben Bernanke, but if you didn’t, here’s the transcript. You will also find taped interviews at the site. Here’s Bernanke’s take on employment.
Chairman Ben Bernanke: The unemployment rate is just not going down. Unemployment is just about the same as it was in mid-2009, when the economy started growing. So, that’s a major concern. And it looks that at current rates, that it may take some years before the unemployment rate is back down to more normal levels.
Scott Pelley: We lost about eight million jobs from the peak. And I wonder how many years you think it will be before we get all those jobs back?
Bernanke: Well, you’re absolutely right. Between the peak and the end of last year, we lost eight and a half million jobs. We’ve only gotten about a million of them back so far. And that doesn’t even account the new people coming into the labor force. At the rate we’re going, it could be four, five years before we are back to a more normal unemployment rate. Somewhere in the vicinity of say five or six percent.
Four or five years. And Bernanke told “60 Minutes” something else that makes that even more painful.
Bernanke: The other aspect of the unemployment rate that really concerns me is that more than 40 percent of the unemployed have been unemployed for six months or more. And that’s unusually high. And people who are unemployed for such a long time, their skills erode. Their attachment to the labor force diminishes and it may be a very, very long time before they find themselves back in a normal working position.
Bernanke seems to be about the only person within the beltway who cares about the level of unemployment This bit from Bloomberg indicates he’s willing to take more steps because he believes that those in charge of fiscal policy will not do the right thing.
Bernanke and other Fed officials have defended the central bank’s announcement that it will purchase $75 billion in Treasury securities a month through June to prop up a recovery so weak that only 39,000 jobs were created in November. The unemployment rate last month rose to 9.8 percent, the highest level since April, the Labor Department said on Dec. 3, three days after the Bernanke interview.
The economy, which grew 2.5 percent in the third quarter, is so weak that Bernanke said growth could fizzle out without support. “It’s very close to the border,” he said. “It takes about 2.5 percent growth just to keep unemployment stable and that’s about what we’re getting. We’re not very far from the level where the economy is not self-sustaining.”
I’m not sure people know exactly how odd it is for a FED chair to say this and what it means to say that the “we’re not very far from a level where the economy is not self-sustaining”, but let me tell you it’s rare and alarming. Washington is playing parlor games and our lives are their pinatas.
In some ways it seems we’re very much on the verge of a much worse recession because things are no longer emanating from the financial markets.
Two Republicans, Tennessee Senator Bob Corker and Indiana Representative Mike Pence, last month proposed removing the Fed’s maximum employment mandate to focus the central bank on stable prices alone. Corker plans to introduce such legislation next year.
Bernanke said fears of inflation are “overstated” and that keeping consumer prices under control isn’t a diminished priority for the Fed.
The rate of inflation has slowed this year, with the personal consumption expenditures index, excluding food and energy, rising at a 0.9 percent annual pace in October, the slowest in 50 years. Including all items, the index increased 1.3 percent.
Without action by the central bank, the economy might have tipped into a period of deflation, or a prolonged drop in prices, Bernanke said.
I cannot emphasize enough that no matter what these people say to appeal to your inner demons, there is no problem with inflation and we desperately need stimulus for demand. Sustaining tax cuts at the very high levels will not do it because rich people simply do not spend money like poor people do. Additionally, more foreclosures will not help the housing market and loss of jobs will not help the economies of states. I cannot believe that after so much information coming from the last 60 years that we still have to have these conversations.
Here’s an interesting piece from Medical Daily: People with a university degree fear death less than those at a lower literacy level. Since I’m not the psychologist on board at Sky Dancing. I’ll leave the explanations to Dr. BostonBoomer.
People with a university degree fear death less than those at a lower literacy level. In addition, fear of death is most common among women than men, which affects their children’s perception of death. In fact, 76% of children that report fear of death is due to their mothers avoiding the topic. Additionally, more of these children fear early death and adopt unsuitable approaches when it comes to deal with death.
I’m not sure you want to hear this news from NPR, but it is what it is: Gingrich: A Run For President Is ‘Doable’.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says he’s more inclined to run for president in 2012 than not to make a bid.
Gingrich says he probably won’t make a decision until late February or early March. But he says that talking to friends and thinking about such an undertaking have made him more inclined to believe that “it’s doable.”
We are so f’d.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Dak, wow what a way to greet a Monday Morning…
This thing that Bernanke said, about unemployment is huge. I don’t know if it is just me…but it seemed that when Greenspan was the Fed Chief…if he blew his nose, it made the media snap to attention.
This is interesting:
BBC News – List of facilities 'vital to US security' leaked
“In February 2009 the State Department asked all US missions abroad to list all installations whose loss could critically affect US national security.”
“There are obvious pieces of strategic infrastructure like communications hubs, gas pipelines and so on. However, other facilities on the list include:
Cobalt mine in Congo
Anti-snake venom factory in Australia
Insulin plant in Denmark”
And, I am looking forward to those BoA leaks. Can’t wait to flesh out those secrets!
Announcements like that by the head of the FED are the stuff that can crash markets.
Politics free day yesterday…..it was kind of nice to pretend that I could wish the incompetence and malfeasence away.
The Fed’s statements have been interesting in the sense that he seems to make contradictory statements and his behavior seems to be erratic in regards to the economic health of our country. He says in one breath that we aren’t far from an economy that isn’t self sustaining and then with another says that he doesn’t believe we’ll double dip. He seems to be interested in propping investors and his end run around consumer protections in regards to lending has me questioning his commitment to the economy rather than solely to the upper echelon.
I think they’re worried about having a ‘Japan malaise decade’. Basically, that we maintain where we are right now and the unemployment rate just stays unacceptably high. Also, he has to temper his words because if he said we’re going to crash again, he’d crash the markets.
He just seems all over the board. One minute he’s discussing the hazards of the deficit and in the next breath he’s warning about cutting spending or relinquishing tax cuts. With his contrary statements you’d figure he was the Sphinx or something and the economy was a riddle. I realize that he isn’t supposed to play politics but geez. The only ones he seems to be making very, very happy are investors.
Do you suppose Obama can stand up to Wikileaks? He can’t stand to to anyone else. I can’t wait for the next release: BP, BOA, Gitmo, Insurance Co’s. What about Pharma?
I spent the weekend in Boston, free of all the idiocy of the current news cycle, savoring time with my granddaughters yet questioning the kind of world they will enter in a few years owing to the nonsense that envelops us at the moment.
They can expect a much different world than what most of us have lived through but without the supposition that the government will always be here to protect us when things hit bottom.
We have lost faith with our elected leaders and the opportunities that we took for granted have diminished. Listening to the “babble” coming out of DC is so disheartening and so threatening to the American way of life that always stood for something, I come away more convinced that their futures are in jeopardy.
There are few institutions that are not corrupt and there will be few surprises in whatever comes out of the Wikileaks revelations concerning the banking industry. We are at the mercy of men and women who operate without a moral compass or a viable conscience to do good. Money is at the root of most transactions followed by a total lack of accountability.
I cringe at the thought of how this nation will look in 10 years and it strikes terror in my heart.
Sounds like a wonderful weekend!! I can’t wait until youngest daughter finishes finals and she and the terror kitten come for a visit.
Good grief — too much good reading here! This page and all the others over the weekend. What a group! Wish I didn’t have a milliion things to do this morning and could join in. Oh and did anybody else get snow? We have about 3 inches of powder at the house – it’s postcard gorgeous and our Siberian is in heaven. See y’all later. 😉
Nice picture, Zal. We have about two inches of snow here in Indiana, and it’s only 9 degrees!
Thanks (we’ll pretend it didn’t take me three weeks and Kat’s help to figure out how to post it!).
Love the first snow of the year, don’t you?
BTW, I’m setting you up now. Welcome to the front page!!!
Yes, Welcome!
Nice gravatar! Anyone we know?
Ha! That’s me.
Zal, You have a Cary Grant thing going on…did you plan that? And good to hear you are joining us on the FP.
Love the kitten picture, Dak!!
It was Monday and the news is kinda grumpy. I figured we could use gratuitous kitten cuteness.
Monday, Dec 6, 2010 – my daughter is in the hospital just hours away from delivering a new baby. Certainly keeps my Monday from being grumpy 🙂
Congratulations!!! I’m keeping my fingers crossed for healthy mom and baby!!!
Yes, exciting! Keep us in the loop!
Pat Johnson said: We have lost faith with our elected leaders and the opportunities that we took for granted have diminished.
We “took them for granted” because they were part of our Constitution – they were part of the foundation upon which our wonderful country was built. IMHO those who impair our Constitution are treasonous at heart and therefore should be prosecuted for the damages.
I received an email over the weekend stating that 35 governors have filed suit against the Federal Government for imposing unlawful burdens upon them. It only takes 38 States to convene a constitutional convention.
We Americans have been complacent for far too long. Many citizens don’t even know the simple things we here talk about on a daily basis, i.e. Congress critters can retire with a full salary for life after serving only one term, they carefully exempt themselves from many of the laws they pass, etc.
I know Joe Cannon is working on a New Deal that might be the start and I’m hoping that those critters have their heads so far up there that they won’t notice the possibility of a convention.
Any of those 35 governors from BLUE states?
I’m actually afraid what might happen these days if they convene a constitutional convention.
Most of that post is urban legend. 11 governors have filed suit over the health care bill. 11 not 35. Second, Congress members do not get their full salary after 1 term.
It is kind of scary to think of what the people who created this chain letter scam might dream up if they ever got a constitutional convention all things considered.
The GOP is trying to drum up some support for it though so they can create mischief at a state level if they aren’t in charge of the federal government.
Grad students at U.S. universities are being told if if they read or link to Wikileaks documents they won’t be able to get a government job in the future.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/students-warned-read-wikileaks-government-job/
Does that include linking to newspapers and websites that publish Wikileaks documents? What next? A new Un-American Activities Committee? A new McCarthy era?
Unbelievable! Isn’t this censorship or have I missed something vital within the admonition?
With the rise of the internet as a gathering place, there is little left that is unknown to anyone who wishes to make it their business to syphon out every last bit of information available and use it in any way they see fit.
The days of Big Brother are upon us. Threatening people who follow a link is the validation.
You should read Ian Welsh’s latest. He’s convinced we’re a fascist state already.
Well there definitely can be arguments made since Phrma and insurance companies had more input into health care then citizens did. Then there was oil industry and how it wrote energy policy and colluded to have climate change findings hidden from everyone. Or let’s not forget how AT&T managed to get retroactive immunity after illegally spying on citizens in collusion with the government. Yeah, definitely some fascism undertones at work.
One article said that if you link to articles of WikiLeaks and if you are on FaceBook and Twitter linking too. Oh, well there goes MOA…I twitter about it and I even sent a message regarding a link that didn’t work.
I watch all the videos about WikiLeaks to see what is developing. I don’t go to the site and go through the logs, nor have I downloaded the ‘Insurance File’, but I do read what newspapers and magazines report about what ‘they’ have seen and what they report back.
Oddly, enough during the Iran hoo haa the government didn’t tell us we couldn’t get involved on Twitter/FaceBook or on the sites to post locations of embassies helping the injured since they were disappearing from the hospitals and also reporting on the servers available. We all know not to travel to Iran. 😯 where we will be pan tostado…
Granted none of use have been working on keeping WikiLeaks servers up or anything other than discussing the media reports etc., but it does give you the willies.
So, the horse is out of the barn, we can’t discuss how the horse got out, link to where the horse went prior to getting out, link to where the horse is, download anything posted by the horse, where the horse is currently and what the horse might do and forbidden to have contact with the horse because you will be listed and don’t FaceBook or Twitter about the horse. All the Horse Tweets are being kept in some congressional record, about the horse and the discussions about the horse… AND DON’T DISCUSS THE HORSE if in SCHOOL lest you be listed and never get a job…
BB, does anyone have a list of what we are NOT ALLOWED to do?
Hillary was joking about going home to do a cable so every one could read it on their computers at home. I can’t imagine that she’s going along with that.
I sure hope NOT! What gets me upset is Senator Dianne Feinstein going all CensorSHIP with Senator ‘Internet KillSwitch’ Joe Leiberman (who boasts “China has one”) and Capture Assange ala Sarah ‘Journalist Hunter’ Palin, rather than looking at the mess the ‘Patriot Act’ has caused and ‘Gate Grope’ TSA are doing to the ideals of America via the loss of our Civil Liberties. I guess when we lose all of OUR RIGHTS, we will then be PROTECTED ala CHINA!
We should know why people are ticked off at us (Due to policies or support of oppressive governments and governments using us to do their dirty deeds), and 15,000 deaths of Iraqis do matter, they were human beings, we need to assess why they died and how it can be averted in the future because HUMAN LIFE MATTERS.
My guess is maybe we are already on a LIST, we simply don’t know because those elected officials that see themselves ABOVE the people, don’t think we have a RIGHT TO KNOW what our government does and what it plans to do to us.
The CNN video has been removed and the clip can only be found at the beginning of this video here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3adw9oLBkBI
Here is the ‘WAR’ Joe Leiberman is talking about waged against the Chinese citizens via Reporters Without Borders observation on the Listening Post (November 23, 2006):
Al-Jazeera and Chinese Internet Censorship
Update, Columbia reverses its statement:
Columbia University Reverses Anti-WikiLeaks Guidance | Threat Level | Wired.com
Thanks for catching this, Minx.
That’s very troubling.
The problem is that the kids weren’t around during the McCarthy era and haven’t a clue what it can mean to their lives, their kids lives and our freedoms in general
Soon we will have to meet in corners…pppst…did ya hear….yup…they say; THERE WERE NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION IN IRAQ, IT WAS ALL A BUSH LIE, TO START ANOTHER WAR! pppst….pass it on….
The government appears to have forgotten history itself. Our founding fathers did not have the internet. They spread the word through LTE type editorials written with pen names. Frankly, if I were a college student I’d take a page out of that book. Silence Dogood anyone?
cwaltz,
Good point…but sad that we are even discussing all of this.
Really grime forecast by Ian Welsh –
http://www.ianwelsh.net/an-american-future/#comments
I always thought the truth coming out would allow corrections to be made, would motivate leaders to change course. Ian states leave now if you can. If you have children and can’t leave – send them away. Is it that late?
wow, grim is right …
Pheww. He said all the things I’ve thought, but been too frightened to actually voice. We are so f’ed.
I, for one will not meet in corners – I subscribe to what Patrick Henry said, Give me Liberty, or give me Death
The Feds at work:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/40521684
A significant production problem with new high-tech $100 bills has caused government printers to shut down production of the new notes and to quarantine more than one billion of the bills in huge vaults in Fort Worth, Texas and Washington, DC, CNBC has learned.
…
The redesigned bills are the first $100 bills to feature Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s signature. But to stave off a cash crunch as existing $100 bills deteriorate and can’t be replaced, the Federal Reserve has ordered renewed production of the current-design $100 bills, which feature Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s signature and do not have the new security features.
Dak, have you seen this chart the article below is linking to?
Post-recession unemployment 'scariest ever' job chart show its worst than WW2 | Mail Online
yeah, I’ve seen the chart before but the article is new. thx!!! 🙂 I just don’t get how our policy makers do not understand how significant unemployment is.
Great reads this morning, Dak. Thanks. My eye was naturally caught by the link to The Economist article. Mintzberg’s arguments are correct, IMO, as far as they go, but there are other issues here, too, one of which was highlighted by a commenter:
I came out of business school in the 1970s, when the emphasis was on work teams and investing in employees. I suspected that the b-schools might have been responsible for pushing this philosophy, but it was interesting to have a more recent graduate confirm my suspicions.
I came out in the 1980s so, I’m not all that much fresher than you on the topic. Plus, I came out from an academic Masters in Economics and we didn’t usually get the same sort’ve stories that some of the MBAs were given so I’m not sure on that point. I do remember hearing the meme to not worrying about industry going away and being replaced by service industry at a time when I was struggling to bring Dr. Deming’s methodology to manufacturing. I didn’t really buy that because I knew that not every one had what it takes to be a programmer or a cpa or a nurse. I spent most of the 1980s trying to help manufacturers stay in the U.S. so maybe that’s why I didn’t get so much of that message.
I suspect that the economists the commenter was referring to were those surrounding D.C. politicians, or working for lobbyists disguised as think tanks. It just seems too coincidental that economic policies coming out of D.C., regardless of administration, were following this trajectory. Unfortunately, very few of our politicians have any business background whatsoever, or training in accounting, finance or economics. Bill Clinton, at least, was honest enough to admit as much about himself. A friend of mine who comes out of the financial services industry keeps saying, “Why is it that barbers have to be tested and receive state licenses in order to practice, but our politicians don’t have to demonstrate any knowledge of the subject matter on which they pass laws?”
The worst is that they sit on these committees and are ignorant of the actually functioning of the details of what they’re looking at. Every time the Financial Services committee meets I’m just appalled at the stupid questions. I think most of their aides are just public relations graduates and don’t even have backgrounds in those areas. The entire place is just filled up with lawyers. What a novel idea that some of them might actually have degrees in things other than law!
Agree. I stopped watching those hearings. It was just too embarassing.
OT: US Involvement in Iraq: A Lot of Blood for Little Oil – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International
h/t PUMA SF
This is worthy of a discussion post all its own, because it touches on how Nobel Peace Presidedent Obama, having control of both houses and HE was the one that blocked the public OPTION, and HE was the one that passed the Jane Crow, Presidential Stupak Executive Order restricting reproductive coverage and requiring women to buy separate coverage on their dime (when our insurance covered it before!)…,, Obama’s Cat Food Commission and on and on…
He bent over backwards giving and giving to the GOP and the Wall Street Greedos! Finally, people are saying what we have been jumping up and down about for years!
He had it ALL,
and blew it! It took YEARS TO GET THE HOUSE and Cindy Sheehan who camped out in front of President Bush’s ranch after her son was killed in the war (many people forget about this…PUMA SF remembers too how Will Bower was in contact with Cindy and some people did meet with her… Cindy understood that Pelosi didn’t want to fight to end the wars) and how she devoted years fighting to bring awareness to the loss of life. Cindy, lost everything, her marriage, her home, but she didn’t care, she didn’t want another mother to go through losing a child as she did.
Yes, ONE PERSON DOES MAKE A DIFFERENCE, when they have convictions and believe in what they are advocating for, because it matters and so they fight on.
Okay, this is way OT, but I wanted to give a heads up to you all. Tonight on TCM there will be a couple movies that are very good…One of them has been mentioned on Sky Dancing before.
The time is eastern, so if you want to see when it is playing for your timezone:
Turner Classic Movie Schedule – TCM Channel Guide
9:15 PM Marty
12:00 AM A Face In The Crowd
BTW A Face In The Crowd is written by Bud Schulberg…same guy who wrote the screenplay for On The Waterfront. A Face in the Crowd, is one of my favorite “about politics” genre of movies…The other being The Great McGinty (which if anyone has a chance to see, watch it)
Anyway, watch A Face In The Crowd tonight…this is the movie that BB mentioned reminds her of Obama…
Getting Into Politics…couple scenes from The Great McGinty
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnWn59wDvSg
Yes yes yes! Two great movies.
A Face in the Crowd is must-see. Spectacular work all around. Screenwriter Schulberg (adapting his own short story) and director Kazan — both of whom ratted out, or named names, before HUAC and were hated by many who were damaged by McCarthy — and Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal all at the top of their game. Walter Matthau as well. That movie is what happens when real talent goes to work. Didn’t know it was on tonight; thanks for the heads-up!
And BB’s right – I bet Obama crosses your mind while you’re watching.
Thank you for bringing up all the players and the director Kazan. Marvelous!
I am glad that I am not the only Sky Dancer who is so appreciative of Classic Movies. That movie is also the screen début of Lee Ann Remick. I have to say it again, if y’all can watch it, you won’t be disappointed.
I forgot about Lee Remick. But I bet I know which character she plays!
Absolutely one of my favorites and I swear Glenn Beck is using the script!
What is so hard about this tax cut thing? | Crooks and Liars
“Saturday’s vote was a disaster in so many ways. On top of the ten non-voting Republicans, five Senate Democrats peeled off from the pack to join Republicans, including Russ Feingold. Feingold’s reason for voting “no” was because he believes they all should expire, but I dare any one of you to find another person who knows that. Instead, we have ridiculous Republican talking points claiming “bipartisan support” for extensions.”
Wasn’t Pilgrim looking for an answer as to why Feingold voted no? I don’t know if this will appease…
Thank you for your info. I had read that he refused to vote for the middle class to expire because he believed it should be paid for in some way.
But if he didn’t vote because he thinks they should all expire….
No, I don’t think that satisfies at all.
What I mean to say is “middle class tax” cut, not middle class, although it’s sure the middle class may expire if things continue as they do.
I knew it wasn’t good of enough answer.
And one more link that I got from HNN (History News Network) I will preface this link with a note: It is long….let me repeat that, it is long.
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Taking Down America | TomDispatch
Okay What EXACTLY does this say to little girls? Anorexic Minnie Mouse? Is Disney off their rocker?
Too much, as it goes beyond skinny to mere sticks as legs.
That is revolting! and it is referring to some sort of designer clothes thing?
Hey, My daughter was watching the ABC Family channel on Saturday…and there was a commercial for this new reality show, Bridalplasty. Where brides compete for plastic surgery “before” the wedding. I could not believe that this crap is on TV.
Glenn Greenwald re: Wikilinks
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html
Just look at what the U.S. Government and its friends are willing to do and capable of doing to someone who challenges or defies them — all without any charges being filed or a shred of legal authority. They’ve blocked access to their assets, tried to remove them from the Internet, bullied most everyone out of doing any business with them, frozen the funds marked for Assange’s legal defense at exactly the time that they prepare a strange international arrest warrant to be executed, repeatedly threatened him with murder, had their Australian vassals openly threaten to revoke his passport, and declared them “Terrorists” even though — unlike the authorities who are doing all of these things — neither Assange nor WikiLeaks ever engaged in violence, advocated violence, or caused the slaughter of civilians.
Rule of Law applies to whom, in what country? We have already lived through ten years of Wild West Rules. Why do American citizens not stand up against this?
At the end of GG’s post he offers two sites with which to make donations to Wikilinks.
He is an attorney and I hope, a former supporter of Bumbles. No more kool aid.
BBC says Assange is going to turn himself in to British police to be extradited to Sweden.
I suppose that’s the end of Assange. Some ‘accident’ll happen. Brave guy.