Saturday Reads

Posted: November 20, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Diplomacy Nightmares, morning reads, The Great Recession | Tags: , , , , , , , | 52 Comments

Good Morning!!

President Obama has left the country again. He was in Lisbon today for a NATO meeting, at which the organization agreed to build a missile shield, and they hope that Russia will go along with it too.

In general, senior NATO officials note a welcoming Russian tone under President Dmitri A. Medvedev to the idea of cooperation with NATO on missile defense and European security, and they also note the general silence of Mr. Putin, now prime minister.

On Saturday, Russia will be formally invited to take part in the missile defense system, especially with intelligence and radar sharing. Moscow has indicated that it is interested but has questions, and wants to ensure that the system is not aimed at countering Russian missiles.

The missile defense system approved Friday is different from the fixed-missile defense that President George W. Bush initiated and that proved controversial. The idea is to have a phased system of radars and antimissile missiles that would be less expensive than the Bush system. The NATO spokesman, James Appathurai, said the nearly $1.5 billion cost could be managed over 10 years.

Plenty of money for missile defense that probably won’t work, but nothing for the desperate long-term unemployed.

In one of his many bad decisions, President Obama invited Skeltor Alan Simpson back out of obscurity, and we may never get rid of him. With his latest pronouncement, he has moved way beyond inappropriate to sociopathic.

He predicted a government that approaches shutdown in April of next year.

“This is going to be beautiful politics – The brutal kind,” he told reporters in Washington at a forum put on by the Christian Science Monitor. “I love those,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye and a jokester tinge to his voice.

“The debt limit, when it comes in April or May, will prove who’s a hero and who’s a jerk and who’s a charlatan and who’s a faqir,” said Simpson. “And there it will be right there. Because they’re going to say, these new guys, some of them, and I’ve met a good deal of them and boy they’re sharp cookies,” he said, adding a message to new Congressmen.

“Compromise is not a filthy word,” said Simpson. “It doesn’t mean you’re a wimp when you learn to compromise. You either learn to compromise and legislate or go home – my personal view – anyway there they are and they’re going to say I will not vote for the debt limit extension until you cut this. Say, you can’t do that. you can’t possibly do that. well, then I’m not voting for it. and they’ll say well the government will close. Which they’ll say that’s what I came here for. Oh, I can’t wait. It’ll be something and I’ll be watching.”

You can watch it at the Christian Science Monitor site.

If only there really were a hell so Alan Simpson could spend eternity there.

Ezra Klein is thinking along the same lines as Simpson, but makes more of an effort to sound reasonable. He says Democrats should trade an extension of the Bush tax cuts to the rich for Republican votes to extend unemployment benefits and increase the debt ceiling when the time comes.

Ezra must have learned bargaining strategy from that great bipartisan choker compromiser Barack Obama.

Elsewhere in The Washington Post is the story of “one family’s plunge from the middle class into poverty.”

Walker used to make $100,000 a year as a nursing home executive until she lost her job a year and a half ago. Unable to find a new one, she shed her business suits and high heels and put on an apron and soft-soled shoes. This year, she and her daughter are living on $11,000: her unemployment benefits plus whatever she can earn selling home-cooked dinners for $10 apiece….

The Census Bureau recently reported that the poverty rate in the United States rose to 14.3 percent last year, the highest level in more than 50 years.

Texas and Florida saw the most people fall below the line. In Florida alone, 323,000 people became newly poor last year, bringing the state’s poverty total to 2.7 million.

The numbers tell another tale as well: Nationwide, in black households such as Walker’s, income plunged an average of 4.4 percent in 2009, almost three times the drop among whites. The number of blacks living below the official poverty line – $21,756 for a family of four – increased by 7 percent in just one year.

Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, co-chairs of the Catfood Commission, should be forced to read this article, memorize it, and then write on a blackboard 1,000 times, “I am a damn fool who knows nothing about economics.”

At Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn thinks “it’s time for a real mutiny.”

So much for 2010 as the year of mutiny, when the American people rose up and said, “Enough! Throw the bums out!” As the dust finally clears after the midterm elections, and the bodies are hauled from the field of battle, guess what? It was all so predictable. The safest thing to be in 2010 was an incumbent.

Out of 435 seats, 351 incumbents will be returning to the House in January. In the Senate, out of 100 seats, 77 incumbents will return in January. As the libertarian Joel Hirschorn puts it, “Welcome back to the reality of America’s delusional democracy where career politicians will continue to foster a corrupt, inefficient and dysfunctional government because that is what the two-party plutocracy and its supporters want for their own selfish reasons.”

What will Dear Leader do next?

Already there are the omens of a steady stream of concessions by Obama to the right.

There’s hardly any countervailing pressure for him to do otherwise. The president has no fixed principles of political economy, and who is at his elbow in the White House? Not the Labor Secretary, Hilda Solis. Not that splendid radical Elizabeth Warren, whose Consumer Financial Protection Bureau the Republicans are already scheduling for destruction. Next to Obama is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the bankers’ lapdog, whom the president holds in high esteem….

Two more years, of the same downward slide, courtesy of bipartisanship and “working together”? No way. Enough of dreary predictability. Let’s have a real mutiny against Obamian rightward drift. The time is not six months or a year down the road. The time is now.

But who will lead the charge?

Dakinikat turned me on to this article about Obama’s Asian trip: Asia After Obama, by Brahma Chellaney

Significantly, Obama restricted his tour to Asia’s leading democracies – India, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea – which surround China and are central to managing its rise. Yet he spent all of last year assiduously courting the government in Beijing in the hope that he could make China a global partner on issues ranging from climate change to trade and financial regulation. The catchphrase coined by US Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg in relation to China, “strategic reassurance,” actually signaled America’s intent to be more accommodating toward China’s ambitions.

Now, with his China strategy falling apart, Obama is seeking to do exactly what his predecessor attempted – to line up partners as an insurance policy in case China’s rising power slides into arrogance. Other players on the grand chessboard of Asian geopolitics also are seeking to formulate new equations, as they concurrently pursue strategies of hedging, balancing, and bandwagoning.

Once again, Obama plays the role of Bush III.

At Truthdig, I learned that David Sirota has found a new hero to replace his now tarnished idol Barack Obama. These days Sirota is bragging about hanging with cut rate Rolling Stone gonzo writer Matt Taibbi.

Sirota reminds me of that little dog Chester in the Looney Tunes cartoons–the one that idolizes the big bulldog Spike. Chester jumps around Butch, trying to get his attention, praising him, agreeing with him; and when Spike brushes him aside, he just keeps coming back for more. Sirota:

Over drinks in my living room, Taibbi and I pondered the financial Masters of the Universe and their maddening infallibility. I asked him why they never fear facing legal consequences. Do they believe they’re untouchable? Or do they know law enforcement won’t pursue them?

“They’re not afraid because other than Bernie Madoff, when was the last time someone on Wall Street faced any real punishment?” he responded. “Sure, a few go to jail once in a while, but they’re usually out in a few months and then on the speaking circuit. That’s not exactly a deterrent against bad behavior that’s making you millions.”

Deterrence—it’s the vaunted idea behind “tough on crime” sentences for violent offenses. Lock the door, throw away the key, and the theory says that heinous acts will be prevented.

Duh! I think Sirota wrote this piece just so everyone would know he’s pals with Taibbi.

Since it’s Saturday Morning….

What’s on your reading menu this morning?

Friday Reads

Posted: November 19, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 50 Comments
Good Morning!

So, this first item I dug up is kind’ve bothersome. It’s a Pew Poll with a self quiz attached on economic and other news. You can go take it yourself if you’d like!

Nearly eight-in-ten (77%) say correctly that the federal budget  deficit is larger than it was in the 1990s and 64% know that in recent  years the United States has bought more foreign goods than it has sold  overseas. As in recent knowledge surveys, about half (53%) estimate the current unemployment rate at about 10%.But the public continues to struggle with questions about the Troubled Asset Relief Program known as TARP: Just 16% say, correctly, that more than half of the loans made to banks under TARP have been paid back; an identical percentage says that none has been paid back. In Pew Research’s previous knowledge survey in July, just 34% knew that the TARP was enacted under the Bush administration. (See “Well Known: Twitter; Little Known: John Roberts,” July 15, 2010

The new survey finds that an overwhelming percentage (88%) identify  BP as the company that operated the oil well that exploded in the Gulf  of Mexico earlier this year. But as in the past, the public shows little awareness of international developments: 41% say that relations between India and Pakistan are generally considered to be unfriendly; 12% say relations between the two long-time rivals are friendly, 20% say they are neutral and 27% do not know.

Steny Hoyer is promising congressional Dems that they will have a chance to vote to extend the middle class tax cuts. I wonder if he’s spoken to the President who is already indicating he’ll negotiate with the Republicans.

The move indicates that House Dems are growing more resolved to draw a hard line on the Bush tax cuts, forcing Republicans to choose between supporting Obama’s tax plan and opposing a tax cut for the middle class.  However, the way forward still remains murky. Even if such a measure were to pass in the House, it’s unclear whether the Senate will agree to such a vote, and the White House has not endorsed the approach.

What’s more, the vote could conceivably go down, or alternatively, Republicans might successfully mount a procedural response, known as a “motion to recommit,” that could also force a House vote on the high end cuts. I have not been able to determine how House Dems might respond to such a move.

For all these reasons, this House move does not preclude a deal being reached in the end on a temporary extension of all the cuts. And plans could still change: The House Dem leadership has yet to publicly endorse this plan

The House failed us on pay equity, extension of unemployment benefits, and the food bill that Sima wrote about yesterday.  One bright spot is that NPR will still get federal funding.

House Democrats on Thursday shot down a G.O.P. attempt to roll back federal funding to NPR, a move that many Republicans have called for since the public radio network fired the analyst Juan Williams last month.

Republicans in the House tried to advance the defunding measure as part of their “YouCut” initiative, which allows the public to vote on which spending cuts the G.O.P. should pursue. But their push was blocked, 239 to 171, with only three Democrats voting with a united bloc of Republicans.

Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 House Republican who is set to become majority leader in the next Congress, said the vote showed Democrats had failed to learn the lessons of this month’s midterm elections.

“Today’s vote was just the latest common sense YouCut to cut spending and save taxpayer dollars, and again Democrats showed that they just don’t get it,” Mr. Cantor said in a statement.

It’s beginning to look like Congress may get rid of DADT.  Boxer and Feinstein will be pushing for the effort during the lame duck session.  Lisa Murkowski has indicated she will support the effort. Lieberman told The Advocate that the Senate has the required 60 votes for closure.

Sen. Joe Lieberman said Thursday that repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” as part of the National Defense Authorization Act is no longer a question of votes; it’s a question of process.

“I am confident that we have more than 60 votes prepared to take up the defense authorization with the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ if only there will be a guarantee of a fair and open amendment process, in other words, whether we’ll take enough time to do it,” Lieberman told reporters at a press conference, naming GOP senators Susan Collins and Richard Lugar as yes votes. “Time is an inexcusable reason not to get this done.”

Lieberman, an independent, was flanked by 12 of his  Democratic colleagues — a core group that seemed intent on urging the  Democratic leadership to allow enough room in the Senate schedule for a  debate that would be acceptable to Republicans. The senators talked about working over the weekends, and Sen. Mark Udall offered to go straight through until Christmas Eve.

There is supposedly an Antimatter Breakthrough that could lead to Starships. All the Trekkers out there will sure to be excited.

Scientists at CERN, the research facility that’s home to the Large Hadron Collider, claim to have successfully created and stored antimatter in greater quantities and for longer times than ever before.

Researchers created 38 atoms of antihydrogen – more than ever has  been produced at one time before and were able to keep the atoms stable  enough to last one tenth of a second before they annihilated themselves  (antimatter and matter destroy each other the moment they come into  contact with each other). Since those first experiments, the team claims to have held antiatoms for even longer, though they weren’t specific of the duration.

While scientists have been able to create particles of antimatter for decades, they had previously only been able to produce a few particles that would almost instantly destroy themselves.

“This is the first major step in a long journey,” Michio Kaku,  physicist and author of Physics of the Impossible, told PCMag.  “Eventually, we may go to the stars.”

For now, scientists are interested in producing antimatter in these relatively large quantities because it could lend insight into fundamental physical laws. It’s generally believed in the scientific community that at the universe’s creation, both matter and antimatter existed but not in the same quantity, so when the two annihilated each other, only matter remained. That could be because antimatter behaves differently than the regular variety.

“It’s a fundamental tenet of physics that antimatter and matter behave very similarly although not exactly,” said Lawrence Krauss, physicist and author of The Physics of Star Trek, in an interview. “And in order to really test that, you need anti-atoms. Being able to test the properties of antimatter at a whole new level of precision is obviously important.”

Further into the future, Kaku believes we may be able to use antimatter as the “ultimate rocket fuel,” since it’s 100 percent efficient – all of the mass is converted to energy. By contrast, thermonuclear bombs only use about 1 percent.

“One of the main uses of antimatter would be a starship,” said Kaku “Because you want concentrated energy. And you can’t get more concentrated than antimatter.”

Sarah Palin has fallen directly into the trap I spoke about yesterday in my thread on inflation.  I guess she thinks that a few home economics courses are enough to qualify someone to talk on the country’s economy.  TNR has a great article up about how conservative Republicans are going after the FED with fallacies and ideology instead of facts. If you read me yesterday, you will know how woefully wrong this is.

Last week, in between leading a graduate seminar on Proust and delivering a long-scheduled lecture on mass spectrometry, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin ventured a few ticks beyond her acknowledged area of expertise and reflected on monetary policy at a convention in Phoenix. The occasion for her unexpected soliloquy—I’m actually serious about the economics speech—was the Fed’s decision to buy some $600 billion in long-term government securities, a practice known as quantitative easing. “We shouldn’t be playing around with inflation,” Palin said, in a typically Delphic pronouncement. She helpfully added  that “everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that  prices have risen significantly over the past year or so.”

There’s a great series called The Rules of the Game over on Project Syndicate by two superheroes of economics and finance –specifically corporate governance–Lucian Bebchuk and Luigi Zingales.   They leap out with a great series of questions and answers for reform for Wall Street and big public corporations.

Were over-compensated and unaccountable bosses to blame for the Great Recession? Are bankers and financial managers overpaid? Which reforms must be adopted to save capitalism – above all from its practitioners?

The series is updated ever-so-often and if you get a chance to read any of them, you should. One of my favorites is ‘How to Pay a Banker’ by Bebchuk.

Insulating executives from losses to stakeholders other than shareholders can be expected to encourage them to make investments and take on obligations that increase the likelihood and severity of losses that exceed the shareholders’ capital. In addition, such insulation discourages the raising of additional capital, inducing executives to run banks with a capital level that provides an inadequate cushion for bondholders and depositors. The more thinly capitalized banks are, the more severe these distortions – and the larger the expected costs rising from insulating executives from potential losses to non-shareholder stakeholders.

Compensation schemes for executives should provide disincentives to moral hazard.  What we have now is nothing but encouragement.   Here’s another quote from ‘Politics and Corporate Money’, from the same author and series.

In expanding corporations’ rights to spend money on politics, the US Supreme Court relied on “the processes of corporate democracy” to ensure that such spending does not deviate from shareholder interests.  Clearly, however, such processes can have little effect if political spending is not transparent to public investors.

For such disclosure to be effective, it must include robust rules with respect to political spending via intermediaries. In the US, for  example, organizations that seek to speak for the business sector, or  for specific industries, raise funds from corporations and spend more  than $1 billion annually on efforts to influence politics and  policymaking. While the targets of these organizations’ spending are disclosed, there is no public disclosure that enables investors in any public corporation to know whether their corporation contributes to such organizations and how much. Investors deserve to know.

Moreover, a public company’s political spending decisions should not be solely the province of management, as they often are. Independent directors should have an important oversight role, as they do on other sensitive issues that may involve a divergence of interest between insiders and public investors. And these directors should provide an annual report explaining their choices during the preceding year.

Fed Chair Ben Bernanke criticized China’s currency manipulation in what seems to be a ramped up U.S. effort to stop trade deficits through rhetoric. He actually didn’t say China, but the implication is really there in his words.

While Bernanke didn’t identify China, he took aim at “large, systemically important countries with persistent current-account surpluses.” Bernanke’s comments come a week after leaders of the Group of 20 developed and emerging nations meeting in South Korea failed to agree on a remedy for trade and investment distortions. At the summit, President Barack Obama attacked China’s policy of undervaluing its currency.

Bernanke said that the “sense of common purpose has waned” after officials around the world united to fight the financial crisis. “Tensions among nations over economic policies have emerged and intensified, potentially threatening our ability to find global solutions to global problems,” he said.

China has tied the yuan to the dollar to promote exports that helped produce the fastest gains in gross domestic product of any major economy. China, which surpassed Japan’s GDP to become world No. 2 in the second quarter, recorded 9.6 percent annual growth in the three months through September. It holds about $2.6 trillion in foreign reserves, the most in the world.

So, it appears that the pending Thanksgiving weekend has slowed things down a bit.   I did want to share something with you concerning my University here in New Orleans and what Jindal the terrible has left to our students here. (You  know he was actually on Scarborough this week bragging how he’d cut taxes and balanced the state budget.)  This is a University with around 15,000 students and quite a good sized campus with many buildings.

Students at the University of New Orleans did their part on Thursday to help clean up what they believe is a broken funding system for higher education.

Before Hurricane Katrina, there were 87 members of the custodial staff at UNO. There are currently only 31 due to a combination of layoffs and positions that were never filled as people left or retired.

Students said they’re tired of the dirt, and they’re doing something about it.

“It means when we have trash in between classrooms, dust, even roaches, it becomes noticeable (and) very distracting,” said UNO Student Government President John Mineo. “To be honest, I don’t want to go to a classroom like that and sit down.”

Since 2009, UNO has lost $16 million in state support and 150 positions. The move has sparked protests schools across the state, like one at UNO in September, when what was supposed to be a peaceful rally turned violent.

Last week, hundreds of students from around the state rallied on the state capitol, and earlier this week at Louisiana State University, some questioned where the funding for higher education was going by throwing fake money with a picture of Gov. Bobby Jindal on it.

However, Thursday night was the first time that students literally cleaned up the mess they said state leaders have left behind by not prioritizing education.

About 50 students showed up at Thursday’s clean up at Milneberg Hall. They said they chose the building because it’s used for freshmen orientation, and they said dirty classrooms are an embarrassing way to introduce new students to the school.

Louisiana public colleges and universities have had about $300 million in budget cuts since 2008.

There are two janitors left in the 4 story CBA building.  It opened just after Katrina and now a good portion of it reminds me of a ghost town.  There are plenty of  students so that’s not the problem.  Our governor is really. really bad news.   He shouldn’t be in charge of anything that could impact any living, breathing being.  He’s ruthless and cruel and every decision he makes has to do with moving him up the next step on the ladder.

This is a picture of President Clinton that I took at UNO a few months after Hurricane Katrina. I was the only person teaching on the main campus at that time and had 5 students in my class. Clinton's listening to the first President Bush. They came to present the universities here with checks to help us get through the Hurricane damage. Who will help us overcome the damage wrought by Jindal the Terrible?

 

What’s on you reading and blogging list today?

Wednesday Reads

Posted: November 17, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , | 59 Comments
Good Morning!!!

So we finally have the triangulation word and President Obama used in the same sentence by liberal groups. Ya think ? This is the Headline from The Hill: ‘Angry left to Obama: Stop caving on agenda’.

Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and an outspoken critic of the White House, said liberal anger has less to do with fears of a Clintonian move to the middle by Obama and more with a misreading of the election results by the administration.

The White House “fundamentally” doesn’t get that “the only way to get Republicans to deal in good faith is to fight them, crush them and teach a lesson that if Republicans are on the wrong side of an issue there will be consequences … so it makes sense to negotiate,” Green said.

“Right now, every time Republicans are on the opposite side of an issue from the public, it’s the Democrats who cave and talk about ‘compromise.’ It’s ridiculous.”

While the White House declined to comment for this story, Obama’s remarks since the election indicate that pursuing compromise with Republicans, including on the tax issue, will be one of his top priorities moving forward.

So, they couldn’t make a point without a little dash of CDS thrown in for good measure.  Could they?

Here’s an interesting commentary on the economy by UCLA economist Roger Farmer at the FT. The economist forum there is a notorious hang out for all bow tie and spectacles set.  He’s got an interesting suggestion here.  Rather than buy Treasury bonds for QE2, the Fed should consider buying stocks.

US consumers and business investors reduced spending in 2008 because the value of houses, factories and machines plummeted. The housing bubble burst and the stock market fell at the same time. Currently, investors hold more than a trillion dollars in excess reserves at the Fed because they are afraid of a repeat performance.

QE is widely perceived to be the same thing as increasing the money supply. But it is not. Mr Bernanke has argued that the first round of QE was effective because it increased stock market wealth. That is an argument I have made in previous opinion pieces in the FT and two recent books. When people feel richer, they spend more. That creates jobs.

But the current problem is not that the stock market is undervalued. The Dow is now back at the level it attained immediately before the 2008 crisis. The problem is that investors are fleeing from risk and are demanding safe assets. The Fed is uniquely positioned to provide a safe haven for investors by buying risky securities from the public and replacing them with interest bearing deposits at the Fed.

What kind of risky assets should the Fed buy? Mr Bernanke plans to purchase treasury bonds. The Bernanke plan could prove costly when inflation reappears because the price of treasury bonds will fall when interest rates rise. And when the Fed loses money, its political independence will be compromised. That is why a better plan would be to buy stocks. This policy would provide a more effective exit strategy, since, when inflation reappears, dividends and stock prices will rise and rather than lose money, the Fed will stand to make substantial gains.

Notice that he says that QE2 is not the same as printing money.  It’s not because the FED’s trying to prime the credit/investment channel, not the real sector directly. It can’t do that.  Another interesting thing in the works is the GM IPO.  It seems strange to call GM stock an initial public offering, but post bankruptcy it is what it is.  The New GM is not the Old GM legally, but has it changed all of its old GM ways? The U.S. Treasury Department and the United Auto Workers’ retiree health-care trust  want to sell more of their stock so this IPO looks to be huge.  It would be interesting to see the FED mop up some of these, wouldn’t it?

The IPO, scheduled for tomorrow, will help Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson return some of the $49.5 billion GM received in a taxpayer bailout last year. The Treasury, which is taking a loss on its portion of the sale, will break even only if the shares climb at least 50 percent, Bloomberg data shows.

“Treasury is confident demand is there for these shares to get soaked up,” said Michael Yoshikami, who oversees $1 billion at YCMNet Advisors in Walnut Creek, California. “It makes a lot of sense for them to do this because we’re already talking about shares going out at a price that is far above what everybody thought would be in demand.”

The IPO would be the second-largest in U.S. history, after Visa Inc.’s $19.7 billion sale in March 2008, and comes 16 months after GM emerged from bankruptcy. The biggest U.S. automaker also increased a preferred stock offering to $4 billion today, $1 billion more than it had planned.

Let’s see what the market does with these things today and see if our dollars were wisely invested in Detroit.

Here’s some interesting Republican infighting between Lisa Murkowski and Jim Demint via Politico. She’s got some fighting words for him.

“I think some of the Republicans in the Congress feel pretty strongly that he and his actions potentially cost us the majority by encouraging candidates that ended up not being electable,” Murkowski told POLITICO outside her Senate office. “And I think Delaware is a pretty good example of that, and I think there’re some folks that feel that DeMint’s actions didn’t necessarily help the Republican majority.”

Murkowski suggested the South Carolina conservative and favorite of the tea party seemed more interested in bolstering his own political standing rather than that of the Republican Party.

“So the real question is, what’s his desire?” she said. “Does he want to help the Republican majority, or is he on his own agenda, his own initiative?”

Asked what she believed the answer was, Murkowksi said: “I think he’s out for his own initiative.”

Fight on little wingnuts, fight on!!  It can only help the things we care about.  Now if only Obama would just take advantage of the infighting and not cave in to their demands before they have shown they are able to deliver anything but sloppy nasty verbiage.

The Plum line at WAPO is going over Richard Wolffe’s book Revival and reporting on all the juicy bits including this on Rahmbo. Rahm didn’t want any thing to do with bi-partanship and he warned that Health Care Reform would be Waterloo. This is an excerpt from the book quoted by Greg Sargent.

From page 102:

Unlike his boss, Emanuel wasn’t interested in looking reasonable with Republicans; he wanted to look victorious. He didn’t care much for uniting red and blue America; he wanted blue America to beat its red rival…

Obama was prepared to sacrifice time and political capital to make his policy bipartisan and more ambitious; Emanuel believed Obama did not have that luxury. “Time is your commodity. That answers everything,” Emanuel said. “But a lot of us thought we didn’t have the amount of time that was being dedicated. If you abandon the bipartisan talks you get blamed. He still wanted to try to achieve it that way. But that’s one of a series of things you can look back on and be a genius about.

“My job as chief of staff is to give him 180-degree advice. He hired me, as he asked, to learn from the past, or to use my knowledge from my time in Congress and in the Clinton administration. Watching ’94, watching ’97 when we did kids’ health care, and then studying Medicare, what were the lessons? The lesson about time as a commodity is not mine, it’s Lyndon Johnson’s. You got X amount of time; you gotta use it.”

There’s more in an another thread on an exchange between Grassley and Obama on removing the public option from the bill.  I guess I may have to buy this book.  I know Bostonboomer’s been looking for it to add to her Kindle.

Wolffe reports that Obama got into a testy exchange with Senator Chuck Grassley, in which the President flatly asked Grassley if he could support health reform if the public option were dropped and he got everything he wanted. Grassley, in effect, said: Nope. And he told a top Obama adviser the same.

The key is that this exchange occurred early on in the process, and the quest for bipartisan support for health reform continued anyway. The tale begins on page 70, when top Obama adviser Nancy DeParle met with Grassley to ask for his support amid the health care wars in the summer of 2009:

Just before [Grassley] returned to Iowa, he met with DeParle for another strategy session.

“If we do everything and resolve all the policy issues the way you want, with no public plan, do you think you’ll be able to support the bill?”

Grassley looked away. “I don’t know.”

Grassley went to the Oval Office for a similar conversation with the president and his fellow Republican and Democratic negotiators. He asked Obama to say publicly that he would sign a bill without a public option of a government-run plan. Grassley believed this would be a reasonable, minimal demonstration of Obama’s desire for a bipartisan deal. But the president declined to confront his own party base so explicitly. Obama asked Grassley the same question DeParle had posed: With every concession he wanted, could he support the bill?

“Probably not.”

“Why not?” asked an exasperated Obama.

“Because I’d have to have a number of Republicans,” said Grassley. “I’m not going to be the third of three Republicans. I’ve defined a bipartisan bill as broad-based support.”

Cheney and Dubya think the tide is turning in their favor.  This is from CBS and it’s about the ground breaking for the Dubya Library in Dallas.  I still wonder what’s going in there and now I’m going to wonder if it wasn’t all lifted from other places.  I can’t believe we’ll all have memories that are that short no matter how much they want Jeb as their next president.

Cheney said that Mr. Bush, whose approval rating upon leaving office was just 22 percent, always understood that “judgments are a little more measured” with the passage of time. He added that Americans “can tell a decent, goodhearted stand up guy when they see him.”

Cheney lauded Mr. Bush as a president who refused “to put on airs,” stating that he was thrilled to find that the most powerful person he knew was “among the least pretentious.” He said Mr. Bush was someone who could “walk with kings, yet keep the common touch,” added that “there were no affectations about him at all – he treats everyone as an equal.”

He spoke admiringly of Mr. Bush’s actions in the wake of the Sept. 11th attacks, telling the former president that “because you were determined to throw back the enemy, we did not suffer another 9/11 or something even worse.”

Okay, now I feel like we should donate copies of “The Pet Goat” when the thing opens just as a reminder.

So, I’m a Nielson family this week and I haven’t turned on the TV once.   Some big contributor to pop culture I’ve turned out to be.  Actually, I think there’s some pretty good reasons that I avoid the thing.  I’m linking you to one PSA that I’d rather not see.  It’s a train wreck.  I’m not going to  put the Youtube up here because I have bodhisattva vows that include being compassionate to sentient being.  It’s Bristol Palin and The Situation discussing abstinence and safe sex. Neither can act.  Neither are  attractive in my book.  Warning.  You will need eyeball bleach and ear wash if you go over there. There’s gratuitous use of the word situation and icky nick names.  Please put all sharp items in a safe place before venturing over there.  Do not have any liquid in your mouth.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Monday Reads

Posted: November 15, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , | 23 Comments

'Cup and sauce and newspaper'by Anthony Ulinski

Good Morning!

I’ve had to dig around to find some things to read.  It seems most of the MSM has had a post-midterm elections let down or something.  So, it’s Monday and here we go!

Myanmar’s Suu Kyi has given her first speech since her release from house arrest.   She has indicated her willingness to work with whomever she can on bringing democracy and freedom to the region. This is from Bloomberg.

“I am prepared to talk with anyone,” Suu Kyi said in Yangon, Myanmar’s former capital, according to The Irrawaddy, an online magazine run by Myanmar exiles that’s based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. “I have no personal grudge toward anybody.”

The speech sets the tone for Suu Kyi, 65, to re-engage with her supporters after spending 15 of the past 21 years in detention. She plans to listen to the views of her fellow citizens and push for national reconciliation in the country formerly known as Burma, where 2,200 political prisoners are still behind bars, according to the Irrawaddy.

“I think we will have to sort out our differences across the table, talking to each other, agreeing to disagree, or finding out why we disagree and trying to remove the sources of our disagreement,” Suu Kyi told BBC World Service radio in an yesterday. “There are so many things that we have to talk about.”

I’ve been trying to follow Obama’s upcoming decision on letting 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stay in that perpetual state of jail with no trial.  There’s several good articles that have come up this week.  First, there’s been the Salon piece by Dahlia Lithwick that headlines the idea that the U.S. has gone from decrying torture to celebrating it.

President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would “turn the page” on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush administration’s war on terror. What he didn’t seem to understand, what he still seems not to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons at which it occurred. Now more than ever, it’s feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it’s not illegal after all.

Today, Emptywheel has laid out the U.S. strategy for a never ending war based on never releasing these prisoners-in-limbo.  It’s one of those reads that makes you tingle.

Obviously, it’s a further spineless capitulation on Obama’s part. It’s a concession, too, that all you have to do to eliminate the rule of law in this country is squawk in Congress and on Fox News.

It also serves as a guarantee that the 2001 AUMF declaring war against the now-50 al Qaeda members who had something to do with 9/11 will last forever–or at least for the rest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s life.

Mind you, the government has been planning on making this a forever war since 2001, precisely so it could hold people like KSM forever.

Now, with the decision to just let KSM rot, it seems to me, that plan gains a new anchor (and none too soon! given that only a handful of al Qaeda members remain in Afghanistan, that justification was getting rather dicey). After all, the very decision not to try KSM in a military commission is an admission that it would not work for him–it might rule out the death penalty for him in any case, but a military commission judge actually has leeway to adjust any sentence on account of the extreme torture KSM underwent, meaning our torture of KSM might become a central issue in a military commission.

But any further delay in charging KSM in civilian court make it less likely they’ll be able to charge him in the future, because this current delay almost certainly violates any interpretation of speedy trial rights. You can’t just wait to charge someone until such a time as the political winds make it easier to do.

There’s an astounding article up on UK’s The Independent’s website about the future without birds called ‘None flew over the cuckoo’s nest.”

According to Henk Tennekes, a researcher at the Experimental Toxicology Services in Zutphen, the Netherlands, the threat of DDT has been superseded by a relatively new class of insecticide, known as the neonicotinoids. In his book The Systemic Insecticides: A Disaster in the Making, published this month, Tennekes draws all the evidence together, to make the case that neonicotinoids are causing a catastrophe in the insect world, which is having a knock-on effect for many of our birds.

Already, in many areas, the skies are much quieter than they used to be. All over Europe, many species of bird have suffered a population crash. Spotting a house sparrow, common swift or a flock of starlings used to be unremarkable, but today they are a more of an unusual sight. Since 1977, Britain’s house-sparrow population has shrunk by 68 per cent.

The common swift has suffered a 41 per cent fall in numbers since 1994, and the starling 26 per cent. The story is similar for woodland birds (such as the spotted flycatcher, willow tit and wood warbler), and farmland birds (including the northern lapwing, snipe, curlew, redshank and song thrush

Ornithologists have been trying desperately to work out what is behind these rapid declines. Urban development, hermetically sealed houses and barns, designer gardens and changing farming practices have all been blamed, but exactly why these birds have fallen from the skies is still largely unexplained.

However, Tennekes thinks there may be a simple reason. “The evidence shows that the bird species suffering massive decline since the 1990s rely on insects for their diet,” he says. He believes that the insect world is no longer thriving, and that birds that feed on insects are short on food.

Here’s two interesting ways to get involved with the Federal Debt issue.  The first is to go to the NYT and use their widget to balance the budget yourself.  BTD tired it here and came up with these suggestions to replace the cat food commission.

How I did it – 71% in revenue increases and 29% in spending cuts. What I raised – the estate tax to Clinton era levels (raised $50 billion), added a bank tax (raised $73 billion), added a millionaire’s tax (raised $50 billion), let the Bush tax cuts expire (raised $226 billion), raised the FICA ceiling (raised $50 billion). For spending cuts I adopted these proposals – reduced Social Security benefits for high earners (saved $6 billion), enacted medical malpractice reform (saved $8 billion), reduced the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 30,000 by 2013 (saved $86 billion), made defense spending cuts (saving $57 billion), eliminated farm subsidies (saved $14 billion) and “earmarks” (saved $14 billion.)

Swiss Economist Hans Gersbach suggests a that governments employ a thing called “vote-share” bonds.  That’s kind of like those revenue bond votes that your school board and municipalities have to get you to vote on.  These things, however, would be be given seniority status by how much buy in they got from voters.  Interesting concept that and it’s explored at VOXEU.

  • Each government bond is tied to the share of the votes that its underlying budget deficit adoption has received in parliament.
  • A government bond that has a higher vote-share than another is senior. This creates a ladder of relative seniority for which the vote-share is the organising principle. At the top of the ladder are the bonds with the highest vote-share.
  • Any government funds available for servicing and repaying government debt will always be turned first to the top of the ladder to satisfy the claims of the bond-holders with the highest seniority. The other bond-holders are served sequentially by moving down the ladder.

U.S. Economist Dean Baker takes the NYT to task for ignorance of unemployment over at FDL.  Like other economists–me included–Baker is appalled that so many are obsessed with a deficit at at time when so many people aren’t working, aren’t paying taxes, and are in need of government services.  That’s a signal that we’re going to continue running a deficit until that’s solved.  Here’s Baker’s call to wake up.

We have more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed, or who have given up work altogether. This is a real crisis. Furthermore, it is worth noting that these people are largely suffering as a result of the incompetence of the budget balancers. (The budget balancers were the same people who dominated economic debate in the years before the crash and could did not see the $8 trillion housing bubble that wrecked the economy and gave us the huge deficits that now have them so obsessed.)

Obviously it is politically popular in Washington to be obssesed by the deficit, but we are supposed to have an independent press in this country. It is utterly loony to be focused on the projected deficit in 2030, when we have tens of millions of people who are seeing their lives ruined today by the downturn. This is like debating the colors to paint the classrooms when the school is on fire with the students still inside. Given economic reality, it would make far more sense to use the effort devoted to construct an elaborate game like this to designing a route toward restoring full employment.

BostonBoomer pointed me over to this Secret Justice Department Report on the NYT that details how the U.S. State Department help NAZIs after World War 2.  It’s been redacted but it’s still got some gripping narrative.  Sections about Congresswoman Holtzman and stories from the 1970s on the realization that a lot of NAZIs got into the U.S are just amazing reads.

Raw Story describes the report in an equally gripping way.

A report the Justice Department has been trying to hide for the past four years offers the most detailed account yet of the CIA’s efforts to protect known Nazi war criminals in the United States.

The report, obtained by the New York Times, may be the most concrete account yet of the role that prominent members of Germany’s Nazi party played in the early, formative years of the CIA, following World War II. It alleges the CIA created a “safe haven” for Nazis believed to be of use to the US’s Cold War efforts.

One last thing!!!  If you have been the recipient of a cartoon viral video that’s really just gold bug libertarian propaganda, please wait before passing it on!  I’ve had so many people link to this factually-impaired thing that I’m going to spend a post this afternoon debunking it.  Yes, it’s cute and uses cute language, but it has so much misinformation in it that I can’t just let it go viral without point out all the factual errors.   So, that’s on my to do list today.

What’s on your reading and blog list today?

Sunday Reads

Posted: November 14, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Human Rights, morning reads, Surreality | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 50 Comments

Out of Town News, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA

Good Morning!!

Since it’s Sunday, I’ll begin with a religious item: Catholic bishops say more exorcists are needed

Citing a shortage of priests who can perform the rite, the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops are holding a conference on how to conduct exorcisms.

The two-day training, which ends today in Baltimore, is to outline the scriptural basis of evil, instruct clergy on evaluating whether a person is truly possessed, and review the prayers and rituals that comprise an exorcism. Among the speakers will be Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston, Texas, and a priest-assistant to New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan.

Now there’s a serious issue for you. Never mind the disintegrating economy, the President’s Catfood Commission, our multiple wars of aggression in the Middle East, and the likelihood that very far right Republicans will likely control Congress and the White House for the next 30 years (if the country survives that long). No, the really important issue is the need for priests who can drive out demons.

On second thought, maybe some of those nuts DC could benefit from exorcisms…

Despite strong interest in the training, skepticism about the rite persists within the American church. Organizers of the event are keenly aware of the ridicule that can accompany discussion of the subject. Exorcists in U.S. dioceses keep a very low profile. In 1999, the church updated the Rite of Exorcism, cautioning that “all must be done to avoid the perception that exorcism is magic or superstition.”

So how do you know when an exorcism is needed?

Signs of demonic possession accepted by the church include violent reaction to holy water or anything holy, speaking in a language the possessed person doesn’t know and abnormal displays of strength.

The article does say that diseases and psychological disorders must be ruled out before someone is determined to be possessed.

Emptywheel has an interesting take on why George W. Bush plagiarized much of his memoir, Decision Points, from other authors: It’s Safer When You Don’t Let the President Reflect for Himself.

She suggests that Bush may have copied from published sources in order to keep his story straight. He presumably told so many lies over the eight years of his presidency that he might slip up if he tried to write anything from memory. She does note that:

Bush admitted to war crimes in his book, so he did exhibit a general lack of caution in his presentation of some of the touchy legal issues dealt with in the book. But unlike Cheney (who has explicitly said that the statute of limitations will have expired on some of the crimes he’ll describe in his upcoming memoir), Bush may well need to finesse…issues [such as his decision not to pardon Scooter Libby].

Speaking of war crimes, the Obama administration has taken the coward’s way out once again in regard to the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. From the Washington Post: Opposition to U.S. trial likely to keep mastermind of 9/11 attacks in detention

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, will probably remain in military detention without trial for the foreseeable future, according to Obama administration officials.

The administration has concluded that it cannot put Mohammed on trial in federal court because of the opposition of lawmakers in Congress and in New York. There is also little internal support for resurrecting a military prosecution at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The latter option would alienate liberal supporters.

The administration asserts that it can hold Mohammed and other al-Qaeda operatives under the laws of war, a principle that has been upheld by the courts when Guantanamo Bay detainees have challenged their detention.

Spencer Ackerman:

So can the Obama administration manage to reach a decision more craven than this one? According to the Washington Post, the months-long internal administration deadlock over trying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 co-conspirators has resulted in a decision: apoplexy. No trying them in federal courts in New York; no trying them at Guantanamo Bay in a military commission. Just… nothing. [….]

And that’s the maddening thing. The Obama team talks about a “different political environment” as if it has nothing to do with creating one. Attorney General Holder talks about federal courts’ capability for handling terrorism trials — you see dangerous secrets leaking out of the Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani trial? Or al-Qaeda storming Manhattan, Cobra-style, to free their comrade? — and then undercuts his own arguments with a defense of military commissions and indefinite detention without trial.

Well, then make a case, and make it consistently. Build support and maintain it. Be willing to stake political capital on it. Or concede that you never meant what you said about justice.

You could say something similar about most of Obama’s campaign promises versus his real actions as President.

Rahm Emanuel has announced his candidacy for Mayor of Chicago.

The former North Side congressman and White House chief of staff laid out a broad agenda, declaring he’d work to help generate jobs, improve education and decrease crime at a juncture in the city’s history when all three need to be addressed.

And he plans to do all that–you guessed it–without raising taxes! That’s what all the Republicans say. Oh wait–he’s running as a Democrat. Good luck Chi-town, you’re going to need it.

The UK Guardian reports that McDonald’s, KFC, and PepsiCo will help write the UK’s new policies on “obesity and diet-related diseases.”

The Department of Health is putting the fast food companies McDonald’s and KFC and processed food and drink manufacturers such as PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, Unilever, Mars and Diageo at the heart of writing government policy on obesity, alcohol and diet-related disease, the Guardian has learned.

In an overhaul of public health, said by campaign groups to be the equivalent of handing smoking policy over to the tobacco industry, health secretary Andrew Lansley has set up five “responsibility deal” networks with business, co-chaired by ministers, to come up with policies. Some of these are expected to be used in the public health white paper due in the next month.

The groups are dominated by food and alcohol industry members, who have been invited to suggest measures to tackle public health crises. Working alongside them are public interest health and consumer groups including Which?, Cancer Research UK and the Faculty of Public Health. The alcohol responsibility deal network is chaired by the head of the lobby group the Wine and Spirit Trade Association. The food network to tackle diet and health problems includes processed food manufacturers, fast food companies, and Compass, the catering company famously pilloried by Jamie Oliver for its school menus of turkey twizzlers. The food deal’s sub-group on calories is chaired by PepsiCo, owner of Walkers crisps.

This sounds like something U.S. politicians would do. Is our insanity taking over the world? Or is it demon possession?

Scientists say that naked body scanners are bad for your health.

US scientists warned Friday that the full-body, graphic-image X-ray scanners that are being used to screen passengers and airline crews at airports around the country may be unsafe.

“They say the risk is minimal, but statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays,” Dr Michael Love, who runs an X-ray lab at the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at Johns Hopkins University school of medicine, told AFP.

“No exposure to X-ray is considered beneficial. We know X-rays are hazardous but we have a situation at the airports where people are so eager to fly that they will risk their lives in this manner,” he said.

The possible health dangers posed by the scanners add to passengers and airline crews’ concerns about the devices, which have been dubbed “naked” scanners because of the graphic image they give of a person’s body, genitalia and all.

They could be bad for your mental health too. Here is one example of what can happen if you are selected for naked body scanning and choose to “opt out.”

Andrew Burmeister had been searched using an airport scanner before and didn’t like it at all. On a return trip from Charlotte, he was selected for another body scan screening and chose to opt out, as the sign said he was entitled to do. Burmeister said the screeners became rude and made him sit down, away from his belongings, which were now sitting unattended on the end of the conveyor belt. Eventually a team allowed him to collect his belongings and, after a turn through the metal detector, he was taken to a private area to be screened.

Mr. Burmeister says these screeners were much friendlier, but despite this, his story is still particularly unsettling. They patted him down and asked him lots of questions. They also swabbed his belongings, removing each one individually and scanning it for explosives. But that’s not the unsettling part. While they were busy going through his belongings, they were chatting to him. One mentioned that he was ‘lucky’ that this was all that was happening because after October 31, the screening for passengers who opt out of a body scan would become a lot more “intimate.”

Here’s another piece about this at The Chicago Tribune.

For the camera-shy, TSA will offer an alternative: “enhanced” pat-downs. This is not the gentle frisking you may have experienced at the airport in the past. It requires agents to probe aggressively in intimate zones — breasts, buttocks, crotches.

If you enjoyed your last mammography or prostate exam, you’ll love the enhanced pat-down. And you’ll get a chance to have an interesting conversation with your children about being touched by strangers.

Reviews of the procedure are coming in, and they are not raves. The Allied Pilots Association calls it a “demeaning experience,” and one pilot complained it amounted to “sexual molestation.” The head of a flight attendants’ union local said that for anyone who has been sexually assaulted, it will “drudge up some bad memories.”

Have I told you lately that I’ve decided I’m never going to fly again? If you do need to fly, and having your genitals stared at by beefy TSA morons is troubling to you, you might want to check into National Opt-Out Day, scheduled for Wednesday, November 24–the day before Thanksgiving and one of the busiest travel days of the year.

“The goal of National Opt-Out Day is to send a message to our lawmakers that we demand change,” reads the call to action at OptOutDay.com, set up by Brian Sodegren. “No naked body scanners, no government-approved groping. We have a right to privacy, and buying a plane ticket should not mean that we’re guilty until proven innocent.”

This isn’t big news for most people, but The New York Times has a front page piece on “U.S. aid for ex-Nazis.”

A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades. [….]

Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.

And let’s not forget that George W. Bush’s family actively supported the Nazi regime before WWII, and he was elected President of the U.S.

I’ll finish with a bit of conspiracy news (my favorite kind). For years I’ve been following the investigation and cover-up of David Kelly’s death. From Raw Story:

Dr. David Kelly was found dead in a field near his home in Oxfordshire in 2003, shortly after he was revealed to be the source of a BBC leak that accused Tony Blair’s government of exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. His death prompted suspicions among many that he may have been killed in retaliation for the leak.

Kelly himself had predicted he would be “found dead in the woods” if the UK invaded Iraq.

Now the Daily Mail is reporting new evidence that Kelly was murdered.

Dr Andrew Watt, an experienced clinical pharmacologist, says he has told Thames Valley Police it is not possible Dr Kelly could have swallowed more than a ‘safe’ dose of two coproxamol tablets because there was so little in his system after death.

He said: ‘I reported to the Thames force that I believe that the death of Dr Kelly may have been murder. I have received an acknowledgement and they have given me an incident number.

‘I have been told that the inquiry is being conducted by a very senior officer.’
A second development also casts doubt on the suicide verdict of the Hutton inquiry – which took the place of a formal inquest.

The Mail has established that Dr Kelly left an upbeat answerphone message to his friend Nigel Cox just days before his body was found on July 18, 2003. Dr Kelly said he was looking forward to joining him for a game of cards on July 23.

An interesting sidelight to the Kelly case is that Kelly sent an e-mail to then NYT “reporter” Judith Miller shortly before his death. Emptywheel mentions this in a recent post about the work of the National Security Archive:

…as I was reading it, all I could think of was David Kelly’s last email to Judy Miller, warning of dark actors playing games, followed shortly by Tony Blair’s apparently unplanned trip to the US, just in time for him to be out of the country when Kelly was suicided (not to mention for him to be here in the aftermath of the Plame outing which Dick Cheney had ordered Judy to be included in). After all, its hard to look at the timeline the NSA lays out without also thinking of Judy Miller’s key pieces of propaganda–boosting claims about the aluminum tubes–on September 8 and 13, 2002 (indeed, those articles appeared at the same time as the Brits were strengthening these claims, which makes me wonder whether her work wasn’t a key part of pushing the UK to make its claims about the tubes stronger).

We knew the Brits and the US built their propaganda for war together. We knew that Judy Miller was an integral part to that. But when we see the emails going back and forth commenting on each others drafts, it raises once again the question of where the emails back and forth to the war effort’s chief propagandist got disappeared to.

It’s all connected. What is Obama’s role in the giant cover-up? Is he just in the WH to make sure none of the secrets get out, or does he have a more active role in future “dark actions?”

Taking my tinfoil hat off now.

[MABlue’s Sunday picks]

Cigarette companies are evil.
Cigarette Giants in a Global Fight on Tighter Rules

As sales to developing nations become ever more important to giant tobacco companies, they are stepping up efforts around the world to fight tough restrictions on the marketing of cigarettes.

Companies like Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco are contesting limits on ads in Britain, bigger health warnings in South America and higher cigarette taxes in the Philippines and Mexico. They are also spending billions on lobbying and marketing campaigns in Africa and Asia, and in one case provided undisclosed financing for TV commercials in Australia.

“A” Rating for Hamas? The Better Business Bureau (BBB) has been running a scam grading. What a disgrace!
Terror Group Gets ‘A’ Rating From Better Business Bureau?

The Better Business Bureau, one of the country’s best known consumer watchdog groups, is being accused by business owners of running a “pay for play” scheme in which A plus ratings are awarded to those who pay membership fees, and F ratings used to punish those who don’t.

To prove the point, a group of Los Angeles business owners paid $425 to the Better Business Bureau and were able to obtain an A minus grade for a non-existent company called Hamas, named after the Middle Eastern terror group.

Patrick Smith, who runs the blog Ask The Pilot has a thoughtful column about the panicky and incoherent reaction to something we’ve been living with forever, only with more composure.
News flash: Deadly terrorism existed before 9/11

With respect to airport security, it is remarkable how we have come to place Sept. 11, 2001, as the fulcrum upon which we balance almost all of our decisions. As if deadly terrorism didn’t exist prior to that day, when really we’ve been dealing with the same old threats for decades. What have we learned? What have we done?

Well, have a look at the debased state of airport security today. We continue enacting the wrong policies, wasting our security resources and manpower. We have implemented many important changes since Lockerbie, it’s true (actually, many of the new protocols are post-9/11), but much of our approach remains incoherent. Cargo and packages go uninspected while passengers are groped and harassed over umbrellas and harmless hobby knives. Uniformed pilots are forced to remove their belts and endure embarrassing pat-downs.

Frank Rich has been writing really good columns lately. I’m not going to stop him while he’s on a roll.
Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?

The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.

It’s the very top earners, not your garden variety, entrepreneurial multimillionaires, who will be by far the biggest beneficiaries if there’s an extension of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for income over $200,000 a year (for individuals) and $250,000 (for couples). The resurgent G.O.P. has vowed to fight to the end to award this bonanza, but that may hardly be necessary given the timid opposition of President Obama and the lame-duck Democratic Congress.

Is anyone even surprised by this?
Spanish priest arrested over ‘21,000 child porn images’

A Catholic priest in Spain has been arrested over the alleged possession of thousands of images of child sex abuse.

Who has the better argument?
Parties battle over bare breasts

The Danish People’s Party wants pictures of bare breasts in an introduction film to scare away fundamentalists.

But, Conservatives counter with a good point:

“Bare breasts are not a protection against fundamentalism,” [Conservative Integration Spokesman] Khader says on his Facebook page.

“Quite on the contrary. Fundamentalists as so sex crazy that bare breasts would make them flock to the country. Perhaps one should try naked pigs and pork – that’ll keep them away…”

I’ll score this one for the Conservatives.

What does your hair say about your health? Check it here:
8 Things Your Hair Says About Your Health

When it comes to our hair, most of us worry most about what to do with it: how short to cut it, how to style it, whether to color it once it begins to go gray. But experts say that our hair says a lot more about us than how closely we follow the latest styles. In fact, the health of our hair and scalp can be a major tip-off to a wide variety of health conditions.

Some interesting wonky stuff abou the devastatingly lasting effect of slavery.
The historical roots of inequality

US commentators regularly lament the country’s racial and ethnic inequality. This column presents data from 1870 and 1940-2000 to argue that the divide has its roots in the slave trade and that its legacy persists today through the racial inequality in education.

It’s Sunday. You can enjoy your gossip column. It looks like the life of the Hell’s Kitchen Chef is unraveling.
The cook, the grief, his wife & his (alleged) lover

For Gordon Ramsay, the past few weeks have been like living in his very own Kitchen Nightmare. Only it has extended beyond his kitchen and into every other room of his house. Like an unwatched pot, the TV chef’s personal and professional life has boiled over in spectacular fashion, leaving the mother of all cleaning-up jobs.

Not that anyone is rushing to pull on the Marigolds; quite the contrary. In typical fashion, Ramsay has heaped more coals this weekend on to a fire he lit three weeks ago when he sacked his father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson. Specifically, he claimed his wife Tana has much to learn about what her father gets up to when not running restaurants, lashing out after his wife’s parents wrote to their daughter, urging her to dump the man she married 14 years ago, aged 22.

So what news articles and blog posts do you recommend today?

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