He dropped $16 million in on Michigan, Colorado, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, and only saw results in Nevada.
Obama spent about 1/3 of this.
McCain lost ground in all but Iowa and Colorado, where he stayed steady, and he picked up in Nevada, and there are no polls for West Virginia.
heh
I think that it’s clear that Julius was a spy, though his role in nuclear espionage is not certain, but Ethel has always been a question. In any case, this relase of data should keep a number of historians busy for the next few years.
No, this is not satire. “Political appointees at the Department of Labor are moving with unusual speed to push through in the final months of the Bush administration a rule making it tougher to regulate workers’ on-the-job exposure to chemicals and toxins.”
They are doing their level best to do it in secret.
Only 180 days to go…..
Ah….Yes…Republicans…..
Senate Republican leaders are now allowing senators to vote as they wish in an attempt to keep seat losses to a minimum in November.
We also have reports that Republicans see Bush as a “jinx”, and that they are trying to avoid the party brand.
No wonder they aren’t letting press into Bush fund raisers. They are afraid of pictures of the candidate and Bush together showing up in the press.
Maybe Republicans should campaign with a more popular member of the Bush administration, like Dick Cheney….I think that I just threw up in my mouth.
According to Zimbabaw’s state run newspaper, The Herald, reconciliation talks are to start tomorrow.
It’s not a bad sign, but I don’t expect to see progress while Mbeki is the chief mediator.
A slightly more positive note, the EU is pressing ahead with more sanctions.
Former Police Officer Scott Nugent tasered Baron “Scooter” Pikes NINE TIMES after he WAS ALREADY HANDCUFFED, and may face criminal charges, though I doubt it: It’s Winnfield, Louisiana, only 45 miles from Jena, and the victim was black:
Williams, who ruled Pikes’ death a homicide in June after extensive study, said Nugent fired his Taser at Pikes six times in less than three minutes — shots recorded by a computer chip in the weapon’s handle. Then officers put Pikes in the back of a cruiser and drove him to their police station — where Nugent fired a seventh shot, directly against Pikes’ chest.
“After he was given that drive stun to the chest, he was pulled out of the car onto the concrete, ” Williams told CNN. “He was electroshocked two more times, which two officers noted that he had no neuromuscular response to those last two 50,000-volt electroshocks.”
Williams said he had two nationally known forensic pathologists, including former New York city medical examiner Michael Baden, review the case before issuing his conclusions. He said it’s possible Nugent was shocking a dead man the last two times he pulled the trigger.
“This fellow was talking in the back seat of the car prior to shot number seven,” he said. “From that point on, it becomes questionable [if Pikes was still alive].”
Curry said Pikes told officers he suffered from asthma and had been using PCP and crack cocaine. But Williams said he found no sign of drug use in the autopsy, and no record of asthma in Pikes’ medical history.
In the year since Winnfield police received Tasers, officers have used them 14 times, according to police records — with 12 of the instances involving black suspects. Ten of the 14 incidents involved Nugent, who has no public disciplinary record.
(emphasis mine)
Taser, International is claiming that they couldn’t have caused his death….Yeah, sure….whatever.
Nothing to see here….It’s just a n*****…move along.
I’m not sure if this looks like something from the days of Stalin, but this McCain campaign poster just gives me the creeps:
John Sidney McCain III barely graduated from Annapolis, 894 of 899, and then only because because daddy was a high ranking admiral.
Now, he gets the escalation in Iraq wrong, claiming that the so-called “Anbar Awakening” was the result of the “surge” even though it pre-dated Bush’s first mention of escalation in Iraq by 6 months.
Of course, this is Katie Couric’s CBS, so when the gaff was made, they edited it out, because by the rules of the “kule kidz” in the press corps, any gaff by McCain is an honest mistake, and the public must be shielded from seeing the “straight talker” when he shows himself to be a complete pratt.
Really. Only 37% of Jews have a favorable view of Lieberman, as versus 48% who view him unfavorably.
OK, the 37% are complete tools, but that’s not much more than one out of three.
Bloomberg.com: Exclusive: “Pemex May Drill Outside Mexico for First Time If Reforms Fail”
Pemex needs foreign help because it doesn’t have the technology to drill in water deeper than 500 meters (1,640 feet), he said.
Pemex may need foreign help, but it does not need a partner.
It can buy that expertise without a foreign partner. Oil field services companies like Slumberger (disclosure) can do this on a fee for service basis.
And it turns out that their “threat” is to do a partnership with Petroleo Brasileiro, which has more deep water experience.
They are trying to get through with a bill that will allow “partnerships” that are ownership in everything but name, because someone gets the fat “commissions” for brokering the deals.
Considering that these programs were all founded by people who prospered under Batista, it’s not surprising that corruption is the rule rather than the exception.
If your goal is to restore corruption and klepto-capitalism to Cuba, it should be no surprise when the organization you found is corrupt and klepto-capitalist.
Our position towards Cuba has been as self-destructive as anything that I’ve seen in US history.
The vote was 275 votes to 256 with 10 abstentions.
Honestly, I think that the nuclear deal is a bad one, it provides civilian nuclear technology to India while its weapons program proceeds apace, but it puts me on the side of the the BJP,* which makes me feeling queasy, though their objection is a nationalist one, that there should be no limits on weapons building and testing, and mine is an anti-proliferation one, that we are rewarding a proliferator with the deal, and will inevitably supply technology for weapons development, simply to benefit the moribund US nuclear industry.
It still has to pass Congress, which is unlikely until after Bush leaves office, and a new administration may wish to tweak the deal.
US negotiators are a $1.4 billion cut, off of a out of a $48.2 billion dollar cap under the current agreement.
Honestly, it should be zero, at least on the world market, and then there’s the whole “patented species” crap that is used to shake down 3rd world farmers.
The New York Times buries the lede:
…..some lawyers and law professors are raising a related question: Will Mr. Bush grant pre-emptive pardons to officials involved in controversial counterterrorism programs?
Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance.
Some legal analysts said Mr. Bush might be reluctant to issue such pardons because they could be construed as an implicit admission of guilt. But several members of the conservative legal community in Washington said in interviews that they hoped Mr. Bush would issue such pardons — whether or not anyone made a specific request for one. They said people who carried out the president’s orders should not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills.
“The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations,” said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. “If we don’t protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances.”
Bush does not pardon out of a compassion, he does not believe in that.
He will pardon for personal and political advantage.
Thus, I expect blanket pardons of his His Evil Minions™, because otherwise, Bush would be in the dock himself.
When Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, many in Washington, particularly Republicans came to believe that immunity from lawbreaking was a birthright, and so they have been increasingly brazen in breaking laws.
These people need to spend time in prison. Real ones. Medium security at least.
It goes from $5.85/hr to $6.55/hour.
It’s also about the only thing that has even a modest chance of stimulating the economy, because the people at the bottom of the wage scale will spend it.
It will hit $7.25 next July.
I’ve always been a doubter that speculation is responsible for much of the run up in oil prices, but I wholeheartedly the proposed “Stop Excessive Speculation Act”, which would crack down on speculators by allowing the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CTFC) to regulate futures market and, “differentiate between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” hedge trading”.
The reason that I support this is because it is a real sea change. It is a refutation of the myth that completely unsupervised markets self-regulate to the benefit of society.
It is the arbitrage and exotic financial vehicles that have been created in the past nearly three decades of free market fundamentalism, frequently lauded by Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan, which are at the core of our current credit crunch.
The markets have devolved into complex self-serving insider deals that have harmed everyone.
I think that this bill is a baby step, but it’s a step in the right direction.
The Congressional Budget Office is suggisting that a rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac is about 50% likely, and could cost $25 billion.
Me, I would put the chance of needing a rescue at over 90%, and multiply by 10, or $¼ trillion for the cost to the tax payers, just based on my gut.
As to secondary costs rippling through the economy? I’m not even going to try to guess at that.
They are asking for the Security Council to delay any investigation for 12 months.
The official reason is because they believe that an indictment would “harm peace efforts”, but I think that it’s because there are other regimes out there, and I’m not limiting myself to Mugabe, who would be subject to possible prosecution from the International Criminal Court.
It appears that the Darfur rebels understand this too:
Djibril Bassole, the joint U.N.-AU Darfur mediator made his first visit to Sudan on Sunday to try to revive a stalled peace process. But Khalil Ibrahim, head of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), said his rebel group would no longer recognise AU efforts to mediate a peace process.
“The African Union is a biased organisation and is protecting dictators and neglecting the African people,” Ibrahim, head of JEM, the most militarily powerful rebel group, told Reuters from Darfur.
Sherif Harir, a senior member of the Sudan Liberation Army Unity faction, also told Reuters that for any AU mediation to succeed, it would have to answer why it had taken such a stance.
“The AU by so doing has indicated to the people of Darfur that they can die and it’s not as important as protecting a president who has taken power by military coup,” he said.
Of course, it’s not like the African Union had much credibility left anyway.
Charles Plosser, President of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, called for rate hikes to forestall inflation. Not surprisingly, the US dollar has risen as a result.
Meanwhile, the banking meltdown continues aplace, with Wachovia losing $9.9 billion dollars and exiting the wholesale mortgage business, meaning that they will no longer offer mortgages through independent brokers, and WaMu Lost $3.3 billion too.
I would also note that federal examiners auditing the GSE’s books, though this is more a preparation for a US government bailout than it is any concern for wrongdoing.
Considering that U.S. home prices 4.8% from May 2007 to May 2008, I’d count a GSE bailout as likely.
Seeing as how tropical storm Dolly largely missed the offshore oil rigs, it’s not surprising that oil prices have fallen, and it appears that retail gasoline is doing the same.
Still, this is mostly a symptom of a slumping economy, where less oil is needed, much as UPS’s profit slump of 21% is clear evidence of a radically slowing economy.
It’s also old home week at 40 Years in the Desert, because we have some news about another monoliner insurer in trouble, this time, it’s Assured Guaranty, one of the two insurers left with AAA ratings from all three major agencies, that is taking a tumble, because Moody’s is making noises about a downgrade.
