We are still having c, see lashes between the Mahdi Militia and the Iranian Puppet Government forces.
David Petraeus is claiming that Iran supported the Mahdi militias in Basra, which is absolute BS.
While Iran wants a Shia dominated Iraq, they do not want Shia Arab nationalists dominating Iraq, they want people in their pocket, like Chalabi, Hakim, and Maliki.
Sir, in lying in this way to promote Bush’s war, you dishonor the sacrifices of your troops.
The Zimbabwean High Court ruled that the MDC’s case to release voting results is urgent. This is not to say that they have ruled that the poll results must be released quickly, but that they will hear the case quickly.
In related news, Zimbabwe security forces have detained poll officials. I guess that they did not do enough voter intimidation and fraud before and during the election, so they are, as Emeril Lagasse would say, “Taking it up a notch”.
Two foreign journalists have been released from detention, New York Times reporter Barry Bearak and another unidentified (likely British) reporter. Bail was set at $Z 3,000,000. About $US 10,000.00 at the official exchange rate, and about $US 10.00 at the black market rate.
It appears that the upper house of parliament, the elected members of the Senate will be split evenly (actually 30 ZANU-PF, 26 MDC Tsvangirai, and 6 MDC Mutambara), with the appointed seats, “10 provincial Governors appointed by the President; the president and deputy president of the Council of Chiefs; 16 chiefs, being two chiefs from each province other than metropolitan provinces, and five Senators appointed by the President”, going largely ZANU-PF giving them a majority.
They label the Senate foreclosure bill a, “A Pro-Foreclosure Bill“:
We refer to a $7,000 tax credit (payable over two years) to anyone who purchases a foreclosed home within a year of the proposal’s enactment. Supposedly, this would help clear the nation’s swollen inventory of repossessed properties, thus propping up home prices more generally. Here’s the catch. For lenders as well as borrowers, foreclosure is an expensive hassle. If at all possible, most banks would rather avoid repossessing a house, which they must then try to resell. But, by making it cheaper to buy a foreclosed house than a comparable unforeclosed property, the tax credit makes it more feasible to sell one. The cost and hassle — for the lender — of foreclosure go down, and the benefits go up. Other things being equal, lenders would be that much more likely to foreclose — rather than to help homeowners stay in their houses on modified terms.
The record of the Washington Post editorial board lately has been so bad that I’ve come to wonder if Richard Nixon was innocent.
H/T Dean Baker
In the world of pipe dreams, we have the EU calling for a coordinated response to the credit squeeze.
The Euro-Wimps just don’t get it. This is America. We don’t do joint action based on a deliberate approach to everyone’s long term best interest. We shoot first, and ask questions later, and when the dead guy we shot doesn’t answer, we water board him, and then we bail out the bad actors, like Bear Stearns.
In the ever entertaining world of the monoliners, Fitch has cut MBIA’s rating to AA from AAA, because they are under capitalized (broke).
The disgrace here is that it took so long, though you knew that it was coming when MBIA asked Fitch to stop rating it about 3 weeks ago.
In the no surprise category, bankruptcies jumped 30% over in march 2007 year over year.
And for those of you who think that commercial real estate will be uneffected by the crash, vacancies at malls have skyrocketed.
Yep, he’s claiming that the housing bubble, and subsequent bust are not his fault.
Let’s see, you nearly tripled the money supply before you stopped publishing M3 data in 2006, and that is “fragile”.
M3 again baby, with all that money that you created, it all had to go somewhere.
Dude, that was you PIMPING yourself to George Walker Bush for the election, so you would get reappointed.
Dude, you have actively pumped up and bailed out every asset boom under your watch. You engineered bailouts, either through monetary policy such as low interest rates, or directly, as you did with the LTCM hedge fund.
Which is why you did your best to effectively dismantle Glass-Steagall back when Paul Volker was Fed Chair.
You allowed, scratch that, you encouraged the repackaging of garbage into Byzantinely complex instruments, and you called them good.
Regulators are more than able to prevent this, you were simply completely unwilling to take even the most basic advisory steps to do so. Your whole hearted of so called financial innovations like “credit default swaps” which are too complex for the people who trade them to understand is clear.
The legacy of Ayn Rand, your mentor, is bad writing, ugly prose, and the impoverishment of all but the most dishonest.
Thanks asshole.
He is no longer a “Senior Strategist for the Clinton Campaign“.
Took them long enough to dump that incompetent jerk. The man has been a complete disaster.
The bad news is that he appears to still have a role in the campaign, albeit a diminished one.
This guy should have been given the boot long ago. He’s incompetent and expensive, and his continued presence on the campaign does not reflect well on either Bill or Hillary, both of whom stuck with him almost a year longer than they should have.
Paul Krugman notes that we are in the middle of a major food crisis, with the prices of staples such as wheat, corn, and rice skyrocketing, and he blames, along with weather and energy prices, biofuels.
As he so eloquently states, “People are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states”.
It’s a nice sound bite, but it is incomplete, which may be an unfortunate fact of life when one has only about 800 words to put forth an idea.
Simply put, there is much more to this problem than simply the currently minuscule demand for feed stock for bio-fuels.
First, he misses the very real possibility of worries regarding social unrest, possibly to the level of failed nation states from food riots, that may very result from this, which may be far more lethal the direct starvation deaths.*
Major exporters, such as China, India, Egypt, Vietnam and Cambodia have introduced export restrictions to forestall this, which, of course, worsens the problem for net food importers.
More interisting is a Bloomberg article showing the problems in the market being akin to the current credit crisis. The reporting is mind boggling simple here telling , “Bad countries interfering with the free market by regulating their exports so that poor people don’t starve“, story.
The reality, and it can be teased out from the article, is that there is a lot of arbitrage generating volatility. The quotes are from rice traders, and they are wringing their hands. Let’s look at the various non-producing players in the market that were listed:
To the best of my knowledge, ot one of these companies owns a farm, nor processes the grain, they make their by extracting fees on trades, and while that can be useful to buy a contract for future delivery, the reckless Anglo-Saxon trading model that is at the core of the current credit crunch, where numerous people buy and sell contracts to generate trade profits is making things worse.
In fact, until we move back to depression era regulators to reign in this activity, it will continue to get worse.
*Yes, I’m looking at this cold blooded construct, and realizing that it means for many people the end of the world as they know it.
In the spirit of L. Ron Hubbard, who once declared, “I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is!*, I hereby declare myself the first Senior Ecclesiastic Authority of The Church of Ronald Reagan. I declare myself to be the supreme confessor and Pontifex Maximus.†
My inspiration is the inimitable Digby, who notes that when the Republicans discovered that Ronald Reagan was rated by historians as mediocre, “They put millions in to the project and succeeded in changing the names of airports, schools and highways all across the country. They have plan to put Ronnie on Rushmore and the ten dollar bill. Over time I would expect that someone will come up with the idea to declare Reaganism a religion.”
You know, designing and analyzing useful things, much like Hubbard’s few pennies a word, are not a great way to make a lot of money, but as Pontifax Maximus, the revenue possibilities border on endless.
Just think of that lucrative “selling tortillas with Reagan’s visage on eBay” market.
I would be set for life.
*Full disclosure, I have met editor Sam Moskowitz, one of the sources of the quote, though I don’t recall talking with him, I think that I was just in the audience at an SF con.
†This is a reference to the Roman Emperor’s role as head of the state Church, not the Pope. Both terms derive from the word for “bridge”.
it appears that voting officials claims that e-voting would save money are manifestly false, with costs increasing by 179% per voter on average as compared to optical scan systems.
I am so completely unshocked.
When he says:
And finally, new rule: If voting can destroy the Democratic Party, then the party isn’t very democratic. Democrats need to stop freaking out about how this long primary battle between two popular candidates needs to be “settled yesterday! Because the candidates are bloodying each other! They’re causing irreparable harm! Mommy and Daddy are fighting!” Hey you people need to reach into your teenager’s knapsack and pull out a Paxil or Prozac and chill out.
This is an very interesting development. It appears to me that this renders the legal authority of Yoo memorandum to a level akin to graffiti on a bathroom wall:
Neither the attorney general at the time, John D. Ashcroft, nor his deputy, Larry D. Thompson, were aware of the 81-page memo when it was written and sent to the Pentagon in March 2003, according to several former senior department officials. The Pentagon was told in December 2003 to disregard the legal advice in the memo after Justice Department lawyers raised objections.
The sequence of events is now that someone demanded this memo, got a copy, and sent it out for implementation without any sort of legal review. This memo said that “military operations combating terrorism inside the United States are not limited by Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures”.
For anyone who wishes to assert that DoJ opinions indemnify law breakers (Mukasey), it becomes increasingly clear that the political appointees of the DoJ created a clown show, and that John Ashcroft was one of those showing the greatest integrity.*
*He doesn’t have much, he just had the most integrity. Still, that is something I never expected to write.
This is good news for the defense.
To refresh your memory, this trial is about “celebrity pathologist Cyrl Wecht” allegedly using public resources of his medical examiner’s office for his private practice, and 24 of the counts are over $3.06.
Basically, it appears that he may have used a publicly paid secretary to run his business and make some faxes, and the US Attorney in Pittsburgh literally made a federal case out of this.
Note that he is a prominent Democrat, and that Republican Dick Thornburg, former Attorney General has called it a political witch hunt.
So asks Dean Baker.
No.
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
The longer answer is that the graduates of the Ivy League who would otherwise go into investment banking should care, but I’ll view them with the same degree of concern that they view people in the automobile, textile, steel, machine tools, etc. industries.
Not really updated this for the past few days, as my wife’s birthday has taken precedence.
First, we have Maliki threating an escalation against the Mahdi Army (see here and here), and then we have reports that he’s seeking to ease tensions with the Mahdi Army, and that he has
suspended raids against them.
So it appears that there are some mixed signals out there.
It doesn’t help that the performance of the state security forces was atrocious, with More well over 1000 deserting or refusing to fight.
Abu Aardvark, who has an advantage over most bloggers, and for that matters most US journalists, in that he can read Arabic, the fact that Maliki’s response to all of this has been to recruit over 10,000 members of the Badr Brigades (you know, the ones who are in the pay of the Iranian Republican guard) and the Dawa militias, after insisting that there were no resources available to hire more forces after insisting that there were no positions available to Sunni security forces.
Nothing Maliki does is about anything but short term personal political advantage, which should come as no surprise.
In related news Muqtada al-Sadr is offering to help purge the security forces of militia elements, which I assume means elements of the Badr Brigades and the Dawa militia, and we are seeing an uptick of violence in Sadr City.
If this is not surreal enough for you, the State Department just renewed the contract for Blackwater security with out any changes to the terms, so they still have a license to kill with impunity.
Needless to say, being really pissed off by this, because there is one thing that all the various factions in Iraq can agree with, they want the unaccountable, incompetent, and violent mercenary forces out of their country.
Given the timing of the Basra raid, I have come to the conclusion that this was instigated by Bush and His Evil Minions™, particularly Dick Cheney, who visited just before this all blew up, at least in generalities, if not specifics.
I think that they wanted a dramatic sign of progress prior to the Petraeus testimony
Truth be told, I was never a fan of his acting, and his politics were paleolithic, but he was fun on talk shows.
The background here is fairly simple. The Communications Decency Act (CDA)grants a safe harbor for online providers of an “interactive computer service” from things that others might post.
So, for example, if someone other than me posted in the comments that Frau Blücher of deliberately scaring horses, I could not be held responsible in a libel suit.
What happened here is that Roomates.com is a roomate get together service, and when one logs in, you are asked about things like race, sex, sexual preference, religion, whether one has children, etc.
The problem here is that advertising using these categories an unambiguously clear violation of the fair housing act, and they were sued by the fair housing councils of San Diego and the San Fernando Valley.
Roomates.com claimed that they were immune under the CDA because the users of the service, and not Roomates.com entered the data, but the 9th circuit court of appeals called bullsh$#.
They said that Roomates.com required in order to participate, and as such, it was generating the illegal content itself.
I agree wholeheartedly with Eugene Volokh, who says that they made the right call. They were deliberately creating discriminatory ads, and deliberately facilitating these ads, as opposed to the hand wringing of publius of Obsidian Wings and Susan Crawford.
The analogy here is the difference between a bookstore carrying a publication that infringes on the Fair Housing Act, and the publication that actually carries those illegal ads.
The internet should not be a magic wand to excuse illegal behavior. Publius argues
….. that litigation if often done in bad faith. As any real litigator will tell you, the point of litigation isn’t necessarily to vindicate a right, but to harass an opponent with discovery, document productions, and other expensive tactics. So long as a claim is plausible, you can inflict real damage (and maybe get a favorable settlement) even if you think you will ultimately lose.
Every bookstore operator operates the same way. The books you host do not open you up to law suits, but the store newsletter does.
The internet is not a license to break the law, and we have case law distinguishing between hosted content and user generated content, and this was clearly the latter. Roomates.com is guilty as hell.
It appears that while Hillary Clinton was condemning the Columbia free trade pact, mark pen, in his capacity as CEO of Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, was having meetings with representatives of the Columbian government in order to lobby for the agreement.
Penn subsequently apologized for this, but the Change to Win union alliance is now demanding that Penn be fired by the Clinton campaign:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, April 4, 2008CONTACT: Greg Denier
Noreen Nielsen
(202) 721-0660WASHINGTON, DC – The following is a statement from Change to Win executive director Greg Tarpinian concerning the latest revelation that Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist Mark Penn met Monday with Colombia’s ambassador regarding the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.
“It’s time for Senator Hillary Clinton to send her vaunted ‘chief strategist’ Mark Penn packing — back to his job consulting for union busting corporations and anti-labor governments for good.
“We have questioned Penn’s role in the Clinton campaign in the past for his representation of union busting employers like Cintas. At that time, Penn said there was a wall between him and his firm’s representation of union busters. The latest revelation that Penn — whose firm represents the Colombian government in its effort to secure passage of a so-called free trade agreement — is actively involved in securing its passage in the middle of Senator Clinton’s presidential campaign is outrageous. It also suggests that he has been playing a double role – advising the Senator on what to say to curry Democratic voters and advising the Colombian government on what to say to curry a majority of votes in Congress.
“The vast majority of Americans do not believe that we should be granting preferential trade status to a government that coddles death squads that target union organizers. Colombia remains the most dangerous country in the world for union members, where more than 2,200 workers have been murdered since the 1980s by Colombian death squads for trying to form unions while the government has done nothing to effectively stop the murders. It is time for Penn to go.”
A postscript to all this is that Columbia has now fired Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, saying that, “The Colombian government considers this a lack of respect to Colombians, and finds this response unacceptable.”
Bummer of a birth mark, Hal.
The good general wrote to the Dean of the UC Berkely law school, regarding their hiring of war criminal John Yoo.
I wish I could write so well. The phrase, “Mengele Professor of Sado-Political Studies” is prize.
A shining interrogation center upon a hill
Christopher Edley, Jr
Professor of Law and Dean
School of Law
University of California, BerkeleyDear Dr. Edley,
I’m very impressed by your decision to hire former Justice Department official John Yoo to serve on your faculty. It was a very shrewd marketing move on your part. It allows Berkeley to finally get past its sordid history as the battleground for the expansion of our civil liberties and become the foremost advocate for that “shining interrogation center upon a hill” so many of us wish our nation to become.
Go read the rest.
Some recent news on how we raise our children. First is a news story about a mother who let her 9 year old son ride alone on the subway. There is nothing wrong with the story, except for the fact that it qualifies as news. Kids have been taking mass transit on their own at that age for years, but in this plan-every-minute soccer mom stamp-out-independent-thought culture we have, it gets a significant amount of media play.
We are raising kids who will never have the smallest adventure, nor the smallest sense of responsibility.
Kudos New York Sun Columnist* and mom, Lenore Skenazy for not buying into the toxic waste paranoia of the phony missing child hysteria of the mid-1980s.
On the darker side, we have a six year old kid who is labeled a sexual harasser for smacking a girl on the butt.
The police were called, and his school record now lists him as a sexual harasser.
This is insane. Did the kid do something wrong, of course he did, and his parents should have been called in, and he should have gotten a few days detention, but it’s not sexual harassment.
We was 6 years old, not 13.
Then we have an 8 year old child suspended because he is alleged to have sniffed line from a marker on his shirt. School administrators are suggesting that he was “trying to get high”, aka “huffing”.
There are two problems with all of this, the first is that we are allowing people who are clearly psychopaths abuse their authority, and the second is that increasingly, there are policies in place to support these psychopaths.
Osama bin Laden does not have to destroy America, we are doing it through what we do to the next generation.
*When I say the phrase “Kudos to NY Sun Columnist”, something is very, very, wrong with reality.