USA! usa!

9-30-08--In an effort to control rising costs, a small but growing number of insurers and employers are giving people the choice to seek treatment in other countries, a practice known as medical tourism. WSJ B1

the saga continues

9-29-08--WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Monday appointed a prosecutor to examine potential criminal charges in the Justice Department's firings of nine federal prosecutors, which it said bore substantial signs of improper political considerations.

The appointment of Nora Dannehy, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, came as the department released an inspector general's report that found former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had "abdicated" his responsibility in the matter.

The report also said several White House officials, including former top political aide Karl Rove, were unwilling to be interviewed by investigators about the 2006 firings.

GWB IDs crisist culprit

9-29-82--In a televised address Thursday, President George Bush blamed the current financial crisis on the “massive amount of money [that] flowed into the United States from investors abroad, rather than on greedy decisions by US mortgage lenders and borrowers. WSJ A2

WSJ IDs crisis culprit

--Sept. 27/28, 2008--What we have here essentially are a pair of government slush funds created in July as part of the Economic Recovery Act that pump tax dollars into the coffers of low-income housing advocacy groups, such as Acorn.

Acorn, one of America’s most militant left-wing “community activist groups,” is spending $16 million this year to register Democrats to vote in November. In the past several years, Acorn’s voter registration programs have come under investigation in Ohio, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and Washington, while several of their employees have been convicted of voter fraud.

Along with other potential recipients of these funds, … Acorn has promoted laws like the Community Reinvestment Act, which laid the foundation for the house of cards built out of subprime loans. Thus, we’d be funneling more cash to the groups that helped create the lending mess in the first place.

…We’re told the White House and House Republicans are insisting that the Acorn fund be purged from the bailout bill. The Paulson plan is supposed to get us out of this problem, not start it over again. –WSJ, Editorial, A18

d'oh!!

9-25-08--Crisis Stirs Critics of Free Markets. WSJ A3

more disgusted blonde people

9-24-08--Yet doubts were being raised not just at the United Nations but farther afield, with Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, among the most outspoken. She said that at last year’s meeting of the Group of 8, she had strongly urged both the United States and Britain to be more rigorous in supervising financial activities, and even offered specific proposals to be applied to banks and other institutions.

But the United States was not interested, she said. She also seemed to express a certain exasperation that the United States was now asking Europe for help, after inflicting damage on the rest of the world that could have been avoided.

“We did what we were supposed to do,” she said in an interview with Münchner Merkur, a German newspaper. “We adopted a decent E.U. regulation on the national statute books,” but “when it came to it, the Americans said, ‘That’s not for us.’ ”—NYT A6

yoompin yimminy

9-23-2008--A banking system in crisis after the collapse of a housing bubble. An economy hemorrhaging jobs. A market-oriented government struggling to stem the panic. Sound familiar?

It does to Sweden. The country was so far in the hole in 1992 — after years of imprudent regulation, short-sighted economic policy and the end of its property boom — that its banking system was, for all practical purposes, insolvent.

But Sweden took a different course than the one now being proposed by the United States Treasury. And Swedish officials say there are lessons from their own nightmare that Washington may be missing.

Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government.

That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well.

“If I go into a bank,” said Bo Lundgren, who was Sweden’s finance minister at the time, “I’d rather get equity so that there is some upside for the taxpayer.” NYT C9

9-18-08

9-18-08—But now American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the [US Supreme] court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices. NYT A1

--“We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams.” –Ron Chernow NYT C1

--[President] Bush sought to reassure the public Monday, but his comments appeared to have little effect on markets. WSJ A3

--..European states have regularly come to the rescue of their distressed companies.—WSJ A4

market god

9-17-08—There is simply no way to blame this disaster, as Republicans used to do, on labor unions or over-regulation. No, this is the conservatives’ beloved financial system doing what comes naturally....By the way, this is the same system the Republicans would still apparently like to put in charge of Social Security. –Thomas Frank, WSJ A25

late weekend update

9-12-08-- Some of the world's biggest corporations are facing intense pressure from China to allow the state-approved union to form in their Chinese plants and offices. But many companies fear admitting the unions will give their Chinese employees the power to slow or disrupt their operations and will significantly increase the cost of doing business here.-- NYT C1

protecting democracy at home

9-9-08—Senior Justice [sic] Dept. officials told civil-rights organizations they plan to deploy hundreds of poll monitors in November to prevent voting-rights violations and deter fraud ... The 2006 Justice [sic] Dept. firings of several US attorneys grew into a political scandal because some of those fired landed on a list to be removed from office after they refused to file charges against Democrats over alleged vote-fraud infractions. WSJ A4

9-4-08

9-4-08—A new study finds that the strongest of hurricans and typhoons have become even stronger over the last two and half decades, adding grist to the contentious debate over whether global warning has already made storms more destructive. NYT A18

9-4-08--Justice Minister Rachida Dati said Wednesday that she was pregnant and that it was “fundamental” for her to have a child. Ms. Dati, 42, is single and the highest-ranking Muslim minister in the French government. She would not reveal the identity of the father, saying, “I have a complicated private life and I’m keeping it off limits to the press.” Ms. Dati had an arranged marriage in her youth that was annulled. More than half of all births in France are outside of marriage. NYT A10

9-4-08—At the Petnecostal church where Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin worshipped for more than two decades, congregants speak in tongues, and are part of a faith that believes that humanity is in its “end times”—the days preceding a world-wide cataclysm bringing Christian redemption and the second coming of Jesus. –WSJ A6

9-3-08

VP Dick Cheney will use his trip to th Caucasus this week to try to loose Russia's grip on Caspian and Central Asian oil and as exports. But he may be too late. WSJ A14

for sarah palik and her ilk

Dear White Trash:

Please keep and enjoy your god and your guns. Since, as Casanova observes, intelligence is avenged when fools are deceived, I will enjoy myself as I watch you continue to lose your jobs, your money and your health

Labor Day Weekend Update 2008

Sept. 2, 2008—Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales mishandled highly classified notes about a secret counter terror program, but not on purpose, according to a memo by his legal team. WSJ A2

--Sept. 2, 2008.On Monday morning, Ms. Palin and her husband, Todd, issued a statement saying that their 17-year-old unmarried daughter, Bristol, was five months pregnant and that she intended to marry the father. Among other less attention-grabbing news of the day: it was learned that Ms. Palin now has a private lawyer in a legislative ethics investigation in Alaska into whether she abused her power in dismissing the state’s public safety commissioner; that she was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party, which has at times sought a vote on whether the state should secede; and that Mr. Palin was arrested 22 years ago on a drunken-driving charge.

--August 31, 2008—I have spent the last 8 years so disgusted with the incompetent yahoos of the executive branch that I had forgotten that I believe in one of the core principles of the Democratic Party—that government can be a useful meaningful and worthwhile force for good in this republic instead of just an embarrassing, torturing Book of revelation starter kit...Picture this: a wind-powered public school classroom of 19 multi-racial 8-year olds reading above grade level and answering the questions of their engaging, inspirational teacher before going home to a cancer-free (or in remission) parent or parents who have to work only 8 hours a day in a country as war solely with the people who make war on us, where maybe Exxon Mobil can settle of, oh, $8 billion in quarterly profits instead of $11 billion, and the federal government’s point man for Biblical natural disasters is some one who knows more about emergency management that a how to put on a horse show. Is that really too much to ask? Can we do that?—Sara h Vowell, NYT, WK 12

-August 30, 2008—The era of the American Internet is ending ... Data is increasingly flowing around the US, which may have intelligence—and conceivably military—consequences. NYT B1

--August 26-29, 1968. Riots at Democratic Convention in Chicago.