Thursday, August 27, 2009
8-27-09
8-27-09—French President Sarkozy said the dollar can’t remain the world’s only reserve currency, as the rise of emerging powers such as Chinese and Russia challenge US prominence.—WSJ C2
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
8-26-09
8-26-09—Investors are also growing more comfortable with the idea of emerging economics like China, Russia and Brazil playing a bigger role in shaping international finance.—WSJ A2
--President Nicolas Sarkozy of France on Tuesday announced steps, agreed to by bankers, to curb excessive compensation in the industry as he pledged to push for tighter international rules at a meeting of global leaders next month. “It’s too easy to say we’ll do nothing because others aren’t,” Mr. Sarkozy said, The New York Times’s Matthew Saltmarsh reports from Paris. “France must lead and try to persuade the others.” NYT B5
--“The Family Research Council, a conservative Christian organization, has issued an electronic “Town Hall Kit” to help its followers, including pastors, to set up their own meetings “to inform and activate the people in your pews and communities against the health care overhaul proposals moving through Congress. Actual Town Hall Not Included, NYT A14.
--President Nicolas Sarkozy of France on Tuesday announced steps, agreed to by bankers, to curb excessive compensation in the industry as he pledged to push for tighter international rules at a meeting of global leaders next month. “It’s too easy to say we’ll do nothing because others aren’t,” Mr. Sarkozy said, The New York Times’s Matthew Saltmarsh reports from Paris. “France must lead and try to persuade the others.” NYT B5
--“The Family Research Council, a conservative Christian organization, has issued an electronic “Town Hall Kit” to help its followers, including pastors, to set up their own meetings “to inform and activate the people in your pews and communities against the health care overhaul proposals moving through Congress. Actual Town Hall Not Included, NYT A14.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
dog days of August
8-25-09—Rhode Island will shut down its government for 12 days... NYT A11
---...smoking has been banned .. at a prison where several buildings were burned down during an inmate riot. --Ibid.
--At least 1200 veterans across the country have been mistakenly told by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs that they have a fatal neurological disease.—Ibid.
--8-22-09—Taylor is expected to go to Yale or Wellesley even though her grades don’t hold up. When Taylor points out [to her ambitious mother] that a high-status education may not be everything, that Condoleeza Rice went to the University of Denver, her mother isn’t moved: “She, my darling, is conspicuously single. Maybe if she had gone to Wellesley she would have amounted to something.” ... [Mother] wants Taylor to consider doing more good works to beef up her applications, like volunteering at the golf course. When Taylor explains that the bar for charitable endeavors is pretty high—her friend Maya spent a summer working at a leper colony in India—[Mother] dismisses the effort. “You can hardly walk down the street without running into them. Four days later they’re cured.” NYT C3
---...smoking has been banned .. at a prison where several buildings were burned down during an inmate riot. --Ibid.
--At least 1200 veterans across the country have been mistakenly told by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs that they have a fatal neurological disease.—Ibid.
--8-22-09—Taylor is expected to go to Yale or Wellesley even though her grades don’t hold up. When Taylor points out [to her ambitious mother] that a high-status education may not be everything, that Condoleeza Rice went to the University of Denver, her mother isn’t moved: “She, my darling, is conspicuously single. Maybe if she had gone to Wellesley she would have amounted to something.” ... [Mother] wants Taylor to consider doing more good works to beef up her applications, like volunteering at the golf course. When Taylor explains that the bar for charitable endeavors is pretty high—her friend Maya spent a summer working at a leper colony in India—[Mother] dismisses the effort. “You can hardly walk down the street without running into them. Four days later they’re cured.” NYT C3
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
8-19-09
8-20-09—Only about a quarter of the 2009 high school graduates taking the ACT admissions tests have the skills to succeed in college, a report found. WSJ A1
--The only place at the moment where you can see women forking over money to have sex with a gigolo is on HBO’s salaciously named “Hung.” The kooky comedy is about a divorced Detroit high school basketball coach ... He decides to sell his best asset, dubbing himself “a happiness consultant,” and teams up with an unlikely pimp, Tanya Skagle ... an aspiring poet who listens to PBS and has “Proust” tattooed on her forearm.—Dowd NYT A23
--...business embraced the carnival it saw in the muddy hills of upstate New York in 1969 not merely because it wanted to sell things to kids but because coolness, nonconformity and soulfulness expressed something deep and true about capitalism itself... let us remember that any establishment is lucky to have an opposition like this one.—Frank, WSJ A13
--[Engels] hosted regular Sunday parties for London’s left-wing intelligentsia and, as one regular put it, “no one left before 2 or 3 in the morning.” On a personality quiz, three of Engels’ answers were “Favorite virtue: jollity”; “Idea of happiness: Chateau Margaux 1848”; “Motto: take it easy.” NYT C1,6
--The only place at the moment where you can see women forking over money to have sex with a gigolo is on HBO’s salaciously named “Hung.” The kooky comedy is about a divorced Detroit high school basketball coach ... He decides to sell his best asset, dubbing himself “a happiness consultant,” and teams up with an unlikely pimp, Tanya Skagle ... an aspiring poet who listens to PBS and has “Proust” tattooed on her forearm.—Dowd NYT A23
--...business embraced the carnival it saw in the muddy hills of upstate New York in 1969 not merely because it wanted to sell things to kids but because coolness, nonconformity and soulfulness expressed something deep and true about capitalism itself... let us remember that any establishment is lucky to have an opposition like this one.—Frank, WSJ A13
--[Engels] hosted regular Sunday parties for London’s left-wing intelligentsia and, as one regular put it, “no one left before 2 or 3 in the morning.” On a personality quiz, three of Engels’ answers were “Favorite virtue: jollity”; “Idea of happiness: Chateau Margaux 1848”; “Motto: take it easy.” NYT C1,6
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
theology
8-18-09—Last summer, Richard Posner, a federal appeals court judge, issued a surprising and prescient dissent. Executive pay is out of control he said, and the marketplace cannot be trusted to rein it in. Judge Posner is a conservative with libertarian leanings, and he is a leader of the law and economics movement associated with the University of Chicago ... and believes that many [legal] questions are best sorted out by the marketplace. NYT A10
--BBVA Compass [Spanish Bank] includes nearly 600 branches stretched across the southern US[and is looking to move west and into California]. .. Spanish banks have benefited from strict regulation by the Bank of Spain, which kept them on a tight leash after two banking crises since the 1980s. In a system that international banking regulators now hope to emulate, Spain forced banks to build up capital cushions during the years of plenty. That has helped them ride out the crisis so far with little government aid. –WSJ, C1 C2
--BBVA Compass [Spanish Bank] includes nearly 600 branches stretched across the southern US[and is looking to move west and into California]. .. Spanish banks have benefited from strict regulation by the Bank of Spain, which kept them on a tight leash after two banking crises since the 1980s. In a system that international banking regulators now hope to emulate, Spain forced banks to build up capital cushions during the years of plenty. That has helped them ride out the crisis so far with little government aid. –WSJ, C1 C2
Friday, August 14, 2009
d'oh....
8-14-09—Europe Recovers as US Lags: Germany, France Escape Recession Even as Consumer Weakness Hobbles America.—WSJ A1 [d’oh...]
--“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past. Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.” So, how’s it going? Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex. This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing. –Krugman, NYT A17
--Aug. 28, 1969 [Woodstock editorial WSJ]: The so-called generation gap is not really as much a matter of age as it is a gap between more civilized and less civilized tastes. As such, it may be more serious, both culturally and politically, than it first appeared. WSJ W5
--“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past. Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.” So, how’s it going? Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex. This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing. –Krugman, NYT A17
--Aug. 28, 1969 [Woodstock editorial WSJ]: The so-called generation gap is not really as much a matter of age as it is a gap between more civilized and less civilized tastes. As such, it may be more serious, both culturally and politically, than it first appeared. WSJ W5
Thursday, August 13, 2009
ketchup
8-13-09—At the World Cup, Mexico’s teams are often among the three teams whose fans are loved by nearly all supporters from other nations: Brazil, Scotland and Mexico. The Brazilian fans are loved for their rowdy mixture of samba and sex appeal, the Scots for their bagpipes and kilts, if not their sex appeal, and the Mexicans for their outlandish sombreros and tequila-fueled good nature. WSJ D8
8-12-09—Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jesson were military retirees and psychologists ... in 2002 [for the CIA] they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism. They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions.. They had no relevant scholarship; their PhD dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda. NYT A1
--“Golf is a bourgeois sport—“ Hugo Chavez—NYT A4
--a new study argues that the Beatles may have helped bridge today’s generation gap in America.--NYT A13
--The young grass-roots army that swept Obama into office has yet to mobilize now that the fight is about something complicated rather than a charismatic hope-monger. No, they can’t? Instead of a multicultural tableau of beaming young idealists on screen, we see ugly scenes of mostly older and white malcontents, disrupting forums where others have come to actually learn something. Instead of hope, we get swastikas, death threats and T-shirts proclaiming “Proud Member of the Mob.” President Obama has proven quicksilver instincts, but not in this case. You would think that a politician schooled in community organizing and the foul balls of a presidential campaign would be ready to squash this kind of nuttiness. (Like it or not, Speaker Pelosi, that’s democracy in action.) Instead, the president’s overconfident Harvard Law Review side, expecting a high-minded debate, prevailed. –NYT A21
8-9-09--Climate Change Seen as Threat to US Security; Pentagon Studies Issue.—NYT A1 [d’oh...!...]
8-12-09—Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jesson were military retirees and psychologists ... in 2002 [for the CIA] they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism. They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions.. They had no relevant scholarship; their PhD dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda. NYT A1
--“Golf is a bourgeois sport—“ Hugo Chavez—NYT A4
--a new study argues that the Beatles may have helped bridge today’s generation gap in America.--NYT A13
--The young grass-roots army that swept Obama into office has yet to mobilize now that the fight is about something complicated rather than a charismatic hope-monger. No, they can’t? Instead of a multicultural tableau of beaming young idealists on screen, we see ugly scenes of mostly older and white malcontents, disrupting forums where others have come to actually learn something. Instead of hope, we get swastikas, death threats and T-shirts proclaiming “Proud Member of the Mob.” President Obama has proven quicksilver instincts, but not in this case. You would think that a politician schooled in community organizing and the foul balls of a presidential campaign would be ready to squash this kind of nuttiness. (Like it or not, Speaker Pelosi, that’s democracy in action.) Instead, the president’s overconfident Harvard Law Review side, expecting a high-minded debate, prevailed. –NYT A21
8-9-09--Climate Change Seen as Threat to US Security; Pentagon Studies Issue.—NYT A1 [d’oh...!...]
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
8-5-09
--8-5-09—Back in 1932, the future Illinois Senator Paul Douglas advised progressives not to expect too much from the Democratic Party. It was, he wrote, “maintained by the business interests” as a kind of “lifeboat.” Whenever the GOP ship sprung a leak—whenever Republicans were no longer willing or able to do business’ bidding—the interests simply piled into the other party and made their escape.—Thomas Frank, WSJ A11
--Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by pharmaceutical companies played a major role in producing 26 scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously noted.—NYT A1
--A trade group representing coal producers and power companies says that it directly hired a lobbying firm that sent fake letters to lawmakers purporting to be from nonprofit groups [e.g., NAACP, Creciendo Juntos] opposed to climate change legislation.—NYT A12
--Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by pharmaceutical companies played a major role in producing 26 scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously noted.—NYT A1
--A trade group representing coal producers and power companies says that it directly hired a lobbying firm that sent fake letters to lawmakers purporting to be from nonprofit groups [e.g., NAACP, Creciendo Juntos] opposed to climate change legislation.—NYT A12
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