weekend update

1-31-2010—[Nobel prize winner] Joseph Stiglitz argues that so-called too-big-to-fail banks like Citigroup are exactly that: too big. He says that they should be broken up, and that the government should regulate derivatives and discourage mortgage securitization. What’s more, he says, Americans need to get over the idea that higher taxes and more government involvement in the economy are a recipe for disaster. He points to Sweden as an example of a country that has a thriving economy but still provides its citizens with extensive social services. NYT WK4
--NYT Mag interview w/ Stiglitz: You grew up in Gary, Ind? Paul Samuelson was from Gary, Ind., too. NYT Mg 13.
1-30/31-2010—The ire directed at bankers from all sides [in Davos] is palpable, acknowledged Donald Moore, chairman of Morgan Stanley in Europe ... Asked which other gropus of people have been similarly unpopular in Davos in the past, he said: “terrorists.” WSJ A1
--Ibid.—But just as New Orleans is revving itself into a fever pitch ... the NFL is claiming ownership of the phrase “Who Dat.”

freaky friday

1-29-2010In the hours after the iPad announcement on Wednesday, “iTampon” became one of the most popular trending topics on Twitter.—NYT A1 [any girls in their marketing dept?]



--Tampering at Senator’s Office was “Stunt” Lawyer Says-NYT A10 [and ACORN runs bordellos]



--Meanwhile, Thursday, CTS Corp, the Elkhart, Inc., parts supplier that makes the gad pedal units for Toyota, said the problem is related to Toyota’s design WSJ B1 [hoosiers are clean]



--The Saints’ win on Sunday night, a victory that sends them to the Super Bowl for the first time, unleashed a raucous, trombone-blaring, grown-man-weeping, stranger-hugging frenzy. In a city that has been associated over the last four and a half years with divisiveness and suffering, the delirium over the Saints is pretty much unanimous.

Consider: Sunday night’s game prompted the rescheduling of both a performance of Verdi’s “Requiem” by the New Orleans Opera Association, and a performance of Keith Lewis and his Blues Revue at the Young at Heart Lounge.

A number of schools have canceled classes for Feb. 8, the day after the Super Bowl. A civil trial has been postponed. Mardi Gras parades have been moved. Commander’s Palace, the 130-year-old grand dame of New Orleans restaurants, will close on game night, the first time the restaurant has closed for a one-time event in memory, possibly ever.

And at least 20 Catholic parishes are rearranging or outright canceling evening Mass on Super Bowl Sunday.

Serious people are discussing how much the Super Bowl will affect the turnout in this year’s mayoral election, as the primary takes place on Saturday, Feb. 6, the day before the game.

“It’s more of a problem for candidates who have to build support,” explained Silas Lee, a pollster and political analyst, arguing that the distraction benefits the current front-runner, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu. “It’s harder to crack that emotional barrier right now.”

Just how much of an effect is debatable, but it is generally agreed that there will be one. In other words, Garrett Hartley’s straight and true field goal from 40 yards on Sunday could have a direct bearing on who governs New Orleans for the next four years. Few seem to think this is odd. [who dat?]



1-28-2010--...voters in Oregon have agreed to raise taxes on people with higher income... NYT A14



John Edwards and Wife have separated, Friends say NYT A15 [hot breaking news]



--Sarkozy calls for global monetary system, without dollar as top reserve currency—nyt B3 [more cracks in the empire]

1-27-2010

1-27-2009—The book says that John Paul, who died in 2005, engaged in a practice known as mortification, the self-infliction of pain in order to feel closer to God, whipping himself with a belt that he kept in his closet.—NYT A12 [and God said it was good]



--Rivalries in Iraq Keep GI’s in the Field. US Acts as Arbiter At Ethic Fault Line. NYT A6 [and USA said it was good]



--Former Justice O’Connor Sees Ill in Election Finance Ruling. “Gosh,” she said, “I step away for a couple of years and there’s no telling what’s going to happen.”NYT A17 [Gosh indeed, Sandy, golly gee gosh indeed]



--James Harper III, a former federal prosecutor hired by the gun maker Glock to investigate fraud within the company, was indicted with two other men in the theft of about $3 million from the company. –NYT A17



--...unemployment also harms the community.—Norway’s prime minister, New Year’s address NYT A23 [does Obama read Norwegian?]



--the economic recession has exposed ethical shortcomings in the way market and society operate.—NYT A23 Dutch Queen Beatrix speech from the throne [does Obama read Dutch?]



--Why settle for Ivy League cool when we have Cosmo hot? Why settle for a professor who favors banks, pharmaceutical companies and profligate Democrats when we can have an Everyman who favors banks, pharmaceutical companies and profligate Republicans?—Maureen Dowd, NYT A23

Obama = Empire Lite

--Obama to seek spending freeze to trim deficits; domestic budgets are focus; pentagon is among exempt. NYT A1



-- But the full cables, obtained by The New York Times, show for the first time just how strongly the current ambassador felt about the leadership of the Afghan government, the state of its military and the chances that a troop buildup would actually hurt the war effort by making the Karzai government too dependent on the United States. ...And while General McChrystal warned of failure if additional troops were not deployed, Mr. Eikenberry concluded by cautioning of competing risks “that we will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves, short of allowing the country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos.” NYT A1



--China Issues Sharp Rebuke to US Calls for an Investigation on Google Attacks; Casting the American government as a cyberhegenomist. NYT A6



--Oil Company Near Settling over Contract in Kurdistan; A US diplomat truned dealmaker stands to benefit. NYT A9



--Ford to being hiring at New Lower Wages, May Make Half of Old Wage. WSJ B1, B2



--“We need a global sheriff.” Those were the words of George Soros ... in 2008, a little more than a month before Bear Stearns neared collapse. Two years on ... we are no closer to any sort of global financial regulator...—NYT B1



-— Several dozen members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group founded by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., gathered here from across the South on Monday to demand the resignations of two board members accused of financial and ethical violations.

The board members have been accused of diverting at least $569,000 from the group into privately controlled bank accounts, according to a letter written by the board’s vice chairwoman and obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. One of the two men, the Rev. Raleigh Trammell, the board chairman, has also been accused of sexual harassment by a female employee. NYT A15 [woosies]

1-23 (2010)

January 23, 2010
--Being popular with the kids doesn’t usually hurt the cause of liberty.—WSJ Editorial, A14 [bizzarro world]
--For the first time in American history, a majority of union members are government workers rather than private-sector employees…NYT B1
--The US government borrowed more money than ever before in 2009, but its largest lender—China-sharply reduced the amount it was willing to lend.—NYT B3
--As somebody said of giving up alcohol: You don’t live longer; it just feels like it. –WSJ B8
--…girls were supposed to be skinny, with straight blond hair (like Marcia Brady…. Then in 1977 “Saturday Night Fever was released. “It changed the image for all of us,” said State Senator Diane Savino, a Democrat who represents Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn…--NYT C5
--“We’re getting a lot of clients saying ‘What we want is someone who can do it all from cooking, cleaning, to paying the bills and watching the kids,” said … co-founder of … a Connecticut staffing and consulting firm for wealthy households. “They want their own Alice [from The Brady Bunch]” WSJ A4
--[Senator Specter] is about as inept as you can get. When [Michelle] Bachmann started lecturing him [on TV] about how Americans want less government, the correct response was “Yeah, unless it’s $250,000 in subsidies for the Bachmann family farm.” Instead, Specter kept complaining and calling for lady-like deportment until the host mercifully intervened and ended the show.
CLOSING THE SALE
--“This is a deeply divided court with a strong pro-corporate wing” … That is a big shift, she said, from the sort of conservatism espoused by the Rehnquist court. Rehnquist “was not some one who thought corporations had strong rights claims.”—Stanford Prof. Karlan NYT A13
--“There were principled, narrower paths that a court that was serious about judicial restraint could have taken.”—Justice Stevens NYT A13
--About 40 current and former corporate executives have a message for Congress: Quit hitting us up for campaign cash. In a letter to Congressional leaders on Friday the executives urged Congress to approve public financing for House and Senate campaigns. NYT A13
-- By means of two legal fictions, that corporations are people and money is speech, the Roberts court has turned America from a democracy to a plutocracy--letter to editor NYT A16
-- The justices have affirmed a core principle of Republican government: one dollar, one vote --letter to editor NYT A16
--1-23-09—Mr. Edwards’ admission of paternity is the final vindication for the National Enquirer, which broke the news of his affair with Ms. Hunter in 2007 and continues to pursue the story. ... The breakthrough came early summer of 2008, with information that Ms. Hunter and Mr. Edwards would secretly meet at the Beverly Hills Hotel. –WSJ A15
-- Why is everyone up in arms about the recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporations unfettered monetary access to the American election process? TO me this is a golden opportunity, as now our elected officials can sell corporate naming rights to their seats. The junior senator from North Carolina? He or she is now the Bank of America senator. The senior senator from Alaska could be the Exxon senator.--letter to editor NYT A16

thought for the day

"His Highness worked on the assumption that even the most loyal press should not be given in abundance, because that might create a habit of reading, and from there it is only a single step to the habit of thinking, and it is well known what inconveniences, vexations, troubles, and worries thinking causes. For even what is written loyally can be read disloyally. Someone will start to read a loyal text, then he will want a disloyal one, and so he will follow the road that leads him away from the throne, away from development, and straight toward the malcontents. No, no, His Majesty could not allow such demoralization to happen, such straying, and that's why in general he wasn't an enthusiast of excessive reading." -- Ryszard Kapuściński

1-20-2010

1-20-2010—Conan O’Brien and his production team are expected to receive about $40 million to leave NCG, the media conglomerate of General Electric, itself among the largest recipients of taxpayer help.—NYT B2
--Were the government actually to begin understanding itself as a market-ased, profit-maximizing enterprise, ... can there by any doubnt what it would do? It would sell gold. ... Were the administration to get started on the great gold dump ... we’d come to a different judgment day very quickly. When the massively inflated price of that metal collapsed, it would probably take with it a hefty chunk of the portfolios of tea-party types, survivalists, Birchers, dittoheads, Objectivists, and almost every imaginable species of secular end-timer.—Frank, WSJ A15
--The election turmoil in Massachusetts produced one clear winner: health-care stocks. DJIA jumps 1.1% to 10725.43, a new 15 month high. WSJ C1
--Erich Segal (LOVE STORY, love means never having to say your sorry) dies at age 72.NYT A15
HARPERS, February 2010
--Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantanamo, restore the constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet. None of these things has come to pass ... Our torturers and war criminals and illegal spies and usurpers remain at liberty, unpunished... That Obama is in most respects better than George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin, or Joseph Stalin, is beyond dispute and completely beside the point. [p. 7]
--What computerized analysis of all the country’s school texts has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases life is turned into a data-base. [p 18]
--The anthropologist Steve Barnett saw in [members of Generation “X”] the phenomenon of pattern exhaustion, in which a culture runs out of variations of traditional designs in their pottery and becomes less creative. [p 19]
--Management researchers in Michigan found that lawbreaking by American corporations tends to increase as companies grow more successful and prominent... [p80]

weekend update

--1-17-2010--On Jan. 9 The Washington Post ran a front-page article headlined “Frustrations With Steele Leaving G.O.P. in a Bind,” reporting, among other embarrassments, that the party had spent $90 million during Steele’s brief reign while raising just $84 million. Enter “Game Change,” right in the nick of time for Steele to pull off his own cunning game change. On Jan. 10 he stormed “Fox News Sunday” and “Meet the Press” to demand Reid’s head. There has been hardly a mention of Steele’s sins since. He can laugh all the way to the bank.... His behavior is not anomalous. Steele is representative of a fascinating but little noted development on the right: the rise of buckrakers who are exploiting the party’s anarchic confusion and divisions to cash in for their own private gain. ...Both Steele and Palin claim to be devotees of the tea party movement. “I’m a tea partier, I’m a town-haller, I’m a grass-roots-er” is how Steele put it in a recent radio interview, wet-kissing a market he hopes will buy his book. Palin has far more grandiose ambitions. She recently signed on as a speaker for the first Tea Party Convention, scheduled next month in Nashville — even though she had turned down a speaking invitation from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the traditional meet-and-greet for the right. The conservative conference doesn’t pay. The Tea Party Convention does. A blogger at Nashville Scene reported that Palin’s price for the event was $120,000. ... The entire Tea Party Convention is a profit-seeking affair charging $560 a ticket — plus the cost of a room at the Opryland Hotel. Among the convention’s eight listed sponsors is Tea Party Emporium, which gives as its contact address 444 Madison Avenue in New York, also home to the high-fashion brand Burberry. This emporium’s Web site offers a bejeweled tea bag at $89.99 for those furious at “a government hell bent on the largest redistribution of wealth in history.” This is almost as shameless as Glenn Beck, whose own tea party profiteering has included hawking gold coins merchandised by a sponsor of his radio show. Last week a prominent right-wing blogger, Erick Erickson of RedState.com, finally figured out that the Tea Party Convention “smells scammy,” likening it to one of those Nigerian e-mails promising untold millions. Frank Rich, NYT WKW 8

1-16-10—For the record, according to the Nielsen Company, more than 95% of the viewers of the Fox News Channel are white.—NYT A17

ides of January

1-15-10—Banks set for record pay. WSJ A1

--Prior to about 10 years ago, the SEC was, in our estimation, the crown jewel of the federal agencies.—Texas Securities Agency, NYT B3

for the betting man or woman

1-13-10—Shortly after her hiring [as a FOX News commentator] was announced, Irish betting site paddypower. come set the line at 8-to-1 that Palin will leave or lose her new commentary gig before Sept. 1. The odds are 10-to-1 that she’ll be out between Sept. 1 and Dec. 31, and 11-10- that he departure will come Jan. 1 or after. ... The company also has set odds on which will be the “first minority group Sarah Palin offends,” with the gay/lesbian/bisexual community leading the fifteen available choices at 4-to-1.—ChiTrib.,p.3.

1-11-10

1-11-10—Europe is often held up as a cautionary tale, a demonstration that if you try to make the economy less brutal, to take better care of your fellow citizens when they’re down on their luck, you end up killing economic progress. But what European experience actually demonstrates is the opposite: social justice and progress can go hand in hand.—Krugman, NYTA15

1-10-10--As Paul Volcker, the regrettably powerless chairman of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said recently, there is not “one shred of neutral evidence” that any financial innovation of the past 20 years has led to economic growth. –Rich, NYT

weekend update

Jan. 10, 2010—The Beijing leadership clearly understands that the ET—Energy Technology—revolution is both a necessity and an opportunity, and they do not intend to miss it. We, by contrast, intend to fix Afghanistan. Have a nice day.—Friedman NYT WK 10
--...aides were worried abut Ms. Palin’s grasp of the facts. She could not explain why North Korea and South Korea were separate nations, and she did not know what the Federal Reserve did. She also said she believed that Saddam Hussein attacked the United Stateson Sept. 11, 2001. NYT 27
January 9, 2010—On “Good Morning America” on ABC Friday, the former New York City mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, stated that “we had no domestic attacks under Bush; we’ve had one under Obama.” ... the interviewer, George Stephanopoulos, let Mr. Giuliani’s assertion go unquestioned. ... Some [Giuliani critics] tied it to a remark by the former Bush press secretary, Dana Perino, who said on the Fox News Channel last November, “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” NYT B2
--The right has seen the enemy, and he is the future.—NYT A17
January 10/11, 2009—Banks are boosting their lending to hedge funds and private-equity firms to levels unseen since before the financial crisis, raising their risk levels and adding fuel to the buying power of key players across the stock, debt and buyout markets. Banks and investment banks .. are offering levels of borrowing—known as leverage—that they haven’t providedin more than two years... WSJ B1

d'oh

1-4-10—Lax oversight caused crisis, Bernanke says. NYT A1
--After US Evangelicals visits Uganda considers death [penalty] for gays. ... The theme o the event ... was “the gay agenda”—and the threat homosexual posed to Bible based values and the traditional African family.” NYT A1
--“Back in the ‘60s, if you signed up for Freedom Summer, it was perceived to be countercultural ..”. But unlike doing Freedom Summer, Teach for America is part of climbing up the elite ladder—it’s part of joining the system, the meritocracy.” Prof. Rob Reich, NYT A10

new decade, same as the old

1-3--10--$35.billion. The amount in dollars that Chinese officials misused or embezzled in the first 11 months of 2009, according to a national audit. NYT WK 4
--As early as 9000 years ago, long before the wheels was invented, inhabitants of a Neolithic village in China were brewing a type of mead .. . The finding by Dr. McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Penn Museum, fits in with his thesis that the development of agriculture was the result of an irrepressible impulse toward drinking and intoxication. Ibid.
--At the CIA, in the 1980s, Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defesne, missed the signs of change in the Soviet Union. Ibid.

good riddance

12-31-09--The "War on Terror," the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and all the rest, did not deter a Muslim Nigerian studnet from trying to blow up an airliner over Detroit last Saturday. It motivated him to do so. But it also accelrated the rise of Asia and the relative decline of the West. ... Prestige is a quality that cannot be measured or quantified, but a reputation for competence in the use of power is a great asset in international affairs. ... The US spent the past decade cutting its own throat financially .... There are two trends that could slow or even stop this [shift of power to China and India]. ... One is peak oil; the other is global warming."--Gwynne Dyer