Send some wampum to Orcinus...
Dave Neiwert has always been a strong ally of Indians, but is too low-key a fundraiser. Toss some coin in their coffee can. They deserve it.
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January 31, 2008
Nudes as Politics
There are so many photos like this. Capa's Spanish Civil War negatives just definitively surfaced in Mexico, having been lost in Paris when the German Army entered the city. Goya worked this in paint. The mass graves of the two great wars, 1914-1918 and 1940-1945. The Indo-China Wars. Rawanda. Bosnia.
Lifted from Juan Cole:
A new professional poll carried out by a British firm in Iraq concludes that excess deaths from violence since March 19, 2003 through summer 2007 came to just over 1 million. Note that excess deaths from violence do not necessarily imply that they are directly war-related. Thus, murders of a criminal sort, tribal feuding, and so forth would be included. Since Bush interfered with the establishment of a strong new government after his invasion, he promoted the sort of insecurity that permitted high rates of violence, whether political, criminal or war-related. This poll tracks with the findings of the studies of Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts, published in the Lancet and disputes lower numbers found by a recent WHO study (which, however, only ran through June 2006 and was limited solely to civilians--this British study goes to 2007 and seems to include everyone.)
The British findings are also consistent with estimates of between 1 million and 2 million widows in Iraq. These widows, many of them young, face extreme poverty without a breadwinner. As the Iraqi street has been captured by religious parties and militias, gender segregation and female seclusion have increased, which prevents single young women from going out to work in mixed-gender settings like stores and workshops. In short, Iraq is being Talibanized by Bush's war.
Reuters points out that almost none of the widows are getting any welfare payments from the Iraqi government. It adds: "A report by aid groups found that 43 percent of Iraqis lived in "absolute poverty". Four million people needed food assistance and only one in three children under five had access to safe drinking water."
Its about fur. It could just as well be about Iraq, where O(106) human beings have died since March, 2003. Except that the image control (in the American media market) has been more selective than in those earlier celebrations of mass casualty ritualisms.
A Rule
IF mail from congressional candidate contains alignment reference to {Clinton | Obama} THEN exercise the unsubscribe {embedded link | mailbot address}.
Several yesterday. Probably more today.
Woke up thinking if Edwards had to drop out within four weeks of the first Party caucus to extract a promise from the Hero Twins, who claim they alone can make the trip to Xibalba and defeat the Lords of Death, to protect the hopeless, the downtrodden, the poor and the working poor, what did the Hero Twins promise to inflict upon the hopeless, the downtrodden, the poor and the working poor, if he stayed in a fifth week or a sixth week or longer?
Something worth reading is this.
January 30, 2008
China Snow
A little over a week ago a friend of mine flew into Guangzhou, found his uncomfortably upscale hotel, and went over to the adjacent Starbucks to Skype me. We compared notes, his surroundings in Guangzhou (aka "Canton"), and mine seven years ago in Beijing, and used Google Earth to find the two train stations in Guangzhou and orient both of us. He caught a flight the next day to Hainan Island for the meetings that were the purpose of his trip. Two days ago he returned from Hainan to Guangzhou, and then returned to Europe.
Today a fifth of a million people are stuck at the train station less than a kilometer from where my friend was sitting nine days ago, due to snow. Another half of a million people are stuck elsewhere in Guangzhou. Snow in the south of China. The worst since the KMT was forced to flee to Formosa.
Read Xinhua and be amazed. Utterly amazed.
Cobell Press Release
Statement by Elouise Cobell, Lead Plaintiff, Cobell vs. Kempthorne
BROWNING, MONT., Jan. 30 -- Elouise Cobell, lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit over the federal government's mismanagement of the individual Indian Trust, expressed delight with today's ruling by U.S. District Judge James Robertson in the 11-year-old litigation.
"This is a great day in Indian Country," she said after the judge's ruling was released in Washington. "We've argued for over ten years that the government is unable to fulfill its duty to render an adequate historical accounting, much less redress the historical wrongs heaped upon the individual Indian trust beneficiaries. Instead of truthfully seeking to remedy the government's admitted historical mismanagement, the government elected to fight plaintiffs every step of the way.
Judge Robertson has settled the debate in favor of plaintiffs and found that an adequate historical accounting is, in fact, impossible. "Plaintiffs look forward to Judge Robertson's scheduling of a hearing 'determining an appropriate remedy' in light of their [government's] failure to render the court-ordered accounting."
In his ruling, Judge Robertson declared: "My conclusion that Interior is unable to perform an adequate accounting of the IIM [Individual Indian Money] Trust does not mean that a just resolution of this dispute is hopeless. It does mean that a remedy must be found for the Department's unrepaired, and irreparable, breach of its fiduciary duty over the last century. And it does mean that the time has come to bring this suit to a close."
For additional information:
Bill McAllister
703-385-6996 (media only)
Cobell is OUT!
Judge Robertson writes:
These findings and conclusions, derived not only from the trial, but also from the extensive record that preceded it, support and explain my decision (i) that, although the defendants have attempted and continue to attempt to cure the breach of their fiduciary duty that was found in Cobell V and affirmed by Cobell VI, they have not succeeded in doing so; (ii) that the historical statements of account contemplated by defendants' latest accounting plan will not satisfy defendants' duties "rooted in and outlined by the relevant statutes and treaties . . . [and] defined in traditional equitable terms," Cobell VI, 240 F.3d at 1099; and (iii) that the defendants have unreasonably delayed the completion of the required accounting. Indeed, it is now clear that completion of the required accounting is an impossible task.
I'll have so much more to say, but wanted to get this up right away!
Thanks to Acee at Indianz.com for the email!
In the meantime, read Indianz write up.
Here's the decision.
Update1: An interesting footnote from Robertson:
"I do not reach the conclusion urged by plaintiffs: that an adequate accounting is impossible because of the problem of missing records. The record before me is inconclusive on that point. The record is not inconclusive, however, on the tension between the expense of an adequate accounting and congressional unwillingness to fund such an enterprise."
Robertson is referring to the actions of a Republican Congress, some of which I discussed here on Wampum two years ago. Essentially, Tom Delay rammed through legislation defunding the accounting. Why? My theory was then, and now remains, that BigEnergy fears an accurate accounting, as it will begin to uncover their many misdeeds regarding royalty underpayments, possibly on the scale of tens (hundreds?) of billions. Robertson is laying the blame at the feet of Delay et al. Note that he does not commit to whether an accounting is achievable in relation to documents - to say as much would close the door on one huge source of documentation of trust accounts - the books of BigEnergy!
It's the unemployment, stupid...
I just finished reading, What We're In For: Projected Economic Impact of the Next Recession by John Schmitt and Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). The final conclusion:
Labor-market recessions last far longer than the technical recessions declared by the NBER. Long after financial markets and employers have begun to recover from an economic downturn, workers continue to suffer from high levels of unemployment, depressed levels of employment, falling incomes, loss of health insurance, and outright poverty. Even a mild-to-moderate recession along the lines of the recessions of the early 1990s and the early 2000s would likely see the unemployment rate rise above 6.5 percent, with 3.2 million more unemployed workers, 4.2 million fewer jobs, a $2,000 per year drop in inflation-adjusted incomes for the typical family, 4.2 million more people without health-insurance coverage of any form, and 4.7 million men, women, and children thrown into poverty. Minority workers would suffer disproportionately, with the black unemployment rate rising to 11.3 percent, and the rate for black teens increasing to over 37 percent. If historical precedent holds, these effects would not bottom out until sometime in 2010.A severe recession, along the lines of the early 1980s, would have far worse effects. The unemployment rate would likely increase to 8.4 percent, increasing the pool of unemployed by over 5.8 million workers. The economy would lose a total of 4.6 million jobs. The inflation-adjusted income of the typical family would fall almost $3,750 per year, and the number of Americans living in poverty would rise by 10.4 million. Again, racial minorities would bear a disproportionate share of the economic hardships. Blacks, for example, would account for 1.3 million of the total 5.8 million worker increase in unemployment. If the historical pattern repeats itself, the labor market would not likely begin to recover until 2011.
Here are a couple of their scarier tables:
I'm not an economist...
But I did stay in a Holiday Inn last night. Well, not really, but that doesn't prevent me from expounding on the current economic situation. Take today's Q4 GDP release:
U.S. Growth Slowed Drastically in 4th Quarter
By PETER S. GOODMAN Published: January 31, 2008The United States economy expanded by a disappointingly weak 0.6 percent during the last three months of 2007, the government reported Wednesday, offering the latest indication that the United States is already suffering a substantial slowdown, and perhaps a recession.
The growth from October to December came in at half the rate forecast by most economists, and it was down strikingly from the 4.9 percent clip registered last fall. Over all, the economy expanded by 2.2 percent in inflation-adjusted terms for all of 2007, the slowest rate of growth in five years.
Over on The Big Picture, a discussion erupted in comments regarding the disconnect between the falling GDP and stagnant unemployment claims; the assumption being that if the economy is slowing, more workers should be filing claims.
In a typical recessionary business cycle, that assumption would probably play out. However, this slow-down was precipitated by the pop of the housing bubble, particularly in areas such as California and Florida, an the industry on the front line, construction, has changed dramatically over the past few decades. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, the construction industry is the largest employer of undocumented workers in the US, with an estimated 1.4 million workers in some form of construction, accounting for 12% of the industry’s work force. That's a nationwide number, and is much, much higher in specific regions, namely the West and Southwest. In addition, thousands more construction workers are "day laborers", usually paid in cash and thus not eligible for unemployment benefits.
Officially, unemployment in construction in the US jumped from 6.9% to 9.4% from December 2006 to December 2007, or with 243,000 workers filing unemployment new claims during that period. What's missing, of course, are the numbers of undocumented workers who also lost their jobs, thus removing millions, even billions, of dollars from the US economy. The impact on the economies of our southern neighbors should be clearer in the next few months as well.
Who are you, and what have you done with the right-wing loon?
I can't believe I'm actually linking to Michelle Malkin, and not in an I'm-ripping-out-my-eyes way. On the proposed "solutions" to the current mortgage crisis, she sounds downright sensible:
I certainly have sympathy for borrowers who may have been misled. But for every "predatory lender" out there, you can find a predatory borrower. For every fraud-minded loan officer or mortgage broker, you can find a homeowner who secured financing and bought a home he knew he couldn't afford with little money down and bogus or no income verification. Washington is silent about this reckless behavior, which it is encouraging both tacitly and explicitly.Now comes word from California that some of these homeowners Washington is rushing to rescue are simply walking away - abandoning their mortgage commitments and contractual obligations. Poof: "Foreclose me. ... I'll live in the house for free for 12 months, and I'll save my money and I'll move on," one homeowner blithely told the Los Angeles Times this week.
...
The true victims in this "crisis" are those who paid for homes within their means and those who waited to enter the housing market. A reader in New York City wrote me last week:
"My husband and I patiently sat back and watched while our friends made a killing in real estate over the past six years. ... Now, after several years, we are ready to move to the ‘burbs, and we feel it is responsible people like us who are going to get hurt by this mortgage mess. We're the ones who have to sit back and wait for housing prices to fall, while our government, looking to protect only the homeowners, keeps prices artificially high with bailout programs and artificially low interest rates.
Frankly, I don't give a hoot for the "I still can't afford my McMansion" crowd, but the fact is that this behavior harms us in the unwashed masses who either cut our losses early, or didn't participate in the bubble-frenzy at all. Prices may have fallen in California, but they are still way beyond the means of most average worker bees. So not only are the foreclosed now moving into rental housing, pushing up demand, and thus prices, but thousands of foreclosed homes are sitting vacant, priced too high for anyone but "knife catchers". The proposed "fixes", freezing interest rates and foreclosures, will only prolong this pain. Face it, the we're in the middle of measles, and there's nothing left to do but wait for the fever to break. There are ways to mitigate the pain - build more affordable rental housing, provide moving assistance, implement real transportation options, increase food stamps benefits - all of which would help those who would never could have afforded that 3br/4bath track house in Chula Vista without the "creative financing" efforts of Ameriquest and Countrywide.
You don't have to be a ranting, uncaring wingnut like Malkin to believe that the most compassionate, and pragmatic, policy is to "let the markets" prevail. With a safety net, of course.
Return of the Guard
Bob Kinzel's coverage Group of lawmakers calling on Douglas to end deployment of Guard troops in Iraq on VPR.
Terri Hallenbeck's coverage Lawmakers call for governor to pull back Guard from Iraq in the Burlington Free Press.
The AP's coverage Lawmakers Call For Withdrawal Of Vt. Guard From Iraq.
Chris Miller ran on his energy ideas, which were prescient of $100 bbl crude, and Elizabeth Trice was the only Green I've met who, like Chris, connected the dots between energy cost, housing construction, transit, and overt and covert poverty and near poverty. As a courtesy to me he also ran on the idea that the Governor of Maine should, and could, challenge the claim of the current Federal Executive to use the Maine Guard to engage in a war of aggression, or simply to garrison the largest US operated concentration camp in Iraq -- the Abu Ghraib prison.
I've got calls to make tomorrow. To Burlington. There may be stuff I can learn.
Three years from now, in the next mid-term, we may still be trying to get done what we could have gotten done in '06, in the last mid-term. Looking for a candidate, or incumbent, governor, with a profound interest in the Constitution, in particular, Art. 1, Sec. 8, cl. 15 and 16, and not knocked breathless by the National Defense Act of 1916, or any such subsequent, and interested in how the current USSC read historic, and contemporanious, wartime Congressional "Amendments" to the Constitution.
January 29, 2008
Risking Communications Security: Potential Hazards of the Protect America Act
Steve Bellovan, Matt Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, Susan Landau, Peter Neuman and Jennifer Rexford have a 10 page paper in the IEEE journal Security and Privacy entitled Risking Communications Security: Potential Hazards of the Protect America Act.
I've put a copy up here. Its 10pages.
You all have 15 days to read this and get it onto the A list blogs, which may pick it up on their own anyway. Its a page a day. You can fax a page a day to your choice of Senators.
I'm going to send a copy to Tom Allen, who could beat Susan Collins this fall.
I remember Nixon, and Haldeman, and Erlichman
via Indianz.com, this gem -- "If he wins the November election, Obama plans to appoint an Indian policy advisor at the White House".
So, he's going to rise to the level of Nixon, Haldeman and Erlichman, which is actually the gold standard, the high-water mark for the Federal-Tribal relationship, but he's too inexperienced to actually know what he's doing, and in all liklihood, he'll just promote Ross Swimmer. That plus an annual "Summit", which either means a do-nothing 400-and-some-plus-ONE media circus, or a USET+NCAI+IGA+ONE clubman's foursome that excludes Hawai'i, Alaska, and all the fucked-over-by-the-BIA, the fucked-over-by-corrupt-Chairs, the fucked-over-by-Abramoff, and all of the Urbans.
Edwards actually worked the Lumbee issue, which counts far more than the promise of symbolism and circuses. Edwards could cut to the chase and just say "I will invite Ms. Eloise Cobell to join my Administration as Secretary of the Interior. He could run that into the seam of dirt MB's mined since we set our sights on Saint John McCain, hitting Haliburton and the Petro-Oligarchy as casually as children chase crows out of the garden corn.
Cobell v Babbit began under Clinton, and the MMS mess wasn't invented by the RNC, they just improved on a pre-existing condition.
Didn't tune in
There really are better comedy acts. We watched West Wing VI instead.
This morning there was additional clutter in the inbox -- Obama's I-am-the-change "reaction" to the final SOTU from the putchist. Yawn2. Deleted.
The Indian Health Act
The NY Times discovers Indians. It's only been an issue for a few years now. And one reason the bill was delayed? St. John McCain.
Jonah is a savant...
Comes as a shock.
January 28, 2008
And things continue to get worse...
This should make the markets happy this morning:
New Home Sales Fall More Than Expected
By REUTERS Filed at 10:24 a.m. ETWASHINGTON (Reuters) - New single-family U.S. home sales fell 4.7 percent in December to the lowest rate in nearly 13 years while the median sales price dropped sharply according to a government report on Monday that delivered more grim news for the housing sector.
New home sales fell to an annual rate of 604,000 from a downwardly revised rate of 634,000 in November, the Commerce Department said.
Economists polled by Reuters were expecting December sales to fall to an annual rate of 640,000 from the November previously reported rate of 647,000.
Expect that number to be revised downward next month. Remember that this time last month, the Commerce Department reported 14,000 homes were sold than actually were, and the month before, 17,000. It's important to note that the October release claimed that new home sales were up (!!!), when, in fact, they were not. But it did give the market a happy bump that day.
Calculated Risk has lots of pretty graphs.
Count to Five
In Mossel today a vehicle was engaged with a mine. Five US KIA.
January 27, 2008
Military Space Operations
The launch we observed from our secret hideout a few miles down range from Delta Space Launch Complex (SLC-2), aka "Slick 2" is in the news.
Update: at GS.O, via Le Monde of all places.
The launch report is here. What is missing is (a) the eventual inclination of the package, (b) the dry weight of the package, [note: these are related -- a launcher capable of boosting 32,000 pounds of payload out of Vandenberg into polar orbit is cabable of boosting 40,000 pounds of payload into a geosynchronous orbit.], (c) the fuel weight remaining, O(104 lbs), and (d) the number of minutes after launch when control of the package was lost.
So for those who love minutea ... The launch vehicle was a Delta 7920, the perigee: 354 km (219 mi), the apogee: 376 km (233 mi), the inclination: 58.50 deg, and the period: 91.83 min. The COSPAR ident is 2006-057A. The USAF Sat Cat entry is 29651.
The ground track repeats nearly every 2 days (30.92 revs), enabling frequent revisit of targets of interest. The first four Lacrosse / Onyx behaved similarly (28.9 revs in 2 days). and Lacrosse 5 made 43.05 revs in 3 days. KH-11 (Keyhole) ground tracks repeat nearly every 4 days. Naval Ocean Surveillance System (NOSS) also have 4 day ground track repeat cycles.
Therefore it was LACROSS-6 / ONYX, on a Delta, rather than a Titan, a first for the SAR (imaging radar) series, and the mission cost was a billion dollars and change, or about two weeks of the cost of running the Iraq War.
Here's the pre-launch audio, an mp3 format recording.
Its not every day one sees 1bn in "national technical means", and the best in orbital look-down SAR technology, go kersplat. Naturally, the shoot-down was the work of Al-Qaeda-in-Low-Orbit-i-stan, using bottle rockets and fly paper, or Saddam's dastardly covert space weapons program, which fried Intelsat 804 and Intelsat Americas-7, using a directed energy weapon located somewhere in Iraq and dischared directly through the earth's core, previously disclosed by Judy Miller and Dick Cheney.
Hat tips: SatTrackCam Station Leiden, operated by Dr Marco Langbroek (NL), Astronautix, operated by Mark Wade (AT), Global Security operated by our friend John Pike in (occupied) WDC, Space Report, by Jonathan McDowell of Sommerville, plus some non-classified leakage from a variety of USAF and NRO websites.
Also posting on this is Dr Jeffrey Lewis (and friends) at Arms Control Wonk.
Do food stamps cause obesity? Does reading Jane Galt cause brain rot?
I can't even bring myself to link to Ayn Rand roadie (and formerly known as Jane Galt) Megan McArdle's latest eat-the-poor rants on food stamps = obesity in the poor, but I will recommend this response from Andrew Leonard in Salon:
Would increasing food stamp benefits worsen American obesity? The claim that this is so has been a hobby horse of the right in recent years, most often associated with the writings of Douglas J. Besharov, the director of the Social and Individual Responsibility Project at the American Enterprise Institute, a hard-right think tank. But there are plenty of academics who argue otherwise. One economist at Sonoma State University declared in 2003 "that the data does not indicate any relationship between obesity and food stamps." That same year, a paper titled "Food Programs and Obesity in U.S. Children" by two University of Maryland Family Studies professors found no evidence that food stamps were correlated with childhood obesity in the United States. A study published in the Journal of Nutrition (also in 2003) by a City University of New York researcher did find that food stamp participation was "positively related to obesity in low income women" but a commentary in the same issue by a Cornell University nutritional scientist cautioned against making too much of the findings.Low incomes in the United States are correlated with obesity, a stunning turnaround from the pre-World War II era. Low incomes are also correlated with food stamp program participation, so it makes sense that there would be some relationship between obesity and food stamps. But obesity is also correlated with disproportionate patronization of fast food outlets -- a practice that food stamp benefits don't cover. Which at least raises the possibility that strapped families would use a food stamp increase to buy more groceries instead of eating out at McDonald's, and thus potentially reduce obesity among the poor.
I lost a whole day of blogging on Friday, reading and commenting on McArdle's drivel. Apparently I wasn't alone. Feministe commenter Kali brilliantly opined:
It's Friday night, and also I think my brain might have melted at some point while reading her post, so I'm not sure I've got her meaning correct here: but I really think she is seriously saying that fat people are poor because they're fat, not vice versa. My head hurts now, because I find myself wanting to simultaneously argue with this ridiculous proposition, question whether she could actually have really meant this, wonder what her proposed mechanism for fatness causing mass poverty is (like, is it supposed to be a signal to employers that you're lazy and have no self discipline?)...and, gah.Derren Brown talks about how if you're being threatened or in danger a good strategy is to say something totally surreal, because it will throw the person threatening you off balance mentally, and give you a chance to take control. I think it would probably work for criminals as well as victims. You could have burgled my house while I was reading that trainwreck. You could have driven a truck right up to the door and got a bunch of guys in black balaclavas to start carrying away my furniture and I would still have been frozen in disbelief, staring slack jawed at the screen with that blog on it. It's a weird talent, to be able to have that effect on a person. Maybe that's how she gets people to take her seriously - being so blithely and two dimensionally stupid that your brain rejects what it's seeing and starts an argument with itself, and then people mistake this mental mugging for being intellectually stimulated.
January 26, 2008
Worse than a Crime
An analysis of the Israeli blockade of Gaza by Uri Avnery -- Worse than a Crime.
The essense of his article is that the blockade was a blunder just as the 2006 war was a blunder.
You may want to reflect on Uri's position on the secular, unitary nature of the Palestinian state, and Dr. George Habash's, and on their positions on the religious, mutually-exclusive nature of the Zionist and Islamist armed political organizations and their territorial pretentions. Then there's the conservative or monarchist Arab states and the Right of Return of all Palestinian refugees to their homes in pre-1948 Palestine.
Today's NPR coverage of Habash and the PFLP was entirely operational. Apparently NPR is unaware that Habash and the PFLP had a political program. When they do Avnery's they'll probably miss the aims of Gush-Shalom as well.
Transitions :: Dr. George Habash, PFLP
Dr. George Habash, a Palestinian Christian, from Lydda, and founder of the PFLP. He died today in Amman, Jordan, where he has lived since 2001. He was 81.
If you think the solution to the problem is "two states", where one or both have a religious character, or you think that the conservative or monarchist Arab states like Morocco and Jordan are good governments, or you reject the Right of Return of all Palestinian refugees to their homes in pre-1948 Palestine, then you may have a fairly negative view of Dr. Habash.
Triangular Bandages
The costs of MB's several hospitalizations at MaineMed for hyperemesis and preterm labor, as well as Kezzie's birth at the same facility was covered by MaineCare. After the boys' diagnosis, their medical costs were all picked up by Medicare, which is MaineCare. Under Maine's wicked enlightened policy, the work of Michael Brennan, Chellie Pingree, and Mark Lawrence, the siblings of children with profound disabilities were also covered.
Further, the parents of children with profound disabilities, who's lives are defined by non-normal pediatric schedules, intensive interventions in hospital, speech therapy sessions, occupational therapy sessions, clinical schools, repeated for each sibling with a disability, plus the normal round of pre-schools and play dates and schools and normal pediatric schedules for siblings without disabilities, "work" and commute time and cost, are not, under MaineCare, courtesy of Brennan, Pingree, Lawrence, not required for the health care coverage of adults who's children are covered by MaineCare.
The costs of Sam's birth, our first of three at MaineMed, were covered by not just one, but two private, employer-provided, insurance scams -- Etna and United Health Care. Nine years later and there is still an O(104) bill from MaineMed marked "unpaid" on our credit report, as Etna and UHC echo "declined, covered by other" to MaineMed's accounts payable, and will probably do so for as long as MaineMed tries to get paid by either of those two criminal enterprises.
Anyway, here are the money quotes from Ethan's second-hand message-as-endorsement:
Sure, there are programs designed to help people without private insurance from an employer -- MaineCare for example -- however, so much time is lost waiting for these programs to kick in that progress toward wellness is lost and suffering is inevitable -- let alone the red tape and confusion when people are trying to navigate these programs. There has got to be another way.I do not know the ultimate answer to this dilemma, but I do know where the system fails us, and there must be ways that we can work to patch the system -- until we come up with a better solution. (That is why I am leaning towards Hillary for '08. She has some solutions that are implementable, not just ideals that are too good to be true).
I have to say I don't recall "time lost waiting" for MaineCare, but the allusion to "why Canada sucks" is unimportant. There are Dems in the primary voting demographic, which has an average age of 60, who will buy Ethan's substance-free message. Ethan came to Maine triangulating his way towards the Hill, and he didn't waste his time at Augusta doing useful work to make health care a human right. Nope. He was working a TABOR "compromise" with the Republicans.
Now that I'm working again, Sam and Jonah are no longer eligible for MaineCare, so I have to explore the wornderland of Ethan's preference -- private insurance, with realistic fixes, for children with a pre-existing condition -- autism. Its funny, like being offered a non-filtered cigarette "for health reasons" by the leader of the firing squad, or a low-carb last meal before leaving Death Row.
"a double-edged sword of epistemological futility"
The quote is from a comment on Josh Landis' Syria Comment.
The team that carried out the December 27th assassination of Benazir Bhutto is now believed to have comprised no fewer than six persons. See Dawn for details.
Two texts
This one from AFP, taken from yesterday's Daily Star of Lebanon, where the lead story is the bombing of a convoy, targeting Wissam Eid, a communications and computer engineer who lead the technical office at the Internal Security Force's Intelligence Bureau. Eid worked on the technical aspects of all cases involving bombings in Lebanon -- the (former Prime Minister Rafik) Hariri investigation, investigations involving the Fatah al-Islam armed organization that fought the Lebanese Army in the northern Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, and (via Al-Safir via T_DESCO via Landis), "the investigation of the al-Qa'ida-linked "cell of 13" headed by Hassan Nabaa/Khaled Taha and to which Ahmed Abu Adass was connected, possibly linking the Hariri case to the Fatah al-Islam/al-Qa'ida/Dinniyeh group investigations."
Compare the treatment of the prior bombing, where the apparent target was a US diplomatic asset with Hugh Macleod's piece below, which he describes as "I wrote an analysis for San Fran Chron on the attack on the US embassy vehicle and how there appears to be a new strand of political violence emerging in Lebanon, that seems more the work of Al-Qaeda style fundies than hit squads taking out anti-Syrian figures . . "
Here's the Daily Star of Lebanon's "news" copy:
...
Ten days ago a US embassy vehicle was targeted in a car bomb attack. No one in the US car was killed in that attack but three other people who were driving in the area died.That bombing was the first such attack against US interests in Lebanon since the mid-1980s and came during a visit to the Middle East by US President George W. Bush.
Lebanon is grappling with its worst political crisis since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war.
The country has been without a president since pro-Syrian head of state Emile Lahoud stepped down on November 23 with no elected successor because of a standoff between the Western-backed government and the opposition.
Here's the SF Chronicle's "analysis" copy:
The attack on a U.S. embassy vehicle that killed four people last week represents a dangerous widening of political violence that includes international targets, and shows how al Qaeda-inspired extremists are attempting to push the politically deadlocked country toward civil war, some analysts say."Al Qaeda is now unleashed in Lebanon and they are here to stay," said Ahmad Moussali, professor of political science and Islamic studies at the American University of Beirut. "Al Qaeda thrives in civil war and chaos. International players should be very careful in Lebanon."
...
A stand-off munition on a transport axis regularly used by a target really isn't a lot to go on to infer organizational ability, and origin, but in Nancy Pelosi's district, the narrator jumped straight to the desired outcome, and only several paragraphs later mentioned Lebanon's politics, and no where the fact that Bush was in the region when a US asset was targeted.
Like the hanging chad of the Winograd report on Olmert's 33 Day War, due any day now, Serge Brammertz, the UN chief investigator, is due to submit a report to the UN security council updating his findings into the death of al-Hariri in 9 days.
No group has acknowledged carrying out the attack. My guess however is that Hugh MacLeod's "analysis" that the "new strand of political violence emerging in Lebanon, that seems more the work of Al-Qaeda style fundies than hit squads taking out anti-Syrian figures . . " will not be supported by the respective investigations.
I'll make it simple. There was a fire last night at a casino in Las Vegas. It may not have been the work of Al-Qaeda-in-Gamble-stan, but the Homeland Insecurity clowns could spin it that way too by the end of the day.
January 25, 2008
I can't tell time
I missed my chance to phone back to South Carolina, 6pm plus a few PST is after 9:05 pm EST, when the calling window for voter ID and persuasion ends. The volunteer who called to vet me after registering at the website was smart and when she was walking me through the call and script and I mentioned I'd done GOTV, she switched to operative-speak, which made it a lot easier for me.
Pull back on food stamps and unemployment...
I saw this piece this morning, but we had to move the trailer to a new site, and so Suzie (brilliant wench she is) got it up first. But I still call dibs.
By the numbers...
In 2006, 134,372,678 US taxpayers filed returns with the IRS on income received in 2005. Of those returns, 43,779,597, or 32.5%, did not pay any federal income tax due to exemptions and credits. Of the 90,593,081 returns which reported taxable income, 40,081,459 were from married filing jointly, 2,004,781 married filing separately, 6,572,893 head of household, 33,793 surviving spouse and 41,900,155 filed as individuals. 81,170,334 exemptions were filed for dependent children, including children over 18 in college or disabled. 30% of US taxpayers have dependent children, with over 2/3rds living in married households.
3,949,703 (8.1%) of single taxpayers reported adjusted gross incomes over $75,000. For married couples, 3,045,750 (7.2%) filed tax returns with more than $200,000 in adjusted gross income. The IRS report for 2005 did not break down income for married filers between $100,000 and $200,000.
From these numbers, we can get a bit of an idea of where the "stimulus" checks will go.
55% of non-taxpayers filed as individuals, 45% as married. Thus we can extrapolate 24,078,778 individuals and 39,401,638 married taxpayers from the 43,779,597 mentioned above. However, approximately 3,000,000 households (single and family) have annual incomes below $3,000 cut off, so we after reducing and rounding, we get to around 62 million non-taxpayers receiving checks of $300 each for $18.6 billion.
84 million married and 48.5 million individual (totaling 132.5 million), each getting $600 for $79.5 billion.
Approximately $20 billion for dependents at $300 apiece, two-thirds going to 20% of taxpayers (married), with another third to the 10% of individual taxpayers with children.
I wanted to get these numbers up asap (since I've been working on them since 3am PST), but will update with more stats and some pie charts later today.
Update: Made a stupid addition error, now fixed.
Wolfowitz moves from the AEI to State
He's to chair the State Department's International Security Advisory Board, formerly the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board.
I expect he'll find WMDs somewhere.
CBPP's Greenstein speaks out on "stimulus"...
If you don't regularly check out the material on Center for Budget and Policy Priorities website, you should. Today, ED Robert Greenstein had this to say about the Pelosi/Boehner stimulus plan:
STATEMENT BY ROBERT GREENSTEIN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTORREPORTED STIMULUS PACKAGE WOULD PROVIDE LITTLE IMMEDIATE BOOST DUE TO REMOVAL OF MOST EFFECTIVE PROVISIONS
Changes reportedly made last night in the stimulus package would reduce its effectiveness as stimulus. Although the package includes a reasonably designed tax rebate, the two most targeted and economically effective measures under consideration - a temporary extension of unemployment benefits and a temporary boost in food stamp benefits - were zeroed out, apparently at the insistence of House Republican leaders.
The two respected institutions that have rated stimulus options in recent days - the Congressional Budget Office and Moody's Economy.com - both give their two highest ratings for effectiveness as stimulus to the two measures that were dropped.
* Of all tax and spending stimulus options that CBO examined, the only two that it found would have a large "bang-for-the-buck" as effective stimulus and act fast to boost the economy are the unemployment insurance and food stamp provisions. Both could start injecting more consumer purchasing power into the economy within one to two months. The planned tax rebate checks, in contrast, are not likely to be sent out until June.
* Economy.com found that for each dollar spent on extended UI benefits, $1.64 in increased economic activity would be generated. For each dollar in increased food stamp benefits, $1.73 in new economic activity would be generated. No other options rated as high.
* In contrast, Economy.com found that for each dollar in "accelerated depreciation" - the main business tax cut in the package - only 27 cents of increased economic activity would be generated. CBO and a Federal Reserve study in 2006 found that the business tax cuts adopted in the last recession, which closely resemble those in the current package, had only modest stimulative effects. Despite this evidence, the package apparently contains at least $50 billion in business tax cuts while excluding unemployment insurance - the single measure most focused on the people hardest hit by the downturn - and food stamps.
* The business tax cuts also would cause states to lose at least $4 billion in state revenue, due to linkages between federal and state tax codes. The package contains no fiscal relief for states, not even to offset this loss. As a result, many states will have to enact deeper and more painful budget cuts, likely hitting areas from health care and education to aid to local governments. Those state budget cuts will also act as a drag on the economy.
The unemployment insurance and food stamp provisions apparently were rejected by House Republican leaders, who reportedly said that the inclusion of spending measures would be unacceptable to the House Republican Caucus and would derail the package. Such a stance reflects the elevation of ideology over sound economic reasoning. As Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and now-CBO director Peter Orszag wrote in late 2001, "Basic economic analysis indicates that increased government expenditures can indeed be stimulative, and, in fact, are often more effective as stimulus measures than tax cuts."[1] This is because a significant portion of most tax cuts is saved rather than spent.
There's more at this link.
Flashing the flashback...
I thought I'd put up the original Flashback Friday post from this week in January, 2003. I haven't actually re-read it, just pulled it from the old Wampum site at blogspot, so it'll be interesting to see if time is again repeating itself.
So what's remarkable about these headlines?WHEREFORE ART THOU, RECOVERY?
Published on December 5: Charlie Stein, Boston Globe StaffThe latest statistics out of Washington confirm what most people already suspected: The sluggish recovery is threatening to stall altogether.
The economy grew at an annual rate of 1.7 percent in the third quarter, the Commerce Department reported yesterday, down from a previous estimate of 2.5 percent. The revision showed that inventories were higher and sales weaker than originally thought, a pattern that does not bode well for the fourth quarter...
INDEX SHOWS ECONOMY STAGNANT BUSH SAYS, 'WE CAN'T SIT BACK AND HOPE FOR THE BEST'
Published on December 4: John D. McClain, Associated PressWASHINGTON -- The government's chief measure of future economic health edged up an anemic 0.1 percent in October, casting new doubts on the economic recovery.
"It tells me that whatever recovery we had is gone," said economist Paul Getman of Regional Financial Associates in West Chester, Pa. "The economy is in imminent danger of slipping back into recession."
In Bradenton, Fla., President Bush said he understands the plight of Americans who have lost jobs and...
ECONOMISTS TAKE DIM VIEW OF USING TAX CUTS TO STIMULATE THE ECONOMY
Steven Mufson, Washington Post Staff Writer
December 18; Page a18It's two and a half times the food stamp program. It's roughly the size of the entire budget of the Transportation Department. It's nearly as big as the contributions the Persian Gulf countries made to cover the cost of Operation Desert Storm. It may be dubbed the Great Tax Giveaway, and it's one of the latest ideas underconsideration by the Bush administration and other Republican leaders. It would give $200 to $300 to every American taxpayer, or a total of $300...
U.S. FACTORY PRODUCTION FELL 0.4% IN NOVEMBER
Steven Mufson, Washington Post Staff Writer
December 17; Page c1The nation's industrial production fell 0.4 percent last month, the government said yesterday. It was the biggest decline in eight months and a sign that the economy might shrink during the final quarter of the year, analysts said. The drop in output at the nation's factories, mines and utilities was twice as severe as most economists had been expecting and heightened expectations that the Federal Reserve would decide to cut interest rates when its policy-making open market ...
ADMINISTRATION RETRACTS AFFIRMATIVE ACTION CURBS MOVE FAILS TO MOLLIFY CRITICS
Published on November 22, Author(s): Michael K. Frisby, Boston Globe StaffWASHINGTON -- The White House retreated yesterday from a proposed directive that would have eliminated federal affirmative action programs and crippled private-sector ones. But the action did not quiet a storm of protest over the changes circulated by his legal counsel.
AMERICANS GRADE THEIR HEALTH CARE
Richard Morin, Don Colburn, Washington Post Staff Writers
December 31; Page z6Most Americans are satisfied with the quality and availability of their health care, but anxieties about cost prompt an overwhelming majority to favor key changes in the health insurance system, a nationwide Washington Post-ABC News poll shows three out of four of those surveyed favor efforts to expand health insurance either by requiring businesses to provide coverage to all employees or by a national health care plan run by the government and financed by taxpayers...
Dream of Striking It Rich Fading in Silicon Valley Technology: Severe business restructuring and recession alter face-and attitude-of electronics Mecca.
The Los Angeles Times; Los Angeles, Calif.; Sep 9; JONATHAN WEBER;No one believes that Silicon Valley is withering away as a center of innovation. Indeed, it is likely to remain a premier technology hub and a powerful economic driver for the state and nation. But many in the high-tech community agree that when it emerges from the recession, Silicon Valley probably will look more like any other vibrant industrial region rather than ...
State's Long-Term Jobless Corps Grows 50% in Year Recession: Thousands have exhausted their unemployment benefits and are still without a job.
The Los Angeles Times; Los Angeles, Calif.; Sep 8; JESUS SANCHEZ;Diane Dixon is one of a fast growing number of Californians who have exhausted their unemployment benefits before finding work in a recession-battered job market. The state's corps of long-term unemployed jumped 50% over year-before levels to about 36,000 in July, the latest month for which figures are available from the state Employment Development Department.
TWO VISIONS OF US ENERGY FUTURE
Published on November 4: Ross Gelbspan, Globe StaffThe US Senate's vote Friday to derail action on the Bush administration's massive energy bill provided a vivid reminder of the nation's profound division over how best to provide for its energy needs in the 21st century.
The president's bill foundered primarily on opposition to oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but underlying that issue is a far broader disagreement over priorities...
RECORD NUMBER OF JOBLESS LEFT WITHOUT BENEFITS
Chicago Tribune; Chicago, Ill.; Stephen FranklinThe number of workers in the U.S. who have exhausted their jobless benefits and are ineligible for further assistance hit a record high in July, according to a Washington-based research group.
Officials with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said that 318,000 workers nationwide, and 17,293 in Illinois, used up their unemployment benefits in July. The nationwide figure is the highest since monthly ...
US EXPECTED TO RESTRICT USE OF RACE-BASED SCHOLARSHIPS
Published on December 4: Anthony Flint, Boston Globe StaffIn a move that is sure to revive a thorny civil rights issue for President Bush, [the] Education Secretary is expected to propose a rule today prohibiting colleges from restricting scholarships to individual racial groups, although race can be a factor in awarding aid.
Under the proposed regulation, scholarships must be open to "all comers," whether white or black or from other groups, a Department of Education official said yesterday...
ADMINISTRATION RETRACTS AFFIRMATIVE ACTION CURBS HINTS OF WHITE HOUSE ADRIFT
Published on November 22: John W. Mashek, Boston Globe StaffWASHINGTON -- A White House lawyer's attempt to reverse two decades of affirmative action on the eve of a presidential ceremony to sign a new civil rights bill was the most serious of several recent blunders and miscalculations by President Bush and his aides.
The episode, despite Bush's hasty and clumsy attempt to undo the damage, left the president embarrassed and gave the appearance of a White House careening out of control...
PRESCRIPTIONS FOR AN AILING ECONOMY
December 22; Page h1. Washington Post StaffWhat is to be done about the economy? Focus on long-terminvestment? Extend jobless benefits? Jump-start housing and construction through federal spending? Cut interest rates even more? As President Bush huddles with his advisers in search of a new strategy, a cross-section of experts offered their advice about the best path to follow...
BUSH APPROVAL RATING SLIPS TO 47%
POLL RESULTS, REFLECTING ECONOMIC FEARS, ARE WORST OF HIS PRESIDENCYDan BalzWashington Post Staff Writers
December 17; Page a1Fed by surging doubts about his handling of the economy, President Bush's popularity has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, with fewer than half of those questioned in the latest Washington Post-ABC News Poll saying they approve of the way he is doing his job. Bush's approval rating has dropped to 47 percent, marking the first time it has slipped below 50 percent in Post-ABC News surveys. Only about six weeks ago, 59 percent of the public approved of the way he was...
Figured it out yet?They're all from 1991.
Flashback Friday...redux
Just to give any of our long-term readers a taste of the old days...
Renewed Republican Call For Tax Cut Is Led by Bush
By ADAM CLYMER,
Published: October 18, 1991President Bush and Republican Congressional leaders argued today that the way to reduce unemployment was through a capital gains tax cut that would create more jobs, while Democrats renewed their effort to pass legislation extending unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless.
Politics dominated both arguments in the aftermath of Wednesday's Senate vote to sustain Mr. Bush's veto of a $6.5 billion Democratic bill to provide up to 20 weeks of additional benefits for people out of work for at least half a year.
Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the Republican whip in the House, said Republicans "would go to the country very hard this fall and refuse to adjourn" until Congress acted on proposals for economic growth.
Mr. Gingrich said those proposals, which would go beyond the capital gains cut and include a smaller unemployment plan than the Democrats want, would be outlined next week and produced in legislative form as early as next week.
But House Speaker Thomas S. Foley, renewing the assertion that Democrats have consistently made since July, complained that Mr. Bush supported deficit spending to help foreigners but not jobless Americans. He called the Administration's jobless proposal "totally inadequate."
Mr. Bush renewed his calls for a capital gains tax cut in a televised address to the Associated Press Managing Editors' Association, which was meeting in Detroit. He said that "a capital gains tax cut will set off an explosion of small business formation" and "give our economy a much needed boost."
"It would raise real estate prices and cut the overall cost of the savings and loan cleanup," he said. "It would help people of imagination and drive."
January 24, 2008
Send food stamps to Pelosi...
I want to start a campaign to send replica food stamps to Pelosi, both via email, regular mail and in person. But I need some technical help. Anyone know how to create generated email with food stamps graphics included? I can come up with a printable food stamp to be mailed or dropped.
Let the food stamp revolt begin!
email: sf.nancy@mail.house.gov San Francisco: (415) 556-4862 Washington, DC: (202) 225-4965
Eat the Poor
Speaker Pelosi caved, again, to Republicans, and sold out our most vulnerable citizens.
Tentative Deal Is Reached on Stimulus Plan
January 24, 20
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:53 a.m. ETWASHINGTON (AP) -- Democratic and Republican congressional leaders reached a tentative deal Thursday on tax rebates of $300 to $1,200 per household and business tax cuts to jolt the slumping economy.
Congressional officials close to the negotiations said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio reached agreement in principle in a telephone call Thursday morning.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the two wanted key members of their parties to sign off on the accord before any announcement.
The development came as the Bush administration, which also has been pushing for a deal, said agreement seemed imminent. ''Our understanding is there is no final deal yet but they are making progress,'' presidential spokeswoman Dana Perino said early Thursday.
Pelosi, D-Calif., agreed to drop increases in food stamp and unemployment benefits during a Wednesday meeting in exchange for gaining rebates of at least $300 for almost everyone earning a paycheck, including low-income earners who make too little to pay income taxes.
As I indicated in yesterday's post on food stamps and food prices, FS benefits have not kept pace with recent upsurges in food prices, so that $1.50 per meal benefit buys even less. And just who are the people Pelosi has agreed to shaft? From USDA's website:
Based on a study of data gathered in Fiscal Year 2005:
* 50 percent of all participants are children (18 or younger), and 65 percent of them live in single-parent households.
* 54 percent of food stamp households include children.
* 8 percent of all participants are elderly (age 60 or over).
* 77 percent of all benefits go to households with children, 16 percent go to households with disabled persons, and 9 percent go to households with elderly persons.
* 34 percent of households with children were headed by a single parent, the overwhelming majority of whom were women.
* The average household size is 2.3 persons.
* The average gross monthly income per food stamp household is $648.
* 46 percent of participants are white; 31 percent are African-American, non-Hispanic; 13 percent are Hispanic; 2 percent are Asian, 1 percent are Native American, and 7 percent are of unknown race or ethnicity.
(source: McClatchy)
Update1: I've been doing some research and here is the USDA's latest report on Food Stamp Participation in the US. According to the report, 37.7 million Americans (approx. 13% of all citizen) are eligible to received food stamp benefits, though participation rates in the program hover around 65% (varies by state.)
Unemployment numbers are also readily available from the BLS. The current number of unemployed is officially 7,655,000, but that does not include 4,697,000 individuals who are listed as "currently not in the labor force" but "who currently want a job." Of those 4.7 million, 1,338,000 have been unemployed for 26 weeks or more, meaning their unemployment insurance has already run out. Another 1,182,000 have been unemployed for more than 15 weeks (but less than 26). Over the past year, the average length of unemployment has increased from 15.9 to 17.2 weeks, so over a million more former workers are counting the days until their benefits run out.
Are we there yet?
Not even close. And the news only gets worse. From Bloomberg this morning:
U.S. Existing Home Sales Fell More Than Forecast (Update1)
By Courtney SchlissermanJan. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Sales of existing homes in the U.S. fell more than forecast in December, capping the biggest yearly slump in more than a generation.
Purchases fell 2.2 percent to an annual rate of 4.89 million, the National Association of Realtors said today in Washington. For all of last year, sales of single-family homes declined 13 percent, the most since 1982, and prices dropped for the first time in at least four decades.
Falling property values and tougher borrowing rules may lead to more foreclosures and depress housing for most of this year. The worsening real-estate recession is at the core of the economic slowdown and will probably prompt the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates next week and in future meetings, economists said.
``We are not at the bottom in the housing market,'' said Nigel Gault, director of U.S. research at Global Insight Inc., a Lexington, Massachusetts, forecasting firm. ``The Fed is trying to battle against the fundamentals which say housing is not going to recover until we have a substantial decline in prices.''
Home inventories are climbing and housing starts are way down. So what does the stock market do?
Home Builder Stocks Continue Rally
Update1: Turns out even those markets which declared themselves immune are catching cold:
Housing Slump Starts to Hit Stronger Cities; Supply Grows, Prices Weaken In Northwest, North Carolina; Manhattan Looks Vulnerable
By JAMES R. HAGERTY
January 24, 2008; Page D1It's getting harder to hide from the housing bust.
Tight credit, fragile consumer confidence and a weakening economy are slowing sales and depressing prices even in some places -- such as the Pacific Northwest and North Carolina -- that until recently had avoided the housing slump afflicting most of the country.
Even Manhattan, where prices continued to rise briskly last year, looks more vulnerable to a slowdown. Falling home prices and soaring defaults elsewhere have created more than $100 billion of losses on mortgage-related securities at Wall Street firms, destroying many jobs in the New York area. The number of homes listed for sale in Long Island and Queens at the end of 2007 was enough to last 18 months at the current sales rate, up from a 12-month supply a year before.
This is a pure investment opportunity
So said Bader Al Sa'ad, who heads he Kuwait Investment Authority, to reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The KIA is targeting the financial sector and real estate sector, and Al Sa'ad noted "this opportunity doesn't come every day". As George Soros concludes So, the current financial crisis is less likely to cause a global recession than a radical realignment of the global economy, with a relative decline of the US and the rise of China and other countries in the developing world. Here's the link to the original.
Here's another investment opportunity, because even the good are from time to time, tempted, and because Chris Dodd's largest contributors are in the synthetic financial instrument market, and are looking for a bail-out, and because retroactive telco immunity for illegal intercept could be swept off the table ...
Name | State Phone | WDC Phone |
| Feingold | (608) 828-1200 | (202) 224-5323 |
| Dodd | (860) 258-6940 | (202) 224-2823 |
| Obama | (312) 886-3506 | (202) 224-2854 |
| Sanders | (802) 862-0697 | (202) 224-5141 |
| Menendez | (973) 645-3030 | (202) 224-4744 |
| Biden | (302) 573-6345 | (202) 224-5042 |
| Brown | (216) 522-7272 | (202) 224-2315 |
| Harkin | (515) 284-4574 | (202) 224-3254 |
| Cardin | (410) 962-4436 | (202) 224-4524 |
| Clinton | (212) 688-6262 | (202) 224-4451 |
| Akaka | (808) 522-8970 | (202) 224-6361 |
| Webb | (804) 771-2221 | (202) 224-4024 |
| Kennedy | 617) 565-3170 | (202) 224-4543 |
| Boxer | (415) 403-0100 | (202) 224-3553 |
I [heart] Robert Reich
How much worse can it get? As I said before, the housing bubble drove home prices up 20 to 40 percent above historic averages relative to earnings and rents. So now that the bubble is bursting, you can expect prices to drop by roughly the same amount, and new home construction to contract. The latter plunged last month to its lowest point in more than 16 years. A managing partner of a large Wall Street financial house told me a few days ago the scenario could get much worse. He gave a 20 percent chance of a depression.Even if a stimulus package were precisely targeted to consumers most likely to spend any money they received, the housing slump could overwhelm it. According to a recent estimate by Merrill-Lynch, the slump will hit consumer spending to the tune of $360 billion this year and next. That's more than double the size of the stimulus package President Bush or any leading Democrat is now talking about. And the Merrill-Lynch estimate is conservative.
In reality, the crisis is both a credit crunch and the bursting of the housing bubble. Wall Street is in terrible shape and Main Street is about to be in terrible shape. And there's not a whole lot that can be done about either of these problems -- because they are the results of years of lax credit standards, get-rich-quick schemes, wild speculation on Wall Street and in the housing market, and gross irresponsibility by the Fed, the Treasury and the Comptroller of the Currency.
I disagree with Reich over what should be done in the short/long run (he says borrow from outside US, I say we have to let the correction occur and soften the pain for individuals) but he still gets it better than most talking heads out there.
January 23, 2008
Al Gore on Gay Marriage
And if you use sendmail, or an operating system product that at any point in its licensing history, ever required a license from the Regents of the University of California, even if unknown to you, your email transits sendmail relays on Berkeley Unix hosts, which is what most ISPs actually use in operational practice, you're using the work products of two men who've been married for longer than I've known them, to each other.
Happy Everyday, Kirk and Eric!!!
FISA is back
We know now that the Metropolitian Area Exchanges which Verizon operates -- MAE West in San Jose, MAE East in New York, and the rest -- WDC, Miami, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles -- have gigataps with black backhaul to ... somewhere. Yesterday Peter Scharr issued a ruling for the member states of the European Union, that ip addresses are personal data.
So what is the legal status of the wiretaps in Verizon's MAEs in Frankfurt and Paris?
Are US nationals protected by EU member state data protection law, by the Treaty of the European Union, when in the territorial jurisdiction of an EU member state? While I'm in Paris next June for the ICANN meeting, using a local ISP to Jabber or Skype or Gizmo to someone in Berlin, say, the Data Protection Commissioner for Berlin, on errors and errata in, or updates to, the P3P specification on the Protection of Personal Privacy since the W3C shutdown the Privacy and P3P project in 2002, on the off chance that I'd like to co-author an update to our last work item -- P3P1.1, which was more or less killed by the governmental data mining rush in personally identifying data that followed 9/11, or contribute to W3C Policy Languages Interest Group, in particular, the meta-language for the provisioning of data protection policy between cooperating data protecting entities, will the United States have the cooperation of French, and/or German authorities, to copy all of my data that transits the Verizon operated MAEs in Europe, as they have in the Verizon operated MAEs in the United States?
There were times when data going from my set of ARPA IMPs (modernly routers) in Menlo Park to the ARPA IMPs in UCLA would not go down the PacTel trunk from SF to LA, instead they'd be routed, with perceptible delay in those 56Kb days, to the ARPA IMPs in Salt Lake, and then to WDC, and then to UCLA. With terrestrial (trans-oceanic) fiber, backhaul from Paris to Halifax to CONUS where the tap may now be (illegally applied), and than backhaul back to Paris, would be much more difficult for the endpoint to detect... unless the traceroute data shows that the packets disapear from the obvious route, and return to it with an increment in the hop count, which is easy enough to forge...
Unless Dodd wins the filibuster, its bedtime for Bonzo for data protection and data or voice personal privacy, and both data and voice for political change tend toward comic. Make some Senatorial aide pick up a phone and chat about the difference between legal, and illegal intercept. Tell them that you'd like a law that will allow you to wiretap your political opponents...
Foreclosures up 353%
Cheery headline in today's SD Union, the paper of record of the 2nd largest metro area in California, who's reporters and wire service editors can't find John Edwards or Carmen Sandiego. Nice graphic too.
Food stamps and food prices...
The current maximum benefit for USDA Food Stamps is $162/month for individuals and $542/month for a family of four. That equates to $5.40 for individuals living alone, and $4.52 for individuals residing in family households. I decided to see where those benefits stood in when the Bush Administration took office, and how their increase held up against inflation in the price of food. For assistance, I turned to the Way Back Machine, where, with a little digging, I was able to determine the benefits beginning October, 2000, were $130/month for individuals and $434/month for a family of four. Thus, individuals and families each saw a 23% increase in their benefits over those seven years, or a whopping $1.07/day for individuals living alone, and 90 cents/day for individuals living in families.
So how does that compare to the prices of CPI-tracked foods, including some I discussed earlier this morning?
(Note: The bottom number is the percentage increase.)
The average increase of these five staples was 45.08%, and even stripping out the highest and lowest results in an inflation rate of 33.4%, 10% higher than the rate of increase of the maximum food stamp benefit.
Clearly, one of the very first actions of any stimulus package should be to bring those number into sync, or better yet, to increase the monthly benefit substantially. Anyone who believes children can subsist, yet alone grow healthy, on $1.50 per meal is either delusional or completely out of touch.
More scary stats from the BLS bunker...
There's just so much information at the BLS, though most of it only sees the light of day through the Bush Administration's rosy filter. I figure I'll pull out some of the more juicy tidbits as I trawl through the archives.
For example, here's are a couple which should have recession-nascent economists biting their nails:
Hours are flat, and inflation adjusted weekly earnings down year over year.
Look at the last three months. Eek.
Those who appease, and those who don't
The Central European Bank won't be lowering interest rates for the Euro zone. No appeasement to the players in the equities markets.
En toutes circonstances, mais plus encore lors des périodes difficiles de correction significative sur les marchés et de turbulences, la responsabilité de la banque centrale est d'ancrer solidement les anticipations d'inflation, afin d'éviter davantage de volatilité sur les marchés.Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the Central European Bank, to the European Parliament in Brussels, this morning.
Compare, the Dollar zone's Fed action of yesterday. No difficult periods of significant correction for the markets. Instead, inflation. Official inflation, kicking off now, in addition to the formally ignored current rate of inflation.
Fun with graphs...
Inflation, in the US, is gauged by the Consumer Price Index, and for the most part, the Bush Administration and its economic puppets have touted just how low the CPI has remained over the past seven years. However, the CPI which the government and economists utilize leaves out those consumer goods it considered "too volatile", namely, food and energy. In order to see the changes in the price of those goods, you need to use a little known tool over at the Bureau of Labor Statistics web site. I spent this morning doing just that. Here are a few results.
First, the price of a dozen eggs over the past two years:
And how about the chicken:
And a pound of coffee:
A loaf of white bread:
And that heating oil:
But while these graphs are telling, the numbers are even more so: From January thru December, 2007, the price of these five goods, none of which are included in the CPI, increased 22.2%, while the "official" CPI increased a mere (seasonally adjusted) 2.4%.
(Note: The BLS no longer tracks the price of milk. The George HW Bush exception?)
Into the breach
Le Monde has 10 images (in flash) here of the breach in the Iron Curtain at Rafah. The foundations of the 20' tall metal barrier Tsahal erected in 2004, on Washington's dime, before pulling out of Gaza, was weakened by explosives, and pulled down by tractors. On the order of 10,000 people crossed into Egypt in the first few hours after the breach was opened, to buy food.
Again, I don't understand why the Edwards campaign fails to distinguish their candidate from the two other AIPAC-blessed candidates. Its not as if they are going to get anything distinguishing out of AIPAC. The largest collective punishment on record (the American war on Iraq excepted), the largest forced impoverishment on record (the American war on Iraq excepted), the largest Berlin Blockade since Eric Honecker's cage was opened, and not a word from the candidate on Peace in the Middle East.
What makes Katrina more dignified of candidate time and message than Gaza? What does a candidate do when confronted by millions in dire necessity? Say "there are looters" or "there are Qassams" and turn back to the comfort of the standard stump?
Armchair Econ 101
So, since I've decided to throw my hat back in the ring as an armchair econoblogger, I thought I'd start out with these numbers.
Think about them as I pull up some other stats. Expect a quiz.
Update: No, it's not gasoline. It's a gallon of milk. Gasoline was up nationally 20% over the last year.
January 22, 2008
Edwards in SC
Not in the San Diego Union.
At the end of the (under)wire is ... a person
During the work of writing the W3C's P3P spec we considered whether an ipv4 address, an end-point identifier, was personally identifying information. We agreed that a complete ipv4 address -- a dotted quad -- numbers of the form 36.26.36.dd (to pun on Avedon Carol's Bra-of-the-Week standard) was "PII", but disagreed as to how much of the dotted-quad to delete so that the remainder would no longer be personally identifying information.
TheP3P Spec Working Group adopted Martin Presler-Marshall's (IBM) definition -- "a partialip element represents an IP version 4 address (only - not a version 6 address) which has had at least the last 7 bits of information removed."
My position was that 7 bits was insufficient, and we needed to limit the bits collected to 16 out of the 32, to avoid off-line and on-line data collection correlation from transforming a partialip element into a unique personal identifier. I won't argue with people who think that because they are behind a commercial or residential NAT or in a (not very dynamic over time, and wicked static for days and weeks on end) ISP managed DHCP block, they are "anonymous". They're wrong. But the Working Group went with the 7bit mask.
Today Peter Scharr issued a ruling for the member states of the European Union, that ip addresses are personal data. Google/DoubleClick differs of course, which is amusing when you consider that DoubleClick's core business model was, and is, deterministic, not statistical, behavioral profiling. Its the difference between knowing that 36.26.36.dd statistically appears to be a person-with-breasts, and knowing that the person is named Jane Doe, and having access to her credit-card transaction history, including her shopping at Bras of the World, and every other bit of linked data Equifax et alia sell.
For background see European Commission > Justice and Home affairs > ... > Data Protection page.
Of course, none of this applies in the US, where everyone is wiretapped. Don't forget you could have supported Chris Dodd in Iowa, and you can still support Chris Dodd on the coming FISA replay.
An Overheated ...
Le Monde is front-paging a story -- Un climat très politique that has absolutely no coverage in the US media market -- on June 23rd, 1988, a climatologist, Dr. James Hanson, then, and now, Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA, was called before a Senate committee to give scientific testimony on what was then the hottest summer on record.
He was recalled on May 8th, 1989, and testified before a Senate committee headed by Senator Al Gore, who asked "Why have you contradicted your written testimony?" Dr. Hanson's reply, "Because I didn't write the last paragraph of this section. It was "added" to my statement."
Hanson had alerted Gore that his testimony had been falsified, faxing Gore the sections he knew had been falsified, allowing Gore the opportunity to ask Hanson if his testimony was in fact, his, or that of a political censor. And of course, the answer was there in plain sight.
Coverage: NPR ran a 20 minute audio interview segment on January 8th, five days after the Iowa caucus. Hanson is an Iowan. link. Good luck finding much else in the US media.
Author Mark Bowen's Censoring Science site has links to online booksellers where the book may be ordered.
Need something funny to brighten your stockmarket day? Try this gem from co2science.org:
GOPE3_DVD - The Greening of Planet Earth and The Greening of Planet Earth Continues Video Set
Is carbon dioxide a harmful air pollutant, or is it an amazingly effective aerial fertilizer? Explore the positive side of the issue in two half-hour documentaries -- The Greening of Planet Earth and The Greening of Planet Earth Continues - yours free today with a qualifying tax deductible donation of $20 plus shipping and handling. DVD burned in -R format, original release dates of 1992 and 1998.
Gee, is CO2 an amazingly effective aerial fertilizer? Instead I think I'll send $20 to the Edwards campaign link. Today is a good day to try.
Synchronized Sinking
January 21, 2008
Armchair econoblogger question of the day...
How many Americans used their HELOCs and refis on their ballooning home values to invest in the stock market?
Planks of a Party
Every Democratic campaign on earth has sent me some garbage about what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would do if he were alive today. Naturally, each one implies that Dr. King would be pushing that campaign's message, staffing their phones, and so on. None dare suggest that he might not be very pleased with their particular political party, or really concerned about each man and woman's paycheck stretching out to the end of the week.
I started this morning looking at the platform of Canada's New Democratic Party, as in, maybe we could start an affiliate rather than go through the tedious mess of actually forming a Party under very restrictive rules, or having to join the Greens and have to put up with their culture of even-handedness towards those with a surplus of social capital and those with much, much less than even sufficiency.
- Studies show that American-style private health care leads to more deaths, costs more money and reduces accessibility. ... In the United States, the private delivery model is so expensive that the governments there spend more per capita providing health care than do the governments in Canada -- while leaving many Americans outside of hospital doors looking in.
- ...
- ...
Tomorrow could be Black Thursday or Black Friday or Black Monday (isn't Wikipedia fun?) and it won't change the hair of a single DNC/DLC/... elite who's already decided to win with one or the other or both of the Senators from New York and Illinois.
Nader's spoke at the Engineers Without Borders National Conference in Montréal on Friday. On the CBC's "Radio's Daybreak" show this morning he was asked about running in the current cycle. His answer:
I'll decide in about a month. What I'm deciding on right now is whether we can get enough volunteers, enough financial resources to overcome the huge ballot access obstacles, which you don't experience here in Canada, but which are the worst in the Western world in the United States.
That's about right. In a month we'll know who the DNC is fronting, and the RNC as well.
Media coverage: Reuters, Le Monde, RTT News.
Then there's Nader on Edwards, here at Reuters.
January 20, 2008
Not in our lifetimes
Two campaigns messaged for "single payer".
Together they obtained less than 5% of the preference. Had there not been a historic "first woman" (not actually correct, the truer meme is "first dynastic spouse", recognizing the Adams, Roosevelt and Bush sets of administrations), or a historic "first non-white candidate" (not actually correct either, the truer meme is "first non-white senator-candidate", recognizing Rep. Chisholm's and Rev. Jackson's campaigns), it is unlikely the outcome would have been any different.
Organized labor, the reason for Nevada's selection as an early-contest by the DNC, chose some other outcome than an affirmation of single-payer as a plank of the 2008 Democratic Platform.
Neither of the two candidates for whom organized labor did align offered any particular policy favorable to organized labor, only the political end of alignment with the winner, or in this particular contest, the winning duo.
The lesson learned is that there is no coupling, tight or loose, between progressive policy and national labor organizations during party primaries. Only the political outcome matters -- organizational elites and their alignment with the winner.
Two campaigns messaged for "out now". The same campaigns and the same result.
The lesson learned is that there is no coupling between a retreat from the intentional errors of two wars that in fact have had significant bipartisan support since the fraud was first uttered, and still enjoy significant bipartisan acceptance, and party primaries. Only the political outcome matters, so whichever party prevails in the general election, the war will continue in its present form.
Two campaigns which could have messaged meaningfully, from the well of the Senate, for "no retroactive immunity for illegal intercept" (wiretap, the FISA mess) didn't. Those campaigns were the beneficiaries of their respective issue-indifferent party activists, and together obtained 95% of the preference.
The lesson learned is that there is no coupling between the erosion of the Constitution and the institutions of law enforcement and the preservation of political liberties, from Ashcroft to Gonzales, from astonishingly massive, and pre-9/11, intercept of voice and data communication, from torture as a routine administrative practice of patently obvious inconsequential utility, from the loss of Habeas Corpus for citizens in our own custody, and party primaries.
We're not going to see "single payer" in our lifetimes, there are simply too few of us who are uninsured and know it, and too many of them, the Republicans, the Reagan Dems, who've got good enough jobs, jobs with some semblance of health insurance, who know they don't need "single payer".
The war will continue, from Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to ... there simply aren't enough killed to make a peace movement.
There won't be any grand clean up of the Ashcroft-to-the-present, in fact, the transactional nature of the relationship between the electoral winners and the organizational elites and their alignment with the winner won't change. The "ethics" message that failed in the campaign for the seat vacated by the resignation and conviction of Representative Duke Cunningham, wasn't present in the message of the winners of Nevada, and before that, Iowa.
Louis de Cazenave died today. He was l'un des deux derniers poilus de la première guerre mondiale.
January 19, 2008
Meanwhile, back at the Digital Divide Ranch
On an Ops list we're discussing a surprising civil case in North Dakota. In what follows "zone transfer" means "copy".
A operates a Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) business (you may use "spammer" if you like), and organic to the business of ... spamming ... operates one or more Domain Name System (DNS) servers, one of which is authoritative for a domain and the associated zone which A uses to originate streams of UBE.B (You may use "anti-spam vigilantee" if you like) requests a zone transfer for the associated zone from a DNS server under the control of A. The DNS server under the control of A is configured to allow zone transfers unconditionally. This is the default configuration of this particular DNS server.
A then sues B for a privacy cause of action.
Ruling at trial: As B is neither a "researcher", nor is a zone transfer of A's zone necessary for the operation of A's zone, B's conduct is not privileged, and A's privacy claim prevails. B is held liable for civil damages.
There's a lot of nuances that are discussed by, what amounts to the experts on the subject, and its not my intent to recite, or discuss the merits, of each.
What I remind wampum's readers is that there really still is very little "law of the internet", and lawlessness begins, like the rot in fish, at the head. I don't mean ICANN, I mean FISA and the employees of the United States who assert their conduct is not criminal because they conduct it, but that arbitrary conduct by others is criminal because they assert that it is so.
That's why Chris Dodd's position on FISA is a matter of life, or civil death, to everyone who uses a can tied to a string that may or may not be tied to one or more other cans. The rotten Cappo del Pesce crowd are doing whatever the hell they want with all the string, weaving nooses for any they think would look better walking in the air.
When this is all over, I'd like to know why they passed on this one
The moment has come and gone for the Edwards campaign (John, Elizabeth, David Medina (PD), David Bonior (NCM), Joe Trippi, ...) to use a Nevada venue to make a distinguishing statement on Yucca Mountain. Oh well, perhaps they have considered and discarded the issue on its political merits.
The Reno Gazette-Journal ran a poll of likely voters (which isn't at all the same thing as likely presidential preference caucus participants, and as Nevada has never had an "early contest" primary, that difference is wicked significant, see MB's piece on the eve of Iowa on our experience in Maine and Iowa caucuses) eight weeks ago.
21% of the registered dems in the sample used the "very important" answer to the does Yucca Mountain determine your presidential preference.
That's more than the 15% needed simply to accumulate delegates. A candidate could drool on three cylinders, as Ron Paul does on the RNC side of the early contests, yet make the delegate accumulation threshold firing on only one cylinder, in Ron Paul's case, the Bi-Partisan Wars of 2003-2009. The Edwards campaign is easily firing on three out of four cylinders, its just missing fire on this, the fourth, which is the deciding issue for a fifth of all voting dems, and could, if used effectively, have disproportionate effect on Nevada's first early contest presidential preference caucus.
53% of the registered dems in the sample used the "important" answer to the does Yucca Mountain determine your presidential preference.
That's a lot more dems who will have to decide if their "most important" issue, perhaps something to do with symbolisms external to Nevada, really does trump Nevada's being used, since November, 1951, as the place where Washington carelessly scatters its atomic trash.
42% of the registered dems in the sample used the "strongly oppose" answer to the Yucca Mountain question.
40% of the registered dems in the sample used the "oppose" answer to the Yucca Mountain question.
The earned delegate count this far is 25 Obama, 24 Clinton, 18 Edwards, and at least one national polling firm announced it is dropping Edwards from the candidates listed questions.
Given a choice between a base of 21%, more if executed correctly, which should have been part of the Nevada field plan, plus anything in the three-way competition for "important" issues, and rasing $7,000,000, I'd go for base-plus.
When this is all over, I'd like to know why they passed on this one. I mailed Political Fiction with a "for Nevada" headnote to Trippi on the 15th, just in case they didn't have an Auntie Nukes message and plan at hand. Of course, who reads email?
On the bright (and glowing side), this issue will be around in the next cycle, and the cycle after that, and the cycle after that, and the cycle after that, and ...
January 18, 2008
Its the (Wicked Broken) Economy, Simpleton
If you are a Maine Dem, and you voted for John over Chris in the last gubernatorial primary, you simply can't read these -- Harold Meyerson (in the Washington Post) and Paul Krugman (in the New York Times), both writing about how we fix this mess. You can't read them because you tossed them both aside as utter crap 18 months ago, and voted for not-so-much-of-an-idea-man John. You "won", and Avedon Carol summarizes what you tossed aside:
Short version: Reinstate the New Deal, and add in Jimmy Carter's energy plan.
On the other hand, expecting more than a quarter of any political party's activists to see around the corner is probably unrealistic.
But caucus times approaches, and every Maine Dem has five basic choices, six counting not going to the caucuses at all: (1) go uncommitted, (2) go with John's endorsement, (3) go with John's other endorsement, all of which reject "reinstate the New Deal, and add in Jimmy Carter's energy plan", or (4) go with Edwards or (5) go with Kucinich, both of which embrace "reinstate the New Deal, and add in Jimmy Carter's energy plan".
4 or 5 is useful. 1, 2, and 3 just tread water.
January 17, 2008
For John and For Us
Tomorrow is raise-the-bat-day for the Edwards campaign. We've given and if you're also so inclined, here's the link.
We're using cricket as the theme, as the MSM is covering the Edwards campaign like it covers the major cricket matches, which is to say, not very well.
If you have a favorite cricket image, stuff the URL in comments. If its not a bug, I may run it tomorrow. If it is a bug, I'll see if I can get one of Gracie's lizards to eat it. We go through a lot of crickets in a week.
Disconnect?
Record numbers of people are losing their homes, choosing between rising heating and food costs, and drowning in credit card debt. John McCain's solution? Cut taxes on the corporations causing this pain:
McCain Proposes Business Tax Cuts
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 17, 2008
AIKEN, S.C. (AP) -- Republican presidential candidate John McCain proposed an economic stimulus plan on Thursday that would lower the corporate income tax rate and provide a host of other tax breaks for business.
His plan would cut the corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent. McCain said that would expand the U.S. economy, creating jobs and opportunity.
...
It does not contain tax relief for individuals other than to renew a McCain call to make permanent expiring tax cuts passed by Congress in President Bush's first term.
Apparently, McCain is taking his lead from Mr. 3% Giuliani. Though, McCain did mention last week (according to Paul Krugman) that he really doesn't know much about economic, other than having read Alan Greenspan's latest book.
January 16, 2008
Le Monde has this ...
Les craintes de récession aux Etats-Unis font plonger les Bourses mondiales.
The real world is beginning to be really worried about infinite tax cuts and infinite war and infinite growth.
Media finds UFO
We understand Chris Mathews will be interviewing the BEMs.
And in other news, John Edwards is still missing.
January 15, 2008
Political Fiction
Le Monde has this: Pour les Européens, la sécession de la Flandre reste de la politique-fiction
So what are the political fictions on this side of the pond?
How about Yucca Mountain? Its a wicked big issue in Clark County (Las Vegas), where most of the votes are, and sure everyone's nominally against the DOE's Repository, just how deeply this position is held by each candidate is a variable only those with Rad-Radar can be certain of.
Yucca isn't about commercial waste, that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's rods in pools at the former site of Maine Yankee, at Vermont Yankee, at ... and of course the operating company for each commercial reactor will eventually have to build more storage pool if Yucca isn't built ... so stopping Yucca is how we stop commercial nuclear power, right? right??
No.
Kerry got it right in the last cycle. The stockpiles of fissiles -- weaponized and mated with delivery vehicles, weaponized and not yet mated with a delivery vehicle, and fissiles not yet weaponized, they are the greatest threat to the United States -- whether they are under the custody of the United States or the Russian Federation. Rust observes princes and their pretenses not a wit, and rust will not reason.
Yucca Mountain is about either pretending there is nothing wrong, that death comes not for thee and thee and we, and happy, confident nuclear engineers can power a two car garage indefinitely into a future where no one ever has to duck and cover, or closing down the grand madness of The Cold War, and taking with it the latent threat of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium remaining in economic circulation, rather than being vitrified and down-blended, respectively, until stone cold dead.
John has the opportunity to give the speech John Kerry should have four years ago, when Bush and Nunn and Turner went for the "lone nuke" thesis -- Saddam's mushroom, putting appearances where needed (for the American psyche) in Baghdad, Tehran, and where ever the young turk of the moment at Homeland Security wants some tarting up and is willing to reach for the gold.
John has the rare chance to give the speech that Helen Caldicot would sit still for and attend on every word, every nuance. The speech that would make it plain that we'd get under a thousand in his first term, and into the low hundreds in his second. The speech that would make plain that deterrence, even massive deterrence, does not need weapons, it needs only ... the ability to fabricate weapons, mate them to delivery systems, and retaliate. A speech that North America is a submarine, it is the survivable element of the triad, and therefore that no weapons are necessary to deter. Any who strike, will eventually be counter-struck, and that certainty, not any present weapon, let alone two vast heaps of aging weapons and one decaying command and control system, is sufficient to ensure the peace. A speech that we're safer without weapons, not because of the Soviets, but simply because of rust, and the things men and women do in fear and panic.
Nevada isn't about the Strip. It isn't about the Clark County housing market out-plunging the San Diego County housing market. Nevada is about the test site and all of its sequela. The long tail, that runs from lung cancer clusters in uranium miners in Dinétah to the down-winders in Saint George, all the way through the pit facilities in the weapons labs to the cheery nuclear nutmen who promise cheap, unlimited electrical power and carefully managed waste.
Nevada's a pretty sane place, the Strip and the overwrought newcomers who fill I-15 each weekend excepted. This evening Jonah asked me for a fire, so I burned some of the wood we picked up in Panaca.
The smell of ceder smoke has heightened my memory of place.
Median Home Prices Plumet in (San Diego) County
The banner headline of the San Diego journal of record. Where we are, towards the eastern margin, where the developers have run hog wild for the last several years, the developments are empty, the up-scale strip malls, anchored by Barnes and Noble and Trader Joe's, are quite to the point of near tranquility. To the west, where the houses were built decades ago, and the population is Asian predominant or Hispanic predominant or Anglo predominant, but more mixed then in the "new territories", and the cars older, the streets and stores are busy with people unaffected by a recession, and the foreclosure signs are rare.
To John, with ... cash
Susie's sent a wicked brilliant piece over the transom to Joe Trippi [link], and something that I've been mulling over in the few idle moments Jonah and the gang and work leave me with ... what if we advised the Edwards campaign? I mean, threw stuff at them, because, they need to pull a rabbit out of a hole in a hat.
When Susie read us the script and got to the Chris Mathews moment I _knew_ the next line would be "Senator Edwards, how much did you pay for your haircut?"
So, Pakistan. Bhutto, Nukes, Baluchistan and Iran, and the Tribal Autonomous Areas.
Senator Clinton opined that there should be a independent, international investigation into Benazir Bhutto's assassination, suggesting that Pakistani security forces or military might have been involved.
She's spot-on that in the history of political successions in Pakistan, the military and the intelligence service have acted with lethal agency, but dreaming that the UNSC (China in particular) would vote to compel a Hariri-like investigation, and further dreaming that the military and the intelligence service could be compelled, in a state under their control, to cooperate and assume culpability for even negligence, or worse. Day dreaming.
Senator Clinton also opined that she would try to get Musharraf to share the security responsibility of the nuclear weapons with a delegation from the United States and perhaps Great Britain so that there is some failsafe.
To quote Jeff Lewis, who has a day job as an academic arms control policy wonk:
First, there is simply no way Pakistan would ever agree to it.Second, it would complicate both U.S.-Indian relations and deterrence on the subcontinent. My eyes cross when I begin to think about the implications of an American/British failsafe in the context of a Pakistani-Indian nuclear standoff.
Third, it would violate the NPT. Article I of the NPT requires nuclear-weapon States like America to not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons. Under the NPT, Pakistan is a non-nuclear weapon State.
My eyes cross also, but not because of the hypothetical Pakistani-Indian nuclear standoff, but because of the certainty of a Senator and Presidential candidate with so proximal a personal experience to nuclear non-proliferation responsibility as the spouse of a former President, who does not know the first rule of non-proliferation: no nukes. Not fissiles, not launch codes, not command and control. Nada.
Next there is Baluchistan and Iran, for which Senator Clinton is not particularly on record. But we are and so John Edwards could be, cause we're way ahead of the curve. We don't really want to frustrate China's attempt to get a straw into the Sui gas field and Gulf oil, because we're not sipping Dick Cheney's mint koolips, and we don't think the whole damn world revolves around nuclear end games for peak oil. That said, we don't give a damn if Baluchistan rejoins Oman or stays in Pakistan, but if it stays in Pakistan, the Punjabi state needs to figure out what "federalism" means, and how they can broker sales of Baluchi natural gas to India. The other side of the Baluchi-Punjabi relationship is the Iranian frontier, and there are US troops there, wicked far away from OBL in or north of, the Autonomous Tribal Areas, doing nothing useful. But doing it far too close to Iran's defense perimeter. They need a movement order, to Diego Garcia or Kuwait or Europe or back home.
Finally there is the Tribal Autonomous Areas. The OBL problem. The worst proposal to come from a Democratic candidate came from Wes Clark in the last cycle -- turn it over to the Saudis and let them ... do it. The value in this is its wrongness. The Pakistani state has never controlled the Tribal Autonomous Areas, it is why they are called the Tribal Autonomous Areas. Whatever our interests are in the area, we are less likely to achieve those interests if we ignore the autonomous and tribal nature of those areas. We have a relationship with the Punjabi state. We need a relationship with the Pashtuns as well, and a constructive one, not just a sequence of special ops. We need to build schools for girls, it is the better choice and it is our enemies weakest spot.
There, less than 2 minutes to make four points in a debate, points that are really about what we'll be doing in 2012, dancing around the same campfire, graced with another many-k of US and Iraqi skulls and crossbones, or out, and comforting the afflicted, creating less long-term risk to ourselves in passing.
January 14, 2008
An unscripted Judge
(AP) A Nevada judge says Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich must be included in Tuesday's candidates' debate in Nevada.
Senior Clark County District Court Judge Charles Thompson says if Kucinich is excluded, he'll issue an injunction stopping the televised debate.
In making his ruling Judge Thompson said, "If the rules changed in the middle of the game, then I am offended by that." link.
I will be keenly interested to see if Rep. Kucinich takes notice of Senator Obama's tax-cuts. If he continues down the path he started in Iowa, his campaign won't be "progressive", it will be cult. Krugman in yesterday's NYTimes would be the link.
January 12, 2008
Does not resonate
We read that Edwards' message doesn't resonate, and of course, it doesn't -- things aren't bad enough, the social distance between the people who live "in need" or "at risk" and those who don't, remains an unbridgeable chasm, and of course, the MSM "resonates" a very select range of messages.
AT&T terminated access lines to almost half a million residences in July, August and September. The trend for October, November and December is more terminations, not less. AT&T is not (yet) disclosing how many $50/mo price-point (aka "broad band") connections are in default each month, or in effect converting to $5/mo price point (aka "dial-up") connections.
The man who parks his car in front of the playground every day at 9am, and sits there, all day, and at 5pm moves his car to site #19, who hasn't been voted for years, won't be voted in the current cycle, because the Democratic Party doesn't vote his kind of people. Assisted housing wasn't voted by Portland Dems, and mobile home parks, public travel trailer and private "RV parks" aren't voted, and for sure the Dems don't vote work camps. Not worker camps -- that a UFW problem. Not the camps, because poverty -- clapped out cars and clapped out campers and clapped out trucks pulling clapped out trailers, all firing on three out of four cylinders on moving day, all having to pack up and move every 7 or 14 days, even if one day "out" before another 7 or 14 days "in" ... not to mention the tens of thousands of full-time or snow-bird retired couples and singles who manage to get their RVs or trailers to BLM "extended stay" no-pay camps in the desert each winter...
The color line is still intact, and it will remain so until there is no social chasm between those who shop at the thrift shops, the donation outlets, and eventually the food pantries, and those who's politics is limited to friends-don't-let-frineds-shop-WalMart, which is miles away from "don't let friends go broke and cry in unrelieved dispair". This line hasn't been broken in my lifetime, it was in my parent's lifetime. My mom's 80. She spent her teens in a travel trailer between Philly and LA, and in her time, both townies and campies voted, not just the more fortunate townies.
Nader's critique is that both parties are corporatist. Ours is too well off to truck with the poor.
Kevin's a janitor. Susie is working poor. We live in camps and have been on relief and off. Not many of us who blog write about poverty from experience.
January 11, 2008
Bové 1, Monsanto 0
Jose Bové's campaign last year wasn't for the presidency, it was for something a little harder to explain. It was for a continuation of the nonist position, but not especially non to the proposed European Constitution, with all its Anglo-American "free market" (pro-capital/anti-union) baggage, but to a manifestation of it -- the 1998 determination by Bruxelles, that is, the Parliment of the European Union, that genetically modified cultigens, in particular Monsanto's MON810, could be grown within the European Union.
France has just invoked its reserved right to ban MON810.
Sarko is president of the Republic, but Bové has caused France to formally declare MON810 unsafe for cultivation, so he, and his wing of the French rural, agricultural, and intellectual left, also won.
We missed the opportunity this cycle to talk about GM cultigens, and closed-cycle patented cultigens, and whether ethanol makes sense, prior to the Iowa caucus. Maybe next cycle we'll have a candidate who can sit when the ethanol anthem is played, and talk about the economics of farming in a market dominated by profit taking on GM cultigens. Or we can go another cycle with ethanol as the solution to "the dangers of foreign oil imports".
It's all a matter of perspective...
I just opened the front page of the NYTimes, and this image greeted me. I was taken aback for more than a second.
Anyone else?
Burying the lede...
It took a few paragraphs for me to get to what I consider the most important line in this article on tumbling stocks on sub-prime fears:
Investors were also nervous after American Express Corp. warned late Thursday that slower spending and more delinquencies on credit card payments will hamper profit throughout 2008.
American Express is one of the most difficult credit cards to obtain, credit-worthiness-wise. If American Express cardholders are failing to pay their bills, then it's not just the poor, unwashed sub-prime masses who are affected now.
UNITE HIRE! Local 11
I'll call and ask what they think of endorsing a candidate who has done nothing for them (Obama) over a candidate who has done more than something (Edwards), and who may have been a fool to have bothered.
They begged me to blog about them, and to ensure that ICANN didn't ignore them and ... if they'd have told me they'd go to bed with rightie on the first date, I'd have told them to go ahead ... without me.
On second thought, if the stewards I spoke with on the picket line on October 31st don't have what I consider to be the correct answer on January 11th, I'll encourage ICANN to schedule its next LA meeting at the Hilton Hotel at Los Angeles International Airport, and Local 11 can play with tamborines, signs, bullhorns and 10 word chants until gravitational polarity is reversed. Or they can tell UH to take a hike.
January 09, 2008
Continuing Increases in Autism Reported to California's Developmental Services System: Mercury in Retrograde.
Continuing Increases in Autism Reported to California's Developmental Services System: Mercury in Retrograde.
Schechter R, Grether JK.
Immunization Branch, California Department of Public Health, 850 Marina Bay Pkwy, Richmond, CA 94804. R.Schechter@cdph.ca.gov.
CONTEXT: Previous analyses of autism client data reported to the California Department of Developmental Services (DDS) have been interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that autism is caused by exposure to the preservative thimerosal, which contains ethylmercury. The exclusion of thimerosal from childhood vaccines in the United States was accelerated from 1999 to 2001. The Immunization Safety Review Committee of the Institute of Medicine has recommended surveillance of trends in autism as exposure to thimerosal during early childhood has decreased. OBJECTIVE: To determine whether trends in DDS autism client data support the hypothesis that thimerosal exposure is a primary cause of autism. Design, Setting, and Patients Study of time trends in the prevalence by age and birth cohort of children with autism who were active status clients of the DDS from January 1, 1995, through March 31, 2007. Main Outcome Measure Prevalence of autism among children with active status in the DDS. RESULTS: The estimated prevalence of autism for children at each year of age from 3 to 12 years increased throughout the study period. The estimated prevalence of DDS clients aged 3 to 5 years with autism increased for each quarter from January 1995 through March 2007. Since 2004, the absolute increase and the rate of increase in DDS clients aged 3 to 5 years with autism were higher than those in DDS clients of the same ages with any eligible condition including autism. CONCLUSIONS: The DDS data do not show any recent decrease in autism in California despite the exclusion of more than trace levels of thimerosal from nearly all childhood vaccines. The DDS data do not support the hypothesis that exposure to thimerosal during childhood is a primary cause of autism.
PMID: 18180424 [PubMed - in process]
January 08, 2008
King David (and two more hotels)
Israel historically is well-acquainted with so-called terrorism. On this day, 61 years ago, a violent Jewish right-wing underground movement in Palestine, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, blew up a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 soldiers and civilians.
Irgun (Hebrew; shorthand for Ha'Irgun Ha'Tsvai Ha'Leumi B'Eretz Yisrael, "National Military Organization in the Land of Israel") was a clandestine militant Zionist group that operated in Palestine from 1931 to 1948. In Israel, this group is commonly referred to as Etzel, an acronym of the Hebrew initials. For secrecy reasons, people often referred to the Irgun, in the time in which it operated, as Haganah Bet, Haganah Ha'leumit or Ha'ma'amad.
The group made retaliation against Arab attacks a central part of their initial efforts. It was armed expression of the nascent ideology of Revisionist Zionism, expressed by Ze'ev Jabotinsky as that "every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only active retaliation would deter the Arabs and the British; only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state". The organisation was a political predecessor movement to Israel's right-wing Herut (or "Freedom") party, which led to today's Likud party.
The most well-known attack by Irgun was the bombing of King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946. British authorities condemned Irgun as terrorist already in the 1930s. The commander of Etzel/Irgun from 1943-1948 was Menachem Begin who later became Israel’s sixth prime minister.
Photo and text lifed from i-eclectica.org.
The size of the op ... and the political response
from Dawn
RAWALPINDI, Jan 7: "A man wearing sunglasses was standing about three metres from Benazir Bhutto's car and was firing at her with a pistol. As soon as I jumped to overpower him, a mighty explosion occurred."These are the words of Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP), Ishtiaq Hussain Shah, who gave his first interview from hospital on Monday. Ishtiaq Shah was among those who sustained multiple injuries in the Dec 27 attack.
President Pervez Musharraf has also admitted that Benazir Bhutto might have been shot. Until now the authorities had been claiming that she died of a skull fracture caused by a lever attached to the sun-roof of her bullet-proof vehicle.
The DSP said that he saw some people appear from nowhere and stop Ms Bhutto’s car while she was leaving the rally.
"I don’t know who they were or from where they came. They were carrying flags of the Pakistan People's Party and shouting pro-PPP slogans. They just appeared on the road," he said. "I started to clear the way for Ms Bhutto's vehicle. I saw a man who was probably wearing a grey jacket and sunglasses shoot from the crowd towards Ms Bhutto. I jumped to overpower him. He was about 10 feet away from my position. A mighty explosion took place soon afterwards."
He said seconds later he found himself lying at a distance from the scene and darkness overtook the place.
DSP Shah said that he was on the left side of Ms Bhutto’s car.
About security arrangements made by the police for the rally, he said that they were "absolutely perfect", insisiting that there had been no security lapse on their part.
Ishtiaq Shah, however, said he got worried when he saw that the walk-through gates were not working because of a power breakdown. He feared that people would get inside the rally venue without any security check.
He said he immediately called Rawalpindi Electricity Supplying authorities and requested them to restore power supply. Later, he said he had sought Naheed Khan's help for getting the power supply restored.
He said: "My family has been in distress since I got injured, but I am thankful to God that I survived."
And the day after Asif Ali Zardari essay is published (in India), The future of democracy in Pakistan, the attorney for the Musharaff-side of the long-running (and so far inconclusive) civil suit in Switzerland holds a presser and bumps the numbers: "Pakistan will pursue Asif Ali Zardari (the widower of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto) for 60 million Swiss francs ($54 million) [the government claims] the couple hid illegally in Switzerland". That's up by a factor of four over the previous amount, which was $13 million.
Catchy way to go into a contested election, neh?
January 07, 2008
Today in Iran
More dumb mail
This just dropped into the inbox -- something Steve Wesley just sent to the California Leadership PAC (how I got on that list is a mystery) -- the part that poked me in the eye with a sharp stick was this:
What impressed me most about the Senator's victory last week was the historic numbers of young and independent voters who came out to vote for him.
Restated, the historic number of non-Dems (or not-yet-Dems, or nacent-Dems, or ...) who crashed the front-loaded early contests in this cycle.
Wesley ran against Angeledis in the last gubanatorial primary. I was running Chris Miller's campaign website at the time ... if I'd been in California in the last off-cycle I'd have held my nose for Phil -- there's no way I'd have voted for yet-another-silly-con-valley enterp-cum-pol -- I mean ... they're management!!!.
Weapons Grades
Are nuclear weapons a net gain or a net loss?
First, what militarized technology presents an existential threat to your polity of choice? For the United States, and the Soviet Union, now the Russian Federation, and China, the only possible answer is weaponized fissiles, targeted at major urban areas. The military and industrial capacities of each, absent nuclear weapons, is insufficient to produce coercion of the political elites of a belligerent state. Soviet submarines could attempt what Generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg attempted, and came within 6 weeks of achievement in February 1917, and Admiral Donitz also almost accomplished in 1943, but inflicting cost at the well head through area denial is more certain. American heavy armor and tactical air could attempt what Marshal Zukoff actually accomplished, and run Air/Land east, or the reverse, but even without NCB weapons, both offense and defense are exhausted before trans-Atlantic, or trans-Caucus political capitulation is required. Two decades of Air/Land scholarship by both Red and Blue Players confirm that absent NCBW, arbitrary carnage involving NATO and WARSAW Pact forces fails to produce a solution that secures either extreme of the envelope of control obtained by the Wehrmacht in 1940 and 1941.
In a nutshell, the oceans protect the WW2 protagonists, from everything except large numbers of nuclear weapons. I've written about this, but in the context of Rumsfeld's attempt to convert the blue water navy into a brown water navy, to transform an institution that forces diplomacy to an institution that is post-diplomatic. I'd link to myself if I could find the piece.
CA-04 exits the Doolittle Death Watch
Steven Maviglio at the CMR is reporting (or posting or whatever) that Doolittle will announce that he will not seek re-election.
I'm wicked amused that Ted Gaines is messaging that environmentalists are to blame for last summer's Tahoe fires. Remember, its a 10+ red district, and even though Gaines' argument is wrong, it is likely to stick unless Charlie Brown knows his way around fine fuels and load and selective cut and bug kill and all the rest of the forestry management loopholes the corporate-to-peckerwood loggers have written into the Bush-era Dept. of Ag's Forestry management plans.
CA-04 enters the Doolittle Death Watch, July 24, 2007
CA-04 heats up in another dimension, June 28, 2007
January 06, 2008
Wicked Stupid Email
This just dropped into my mailbox. It is about as #@$%! dumb as I ever hope to see.
3. In answer to your questions about why I didn't support former Senator John Edwards on the second ballot in Iowa: I have serious concerns about his connections to a Wall Street hedge fund, Fortress Investment Group. While attacking others for accepting campaign money from Washington lobbyists, he is up to his ears in money from Wall Street special interests.He made half a million dollars in a single year for attending a few meetings for Fortress and has invested a substantial part of his own personal wealth in the hedge fund whose portfolios are responsible for sub-prime predatory lending practices, Medicare privatization, and an entire range of corporate sharp dealings that are driving the middle class into poverty.
I sent the following back to info@kucinich.us:
I want you to know that I'm not satisfied with this statement.
First, there is the choice between uncommitted and other-committed for caucus attendees who chose to stand for Dennis during the first division, and who failed to obtain 15% in that caucus. It can't be a surprise to this cycle's staff that the 15% threshold would be achieved in very few of Iowa's nearly 2,000 caucuses, and so the 2nd choice plan has to have been thought through, and "uncommitted" evaluated and rejected for "other-committed", independent of determining the best "other" to instruct KuDem caucus leaders.
It appears that Dennis, and/or the campaign PD, and/or the Iowa CM, just grasped at a straw hours before the doors closed and the actual caucus contests began.
Second, Dennis has had the better part of a year to figure out how to advise his delegates, at the Convention next August, at the State Conventions over the next several months, and on the caucus floor on January whenever (now the 3rd and 19th), how to move for best effect when their pledge to Dennis is vacated, either by the respective processes of the events I just mentioned, or by Dennis himself. This is a core policy issue for the Campaign, just like the last cycle. There is no way we're going to accumulate enough delegates to win, let alone determine the winner in a brokered convention, and in most places (unlike Maine), even pick up state-level delegates. We shouldn't even be doing this if we don't know how we're going to lose to best effect.
It appears that Dennis, and/or the campaign PD, or who ever wrote this unfortunate piece of trash, was unaware that no later than August, if not a lot sooner, a delegates-to-other message would be needed, and therefore a to-other evaluation made.
Further, this isn't a Dennis-and-Dog-in-a-confessional issue, this is the presidential preference of thousands of progressives, in Iowa, Nevada, Washington, Maine, and the rest of the caucus contests, and at each following state party convention, where the presence and coherence of KuDems has a disproportionate consequence in the drafting of each state's Party Platform. In '04 we got important stuff into the MDP's platform, something we couldn't have done if we hadn't worked with a plan, if we just had a mercurial and remote candidate.
Finally, I personally don't share Dennis' evaluation of John Edwards' choices -- perhaps because of my spouse, but probably not.
What can the Campaign senior staff do, what can the candidate do, to correct the error made the afternoon of the 3rd?
Nevada is the next contest where the to-other moment is on calendar in the second round of a caucus. It is January 19th. You all have 10 days to recover the trust and the confidence of your Nevada caucus supporters, and your later caucus supporters and those who support the campaign and don't live in caucus states. Either make your case that John Edwards is the poorer choice for progressive policy and Democratic Party primary politics, or recant. What you've got so far is cum hoc ergo propter hoc nonsense that makes Dennis look like an idiot. I advise recanting. I advise recanting and doing so in a way that shows that Dennis listened to his supporters and considered the near-term and long-term policy and political issues and came to a better conclusion than the error of January 3rd.
My spouse and I organized the largest metro area caucus in Northern New England. We know how important it is to work correctly in real time during the stand-and-divide process, to barter with other sub-15's and identify undecideds who would stand with us if they got to be delegates or alternates to the subsequent County or State conventions, and we know that there is no tactical advantage for candidates like Dennis not to make the strategy of their alternate choice known generally in advance, though not necessarily the edge conditions where the proper tactical choices can affect the outcome of an individual caucus room. So I'm not advising utter bottomless transparency. I'm advising we don't experience profound surprise and dismay when an operational moment occurs in our campaigns -- as your supporters live with being KuDems and caucus-working and convention-working progressive Democratic Party activists long after Dennis goes back to commuting between Cleveland between Washington.
In solidarity, and in principled difference on the policy and politics of the "to-other" pledge issue,
Eric
Dove season in Gaza
Uri Avnery's posts are worth reading each week, if only because a line like this just might tumble past:
... but everybody in Washington knows that in matters like this, the US Congress is not much more than an instrument of Israeli policy ...
Enjoy! [link]
Oh. Oblig spoiler. There is no difference between Senators Obama, Clinton, and (unfortunately) former Senator Edwards on Palestine and all the crap we get the hard way, earned in partnership with the Likudniks. Would that it were otherwise, but AIPAC Rules.
Its just possible that ...
Pervez Musharraf has today allowed as how it is just possible that Benazir Bhutto died as a result of one or more gunshot wounds to the head and neck. Up until today the official line was skull fracture -- the "lever theory".
Something worth reading is this -- The future of democracy in Pakistan, by Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of Benazir Bhutto and a former Pakistani senator, and co-chairman of the Pakistan People's Party. Recall that Wes Clarke wanted to turn the hunt for OBL over to the Saudis, which is the equivalent of using foreign troops to end the political autonomy of a portion of "Pakistan" that has not been under the complete control of the Punjabi military since the Partition of British India, so daftness abounds in all things Pakistani even on the the left hand side of the dial.
Today the Daily Times (Lahore) has a SECOND EDITORIAL: PPP's report on pre-rigging
The PPP Election Cell has unsealed a report that the late PPP leader Ms Benazir Bhutto was going to send to the US revealing the role of the state intelligence agencies in what is called "pre-rigging". The 45-page report graphically describes the activities of one state agency in Balochistan, clearly aimed at boosting the PMLQ candidate in Dera Bugti while eliminating his opponents through intimidation and such devices as abductions. One candidate was unable to file his candidature because he simply "disappeared". Also, in the 45 districts of Punjab -- especially Chakwal, Bahawalpur, Attock and Lahore -- the nazims were found actively engaged in boosting PMLQ candidates.
The PML-Q is part of the Musharaff government. I've written several times in the past on Baluchistan, the category is Is Pakistan?.
Oh! Surprise! (not). The Bush Regime just floated (via the ever-accommodating Gray Lady) the news that it is considering expanding covert military and intelligence operations in Pakistan.
January 05, 2008
BTW...
Trip To Wonderful is up and running again. It's only been 18 months. But if you want to follow our day-to-day adventures, I hope to keep it going for a while, motivated by our upcoming travels to Baja.
Remember those worker bees?
I used to blog pretty consistently (here, here, here, etc.,) about what I termed "worker bee wages", that is, the data found on Table B-4 of the Employment Situation Report. Here's a recap from my last post, back in 2006:
When Bush took office, the average annual hourly wage was $8.11 ($16,869 yearly gross). It increased to an annual average of $8.27, ($17202) in 2003, with a peak of $8.31 ($17,285) in November, 2003.In 2004, annual average wages had fallen to $8.23 ($17, 118). By 2005, the annual average was down to $8.17 (16,994), for a net loss of $208 since 2003.
In comparison, during the Clinton Administration's tenure, the annual average of inflation adjusted hourly wages increased from $7.53 ($15,662) in 1993 to $8.04 ($16,723) in 2000, for an overall net gain of $1,061.
So where are we today? Well, from the latest report, which runs through November, 2007, the average worker bee wage stood at $8.29, down from December, 2006's average of $8.36. Clearly, things are not looking good for America's worker bees.
One really scary note on the personal income report from BLS:
Personal saving -- DPI less personal outlays -- was a negative $116.6 billion in December, compared with a negative $99.2 billion in November. Personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income was a negative 1.2 percent in December, compared with a negative 1.0 percent in November. Negative personal saving reflects personal outlays that exceed disposable personal income. Saving from current income may be near zero or negative when outlays are financed by borrowing (including borrowing financed through credit cards or home equity loans), by selling investments or other assets, or by using savings from previous periods.
People are running up huge amounts of debt to merely stay afloat. Eventually, that debt will come due and people will either pay it (blood from a stone?) or default, as their apparently doing in record numbers on credit cards, auto and student loans, not just adjustable rate mortgages.
Chickens coming home and all...
Packages and Packaging
Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it.
John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, commenting on the record of Dan Haloutz's leadership of Tsahal in the July War.
I've been meaning to write on strategic bombing since before we left Portland two and a half years ago, I can't lay my hands on the pdf of a master's thesis, or credit its author, but what I took from it was that an instance of coercion of political elites of a belligerent state via "strategic bombing" of a that state's industrial infrastructure was difficult to document. A non-military work in this area is Robert Anthony Pape's Bombing to Win. Which leaves SAC with nothing but "strategic bombing" as directly, rather than indirectly, effective in determining outcomes between belligerent states, nuclear packages and the Air Force with nothing but that, tactical bombing, and new missions as the packaging for its claims on the defense budget.
Last month Cheryl Rofer of WhirledView proposed a blogger discussion the policy choices concerning the existing inventories of nuclear weapons -- see The Bloggers Develop Nuclear Weapons Policy. I'm late for the party.
First, the point made by John Kerry in 2004 remains -- the greatest threat to the United States (as well as Japan, China, India, Pakistan, Isreal, Europe, Canada, and the Russian Federation) is the risk that the existing stockpiles of devices and fissile materials will eventually be re-purposed, and the better policy is to allocate resources nominally reducing that risk model, up to and including unilateral partial disarmament. The alternative "single weapon" risk model was articulated in the same debate by George W. Bush, and independently by Peter Daou's sometime employers, Mssrs. Ted Turner, Sam Nunn, Warren Buffett and others, and without loss of generality, by the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator proponents.
Restated, the greatest quantifiable risk has no agency, and cannot be "deterred" or engaged in human discourse. It is rust. Sensor failure. False alarm. The next greatest quantifiable risk has agency, but also cannot be "deterred" or engaged in political discourse. It is covert or overt expropriation of devices or fissiles. Restated, it is sensor and inventory control failure.
This isn't a blogger discovery, its the policy of the Federation of American Scientists, and others, for quite some time.
in all the games I've ever been aware of, the introduction of a package within the bounds of the game substantially alters the game. These are games held at the NPGS, CAC, and I suppose elsewhere, and Air Land presumed that the introduction of weapons packages in theater would generalize without bound, and therefore Air/Land had to be solved, by Red and Blue player alike, without recourse to "tactical" nuclear weapons. So, despite the fact that there are some 3k packages in the Red Player kit, and more than half that number in the Blue Player kit, with delivery capability measured in the hundreds of kilometers, there are no scenarios in which use of a package determines any outcome other than the use of more packages, until all available packages have been used, targeting data is exhausted, or command and control capabilities are terminated (end game).
So, there are a lot of tactical nuclear weapons, in more than two national inventories, the battlefield utility of nuclear packages is without proof.
Restated, the "tactical" vs "strategic" distinction, even in the US / RF context, is merely one of range of delivery system, and locus of command and control. After use, no distinction exists. All packages are "strategic", even where the delivery system has a design range of zero meters. So unlike some of the bloggers contributing to Cheryl Rofer's discussion, I think there are tactical weapons, between 30% and 40% of the US and USSR/RF weapons inventories, none of which have military justification, and it is an area where the existing treaties, the political agreements of weapons states on weapons policy, in particular the bi-lateral treaties between the US and the USSR/RF, do not match military utility.
Later I'll try again, but I'll close for now with a note from my BRAC series:
NB that the current BRAC round does not define "military necessity or utility" in a nuclear weapons capacity context, and that the bases identified by the current SecDef (and war criminal) for closure or re-alignment map much more closely to the Red/Blue political division of the United States than to obsoleted nuclear weapons capacities -- the bombers, missile fields and boomers are budgetary untouchables.
January 04, 2008
Two Images
Sometime yesterday evening, in Iowa, probably after her speech, which wasn't too bad. Photo credited to AP/Charlie Neibergall, who it looks like he worked for the effect.
I've no idea why the AP photographer wanted to achieve this effect, but using Senator Clinton's hanger event on getting to New Hampshire from Iowa, this is what s/he got. via Le Soir. Last year all-around-stinker and former Sherrod Brown communications director Philip de Vellis ran one of these in the stolen-ideas-and-execution-from-Apple in YouTube form, while working for Blue State Digital, then an Obama shop. Same dumb idea, different stolen execution.
The junior Senator from New York is no friend of New York tribal governments, or their land claims, and while there are problems in the tribal governments there, just as there are in Oklahoma, the correct response from a leading federal legislator is not an un-nuanced "No!"
There are good policy reasons to hope for someone other than Senator Clinton, but not because of some dubmssa visual cliché.
Prior Art
Shirley Chisholm's Wikipedia entry, which mentions her 1972 campaign. Representative Chisholm accumulated 152 delegates. Barbara Lee, the only member of the House to vote correctly on the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), was one of Rep. Chisholm's volunteers in the 1972 campaign.
Jesse Jackson's Wikipedia entry for his 1984 and 1988 campaigns, (3.5 million votes, winning five primaries, including Michigan, and 6.9 million votes, winning eleven primaries, respectively)
We echo BlackProf's shout out to Professor Overton, whose hard work in Iowa (going door-to-door in freezing temperatures, reaching out to prospective caucus-goers) paid serious dividends.
Senator Obama isn't our candidate, though we'd like to know his position on Rice vs. Cayetano, whether allowing only Hawaiians to vote in Office of Hawaiian Affairs elections violates the 14th or 15th amendment, and on the Rehnquist line of cases (Oliphant, Lara, Duro), and on PL280, and on the Cobell v Babbit, Norton, Kempthorne litigation and on ...
January 03, 2008
Ballots and Intelligence, part 1
Qui Bono?
I've thought a bit about the universe of possible authors of the successful political assassination operation conducted on December 27th at Liaquat Bagh, in Rawalpindi. I've gotten mail from members of the Hizb ut Tahrir which I've organized here. The Hizb position is that elections as practiced are inherently flawed, a position shared by Ralph Nader, John Edwards, and just about everyone aware of the role of overt institutional influences -- corporate, religious, military, etc., and covert institutional influences -- criminal organizations, foreign agencies, etc -- have in determining the "correct" outcomes of one-person-one-vote contests, See in particular the Political Program of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, which dates from the attempt by Uzbeck Dictator Islam Karimov and Bush ally to award blame for three coordinated explosions that took place in Tashkent in August, 2004.
So, probably not the Hizb or any Hizb-like movement, even those with operational abilities.
Then there's the AQP theory, denied by Baitullah Mehsud as soon as the government's finger pointed towards "Al Qaeda", whether domestic or foreign. Benazir's brothers operated in the same area with the same local tribal vs Punjabi political alignments, from Soviet-occupied Afganistan against the Zia ul Haq dictatorship, the prior incantation of military rule in Pakistan. Assassination of the opposition PPP candidate (or the PML-N candidate) would not weaken the Musharaff dictatorship, unless of course, the "AQP" could hang responsibility on the government or its political supporters -- or Inter-Services Intelligence operatives.
So, probably not the AQP or any AQP-like movement with operational abilities.
In fact, individual assassination isn't going to change the balance of forces overtly organized as political parties with political platforms and material interests, as there is always a "next in succession".
Random shooters don't manage two hitters plus enough bodies to flood the killing zone and block escape by the target vehicle.
So, what organization is capable, and can expect a better outcome from assassination prior to the election than from allowing the target to survive the election and re-acquire limited command and control over the state?
From Dawn's January 2nd edition:
Benazir was set to file dossier on rigging
KARACHI, Jan 1: Benazir Bhutto was poised to reveal proof the night she was assassinated that the Election Commission and a shadowy spy agency were seeking to rig the elections, a top aide said on Tuesday.Senator Latif Khosa, who authored a 160-page dossier with Ms Bhutto documenting rigging tactics, said they ranged from intimidation to fake ballots, and were in some cases unwittingly funded by US aid.
Ms Bhutto had been due to give the report to two visiting US lawmakers over a dinner on Dec 27, the day she was killed in a gun-and-bomb attack.
"The state agencies are manipulating the whole process," Mr Khosa, a top aide of Ms Bhutto and head of the PPP election monitoring unit, told Reuters.
"There is rigging by the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), the Election Commission and the previous government, which is still continuing to hold influence. They were on the rampage."
President Pervez Musharraf's spokesman Rashid Qureshi dismissed the claim as "ridiculous".
"It makes one laugh," he said. "The president has said a free, fair, transparent and peaceful election is essential, which forms part of his overall strategy for transforming Pakistan into a fully democratic (nation)."
"Benazir's coming back to Pakistan was part of a national reconciliation ordinance," he added. "Take it from me, it's going to be perhaps the best election that Pakistan has ever had."
Mr Khosa said the report, entitled "Yet another stain on the face of democracy", details how the spy agency was planning to issue 25,000 pre-stamped ballots for each of 108 candidates for NA seats in Punjab from the party that backs President Musharraf and formed his government. "They have used intimidatory tactics, they intimidated the returning officers into rejecting nomination papers ... they prevented candidates from submitting their nomination papers," Mr Khosa said. "This happened in Balochistan and in the other central areas of Pakistan. It happened in Sindh." --Reuters
And of course it has happened in Baluchistan and Sindh so its not a laughing matter. See Barnett R. Rubins lengthy piece Pakistan's Power Puzzle (With Corrections from Comments), which I linked to yesterday, from mid-point to end, on how to rig sufficiently to obtain the military balance-of-power between several political parties. Musharaff can't be unaware of how Bhutto "lost" the elections in October 1990 to Nawaz Sharif.
McClatchy is running a piece that is surprising to find in the US media market. Commentary: Sins of omission and sins of commission haunt Bush in Pakistan, by Joseph L. Galloway. Via Susie.
That's part 1. There's a part 2.
It's Iowa Caucus Day...
Go, Breck Girl, Go!
January 02, 2008
CA-12 Lantos not running
Tom Lantos has $1,371,287 on hand, according to OpenSecrets.Org, at the end of the 3rd quarter of 2007, which made him unassailable, either in a primary, or in the general.
Jackie Speier and Leland Yee are possible candidates, as are other Dems.
via the Center for Responsive Politics.
More on Pakistan
Two interesting posts about Pakistan.
- Barnett Rubin has published a wicked good piece (and the comments really add to it) at ICGA: Pakistan's Power Puzzle (With Corrections from Comments), via Juan Cole
- Ahmed Rashid has published an incisive analysis from Pakistan in Yale Global Online, via Barnett Rubin's post (above)
Oil hits $100/bl
NYMEX Crude Oil (Light) for February '08 just made $100/bl, up $3.20 over the opening price.
January 01, 2008
WTF???
I read this this morning, took Jonah to the local swings where I drilled him on 1+x= and 2+x= and 3+x=, an answer being the price for some pushing, and 13 being his peculiar stopping point, and came back to find that KuDems in Iowa had just been told to support Senator Barack Obama.
Fortunately, I'm not caucusing in Iowa, so I can ignore the instruction. In Maine however, I'll cut to the chase and when we divide I'll stand for Edwards.
On the walk back to camp we saw four red shafted flickers and found the oldest granary tree in the oak grove.
Remembering Riverbend
It is hard to miss the tidal nature of wind caused by gravity. The air just pours past for hours and days, making wind shadows in the oak leaves and grit downwind of every obstacle large enough to create an eddy, and every chicken wire fence a drift net filled with trapped oak leaves. I'm reminded of Riverbend's post after a week of duststorms in Baghdad in mid-2005.
Last week, a few large ajajas kept Baghdad in a sort of pale yellow haze. What happens when an ajaja settles on the city is that within a couple of hours, the air becomes heavy and thick with beige powdery sand. Visibility decreases during these dust storms and it often becomes difficult to drive or see out the window.On such occasions, we rush about the house shutting windows tightly in a largely futile attempt to keep dust out of the house. For people with allergies or asthma- it's a nightmare. The only thing that alleviates the situation somewhat is air conditioning. The air feels a little less dusty when there's an air conditioner pumping cool air into the room.
One dust storm last week was so heavy, E. slept for a couple of hours during its peak and woke up with little beige-tipped lashes from the dust that had settled on his face while he was dozing. You can even taste the dust in the food sometimes. These storms can last anywhere from a few hours to several days.
After the ajaja is over and the air has cleared somewhat, we begin the cleaning process. By this time, the furniture is all covered with a light film of orangish dirt, the windows are grimy, and the garden, driveway and trees all look like they have recently emerged from a sea of dust. We spend the days after such storms washing, wiping, polishing and beating dust out of the house.
We've dust everywhere and oak leaves continue to dance from east to west.
Thursday in Iowa...
This morning, I wrote this diary over at the Orange site (my first diary in almost a year six months):
Some thoughts from a former Caucus Convenor
Tue Jan 01, 2008 at 06:26:01 AM PSTIn 2004, I was co-convenor for the largest caucus in the Northeast: Portland, Maine. A convenor, for the non-caucus-goers among us, is the person who, prior to and during the event, runs the caucus. Each precinct also has a convenor, and those convenors all were trained by, and reported to me. I held this position solely because I was a member of the Democratic City Committee's four-person executive board (de facto three-person at the time,) and the other two members were organizing the rally/candidate forum which preceded the caucus. Frankly, I had never attended a caucus before.
I'd like to share some of that experience, and some thoughts on Thursday's Iowa caucuses.
The Maine caucus in 2004 fell rather early in the cycle (February 8th), and while Kerry appeared headed for the nomination, Dean, Edwards, and Clark were still putting up a stiff resistance. Gov. Dean was known to have a very strong presence in the city, and Dennis Kucinich, the only candidate to appear in person, also had a large and loyal following.
We were expecting heavy turnout for the caucus; the 2000 caucus drew only 200 of the city's 20,000 registered Dems, and, given the attention, expected at least a five-fold increase. We chose the city's largest high school for the event, as we felt it could comfortably accommodate the 18 Portland precincts. We were wrong on both accounts: Turnout was double our prediction, and many of the classrooms could not hold the crowds of attendees. Many precincts left half their attendees in the hallways, and new accommodations (library, gym, etc.) had to be secured. The large attendance also significantly slowed down the process, as everyone had to be checked in, and extra ballots procured. As the rally had also run late, many attendees were now in their third or fourth hour of "caucusing", and had not yet cast a vote. I spoke with many friends who gave up and left, as it was just too long and they had other commitments. Most were first-time caucus-goers, and never expected it would take so long.
Despite that, we did end up with over 1,800 ballots (I know - I counted them - twice.) My spouse was a precinct convenor, and I was lucky enough to be able to sneak into my own precinct in time for voting. It was there I saw first hand the importance of being an experienced, or at least knowledgeable, attendee.
The first round went smoothly, with everyone breaking into their candidate groupings. It was the second round which shook things up, and in my opinion, cinched a third-place victory (in excess of the 15% threshold) for Kucinich. His supporters were generally more experienced attendees, and knew how to broker the deals which pulled the remnants from those candidates which had not obtained 15% in the first round, into their camp. They were smart, aggressive and willing to barter convention delegates for caucus support. Kerry supporters tended to be older and while not as aggressive, resilient, remaining throughout the caucus. As one of two Edwards supporters in my precinct, I was lucky that I too knew the process, and quickly scooped up the remnant Clark supporters, securing one pitiful delegate (me) from our precinct to the state convention for Edwards.
All evening long, I heard similar stories, and by the end of the evening, Kerry had eked out a victory, based solely, in my estimation, on the experience and staying-power of his supporters. Kucinich was the surprise, pulling, if I recall correctly, 18% of the vote, when pre-caucus polls had put him in single digits. (Note: Kucinich supporters then launched a four-month campaign to woo state convention delegates to their candidate and were very successful.)
Caucusing is a whole 'nother animal from ballot-box voting in primaries. The daily polls cannot predict the dynamics, as we also saw in 2004 in Iowa, where Kucinich supporters overwhelming threw their votes to Edwards on the second ballot. With so many candidates, I believe it is not the person with the most first-choice votes going into the caucuses, but second-, and even third-place supports, who will win in the end. To whom will Dodd supporters migrate? Richardson, Gravel, Biden, Kucinich? Together, they make upwards of 20% of the decided vote, and will have to go somewhere when their candidates do not make the 15% threshold in the first round. Will they move, en masse, not to support, to defeat, a candidate? Which of the top three candidates has done the best job of preparing first-time caucus-goers for the reality of caucus night?
Over there, I didn't come right out and voice a prediction as to how I think it'll all pan out on Thursday. But I will here, at my own place.
One thing I forgot to mention above is that every one of the 1997 precincts is an entity unto its own, meaning, the candidates need to prove viability (15%) in each and every one of them to retain their voters, i.e., have those votes count and not be forced to support another candidate. Which candidate has the most widespread support, that is, not concentrated in urban, rural or suburban areas. There are truly two, perhaps three, "Iowas" in reality. Is there a candidate who has the organization, with disciplined supporters, to make sure that they reach the threshold in all 1997 precincts.
In addition, higher turnout for one candidate does not necessarily equate to substantially more delegates, particularly if turnout is clustered, and not across the board. If Clinton's strategy of "bring a friend" is more successful in cities than in rural areas, it won't make all that much of a difference. Why? Because delegate allotments are determined from turnout at previous caucuses. So the candidate who has done the best job of growing support across the board, or even better, in areas where others have seen support bleed, stands to win from increased turnout.
I've more to say on all this, so I might add to this post as the day goes along. At this point, I'm predicting a decent Edwards win, with Clinton and Obama closely tied for second.
This is why I ignore statewide polls in Iowa - none of them are large enough to actually get to the heart of this matter.
Missing the Boat
I'm still trying to figure out what former first-lady and presently junior Senator from the State of New York could possibly have in mind when suggesting an international investigation into the murder of PPP chairperson Benazir Bhutto. It is a reasonable political posture to make, to look tough and set up the personal narrative of Hillary vs Mushy, but it isn't substantive. The UNSC can't possibly vote without a veto by China, to impose a foreign investigation, which may be a multi-lateral facade in the best of circumstances, so that leaves ... a bilateral facade or the best that expectations of rule of law can accomplish.
Assistant Inspector-General of CID Chaudhry Abdul Majeed and a four-member police team started investigation into the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. They hope to identify the people who forced Ms. Bhutto's car to stop while she was leaving the rally. They may not come to the same cause-of-death conclusion that the government came to within minutes of the execution of the assassination operation at Liaquat Bagh.
Pakistanis will have to work around the domestic minefield of the Army, the SIS, the domestic bombers, and the comforting myth of a foreign bomber, its their Bush vs Gore, their case that can't be cited.
I'm much more impressed with former Vice-Presidential nominee Edwards telephoning General Musharaff, which puts all the rigged election cards on the table, even if none are face up.