Saturday
Flawed Credit Ratings Reap Profits as Regulators Fail (Update1) - Bloomberg.com
Flawed Credit Ratings Reap Profits as Regulators Fail (Update1) - Bloomberg.com: "They’ve benefited from the monopoly status that they’ve achieved with a tremendous amount of assistance from regulators," says the Bush-appointed regulator with pride.
Wednesday
Monday
The GOP: divorced from reality - Los Angeles Times
The GOP: divorced from reality - Los Angeles Times: "She's found somebody new. And it's a black guy."
Sunday
Apparatchiks - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com
Apparatchiks - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: "We wonder how someone as hapless as John Boehner could be minority leader, why one Congressman after another abjectly apologizes to Rush Limbaugh, and so on; the answer is that they’re hollow men, careerists who thought they had a safe ride."
Tuesday
SCOTUSblog
SCOTUSblog: Scalia: "the “charade of officer safety” ... should be abandoned in favor of the rule that the majority ultimately adopts in its opinion."
Think Progress » Harman: ‘I’m Just Very Disappointed’ NSA Wiretapped Me, After I Voted To Allow Them To
Think Progress » Harman: ‘I’m Just Very Disappointed’ NSA Wiretapped Me, After I Voted To Allow Them To: "This legislation arms our intelligence professionals with the ability to listen to foreign targets -- without a warrant -- to uncover plots that threaten US national security."
Monday
The Columbus Dispatch : Work on I-71 runs into dead end
The Columbus Dispatch : Work on I-71 runs into dead end: "So weighty was the decision to widen the highway that a train was once approved to ferry passengers daily between Columbus and Cleveland to help relieve traffic during the construction. After cost projections for the train service increased, ODOT dropped funding for it in 2000."
If only they dropped funding for the road and kept the train.
If only they dropped funding for the road and kept the train.
Saturday
Despite economy, developers want to build on Florida land - St. Petersburg Times
Despite economy, developers want to build on Florida land - St. Petersburg Times 630,000 new homes planned for 410,000 acres, landowners fear Hometown Democracy amendment will pass in 2010.
Wednesday
FT.com | The Economists' Forum
FT.com | The Economists' Forum: "The plan meets Einstein’s definition of madness: continuing to do the same thing, hoping for a different outcome."
Tuesday
Al Jazeera English - Africa - 'Toxic waste' behind Somali piracy
Al Jazeera English - Africa - 'Toxic waste' behind Somali piracy Not a new story, but one that bears revisiting.
Monday
Deadly mayhem for you, Your Children, YOUR GRANDCHILDREN | Beyond the Beyond from Wired.com
Deadly mayhem for you, Your Children, YOUR GRANDCHILDREN | Beyond the Beyond from Wired.com: "I'm not asking you to do anything in particular; just don't moan and whine that nobody ever told you about this."
Friday
Thursday
The People's Bank of China--Speeches
The People's Bank of China--Speeches: "The outbreak of the crisis and its spillover to the entire world reflect the inherent vulnerabilities and systemic risks in the existing international monetary system." Who could have seen this coming?
Wednesday
The Sentencing Project - News Details
The Sentencing Project - News Details: "The U.S. prison and jail population has reached a record high exceeding 2.3 million people"
Saturday
The Atlantic Online | May 2009 | The Quiet Coup | Simon Johnson
The Atlantic Online | May 2009 | The Quiet Coup | Simon Johnson: "In a society that celebrates the idea of making money, it was easy to infer that the interests of the financial sector were the same as the interests of the country—and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington."
Tuesday
Wednesday
Big Pharma bulks up with Merck-Schering deal - Los Angeles Times: "The pending deals are expected to result in at least 35,000 job losses, mostly in the U.S. -- helped in part by the government's bailout efforts....
The deals would be virtually impossible to complete if the banks had not received money from the Treasury Department under the Troubled Asset Relief Program."
The deals would be virtually impossible to complete if the banks had not received money from the Treasury Department under the Troubled Asset Relief Program."
Friday
Tuesday
Getting Prepared for the Great Collapse: Dmitry Orlov
Getting Prepared for the Great Collapse: Dmitry Orlov "So that's what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is rising, and the captain is shouting "Full steam ahead! We are sailing to Afghanistan!" Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic straws even sillier. Except that it won't be funny: what is crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I don't recommend passively standing around and watching the show ¬ unless you happen to have a death wish."
Saturday
Friday
Barack Obama is @#$% tired of this @#$%!: "(Or, a NSFW plan to ram the stimulus bill home, told via downloadable mp3 ring tones.) You ain't my b****, n****, buy your own d*** fries."
Thursday
California farms, vineyards in peril from warming, U.S. energy secretary warns - Los Angeles Times
California farms, vineyards in peril from warming, U.S. energy secretary warns - Los Angeles Times: "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California"
Wednesday
Give up the yacht AND the personal trainer? - Los Angeles Times
Give up the yacht AND the personal trainer? - Los Angeles Times: "This wouldn't be happening if John McCain had picked Mitt Romney."
Thursday
Think Progress � REPORT: GOP Lawmakers Outnumber Democratic Lawmakers 2 To 1 In Stimulus Debate On Cable News
REPORT: GOP Lawmakers Outnumber Democratic Lawmakers 2 To 1 In Stimulus Debate On Cable News: "during the Bush administration, the ... rationale was that Republicans were “in power.”"
Friday
Tuesday
Op-Ed Columnist - Wall Street Voodoo - NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Columnist - Wall Street Voodoo - NYTimes.com: "a new kind of voodoo: the belief that by performing elaborate financial rituals we can keep dead banks walking."
Friday
Intelligence wiretap power upheld | SCOTUSblog
Intelligence wiretap power upheld | SCOTUSblog Constitution? What Constitution?
Tuesday
Op-Ed Columnist - Mideast Dream Team? Not Quite - NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Columnist - Mideast Dream Team? Not Quite - NYTimes.com: "it is only in the U.S .Congress that a defense against terror that results in the slaying of hundreds of Palestinian children is not cause for agonized soul-searching."
U.S.: Bush Foreign Policy Legacy Short of Disastrous
U.S.: Bush Foreign Policy Legacy Short of Disastrous: "inflicted unprecedented and possibly permanent damage on Washington's image abroad"
Monday
Sunday
Saturday
Wednesday
The Journal Goes Frontline : CJR
The Journal Goes Frontline : CJR: "the big problem, which goes unmentioned here, is wage stagnation for everybody but the top one or two percent. I’m not denying that lots of us have overspent, but real wages have gone nowhere over the last four decades, and declined over the last several years."
Monday
Tuesday
Wind Energy Industry Applauds U.S. Senate Passage of Renewable Energy Credits
Wind Energy Industry Applauds U.S. Senate Passage of Renewable Energy Credits: "the wind industry is on its way to charting another record-shattering year of growth. That 21,000 MW of capacity will generate over 60 billion kWh of electricity in 2009, enough to serve over 5.5 million American homes and eliminating the burning of
30.4 million short tons of coal (enough to fill two 1,000-mile-long coal trains),
91 million barrels of oil per year, or
560 Bcf of natural gas (about 9% of the natural gas used for electricity generation)."
30.4 million short tons of coal (enough to fill two 1,000-mile-long coal trains),
91 million barrels of oil per year, or
560 Bcf of natural gas (about 9% of the natural gas used for electricity generation)."
Op-Ed Columnist - Time to Reboot America - NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Columnist - Time to Reboot America - NYTimes.com: "we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.”"
UPDATE: Attack on Gaza -- Self-Defense or Mass Murder?
UPDATE: Attack on Gaza -- Self-Defense or Mass Murder?: "In the usual process, the U.S. government -- and media here -- are playing down questions about whether Israel overreacted in its massive air strikes on Gaza, while the foreign press, and even Haaretz in Israel, carries more balanced accounts."
Thursday
Wednesday
Irregularity Is Uncovered at IndyMac Bank - NYTimes.com
Irregularity Is Uncovered at IndyMac Bank - NYTimes.com: "The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One"
Winners & Sinners : CJR:
Winners & Sinners : CJR:: "Cheney’s favorite day was the one when thousands of innocent Americans were murdered by terrorists—because it made it possible for him and his henchmen to wiretap innumerable Americans without obtaining warrants, commit war crimes, and destroy America’s reputation in every corner of the world.
Happy Holidays."
Happy Holidays."
Tuesday
Regulator Let IndyMac Bank Falsify Report - washingtonpost.com
Regulator Let IndyMac Bank Falsify Report - washingtonpost.com: "It is the second time Dochow has been removed from a position as a senior thrift regulator. He was demoted in the early 1990s after federal investigators found that he had delayed and impeded proper regulation of Charles Keating's failed Lincoln Savings and Loan."
Monday
Saturday
The Associated Press: Conservatives win court case in Va. church dispute Although African-Americans were widely blamed for the success of California Prop. 8 and similar measures, at least one writer argues convincingly that African-American churches are no more homophobic than white churches (and the Episcopal schism is the most public evidence of that). Still, it's instructive to see yet another law originally intended to preserve institutional racism being applied in service of the gay-hating community.
Friday
Bloomberg.com: News
Bloomberg.com: News: "Bernanke is basing hundreds of billions in emergency lending on credit ratings from companies that gave AAA grades to toxic securities."
Thursday
UAW busting, Southern style - Los Angeles Times
UAW busting, Southern style - Los Angeles Times: "When one compares how the auto industry and the financial sector are being treated by Congress, the double standard is staggering. In the financial sector, employee compensation makes up a huge percentage of costs. According to the New York state comptroller, it accounted for more than 60% of 2007 revenues for the seven largest financial firms in New York.
At Goldman Sachs, for example, employee compensation made up 71% of total operating expenses in 2007. In the auto industry, by contrast, autoworker compensation makes up less than 10% of the cost of manufacturing a car."
At Goldman Sachs, for example, employee compensation made up 71% of total operating expenses in 2007. In the auto industry, by contrast, autoworker compensation makes up less than 10% of the cost of manufacturing a car."
Sunday
Friday
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination - Neural.it :: media culture, hacktivism
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination - Neural.it :: media culture, hacktivism: "offer a working model of immateriality via the implementation of a vast material cascade of affordances"
Jim Rogers calls most big U.S. banks bankrupt | U.S. | Reuters
Jim Rogers calls most big U.S. banks bankrupt | U.S. | Reuters: "government efforts to fix the sector are wrongheaded"
Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation: Comments for Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP)
Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation: Comments for Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP): "As nuclear terrorism remains one of the gravest threat to U.S. security, the United States should pursue policies that will reduce the stocks of plutonium, rather than produce additional plutonium"
Talking Points Memo | What Happened
Talking Points Memo | What Happened: "Democrats gave up efficiency and emissions standards."
Thursday
UnitedHealth to Insure the Right to Insurance - NYTimes.com
UnitedHealth to Insure the Right to Insurance - NYTimes.com Since innovative derivatives of other types of financial instruments are working so well.
Monday
Sunday
What Obama Has to Look Forward To
What Obama Has to Look Forward To and the Bush regime still has a month to go.
Saturday
Meltdown weakens NYC as global financial capital - Yahoo! News
Meltdown weakens NYC as global financial capital - Yahoo! News: "It's going to be a long, slow process and take many years for us to really restore our leadership in the world,' said Ron Chernow, who has written extensively on the history of Wall Street. 'New York has been damaged, and some of it I think is permanent."
Tuesday
Monday
Tanking economy drives National Guard enlistments | zanesvilletimesrecorder.com | Zanesville Times Recorder The real reason why any economic bail-out won't be designed to create jobs.
Saturday
Friday
Audit Interview: John Ryan : CJR:
Audit Interview: John Ryan : CJR: "The issues related to the unsustainable nature of this housing bubble, the sort of practices that it bred, how the role of Wall Street changed incentives and how the industry itself wasn’t sustainable — these weren’t secrets. ...
"there were significant risks here that were recognized back in the mid 90’s by all sorts of players and debated here in Washington, in terms of the risk of these complex financial instruments and the lack of transparency of the markets in which they were originated and traded."
"there were significant risks here that were recognized back in the mid 90’s by all sorts of players and debated here in Washington, in terms of the risk of these complex financial instruments and the lack of transparency of the markets in which they were originated and traded."
Popular Radio Host Has Drug Company Ties - NYTimes.com
More evidence that Big Pharma controls access to health information at every level: Sen. Charles "Grassley is systematically asking some of the nation’s leading researchers and doctors to provide their conflict-of-interest disclosures, and Mr. Grassley is comparing those documents with records of actual payments from drug companies. The records often conflict, sometimes starkly."
Thursday
Obama Needs a Protest Movement
Obama Needs a Protest Movement: "The parallels between the election of 2008 and the election of 1932 are often invoked, with good reason. ...FDR became a great president because the mass protests among the unemployed, the aged, farmers and workers forced him to make choices he would otherwise have avoided."
Wednesday
Protests Over a Rule to Protect Health Providers - NYTimes.com
Protests Over a Rule to Protect Health Providers - NYTimes.com What's needed is a rule to protect people from religion.
Monday
Don't Believe Spending Cut Rumors - Defense News
Don't Believe Spending Cut Rumors - Defense News: "The informal alliance between the services and conservative think tanks threatens to further politicize the military. The abuse of national security arguments to win political arguments is both morally suspect and threatens the security of the nation by delinking strategic assessment from public policy."
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