36 Democratic Senators Sold Out for Bankruptcy 'Reform' in 2001

Maria Cantwell, Patty Murray, Joe Biden, and a cast of other democrats sold out their constituency in 2001 by voting for the credit card industry's sponsored bankruptcy reform. The bill is back. Biden could be heard on NPR today smirking at the testimony of a Harvard professor who describing how the credit card company's fees were so high and onerous that the bankruptcies they were complaining about were "prepaid."

It's hard to understand when credit card companies and retailers spend billions of dollars to entice people into buying on credit and relying on debt to maintain a lifestyle that they and the lenders know they can't afford, why the credit card companies should be saved by Congress from their own excesses. Every senator who voted for this bill should be ashamed, especially these 36 who voted for it in 2001.

$8.8B: It's around here some place

A US audit can't find $8.8B in Iraqi oil revenue cash that was funneled from Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority to Iraqi ministries with little or no financial controls. It didn't take long for the US to develop its own version of the UN Iraqi oil scandal, only this one will be swept under the rug.

Don't forget that the NeoCon's man in Iraq, Salem Chalabi, has been convicted of bank fraud in Jordan and still faces 21 years in prison if he ever returns there. With friends like these, should a financial scandal be any surprise?

Iraq terrorist training ground about to graduate trainees?

Bin Laden Enlisting Al-Zarqawi for Attacks on the US. "New intelligence indicates that Osama bin Laden is enlisting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, his top operative in Iraq, to plan potential attacks on the United States, federal officials said Monday." Once again we are reminded Iraq poses more problems for the US than just bombings inside Iraq.

Wonderfully Outrageous

Hunter S. Thompson: One editor recalls working with Hunter S. Thompson at the San Franciso Examiner.
"There just is no way to tell a story about Hunter S. Thompson without it sounding totally outrageous."

Europeans find frozen sea on Mars?

'Pack ice' suggests frozen sea on Mars. A European space craft has found what suggests to be a slew of "raft-like"structures on Mars that appear similar to ice formations near the Earth's poles.

New evidence that man causing global warming

The Times has published results from "a major study of rising temperatures in the world’s oceans.

The present trend of warmer sea temperatures, which have risen by an average of half a degree Celsius (0.9F) over the past 40 years, can be explained only if greenhouse gas emissions are responsible, new research has revealed.

The results are so compelling that they should end controversy about the causes of climate change, one of the scientists who led the study said yesterday."

Social Security and Iraq: the same sales strategy

Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times lays out the similarities between the successful Bush sales stragey for Iraq and the one now being used for Social Security. In both cases the Bush camp pointed to a dire problem requiring immediate action.

"Speeches about Iraq invariably included references to 9/11, leading much of the public to believe that invading Iraq somehow meant taking the war to the terrorists. When pressed, war supporters would admit they lacked evidence of any significant links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, let alone any Iraqi role in 9/11 - yet in their next sentence it would be 9/11 and Saddam, together again.

Similarly, calls for privatization invariably begin with ominous warnings about Social Security's financial future. When pressed, administration officials admit that private accounts would do nothing to improve that financial future. Yet in the next sentence, they once again link privatization to the problem posed by an aging population."

Movie body targets children's PCs in UK

Parents asked to join the movie Gestapo.
The US movie industry has launched a new offensive consisting of lawsuits and software than enables parents to check up on what files their children are downloading. Evidently the software is designed only to "protect" copyrights and makes no distinction between smut, G rated movies or music clips and is prone to identify "false positives."

A new spate of law suits has also been launched. In the US, the penalities for downloading music files or movies are so severe that if full awards were achieved by the lawsuits, they could exceed the industry's entire profits for a year. Clearly this is an area of legislation that has been hijacked by the existing media establishment at the expense of new media ventures and the public's rights in the pubic domain.

Gizmos under threat of extinction

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a list of technologies that will become extinct under the onslaught of new legislation and regulatory decisions passed at the behest of existing large media companies. As Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig points out in his new book, Free Culture, the reach of copyright law has been so expanded in recent years that the concept of the public domain is threatened. Beyond enriching media companies at the expense of the public good, it also makes the US creative industries less competitive.

Whitehouse: Gay's yes; Maureen no.

Maureen Dowd's funny column about how the Whitehouse has for years selectively admitted a gay porn site vendor to press conferences to ask soft ball questions of the President while denying access to legitimate members of the press. The difference? Their political persuasions.

Examing Greenspan's entrails

Economists seek Greenspan insights on monetary policy The test of a good oracle seems to be how many different interpretations can be divined from the oracle's utterances. Greenspan appears to have set new marks in the opening rounds of his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee. Major news papers have covered this story with radically differing headlines.

Ex-Aide Questions Bush Vow to Back Faith-Based Efforts

Ex-Aide Questions Bush Vow According to David Kuo, who was deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and responsible for overseeing efforts to assist religious groups help the poor and needy, "There was minimal senior White House commitment to the faith-based agenda." And..."From tax cuts to Medicare, the White House gets what the White House really wants. It never really wanted the 'poor people stuff.' "

States Mull Taxing Drivers by the Mile

States Mull Taxing Drivers By Mile Concerned that as drivers move to more fuel efficient cars revenues from gasoline taxes may fall, states such as California and Oregon are looking at alternate funding mechanisms based on the number of miles one drives. A GPS for every car?

Google Maps is here

Google Maps If you haven't played around with Google's latest offering: Google Maps, you should. It's a big step up from its competitors and third parties are working to add new features to it.

US Judge Concerned Over Abuse of Freedoms

Capitol Hill Blue: Judge Concerned Over U.S. Abuse of Freedoms OK. You are a parent living in Houston, Texas. Your son is a US citizen and valedictorian of his high school class who is imprisoned at US request while attending a university in Saudi Arabia. So you sue to have your son returned to the US where he can face charges, but you can't find out what the exact charges are, the "classified" evidence against him, nor are you allowed to see the motions to dismiss your lawsuit. What faith do you have in our judicial system?

What me worry? Bush budget makes his successor a patsy

The Seattle Times: Budget cost would hit next president The Bush economic strategy seems best summed up as "take the money and run." Not only have his tax cuts run up huge deficits to be paid off by later generations, but his social security plan doesn't phase in until his successor is about to take office, and his incredibly expensive medicare prescription plan doesn't take effect for several years either. The buget crisis that these plans will create will have to dealt with on someone else's watch.

Bigger government, bigger deficits.... who us?

The New York Times points out that since taking control of the Congress during the Clinton administration, the neo-con Republicans have failed to keep one of the central promises contained in Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America": the promise of smaller federal goverment. Instead we have seen an explosion in the size of the federal government and under the Bush administration a corresponding explosion in federal debt to record levels.

Right-wing conservative media?

An interesting article about the development of the 'conservative message machine." Worth a read.

Cows with Guns

Visit AlbinoBlackSheep’s site for an entertaining introduction to bovine freedom.

"an eerie similarity to ... Iraq"

 "There is an eerie similarity to the events preceding the Iraq war," David Kay, who led the search for banned weapons of mass destruction in postwar Iraq, said on Monday in an opinion piece in Sunday’s Washington Post.

 “Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran would be a grave danger to the world. That is not what is in doubt. What is in doubt is the ability to the U.S. government to honestly assess Iran's nuclear status and to craft a set of measures that will cope with that threat short of military action by the United States or Israel.”

 

Bush having trouble with budget math

President Bush’s proposed budget fudges the math in several areas in order to appear to be austere.  His pledge to cut the deficit in half by 2009 does not use this year’s record deficit as a bench mark but rather a ficitious $521 billion implying a goal of $260.5 billion.  These calculations also omit the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan operations as well as any ‘transition costs’ for a revised social security plan.  According to one analyst the Bush budget cuts equal about 6% of the budget deficit, while the tax cuts are equal to about 50% of the budget deficit. 

Even these proposed cuts may be hard to deliver.   "With the deficits that we're now running, I'm glad the president is coming over with a very austere budget," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said on ABC's "This Week." "I hope we in Congress will have the courage to support it."

Grinch of the Year Award goes to

Wanita Renea Young of Durango, Colorado who successfully sued two teenage neighborhood girls for baking and delivering cookies to her door at 10:30 PM as a surprise. While other neighbors wrote the judge saying they enjoyed the event, Ms. Young hopes the girls learned their lesson to the tune of $900. What was the judge thinking?

Coffee, Tea or Mercury?

EPA inspector criticizes mercury plan.  The Environmental Protection Agency ignored scientific evidence and agency protocols to set limits on mercury pollution that fits the needs of industry instead of protecting the environment.

Social Security: Private Accounts in Other Nations

A Wall Street Journal article describes the experience of other nations with government run private accounts.  If you want to understand some of specifics of the upcoming debate, don’t miss this article.

“Argentina and Bolivia show how heavy the cost of financing the transition to a save-for-yourself approach from a state-run system can be. Sweden and Poland illustrate the advantages of limiting workers' investment options. Singapore shows how workers' eagerness to tap their accounts before retirement -- to buy houses, for instance -- can leave them vulnerable when they reach retirement. And Britain shows how hard it is to regain taxpayer support for private accounts if the government bungles the overhaul.”

New Republican goal: Dominance

The L.A. Times published an outline of Republican goals which starts with something along the lines of  “First kill all the lawyers (er, well, plantiff’s attorneys)” to choke off a key source of Democratic financing.  The ultimate goal is political dominance similar to that achieved by FDR and the New Deal.

Transcript of White House staff briefing

Word for word transcript of the White House press briefing for tonight’s State of the Union address.

Driving and cell phone use causes aging

A University of Utah study reported that young drivers (18–25) who used cell phones while driving drove as if they were elderly or drunk.  Hands-free use also diminished driving capabilities.

Positive News for a change

Several web sites are devoted to publishing only positive news which can be relief to visit these days.  Two of these are Positive News and The Good News Network.  They may lack the sophisticated graphics of CNN or Fox, but they offer a pleasant change from the awful and the dreary.  

"Torture memos" defended by authors

 Two former Justice Department attorneys who in January 2002 wrote memos advising that the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war did not apply to the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban defend their  and the Bush administration's’s position in the L.A. Times.  Basically the argument is that the Geneva Conventions still make sense for hostilities between states or signatories, but that violators or terrorist groups don’t qualify.  Read for yourself.

Military Can't Afford Halliburton in Iraq?

The WSJ reported a $4 to $7 billion gap between the US Army budget and Halliburtons estimate of the costs to provide housing, food, and other services to US servicemen in Iraq. 

"The difference dramatizes the cost crunch facing the Pentagon as the bill for the U.S. involvement in Iraq continues to escalate well beyond initial White House estimates. Before the war began in March 2003, the administration said it would cost about $60 billion. The price tag is now more than three times that figure, and growing. President Bush is expected to soon send to Congress an $80 billion supplemental spending bill, largely to cover Iraqi operations, pushing the tab for the current fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1, to $105 billion."

Housing Bubble Ready to Pop?

Barron's columnist Alan Abelson notes that the ratio of housing prices to median US income has risen from 2.25 in 1970 to a record 3.35 today which places US home prices well into the bubble category.  The housing bust of the 80's produced a ratio of just over 3.1 well below todays' inflated prices.  The difference may seem reasonable in view of today's extraordinarily low mortgage rates, but as rates go up, sellers and those with ARM's will be squeezed.

The same column notes several other supporting clues. 

"Our reader, a Miami resident, sent along a piece in a local business paper, the Daily Business Review, laying out in neat detail that, as he put it, the chief operating officer "talks like a bull but walks like a bear." Although said officer and his executive cohorts were brimming over with optimism in a conference call with analysts in mid-December, that didn't prevent him from selling 98,156 shares of Lennar common less than a month later. At $54-$55 a share, he pocketed more than $5 million. (He still owns 60,000 restricted shares and another nearly 71,000 through trusts.)

Insiders may have all kinds of good reasons for selling. But, as we've said before, anticipation that the stock will go up is not one of them."