They'll Send You Home Again, Kathleen

OK, this is getting ridiculous.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Health and Human Services nominee Kathleen Sebelius recently corrected three years of tax returns and paid more than $7,000 in back taxes after finding "unintentional errors"—the latest tax troubles for an Obama administration nominee.

The Kansas governor explained the changes to senators in a letter dated Tuesday that the administration released. She said they involved charitable contributions, the sale of a home and business expenses.

Sebelius said she filed the amended returns as soon as the errors were discovered by an accountant she hired to scrub her taxes in preparation for her confirmation hearings. She and her husband, Gary, a federal magistrate judge in Kansas, paid a total of $7,040 in back taxes and $878 in interest to amend returns from 2005-2007.

Asked by The Associated Press to comment on the amended tax returns as she left a Capitol Hill restaurant Tuesday night, Sebelius said, "We put out a statement and the statement speaks for itself."

Several Obama administration nominees have run into tax troubles, notably the president's first nominee for HHS secretary, former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle. He withdrew from consideration while apologizing for failing to pay $140,000 in taxes and interest.

One or two nominees getting aught owing back taxes might be an understandable mistake. But now it's getting to the point where Obama might not be able to fill cabinet positions until, say, Labor Day. On the other hand, that might not be a bad thing...

The War On Carbons

Moving right along, the ruling party is continuing its Great Climate Change Leap Forward:

Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday unveiled a plan to tackle climate change by cutting greenhouse gases by one-fifth over the next decade, a faster clip than urged by President Barack Obama.

The proposal, seen as the first step toward Congress enacting climate legislation this year, was crafted to attract broader support among centrist Democrats. The plan includes measures to spur energy efficiency and to support technology to capture carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, from coal burning power plants.

The 600-page 'discussion draft' will be the basis for climate debates in the coming weeks as the House Energy and Commerce Committee works to craft a bill by mid-May.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the draft 'a strong starting point' and has told colleagues that she would like to get a climate bill passed before Congress departs for its summer recess in August.

How they plan to do this is the question that nobody seems to want to answer. The main idea seems to be to force power companies to use more expensive alternative energy sources in a recession. Yeah, that'll work, won't it?

The Rust Bowl

Yglesias is skeptical about Obama's GM "takeover":

This isn’t going to prevent the conditions facing the population of Michigan from further deteriorating. That state more-and-more looks like it’s going to be the 21st century version of the Great Depression’s Dust Bowl. The most important policy question facing us in this regard thus continues to be what can be done to help the people of the Rust Belt that doesn’t just involved indefinitely propping up shrinking firms. The first step is simply to turn around the shrinkage in the larger economy, but the question will remain even if recovery reaches the rest of the country.

I personally think allowing the automaker to break up into smaller companies would be the best way to go. Long-term government intervention in business is an iffy proposition at best. If GM were broken up, the free market would be better able to do its thing.

Dead Companies Walking

When it comes to what to do with zombie companies, replacing the guy at the top isn't always the best answer.

The lesson from AIG is that replacing a CEO is no panacea. There is no love lost for the poor management of Rick Wagoner. He is the one who went to the government, hat in hand -- and when the government is paying the piper, it can call the tune. But replacing him won't solve GM's long-term problems of too many brands and too large a workforce. And it is increasingly clear that the bailout itself is an impediment to effective restructuring.

The prospect of an ever-increasing supply of tax dollars is leading parties with auto industry contracts -- unions, bondholders, dealers and others -- to play a game of chicken. No one wants to renegotiate a contract when they think the government will come in with more money to cover the losses....

To say that consumers would be discouraged from buying a car from a company in bankruptcy misses the point. Consumers would be more likely to buy a car from a company restructured by a bankruptcy court, as they buy tickets from once-bankrupt airlines, than [to buy] vehicles from zombie companies dependent on the next government bailout. This delay likely hurts 'satellite' companies like auto parts makers more than a bankruptcy would.

The problem isn't so much the bosses-it's the culture of corruption that business getting into bed with politics breeds. And as we've seen, the zombies are taking us down with them.

The Living Years

In his analysis of Obama's health care plan, David Gratzer notes:

This much is true: Americans live fewer years than people in Canada, Britain and France. But how long a person lives isn't simply about access to health care but reflects various factors: tobacco and alcohol use, genetics, diet, crime rates. Economist Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider observe that deaths from accidents and homicides in America are much higher than in any other developed country. Exclude these unintentional deaths from the statistics, and Americans come out on top in life expectancy.

And it should be noted that Great Britain's vaunted National Health is nothing to cheer about. In the end, lifestyle and eating habits have more to do with our well-being than any nanny-stating meausures.

One Man's Corruption Is Another Man's Representation

John Murtha defends his tax-grabbing:

If I'm corrupt, it's because I take care of my district....My job as a member of Congress is to make sure that we take care of what we see is necessary. Not the bureaucrats who are unelected over there in whatever White House, whether it's Republican or Democrat. Those bureaucrats would like to control everything. Every president would like to have all the power and not have Congress change anything. But we're closest to the people.

Well, technically he's right. It is part of his job as a Congresscritter to get cash for his district. But does he really need so much of it?

Running In Place

It looks like there are no easy solutions when to Afghanistan.

The U. S. military has already been in Afghanistan half as many years as it was in Vietnam, and with troops pulling out of Iraq and talk of a multi-year hard slog ahead here, Afghanistan is on track to becoming America’s longest war. To that end, significant numbers of American officers and civilian contractors will be embedded in Afghan government ministries for years to come, helping to run things. But does the home front have the stomach for it? Our reaction to the fighting about to unfold this summer will speak volumes.

This is not "Obama's war," as some on the right have been harping. But it is our war, and like the other foreign powers that have tried to control Afghanistan in the past, we will ultimately have to decide what to do with it.

Not The Mommy

With all the talk about bias against fathers, it seems that moms are also becoming targets:

In one experiment, about 200 undergraduates were asked to rate paired applications for an imaginary mid-level managerial job. Both female and male students rated mothers lower on competence and commitment, recommended lower salaries for them, and judged them less worthy of promotion than childless women.

It appears there's anti-parent prejudice all around. And that's not a good thing.

The Urban State

The cities are continuing their rapid growth:

By 2100, the United Nations estimates that the global population will level off at about 10 billion, thanks to rising living standards and more widespread population control. By the end of 2008, slightly less than 50 percent of the global population lived in cities. If economic development proceeds at today’s pace, over the next century or so it is highly likely that 8 billion people will live in urban centers, up from today’s roughly 3.3 billion.

What will this mean for politics as city populations become more diverse and better-educated while the countryside and the suburbs diminish? What will this mean for economies? Will they be allowed to become more decentralized and privatized, or will government interference only increase? How do we preserve free markets and individuality in an increasingly centralized setting?

Merkel 1, New Deal 0

How bad is it for Gordon Brown? Even his fellow Europeans are saying enough is enough.

GORDON BROWN’S carefully laid plans for a G20 deal on worldwide tax cuts have been scuppered by an eve-of-summit ambush by European leaders.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, last night led the assault on the prime minister’s “global new deal” for a $2 trillion-plus fiscal stimulus to end the recession.

“I will not let anyone tell me that we must spend more money,” she said.

The Spanish finance minister, Pedro Solbes, also dismissed new cash being pledged at Thursday’s London summit.

“In these conditions I and the rest of my colleagues from the eurozone believe there is no room for new fiscal stimulus plans,” he said.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has insisted that “radical reform” of capitalism is more important than tax cutting.

I agree, the call for tax cuts has become a worn-out canard, especially in this country. But it says something about the level of skepticism there is towards economic shock therapy when the patients don't want it.

Bloggin' In The Years: 1987

The ultimate soap opera for guys is right around the corner. Now in its third year, its appeal is bigger and badder than ever:

While sophisticates sneer and cynics snort, the federation bills its product as ''family sports entertainment.'' The emphasis is distinctly on the entertainment; the ''sport'' is unmistakable camp. Though surveys show that a surprising number of adult fans actually believe the matches aren't fixed, pro wrestling's true appeal is in bringing comic-book-like heroes to life. The colorful performers and even more colorful managers are entangled in such a complex web of running feuds and instant grudges that it takes an especially alert 4-year-old to sort them out.

The formula has given the W.W.F. an incredibly broad appeal in which, says Mike Weber, its media coordinator, toddlers respond to easily identifiable characters, adult women are attracted by the flashy robes and muscled hulks underneath, and adult men appreciate the athleticism of a 275-pounder's back flip, even one executed in pursuit of a seemingly obvious dive.

But what would happen if the heroes became the bad guys, and vice versa? Would it still have its appeal? I don't know if Vince McCmahon wants to take that risk,let alone get involved in the ring himself.

V-Day

He's baaaack:

His party may have taken a severe beating in last year's elections but Republican Sen. David Vitter's political career, once seemingly crippled by a sex scandal, appears to be on the rebound as he takes on a high-profile role of being critical of congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama.

Even before Obama took office, Vitter was becoming more visible, speaking out against the automobile industry bailout. Then he became a chief Senate critic of the $787 billion dollar stimulus bill that passed in February. He also shook up debate on another spending bill with his attempt to add an amendment canceling future automatic pay raises for members of Congress.

'He's been able to not only emerge from a quiet period, he's come on like gangbusters,' said Baton Rouge-based political analyst Bernie Pinsonat.

This is familiar territory for Vitter, who rose to prominence in the Louisiana Legislature by doggedly pushing agendas often unpopular with colleagues in both parties, most notably a successful effort to limit legislators to three consecutive terms.

Obama administration spending measures, upper-income tax increases and budget proposals opposed by Louisiana's oil and gas industry have presented an opportunity for Vitter to regain his political footing in a conservative state that went overwhelmingly for Republican John McCain last fall, Pinsonat said.

'It's just worked out perfect for him. A lot of the stuff on Obama's agenda is very unpopular in Louisiana and who better than David Vitter to go out and champion the opposition,' Pinsonat said.

I understand that the Republicans are looking for real leadership as they rally against Obama, but is a guy who got caught with his pants down really who they want?

From Soap To Nuts

Will the prohibitionists never learn?

It's not easy to get sparkling dishes when you go green.

Many people were shocked to find that products like Seventh Generation, Ecover and Trader Joe's left their dishes encrusted with food, smeared with grease and too gross to use without rewashing them by hand. The culprit was hard water, which is mineral-rich and resistant to soap.

As a result, there has been a quiet rush of Spokane-area shoppers heading east on Interstate 90 into Idaho in search of old-school suds.

Real estate agent Patti Marcotte of Spokane stocks up on detergent at a Costco in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and doesn't care who knows it.

'Yes, I am a smuggler,' she said. 'I'm taking my chances because dirty dishes I cannot live with.'

(In truth, the ban applies to the sale of phosphate detergent - not its use or possession - so Marcotte is not in any legal trouble.)

Marcotte said she tried every green brand in her dishwasher and found none would remove grease and pieces of food. Everybody she knows buys dishwasher detergent in Idaho, she said.
Supporters of the ban acknowledge it is not very popular.

'I'm not hearing a lot of positive feedback,' conceded Shannon Brattebo of the Washington Lake Protection Association, a prime mover of the ban. 'I think people are driving to Idaho.'

I can see it now: soaprunners bringing in the real stuff from across the border, trying to outrun the T-Men...

They Durk Ur Essays

Outsourcing is everywhere these days:

In a previous era, you might have found an essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you'll find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in Manila or Mumbai. Just as many American companies are outsourcing their administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to outsource their academic work...

The writers for essay mills are anonymous and often poorly paid. Some of them crank out 10 or more essays a week, hundreds over the course of a year. They earn anywhere from a few dollars to $40 per page, depending on the company and the subject. Some of the freelancers have graduate degrees and can write smooth, A-level prose. Others have no college degree and limited English skills.

Well, at least it'll prepare them to work in tech support...

Let's Not Talk About Sex

The silence is deafening:

When it comes to taking sex education seriously, most kids are getting left behind. Only one state in the country requires schools to spend any specific amount of time teaching students about sex, one-third don't require any sex education at all, and the rest leave it up to schools--and sometimes individual teachers--to determine whether 'sex ed' means an hour-long assembly kids attend once during their school career or an established curriculum that extends over years and helps them figure out how to develop healthy relationships and make decisions about sex.

Are public schools even the right place to be teaching kids about sex? Maybe not. But parents aren't really stepping up--surveys of parents and teens continue to show a significant gap between the percentage of parents who say they've talked to their kids about sex and the percentage of kids who report their parents have done so.

This is one area where the public schools could be doing the most good, if the subject could be taken out of the hands of people with agendas. If Obama is serious about fixing our schools, this would be a good place to start.

The Childrens' Hour

Justice is served.

The Pennsylvania State Supreme Court said it would overturn the convictions of hundreds of juveniles sentenced in the midst of the Luzerne County kickback scheme.

Calling it a 'first step,' the court wielded a little- used proceeding to throw out and expunge the case records of first-time offenders convicted of minor crimes who appeared before Luzerne County Juvenile Court Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. between 2003 and 2008.

In a report to the Court, a specially appointed judge, Arthur E. Grim, said his investigation uncovered 'routine deprivation of children's constitutional rights to appear before an impartial tribunal and have an opportunity to be heard.'

Today's ruling, which authorizes Grim to overturn the cases, affects as many as 1,200 juveniles, he said. Their cases will be reviewed individually to determine if they meet the court's conditions.

Ciavarella and another former Luzerne County judge, Michael T. Conahan, have pleaded guilty earlier this year to taking $2.6 million in secret payments from the former owner of two juvenile detention centers.

The judges admitted that they helped the centers secure a county contract worth millions of dollars. Ciavarella routinely sentenced children to them.

Both men have agreed to spend 87 months in prison. They are free on bond while a federal judge considers the plea deal.

Sometimes the good guys do win. Good riddance to these creeps.

Rock Star Blues

Bob Lefsetz tells John Mellencamp to get with the times:

The problem is not record companies or radio, but America in the twenty first century. In today’s world, where people use Google to search for exactly what they want, where ads are targeted to their exact desires, do you truly expect everyone to listen to the same damn music?....

The old systems have broken down. Because they don’t comport with the new reality. Are we at the final destination yet? Not even close. But to lament the loss of the past is to miss the point.

Sure, if you want to make a lot of money overnight, you can sell out to a major corporation. But even they don’t have that much money or reach anymore. And playing the Super Bowl didn’t make Bruce’s new album a hit. No, in today’s world, first and foremost you’re a musician, not a star.

Hey Mellencamp! You’re talented, you’ve written some great songs, but you’re not entitled to live your life and guide your career the same way you did twenty years ago. There’s no longer guaranteed employment at the corporation and you have to go through career changes, just like the rest of the American population. Why should you be different, just because you’re a musician?

The days of "Rock Royalty" are over. Some of the royalty, like Prince and Radiohead, realize that. If guys like John Mellencamp can't, they deserve to burn out and fade away.

A Few Good Flunkies

It's apparently trendy to work in D.C. these days.

Two months after President Obama took office vowing to make federal service cool again, career services specialists report an increase among college students who want to work for the government.

'Lots and lots of students lined up for the federal government,' said Alan C. More, employer in residence for U.S. government programs at GMU.

'What we've seen across the board is an increased interest in government,' said Tim McManus, vice president for education and outreach at the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. 'We're hearing from schools that they see government as an employer of choice. Government has been the afterthought option. It's no longer a second choice.'

But should it be the only choice for eager young grads? When Kennedy asked what you could do for your country, at least he meant for the country, not just for Uncle Sam.

Rice And Reason

It must be increasingly lonely for Dick Cheney. Here's Condi Rice:

"I know what it's like to have people chirping at you when they perhaps don't know what's going on inside. These are quality people. I know them. They love the country. And they won't make the same decisions, perhaps, that we did. But I believe they'll do what they think is best for the country and I'll give my advice privately and keep it to myself."

Of course, such statements require a degree of class, which Cheney doesn't have.

Slower Sharks

James Surowiecki on why Europe isn't following our lead:

Europe is refusing to carry its share of the global economic burden and is piggybacking on us. But it’s hard to see how things could have turned out otherwise. The U.S. economy, much more than Europe’s, is like the proverbial shark: if it doesn’t keep moving forward, it dies (or at least creates a lot of misery). In some sense, we need economic growth more than Europe does. It’s not surprising that we’re going to be the ones who end up paying for it.

As has been reported elsewhere, many European governments seem to be figuring out that the welfare state doesn't work anymore. They also have smaller economies than we do, and are understandably reluctant to shoulder the burden of helping to pay their bloated American cousins' bills. At some point, we are going to have to realize that we can't have our proverbial cake and eat it without paying for it, too.

Will He Or Won't He?

Joe Klein shares the concern over Obama following Bush's foreign policy path:

Will the 'demons' rot away his policy judgment? Will he exaggerate Iran's power, as the Israelis and neoconservatives routinely do, turning a relatively modest regional player into an existential threat — mad mullahs ready to blow up the world? Will he allow Republicans to force him into a tough-guy pose for domestic consumption? Will he suffer the delusion that U.S., or Israeli, power can 'take out' the Iranian nuclear program without disastrous retribution?

I don't think Obama will necessarily make that kind of mistake, although it increasingly looks as if the Israelis might. He has his plate full with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Korea as it is. I can see how the previous eight years could give cause for concern-I just don't think it's that warranted.

Moderate Like Me

Who owns the center? Believe it or not, the evidence says it's the Democrats.

Liberals aren't as big a component of the Democratic coalition as many of the Left's leaders believe. Moderate voters are much more important to Democratic success than liberal voters. And liberals are also less important to Democrats than conservatives are to Republicans. That means liberals generally have less leverage than they recognize in these internal party arguments-and less leverage than conservatives can exert in internal struggles over the GOP's direction. 'Liberals are less central to the Democratic coalition than conservatives are to the Republican coalition,' says Andy Kohut, director of the non-partisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

That contrast is apparent from two different angles: identification and behavior. In cumulative Pew data for 2008, Kohut says, only one-third of self-identified Democrats described themselves as liberals; the rest identified as moderates or conservatives. For Republicans the proportions were reversed: two-thirds of Republicans considered themselves conservatives, while only one-third identified as moderates or liberals. Gallup's findings are similar: in their cumulative 2008 data, just 39% of self-identified Democrats described themselves as liberals, while 70% of Republicans identified as conservatives.

Looking at Obama's actual vote in 2008 reinforces the story. According to the Edison/Mitofsky Election Day exit polls, liberals provided only 37% of Obama's total votes. Moderates (50%) and conservatives (13%) provided far more. By contrast, conservatives provided almost three-fifths of John McCain's votes, with moderates contributing only about one-third and liberals a negligible 5%.

The bottom line is that, compared to Republicans, Democrats are operating with a much more diverse electoral coalition-and one in which the party's ideological vanguard plays a smaller role.

Of course, there are things about Obama that aren't so centrist-like his budget, for example-but in terms of overall appeal the Democrats seem to have rediscovered what the Republicans have forgotten-that, in order to win, you need the vast middle. If the Left had the influence they wish they had, the Blue Dogs who are concerned about Obama's spending wouldn't nearly be as vocal as they are. Meanwhile, dissenters within the Republican Party have to apologize to Rush Limbaugh.

Freedom From Your Kids

Why should Social Security be saved? It helped free parents from their children, and vice versa:

Economists Robert F. Schoeni of the University of Michigan and Kathleen McGarry of Dartmouth analyzed the living arrangements of older Americans using Census data. They showed that the decline in older parents living with their children began in 1940, the year that Social Security first began paying out benefits. This indicates that older parents did not desire to live with their children – or the children did not desire to live with their parents -- but were forced to by need. As Social Security alleviated that need, older parents continued to live independently.

Of course, with recent trends showing that kids are moving back in with Mom and Dad again, maybe the kids need another incentive. Or be told to grow up...

Bloggin' In The Years: 1933

In his new book, Mr. Wells reflects on the overseas reaction to President Roosevelt's presence among them:

Everywhere as the Conference drew near men were enquiring about this possible new leader for them. “Is this at last the Messiah we seek, or shall we look for another?” Every bookshop in Europe proffered his newly published book of utterances, Looking Forward, to gauge what manner of mind they had to deal with. It proved rather disconcerting reading for their anxious minds. Plainly the man was firm, honest and amiable, as the frontispiece portrait with its clear frank eyes and large resolute face showed, but the text of the book was a politician’s text, saturated indeed with good will, seasoned with much vague modernity, but vague and wanting in intellectual grip. “He’s good,” they said, “but is this good enough?”

If we are to believe Mr. Wells, then no-but then again, the London Conference seems to be fixiated on the outdated model of saving the Gold Standard. The current economic crisis requires something different. At any rate, Roosevelt is the American president; his cause is America's economy, not solving Europe's economic woes, although if recent trends in Germany are any indication, they may well impact on our own policy whether we wish it or not.

The Border Feed

Hillary says it's our fault.

An 'insatiable' appetite in the United States for illegal drugs is to blame for much of the violence ripping through Mexico, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday.

Clinton acknowledged the U.S. role in Mexico's drug cartel problem as she arrived in Mexico for a two-day visit where she will discuss U.S. plans to ramp up border security with President Felipe Calderon.

A surge in drug gang killings to 6,300 last year and fears the violence could seep over the border has put Mexico's drug war high on President Barack Obama's agenda, after years of Mexico feeling that Washington was neglecting a joint problem.

'Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade. Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the death of police officers, soldiers and civilians,' Clinton told reporters during her flight to Mexico City.

'I feel very strongly we have a co-responsibility.'

I can see her point-we do have a large appetite for drugs in this country, but Mexico hasn't exactly been a model of law enforcement itself. Now we're having to deal with their mess, and it won't be easy.

Obama The Great

Who knew we'd get a real-life Ozymandias?

At the White House’s celebration of Greek Independence Day Wednesday afternoon, President Obama got a little unexpected flattery from Archbishop Demetrios, the head of the Greek Orthodox Church in the United States

Listing a series of challenges Obama will need to deal with as president, Demetrios predicted: Demetrios to Obama: 'Following the brilliant example of Alexander the Great...you will be able to cut the Gordian knot of these unresolved issues.'

Well, it could be argued that there are aspects of Obama's presidency that have the elements of a Greek comedy...

The Man And His Plan

Christopher Carroll says everybody should just calm down:

When fuller details emerge, it would be useful if the economics profession and the financial community could have a mature conversation about whether the plan could be improved before it goes into operation. For example, it may be necessary to make any bank that participates agree to the sale of all their toxic assets, to prevent the kind of cherry picking that has contributed to the shutdown of these markets so far. And there is good reason to be very careful to minimize the possibility of “heads-I-win, tails-the-government-loses” kinds of bets.

But broad-brush denunciations are unhelpful, whether they derive from preconceived prejudices of the left (which needs to recognise the important distinction between the greedy people who got us here and the wise captains of finance who can help us get out), or the right (which espouses a destructive ideology according to which all government action of any kind is a mistake).

Economic purists can be as detrimental to the discussion as social-issues ones. There is a great deal to criticize about Geithner's plan, but it calls for a grown-up analysis and response, not knee-jerk politics. Leave that stuff to the ranters on both sides who don't know what they're talking about.

Jumping Ship

It looks like the rats are leaving early:

A handful of senior executives working within American International Group Inc’s controversial financial products unit have resigned, said a company spokeswoman late on Monday.

The division is at the heart of the financial problems that brought AIG to the brink of bankruptcy last September, saved only by a taxpayer bailout that has now swelled to as much as $180 billion.

The spokeswoman declined to specify the exact number of resignations, noting they were expected to be “manageable,” and said there were indications that more will follow.

I'm sure they'll get as far away as their portfolios can take them.

Population Bum

Once again, people are to blame:

JONATHON PORRITT, one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society.

Porritt’s call will come at this week’s annual conference of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), of which he is patron.

The trust will release research suggesting UK population must be cut to 30m if the country wants to feed itself sustainably.

Porritt said: “Population growth, plus economic growth, is putting the world under terrible pressure.

“Each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries so cutting our population is one way to reduce that impact.”

Population growth is one of the most politically sensitive environmental problems. The issues it raises, including religion, culture and immigration policy, have proved too toxic for most green groups.

Well, there is a reasonable solution to this-get more people living and working in space. But that requires evil things like technology and free markets.

Bloggin' In The Years: 1989

This is what happens when you don't plan ahead.

Until the Exxon Valdez disaster, Alaska was reluctant to officially recognize that a major oil spill was possible in Prince William Sound. Environmental studies and state reports dating almost to January 1968, when huge oil reserves were discovered on Alaska's North Slope, predicted that a major spill was so unlikely that planning for one would be unnecessary.

An influential state study in 1971, for instance, said that the chance of a spill in Prince William Sound of more than 70,000 barrels was ''minute.'' A plan prepared in 1987 by Alyeska said the ''most likely'' oil spill from tankers in Valdez harbor or Prince William Sound would amount to no more than 42,000 barrels and a spill of 200,000 barrels was ''highly unlikely.'' The Exxon Valdez accident spilled from 240,000 to 260,000 barrels of oil into Prince William Sound, according to estimates by Exxon and the state.

Accepting Blame

Residents here said they are heartsick over the accident that has stained hundreds of square miles of Prince William Sound to the color of dark tea. Yet they also realize that in many ways they must share part of the blame for the spill, a disaster many now say seemed almost inevitable.

When you practically live off of black gold, it can become very easy to forget that there's a certain amount of responsibility involved. Will Alaska have more responsible officials in the future? Time will tell.

They Durk Ur Trojans

Now this is hitting below the belt:

In a move expected to cost 300 American jobs, the government is switching to cheaper off-shore condoms, including some made in China.

The switch comes despite implied assurances over the years that the agency would continue to buy American whenever possible.

'Of course, we considered how many U.S. jobs would be affected by this move,” said a USAID official who spoke on the condition that he would not be named. But he said the reasons for the change included lower prices (2 cents versus more than 5 cents for U.S.-made condoms) and the fact that Congress dropped “buy American language” in a recent appropriations bill.

Besides, he said, the sole U.S. supplier — an Alabama company called Alatech — had previous delivery problems under the program.

I guess they just couldn't "Keep it up", then? Are the days of American-made rubber over?

In Space, No One Can See You Sweat

The Japanese have come up with the ultimate odor-eaters.

Wakata's clothes, developed by researcher Yoshiko Taya, are designed to kill bacteria, absorb water, insulate the body and dry quickly. They also are flame-resistant and anti-static, not to mention comfortable and stylish.

Japanese astronaut Takao Doi gave the clothes a trial run during a shuttle mission last year. Even after a vigorous workout, Doi's clothes stayed dry.

'The other astronauts become very sweaty, but he doesn't have any sweat. He didn't need to hang his clothes to dry,' Yanagawa said.

J-ware should reduce the amount of clothing that needs to be sent to the space station, which has no laundry facilities. Toting cargo into orbit is expensive, so having clothes that stay fresh for weeks at a time should result in significant savings.

The Japanese space agency plans to make the clothes available to NASA and its other space station partners once development is complete. A commercial line also is in the offing.

Mother of mercy, is this the end of Right Guard?

Bounding Beckism

As Andrew Sullivan explains, "Movement" conservatives really don't know what to do with themselves now that they have to be content with being Dittoheads:

For all sorts of reasons, most of the current tea-partiers backed the GOP under Bush and Cheney, although some, to be fair, did complain about some of it. The pent-up frustrations behind conservatism’s collapse under Republicans were trumped, however, by the fruits of power, partisan hatred of “the left”, defensiveness over the Iraq war and torture, and, above all religious devotion to the Leader. Now that Bush has been removed, the massive damage done, and a pragmatic liberal is trying to sort out the mess in a sane, orderly fashion, they’ve gone nuts.

Think of someone like Glenn Beck.

He sat back and watched Bush preside over the worst domestic attack in US history, explode the entitlement state, engage in unending projects of nation-building in two of the most dysfunctional countries on earth, rip up the Constitution, and bequeath as his legacy a trillion dollar deficit, unprecedented domestic discretionary spending, a banking collapse and the worst recession in many many years. The right will take some time to absorb this but Bush was Carter II - with two full terms. All that rage at what has actually happened – bottled up by rank partisanship for years – has come bounding out. Hence the bizarre spectacle of a president just two months on the job being treated on the right as if he’s already Robert Mugabe. Throw in a little racial and cultural panic, add a world of genuine economic pain … and you have the Malkin surge.

Maybe it's because some on the left see Obama as Bush Lite that they're doing this, or maybe it's because they're venting at a target who's conveniently no longer there, but at any rate Denial River runs deep these days.

Bachman Ranter Overdrive

Oh, jeeze:

“I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us ‘having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,’ and the people – we the people – are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.”

Remember when it was the loony left that said stuff like this? But it's from Michelle Bachman, so I guess it's OK when "Our side" does it.

A Car For The Depression

No-frills driving comes of age.

The Tata Nano, the world's cheapest car, has been launched in India.


Costing just 100,000 rupees ($1,979; £1,366), the Nano will now go on sale across India next month, with deliveries starting in July.

Tata hopes the 10-foot (3-metre) long, five-seater car will be cheap enough to encourage millions of Indians to trade up from their motorcycles.

Tata owner Ratan Tata has described the Nano as a 'milestone'. Analysts say it will not make a profit for six years.

Tata's managing director Ravi Kant said that from the first orders, a ballot would then select the initial 100,000 people to get their Nano.

'I think we are at the gates of offering a new form of transport to the people of India and later, I hope, other markets elsewhere in the world,' Mr Tata added.

'I hope it will provide safe, affordable four-wheel transportation to families who till now have not been able to own a car.'
....

The basic model has no airbags, air conditioning, radio, or power steering. However, more luxurious versions will be available.

A slightly bigger European version, the Nano Europa is due to follow in 2011, and is expected to cost nearer to £4,000.

Consider it the gift for the person who's lost everything...

Who's Sorry Now?

Um, weren't these guys on the anti-slavery side during the Civil War?

Connecticut legislators are considering making their state the first in New England to apologize for slavery and other racist policies of old.

A legislative committee heard testimony Monday on a resolution that would issue a formal, general apology and express the General Assembly's 'profound contrition' for the official acts that sanctioned and perpetuated slavery hundreds of years ago.

The state's African-American Affairs Commission, a liaison between black communities and the government, is urging legislators to pass the resolution, which it has called 'an exercise in reconciliation' and not an effort to determine fault for slavery.

The commission's legislative analyst, Frank Sykes, told the legislature's Government Administration and Elections Committee that 'opportunities like this must be seized,' especially in light of the 'giant stride' the country took last November in electing its first black president, Barack Obama.

'While this is encouraging,' Sykes said, 'it should inspire us and challenge us to continue peeling away at the layers of racial discrimination and intolerance.'

Considering that we now have a black President, I'm not sure how much peeling away we really have to do anymore.

When Basket Cases Attack

Why Pakistan is scarier than Iran or North Korea:

Pakistan is 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the U.S. Army, and al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn't control. The Pakistani military and police and intelligence service don't follow the civilian government; they are essentially a rogue state within a state. We're now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of the global financial crisis, which just exacerbates all these problems. . . . The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover -- that would dwarf everything we've seen in the war on terror today.

While the right continues talking about the diminished Axis of Evil, one of our "Allies" could be on the brink. Remember when Obama was mocked for saying he'd use force in Pakistan during the campaign? It doesn't sound so crazy now, does it?

National Journalism

Peter Suderman points out why a government bailout of the newspapers is a bad idea:

If you follow debates about health care, you may be familiar with the idea of crowd-out — insurance plans that go through a government connector (and thus are bound by its rules) eventually drive out private plans. In Canada, health-care administrators make it as difficult as possible for private plans to compete with the public system. It’s the nature of government enterprises, and I can’t imagine that wouldn’t be the case under any system resembling what Nichols and McChesney suggest. In the end, what they’re asking for isn’t a free press but a captured press. If that’s saving journalism, perhaps we ought to let it die.

I do find it somewhat strange that the same media types who distrusted government influence of the media under Bush are now willing to trust it with their first amendment rights as they're going out of business one by one. The irony seems to be lost on them.

The Disappearing Generation

The recession is hittimg men where they live:

Doctors around the United States are reporting a sharp increase in the number of vasectomies performed since the economy soured last year, with one noting that many of his clients are from the beleaguered financial industry.

Their best guess is that the trend is due both to a decreased desire to have children because of the expense involved, and an increased desire to get such medical procedures done before their jobs -- and health insurance -- disappear.

Sounds like those aren't the only things "Disappearing..."

Storming The Bastille

Felix Salmon is worried:

As inequality grew in America over the past 30 years, there was always the risk that it would snap back violently and dramatically.

That day is not yet here, but it's closer than it has ever been, and its possibility cannot be discounted. Barack Obama smells the public mood, and is trying to respond to it in a grown-up and non-incendiary way. Congress smells it too, and is being rather less grown-up about things. And Wall Street still largely remains inside its bubble, watching the tour buses on the outside with fear and incomprehension. But unless some very senior executives start smelling the coffee sharpish, they might end up facing the biggest tail risk of them all.

I don't think we're at the point of pitchforks and torches yet. But a day of reckoning may not be far off, and not even the Wall Street swells are immune.

This Too Shall Pass

The Washington Times suggests that the easily offended need to lighten up:

The fundamental right of freedom of speech in this country applies to presidents as much as anyone. Obama is allowed as to say impolitic things as long as they don't hurt the country. It also lent humanity to Mr. Obama, something rarely displayed by presidents in public and that certainly would not have been on display had he stuck with the canned responses he surely discussed with his White House handlers in advance. Most importantly, the President has real problems to address beside hurt feelings. The PC police need to relax and learn to take a joke.

I think it's actually kind of refreshing to have a President who can still be politically incorrect. It's not as if he's the first we've ever had, after all.

Will The Last Terrorist To Leave The Cave Please Turn Out The Lights?

And you thought your job sucked.

An intense, six-month campaign of Predator strikes in Pakistan has taken such a toll on Al Qaeda that militants have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust, U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials say.

The pace of the Predator attacks has accelerated dramatically since August, when the Bush administration made a previously undisclosed decision to abandon the practice of obtaining permission from the Pakistani government before launching missiles from the unmanned aircraft.

Since Aug. 31, the CIA has carried out at least 38 Predator strikes in northwest Pakistan, compared with 10 reported attacks in 2006 and 2007 combined, in what has become the CIA's most expansive targeted killing program since the Vietnam War.

Because of its success, the Obama administration is set to continue the accelerated campaign despite civilian casualties that have fueled anti-U.S. sentiment and prompted protests from the Pakistani government.

"This last year has been a very hard year for them," a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said of Al Qaeda militants, whose operations he tracks in northwest Pakistan. "They're losing a bunch of their better leaders. But more importantly, at this point they're wondering who's next."

U.S. intelligence officials said they see clear signs that the Predator strikes are sowing distrust within Al Qaeda. "They have started hunting down people who they think are responsible" for security breaches, the senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said, discussing intelligence assessments on condition of anonymity. "People are showing up dead or disappearing."

But they had such a great health benefit plan...

Life Without W

Gay Patriot wonders:

Is is that leftists in the blogosphere today are so humorless so self-righteous that they can’t abide the least bit of mockery, criticism or a combination of both?

Or, maybe it’s since they don’t have George W. Bush to kick around any more, they’ve decided to start going after prominent blogresses?

Perhaps it’s something else. Maybe Klein has a case of ADS (Althouse Derangement Syndrome), a syndrome afflicting partisans who can’t understand how a blogress can gain a following without subscribing to any ideology.

While the right may be rudderless, the left seems to have had a lot of the wind taken out of its sails now that Dubya is gone. Which makes these goofs all the more amusing. Don't they know that their guy won?

Ghosts Of McCain-Feingold

I kind of like Bill Richardson, so this is too bad.

The New Mexico Legislature on Saturday gave final approval to the first-ever limits on campaign contributions to statewide elected officials and lawmakers.

New Mexico is one of just five states that doesn't put any caps on contribution amounts.
Gov. Bill Richardson, for example, has gotten multiple donations of $100,000.

Richardson, whose term ends in 2010, has proposed contribution limits as part of a package of ethics reforms but hasn't said he will sign this particular bill.

'I think this is an important step forward, in that it cuts out some of the gigantic contributions,' said Steve Allen, executive director of Common Cause New Mexico. 'It's good for New Mexico.'

"Reform" didn't work when McCain used it as his rallying cry, and I don't think it will work here. Free speech issues aside, this will in fact only encourage more corruption as politicians look for loopholes.

The Next Sahara?

If you want to make the case for climate change, Europe's rain-or a lack thereof-might provide clues.

Between 1925 and 1999, the area between 40 and 70 degrees north latitude grew rainier, while the area between zero and 30 degrees north grew drier. In keeping with this broad trend, northern Europe seems to be growing wetter, while the southern part of the continent grows more arid. The Spanish Environment Ministry has estimated that, owing to the combined effects of climate change and poor land-use practices, fully a third of the country is at risk of desertification. Meanwhile, the island of Cyprus has become so parched that in the summer of 2008, with its reservoir levels at just 7 percent, it was forced to start shipping in water from Greece.

You don't need to be a doomsaying raver like Al Gore to see that something is going on. The question is, can we still do something about it without resorting to phony "Carbon credit" schemes?

Get Me To The Shrink On Time

It's not the same as going to church:

Mainstream psychiatry remains firmly materialist - usually re-explaining experiences that many people attribute to spirits, forces or unseen influences as biological dysfunction. So, in the most fundamental sense, the practice of psychiatry is typically contra-religious.

You could argue that this is 'replacing' religion through colonising the spiritual sphere of explanation, but this makes it no more a religion than physics or evolutionary biology.

Combining the two-like the feel-good pop psychology of the Seventies-tends to have mixed results at best. Religion serves spiritual needs; psychiatry is a science, and people shouldn't try and confuse the two.

Depression Dining

It's one of the unanswered questions of the new economy:

Are we looking at a future with more bistro-esque street carts, hidden restaurants, and bargain gastronomy? Will restaurant critics' best-of lists need to include a place that doesn't even have a listed address? And could you end up having the best meal of your life in some dude's living room, with mismatched silverware and uneven tables? From what I've seen so far, the answer is yes.

In other words, most of us may well wind up eating like we did in college?

Life Without A Teleprompter

So he really is the second coming of History's Worst Monster?

The guy just doesn’t know what to say. He can’t connect. Emotions are here, he’s over there. He can’t get the words to match the situation.

This began, I’d argue, from the first moment. He punted on the inaugural. Everybody ran around like crazy trying to praise it because if Barack Obama couldn’t give a speech then what?

But now, at week 11, we’re face-to-face with the reality, the man can’t talk worth a damn. . . . It’s instructive and humorous to remember that Carter ran a brilliant campaign that succeeded largely because his voice was new. Simple, direct, basic, human. And then, of course, he turned into a sad-sack twit.

I think that's a little unfair-Obama seems at least a little more competent than Jimmy. But if Obama can no longer deliver with a golden tongue, a lot of people are going to be looking for Change again come 2012.

The Blue Guns

There's more dissent from within the ranks:

Sixty-five House Democrats said Wednesday that they would oppose any attempt by the Obama administration to revive a ban on military-style weapons that President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994 and President George W. Bush let expire.

The pro-gun Democrats, led by Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., wrote Attorney General Eric Holder that they would “actively oppose any effort to reinstate the 1994 ban, or to pass any similar law.”
They urged the administration to avoid a “long and divisive fight over a gun control issue” at a time when Washington needs to concentrate on the economic crisis.

The House letter came a day after Montana’s two Democratic senators, Max Baucus and Jon Tester, wrote a similar letter to Holder saying the Justice Department should enforce existing laws before considering new gun ownership restrictions. “We will strongly oppose any legislation that will infringe upon the rights of individual gun owners,” they said.

I knew there was a reason these guys won in conservative areas. The Blue Line starts here.

Walking Dead Publishers

Kassia Krozer is fed up with old-school publishers not getting it:

Give. Me. A. Break. It’s only new for those of you who’ve been pretending change is something you get from a dollar bill. Now you’re wondering how to interact with blogs? Now you’re learning that there’s an entire conference devoted to change in the industry?

I’m so sorry, but it must be said. The future of publishing is already happening. People are doing it and they’re doing it really well. If you’re still worried about engaging bloggers, you are worrying about the wrong thing.

If the newspapers areany indication, it may take a while for these people to realize that they are extinct, and maybe not even then.

The Art Of Capitalism

Have we forgotten it?

America's comparative advantage has always lain in its superior ability to make creative use of disruption; if the Chinese are mastering that art, while the Americans are losing their taste for it, then the country really is in trouble.

If the Chinese can figure out how free markets work and that it's not a good idea to send godd money after bad (as in the case of giving us more loans), then who are the real socialists?

Dickonomics

How to sum up the meltdown:

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people’s money would make his dick bigger.

If these guys were looking for a cure for impotency, they didn't find it.

A Shoulder To Cry On

Andrew Sullivan has a regular feature titled "The View From Your Recession". This particular item, about the life of a dating coach, caught my eye:

Business is good. In fact, business is better than ever. And it keeps pouring in. I'm booked through the end of April coaching guys in four different major cities, sometimes making four figures in a single night out on the town. Then I go home, sleep until 3PM and do it again the next night.

But what surprises me more than the fact that all of these men are turning for help in their love lives, is HOW DESPERATELY they're turning for help.

Guys have been paying me with the last remnants of their bank accounts, deferring rent and bill payments, digging deeper into their credit card debt, even asking me to set up monthly payment plans for a single night out -- a night that typically nets a client only a few phone numbers and maybe a date or two.

I talked to another coach in the industry about it. And we agree that it's gone beyond the simple tripe of 'sex sells.' These single men who have become demoralized financially are seeking their solace not in some sort of economic recovery, but in the arms of a woman. The loss of financial security drives them to seek emotional security.

Maybe it's the loss of self-esteem, or maybe it's that most guys really do want their mothers to comfort them in the end. I'm thinking that more guys are going to be needing good therapists along with a good woman these days.

Toking Like Me

Broadcaster Rick Steves argues that marijuana laws have made some pot smokers more equal than others:

It's racist and classist. White rich people can smoke marijuana with impunity and poor black people get a record, can't get education, can't get a loan, and all of sudden go into a life of desperation and become hardened criminals. Why? Because we've got a racist law based on lies about marijuana.

There's 80,000 people in jail today for marijuana. We arrested 800,000 people in the last 12 months on marijuana. Even in my rich little white suburban community of Edmonds, Wash., 25 percent of police action is marijuana-related. Everybody knows it's silly. I'm not saying I'm pro-drug. I'm just saying it's parallel to alcohol prohibition. When they rescinded the laws against alcohol, nobody said booze is good, they just said it was stupid to make it a crime, that you're creating organized crime and people are dying.

Fortunately, America's first black President seems to be realizing this. But it will take time.

Too Much, Too Soon?

Even Joe Klein is getting concerned:

Sure, I'm worried that Obama isn't dealing decisively enough with the banking crisis--but, on the other hand, this is uncharted territory and maybe a cautious, case-by-case strategy will prove to be the right one. And yes, I'm worried that Obama is deferring a bit too much to the snails and toads (of both parties) in the Congress--but, on the other hand, savvy aides like Joe Biden, Rahm Emanuel and congressional liaison Phil Schiliro will focus and massage the legislative packages that will be forthcoming. It is entirely possible, as this magazine surmised last week, that Obama has taken on too much, too soon. Or maybe not.

I tend to agree that it's too early to say if Team Obama is already failing or not. But jeeze, for people who are supposed to be smarter than the last bunch you'd think they'd stop looking like they're tripping over their own feet by now.

Bloggin' In The Years: 2003

The war against Iraq has begun. However you might feel about it, support the troops and their mission. The hard part will undoubtably come later.

The Worst Job In The World

Seemingly lost in the hue and cry over AIG are the folks who work there:

The handful of souls who championed the firm’s now-infamous credit-default swaps are, by nearly every account, long since departed. Those left behind to clean up the mess, the majority of whom never lost a dime for AIG, now feel they have been sold out by their Congress and their president.

“They’ve chosen to throw us under the bus,” said a Financial Products executive, one of several who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. “They have vilified us.” . . .

If they did walk out the door, who would volunteer to work at the Chernobyl of the financial world? And what would become of the mammoth portfolio that remains?

“It would become the biggest naked position on Wall Street,” one longtime Financial Products executive said, “and everybody would exploit it.”

Hell hath no fury like a financier scorned.

Mrs. Obama, How Does Your Garden Grow?

It's planting season at the White House:

While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at time when obesity has become a national concern.
***
The Obamas will feed their love of Mexican food with cilantro, tomatilloes and hot peppers. Lettuces will include red romaine, green oak leaf, butterhead, red leaf and galactic. There will be spinach, chard, collards and black kale. For desserts, there will be a patch of berries. And herbs will include some more unusual varieties, like anise hyssop and Thai basil. A White House carpenter who is a beekeeper will tend two hives for honey.

This is actually a pretty cool thing to do, at a time when economic necessity may make gardening more popular. And it is a good way to teach kids about healthy eating (aside from keeping them away from Micky D's). It's certainly better than Hillary's garden, which was mostly black roses and hemlock.

How To Save Social Security

Philip Moeller has some ideas:

For starters, the retirement age can be bumped up a year or two. Life spans and working careers are expanding even more, so boosting the age at which people get full Social Security benefits is hardly unfair. It would be unfair to people just about to retire, but even here, a delayed trigger for higher retirement ages would go a long way toward returning the program to financial self-sufficiency. The next big source for a fix, and one that will be a major battle ground, is raising the earnings ceiling on Social Security contributions. Again, we're not talking about confiscatory behavior by the Feds, although any increase in taxes is hard to accept when one considers how poorly Washington has looked out for our money. The third 'easy fix' target is the annual inflation adjustment for Social Security payments, which could be unsweetened a bit.

If these changes were put in place and meaningful progress was also made on restraining the pace of health-care inflation, retirees would come out way, way ahead. Mandatory Medicare premiums will soon eat up 15 to 20 percent of a typical retiree's Social Security check. Out-of-pocket medical expenses can do even more financial damage.

I would add partial privatization, which I still think is a good idea overall. The more control people have over their money when they can no longer work, the better off they-and the rest of us-will be.

The Beautiful One

The Governator goes gaga:

“When have you ever seen a president be that out there?”

That was a mesmerized Arnold Schwarzenegger after Obama’s town hall meeting.

“I’ve never seen that,” Schwarzenegger said to a couple reporters as he and his wife, Maria Shriver, tried to make an exit. “Usually people are so guarded. The aides are always so guarded. They’re so afraid that you will blow it or that you will make news that’s unintended and all those things.”

Schwarzenegger continued to gush about Obama.

“But I think he’s so smart,” he said. “He’s so clear with his thinking and he’s so well informed and has been dealing with policy in all this and is also very philosophic it’s almost like. I think he’s just like – I think it’s beautiful.”

There are things I like about Obama (as well as much I don't) but you can only take Obamamania so far before it starts sounding ridiculous. It sounds like Obama sent a thrill up Arnold's CPU.

Bloggin' In The Years: 1987

Jimmy's out:

The Rev. Jim Bakker, a leading television evangelist, has resigned his ministry, asserting that he was maneuvered into a sexual encounter six years ago and subsequently blackmailed.

Mr. Bakker, a protege of the Rev. Pat Robertson, the founding father of television ministries, has become one of the nation's most prominent broadcast evangelists in the decade since he assumed the spiritual and financial leadership of the PTL Club in Charlotte, N.C. He has repeatedly drawn the attention of Federal investigators because of his fund-raising techniques, which yield more than $100 million annually.

His leadership of the PTL ministry - the letters stand for Praise the Lord and People That Love - will be assumed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Mr. Falwell is host of his own widely viewed television ministry program, ''The Old Time Gospel Hour,'' and is founder of the conservative lobby Moral Majority.

In an emotional statement to The Charlotte Observer on Thursday, Mr. Bakker said he had been ''wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends'' who ''conspired to betray me into a sexual encounter'' in Florida in December, 1980. As a result of the incident, he said, he ''succumbed to blackmail'' to protect his ministry and family.

Well, he certainly succumbed to something...

It's Not Delivery, It's Dear Leader's

Call it a triumph for the Revolution.

It has taken almost 10 years of work, but North Korea has acquired the technology to launch a project very dear to its leader's heart - the nation's first 'authentic' Italian pizzeria.

The launch of Pyongyang's first Italian restaurant meanwhile brings to fruition a ten-year effort by Kim Jong-il - a renowned gourmand and lover of western food - to create the perfect pizza and pasta in his homeland.

Last year a delegation of local chefs was sent by Kim to Naples and Rome to learn the proper Italian techniques after their homegrown efforts to mimic Italian cuisine were found by Kim to contain "errors".

In the late 1990s Kim brought a team of Italian pizza chefs to North Korea to instruct his army officers how to make pizza, a luxury which is now being offered to a tiny elite able to afford such luxuries in a country that cannot feed many of its 24 million inhabitants.

In another ten years they'll figure out the mystery of garlic bread and pizza sticks. That'll show those Western devils...

Magic Man

It's tough to be a master of the dark arts these days:

The Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (Hai’a) in Al-Ahsa arrested a sorcerer who dealt in magic and provided his services to several men and women, who turned to him out of a lack of religious motivation and ignorance, that sorcery became the talk of the town.

Sheikh Adel Faqih, an expert in such matters and director of the Hai’a branch of sorcery in Riyadh, said, “We are in an Islamic country which is governed by Islamic law which prohibits polytheism. Sorcery and magic are considered polytheism in Islam. Unfortunately, sorcery is not a new phenomenon. It is a problem that has existed since the time of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).”

Sheikh Faqih explained that a sorcerer can be identified when he asks for the name of a patient and for the name of the patient’s mother or if he is seeking to buy an animal with certain features. He can also be identified if he asks for a sheep to be killed without mentioning Allah’s name and asks to stain the body with the animal’s blood or if he asks for similar unusual things.

So, word to Gandalf or Harry Potter wanna-be's: stay out of Saudi!

Against The Grain

Let's see how the anti-GM crop crowd responds to this.

Hundreds of agricultural experts meeting in Mexico have issued an urgent warning about a particularly virulent form of the plant disease stem rust. The disease can cut wheat yields 80 percent and could spread to southern Asia and southern Africa from spots where it has been found in Africa and the Middle East.


In a news release, scientists at the meeting, held at a branch of the nonprofit International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, estimated that 90 percent of the wheat varieties planted by farmers around the world lack resistance to the rust variant, called Ug99 after its discovery in Uganda in 1999. But the scientists said that new wheat varieties (small pdf), developed as a result of an aggressive international breeding project, are not only resistant to the fungus but produce better yields than many conventional wheat types. The effort to develop and test the new strains has involved shuttling them from research centers in Syria and Mexico back to test plots in Africa, according to the organizers of the conference.
The Ug99 strain of the reddish, wind-borne fungus has been detected in fields in Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen and Iran.
....

In a statement on Tuesday, Dr. Borlaug again pressed the world’s wealthy nations to increase support for this research. The need was particularly urgent, he said, given projections that the wind will carry the fungus toward South Asia, which produces 19 percent of the world’s wheat in a region with over 1.4 billion people. “Our scientists are making incredibly rapid progress,” Dr. Borlaug said. “But we should have no illusions: a global food crisis is still a distinct possibility if governments and international institutions fail to support this rescue mission.”

And Iran, which is working on a nuclear bomb, is exactly the kind of country we want to see risk starvation, right?

The time is past for bogus quacks to rant and for celebrities to do something fasionable, like hold a rock concert or two and hope that will make the problem go away. Dr. Borlaug is asking for real action. Unfortunately, that action is considered too politically incorrect by many in the "Developed" world. As long as it's happening in the poorer countries, the Luddites simply won't care.

Late Night With Barack Obama

As has been reported, Barack Obama is having a sit-down with Jay Leno.

In a career studded with historic firsts, President Obama is preparing for yet another: hitting the late-night comedy circuit to pitch his economic recovery plan.

It's hardly a laughing matter, with the country in its worst economic shape in decades. And it certainly doesn't approach the import of Obama's election as the nation's first black president.

However, by taking a seat Thursday night on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," Obama will become the first sitting president to appear in such an unlikely venue, erasing -- perhaps once and for all -- any vestige of the line that separates news from entertainment.

It will also extend Obama's habit of speaking past the Washington press corps and ditching the capital for events that distance him from the Beltway status quo; for those keeping accounts, Obama may be sending a signal by going on the "Tonight Show" and then skipping Saturday night's Gridiron Club dinner.

Is it gimmicky? Maybe. But it is a way for Obama to bypass the MSM, which might explain this response:

The president sets the tone of the conversation in America. As much as President Obama would like to be a man of the people, a "regular guy," he's not anymore. His job description encompasses being Commander-in-Chief, leader of the Executive Branch of government, and Head of State. He's "The Leader of the Free World." Doing Jay Leno lessens the stature of the office, and diminishes the man. On Leno, he becomes just one more talk show guest, a celebrity on the circuit promoting his latest movie or book.

In this case, however, Obama is pitching his economic recovery plan. Of course, you could say that if he thought his plan was so great, he'd be back in Washington trying to get it passed through Congress. So, is this undignified? By the standards of a previous era, maybe. But we live in a media-centered age, and if there's one thing Obama knows how to do, it's take advantage of that. Whether it will translate into support in Congress is another matter.

The Bailed Out And The Furious

Hilzoy explains the anger:

I think of people I've known who have worked hard all their lives for not very much money, only to be completely bankrupted by unforeseen medical catastrophes, and I imagine these people being asked to support investment bankers in the style to which they have become accustomed, and fury feels like exactly the right response.

The question is, will the politicians heed the anger? And will the AIG goons ever truly be held accountable?

Stuck On Abstinence

Pope Benedict continues with his enlightened ways.

In his first public comments on condom use, the pontiff told reporters en route to Cameroon that Aids 'is a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, and that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems'.

Pope Benedict has previously stressed that the Roman Catholic Church is in the forefront of the battle against Aids. The Vatican encourages sexual abstinence to fight the spread of the disease.

After his election as Pope, Benedict described Aids as a 'a cruel epidemic which not only kills but seriously threatens the economic and social stability of the continent', but reiterated the Vatican ban on the use of condoms.

He said the "traditional teaching of the Church" on chastity outside marriage and fidelity within it had proved to be "the only sure way of preventing the spread of HIV and Aids".

When the Church learns to accept reality, I'm sure the Africans will be willing to listen.

Fire As I Say, Not As I Do

It seems the Governator forgot about these folks:

From June 2008 to February 2009, most state agencies either increased or kept the same number of full-time employees, according to a [Sacramento] Bee analysis of personnel data. The state also failed to lay off as many part-time employees during the crisis as promised by the governor.

While legislators and Schwarzenegger debated how to close a $40 billion budget deficit, 66 state agencies saw a net gain of full-time employees, 35 kept the same number of employees and 55 lost employees, data from the state controller's office show.

The overall number of full-time state employees increased by roughly 2,000, or 1 percent, excluding the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, which always shrinks sharply outside of fire season, the figures show.

Somewhere, Grey Davis is laughing.

Detainee Hot Potato

It seems some countries are having second thoughts about taking some of those detainees off our hands.

European countries that have offered to help the Obama administration close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have begun raising questions about the security risks and requirements if they accept prisoners described by the Bush administration as “the worst of the worst,” according to diplomats and other officials.

The concerns, and a deep suspicion of whether the American intelligence community will share full information on the prisoners, are likely to complicate the resettlement effort, which is critical to President Obama’s fulfilling his pledge to close Guantánamo within a year of his taking office.

The offers, from Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Belgium, Switzerland and other countries, have been widely seen as efforts to win favor with the new administration by helping to close the camp, which was a contentious issue during the Bush years.

Still, with a first round of talks on the Guantánamo issues scheduled for Monday in Washington between Obama administration officials and a high-level delegation from the European Union, several European leaders have recently emphasized that they can make no firm commitments until they are given complete details on the prisoners.

“We’d have to study concrete cases,” María Teresa Fernández de la Vega Sanz, Spain’s deputy prime minister, said in an interview last week.

Closing Club Gitmo is something that I support, and still hope Obama is able to carry out. Even so, we'll need a place to keep these people if the Europeans don't want them. The good news is, there are such places available for what amounts to a relatively small number of inmates. So maybe the Europeans won't have to worry so much after all.

Cheese We Can Believe In

Reason reports on a free-trade victory:

The U.S. Trade Representative's office has announced that a looming 300 percent tax on Roquefort will be postponed for a month, and possibly done away with.

Prices were already inflating in anticipation of a March 23 deadline, courtesy of a parting gift from the Bush administration, which slapped the tax increase on the stinky blue sheep's cheese as part of a spat with France over importation of American beef.

So the smelly stuff will now be easier to get, if you want it. At least it'll never be mistaken for "Freedom Cheese."

Why Shepherd Smith Makes Fun Of Beckmania

Because of stuff like this:

The audience for Beck’s Friday night special were each given copies of two books. One of them was Cleon Skousen’s Five Thousand Year Leap. Skousen, who died in 2006, is one of the legendary cranks of the conservative world, a John Bircher, a grand fantasist of theories about secret conspiracies between capitalists and communists to impose a one-world government under the control of David Rockefeller.

When he was on CNN, I thought they kept him there as their idea of what a conservative was, since nobody could possibly take him seriously. Apparently Fox News doesn't get the joke.

The School Of Economic Hard Knocks

Is it a recession-or just a hard lesson in free-market reality?

There is no denying that some people have suffered real pain and hardship, including the millions who have lost their jobs, been evicted from their houses, or seen their retirement savings plummet. But as painful as this situation is, it needs to be looked at for what it really is -- a transfer payment from owners to buyers -- and not what it is being portrayed as, which is a dramatic decline in societal wealth.

Maybe so, but that still doesn't make it any easier for the people who played by the rules and are still suffering.

Malcom In The Right

Shelby Steele on why white liberals don't get it:

The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity. I always secretly loved Malcolm X more than Martin Luther King Jr. because Malcolm wanted a fuller human dignity for blacks -- one independent of white moral wrestling. In a liberalism that wants to redeem the nation of its past, minorities can only be ciphers in white struggles of conscience.

After their deaths, the civil rights movement was co-opted by opportunists and hustlers like Jesse Jackson who routinely used white liberal guilt to their advantage. For all its faults, the Obama administration is a step away from that, and an important one.

The Incoherent Age

Why the religious right has lost the culture wars:

The days when America’s leading intellectuals contained a strong cadre of serious Christians are over. There is no Thomas Merton in our day; no Reinhold Niebuhr, Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor. In the arguments spawned by the new atheist wave, the Christian respondents have been underwhelming. As one evangelical noted in The Christian Science Monitor last week, “being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence”.

The rejection of intellectual discourse is one of the things that has contributed to the conservative movement's fall from grace, and the religious argument is sadly no exception.

The Credit Class

Does extending credit to all contribute to resentment and class warfare?

Some rely on credit in emergencies, but many choose to revolve credit to keep spending more than they make...the rest of us need to spend more (and go into debt) to feel like we are keeping up, or we need to make the difficult and somewhat isolating choice to fly in the face of new social norms—forgoing the stuff that seems to have become de rigeur for our social class. We experience a kind of declassing even if we are content with what we have. Credit being extended to traditionally poor credit risks exacerbates that tendency further—those we considered beneath us suddenly seem to have more of life’s good things than we do. All of which is to say that accessibility to credit accelerates the cycling through of class signifiers and inflates the value of all of the ones in play. This seems highly unstable—financially and emotionally.

Attempts to help those who couldn't afford their loans in the first place, no matter how well-intentioned, only seem to increase the dependency and the attitude that being more careful with your money doesn't matter. Naturally, those that play by the rules are going to be displeased.

The California Nations

California's state government may be in dire straits, but that doesn't necessarily apply everywhere.

The “California economy” is not evenly spread across the state, but rather it is driven by a few metropolitan areas. The Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas are responsible for more than half the state’s economic clout. Along with San Diego and San Jose, they together contribute 72 percent of the state’s GDP. True, if California were its own country it would have the eighth largest GDP in the world, but if these four metros alone were a separate nation, they would outpace India, Mexico, South Korea, and Australia.

I see this trend increasing as the economic focus continues to be on cities overall. These micro-economies will play a large part in determining the future of the whole. The question is, do we let them succeed, or continue to let big government mess things up?

The Morning After

It looks like the post-honyemoon hangover is here:

Among those who follow government closely, there has been an unmistakable change in tone in the past few weeks. These are not little Rush Limbaughs hoping that Obama fails. They are politicians and journalists measuring him with the same skeptical eye they apply to everyone else. . . . Meantime, on the main challenge — the economy — the criticism has begun to infect the mainstream media as well as the conservative wing.

I hate it when couples break up. Think of the children!

Chinese Takeout

Did you think we'd ever see the day when communists would be worried about big government?

What the Chinese are worried about is not that the United States government will default on its bonds. That obviously won’t happen. The Chinese concern, now being expressed openly for the first time, is that the U.S. will adopt the standard debtor’s remedy of inflating its currency and paying back its debts in shrunken dollars. Why are the Chinese worried about this? Because Barack Obama’s budget proposes to borrow trillions of dollars, injecting them into the U.S. economy without any offsetting wealth being created. . . . With their shot over the bow, I think the Chinese are telling Obama that they don’t like his budget.

Eventually, the bill will come due. The question is, are they going to give us more time to pay them back, or send somebody over to break our legs?

Too Much Of Awesome

Is the rest of the world not yet ready for the awesomeness of the One?

We may have entered a new era, but much of the world is still Obamaless and mired in the fear and mistrust of pre-Obama times. It will be up to us to help assure the world that Obama’s hope and change is for them as well. They need to know that if Obama’s actions seem stupid or insulting to them, it’s only because they are not yet able to understand his splendor. We must remember that while Obama’s brilliant radiance may fill us with awe, it could actually hurt the eyes of those unused to such light.

Of course, it may be that some of hese countries are used to cults of personality in their history, and so are asking, "What else is new?"

It's Not Easy Being Green In A Recession

Recylying is becoming another victim of the economy:

In a bad economy, it's often the good environmental practices—using energy-efficient light bulbs, insulating homes, driving less, eating less meat—that end up prevailing, in part because they save people money. But that's actually not true of recycling, which, for better or worse, is intimately tied to the health of international markets—and the willingness of countries like China to buy our recycled materials. Right now, demand for those materials has shriveled up, which has been a huge blow to recycling plants.

It would seem that the growth of recycling and consumerism during boom times are closely related. What does this say about environmental awareness in a free-market economy? That we can only afford it when we have more cash to spend?

Depression Delayed?

You know that impending economic catastrophe that was said to be coming? Well, not so fast.

Confronting misgivings, even in his own party, President Barack Obama mounted a stout defense of his blueprint to overhaul the economy Thursday, declaring the national crisis is 'not as bad as we think' and his plans will speed recovery.

Challenged to provide encouragement as the nation's 'confidence builder in chief,' Obama said Americans shouldn't be whipsawed by bursts of either bad or good news and he was 'highly optimistic' about the long term.

The president's proposals for major health care, energy and education changes in the midst of economic hard times faced skepticism from both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, as senators questioned his budget outlook and the deficits it envisions in the middle of the next decade.

But Obama, speaking to top executives of the Business Roundtable, expressed an optimistic vision and called for patience.

Richard Parsons, chairman of beleaguered Citigroup Inc., asked if Obama could offer some help in a national battle 'between confidence and fear.'

'A smidgen of good news and suddenly everything is doing great. A little bit of bad news and ooohh , we're down on the dumps,' Obama said. 'And I am obviously an object of this constantly varying assessment. I am the object in chief of this varying assessment.'

'I don't think things are ever as good as they say, or ever as bad as they say,' Obama added. 'Things two years ago were not as good as we thought because there were a lot of underlying weaknesses in the economy. They're not as bad as we think they are now.'

In the long term he may be right. The problem is, Obama is the one who's been sounding like a pessimist-in-chief. Maybe more caution and less call for Change might not be a bad thing from now on.

The Red Debt Menace

China's bill collectors come calling.

China's premier expressed concern Friday about its massive holdings of Treasuries and other U.S. debt, appealing to Washington to safeguard their value, and said Beijing is ready to expand its stimulus if the economy worsens.

Premier Wen Jiabao noted that Beijing is the biggest foreign creditor to the United States and called on Washington to see that its response to the global slowdown does not damage the value of Chinese holdings.

'We have made a huge amount of loans to the United States. Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I'm a little bit worried,' Wen said at a news conference following the closing of China's annual legislative session. 'I would like to call on the United States to honor its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets.'

Wen's comments foreshadowed possible appeals to President Barack Obama, who will meet with Chinese President Hu Jintao at a London summit of leaders of the G-20 group of major economies on April 2 to discuss the global financial crisis.

Creating a culture of entitlement through bad loans from the government, not smart. Trying to do the same with Chinese communists, not so smart either.

Saterrite Of Rove

Well, I hope Mini-Me's happy.

Japan today threatened to shoot down a satellite that North Korea plans to launch early next month if it shows any signs of striking its territory.

Tokyo's warning that it would deploy its multibillion-dollar missile defence system raised tensions in the region after North Korea said that it had identified a potential 'danger area' near Japanese territory along the rocket's flight path.

The regime told the International Maritime Organisation that the missile would be launched during daylight between 4 and 8 April, and that its boosters would fall into the Sea of Japan – about 75 miles (120km) from Japan's north-west coast – and the Pacific Ocean.

Officials in Tokyo said they reserved the right to destroy any threatening object in mid-flight, despite North Korean warnings that it would consider such a move an act of war.

'Under our law, we can intercept any object if it is falling towards Japan, including any attacks on Japan, for our security,' Takeo Kawamura, the chief cabinet secretary, told reporters.

Isn't this what Godzilla is for?

National Health Lite

I'm afraid I have to agree with this:

If we get national healthcare, we will not get anything like the neat little systems proposed by academics who can assume away many of the political problems. I am aware that proponents would rejoinder, that yes, they know it won’t be perfect, but . . . But I’m not making the perfect the enemy of the good. A national healthcare system in the United States will not merely be something sadly less than ideal—it will be nothing like most of the internally coherent proposals. It will be something jury rigged out of Medicare, S-Chip and insurance mandates, ugly and very expensive.

We already have layers of bureaucracy when it comes to free-market health care. Imagine if we combined the government health care we already have with HMOs. No thanks.

Welcome To The Graybar Suite

It's definitely a step down:

His sprawling East Side duplex is just a memory, replaced by a 7-1/2-by-8-foot cell. After 45 years of waking up with wife Ruth, Madoff may share his room with another inmate.

Instead of a leisurely weekend brunch, the 70-year-old Madoff gets a 6 a.m. wake-up call with breakfast served 30 minutes later.

Rather than a tasteful custom-tailored gray suit, he'll don a baggy brown prison-issued outfit.

Lunch is at 11:30 a.m., and dinner at 5 p.m. Lights out is at 11 p.m. sharp. Depending on the location of his cell, Madoff might catch a glimpse of Manhattan's bright lights from its small single window.

Well, maybe the inmate will become his new wife...seriously, it couldn't have happened to a nicer creep.

"Why Are They So Mean To Us?"

Oh, this is rich:

Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., said the U.S. can rescue its banking system by the end of the year if officials start cooperating and stop the “vilification” of corporate America.

“If we act like a dysfunctional family and we don’t finish these things and we’re forever debating them, I think this will go on for several years,” Dimon, 52, said at a conference hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. “It’s completely up to us at this point.”

Congress called Dimon and seven other bank CEOs to Washington last month to face criticism for outsized pay packages and executive perks at a time when losses were rising and the U.S. was pumping billions of dollars into their companies. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd led an effort to put new restrictions on banks that receive government support.

“When I hear the constant vilification of corporate America, I personally don’t understand it,” Dimon said in his speech. “I would ask a lot of our folks in government to stop doing it because I think it’s hurting our country.”

As opposed to stealing from your investors and making risky bets while paying yourselves a ton of money, I suppose?

Left Behind

Are the Obamacons getting worried?

The debut of President Barack Obama has left many people skeptical about his willingness to confront those who would ignore his lofty standards or plunder the treasury.

Quite of few of President Obama’s supporters are completely bewildered, wondering where the “no earmarks” promise went, feeling the sting of an administration wandering quickly to the left.

Maybe it's because the reality isn't meshing with the rhetoric. Or maybe it's because Obama is...just another politician? Perish the thought!

Get Shorty

Who says crime doesn't pay?

Mexico's most wanted man Joaquin 'Shorty' Guzman, blamed for thousands of deaths in a drug war, has made it onto the Forbes Magazine list of the world's richest people with an estimated $1 billion fortune.

Guzman, who is just 5 feet tall (1.55 metres), escaped from prison in 2001 to set off a wave of killings across Mexico in an attempt to dominate the country's highly lucrative drug trade into the United States.

'He is not available for interviews,' Luisa Kroll, senior editor of Forbes, said on Wednesday. 'But his financial situation is doing quite well.'

Forbes placed Guzman at 701 on its list, tied with dozens of others worldwide with riches of some $1 billion.

Well, if you can make it into Forbes, you can make it anywhere.

Big Brother Is Restricting You

And the answer to gun violence in the nanny state is...banning guns.

Several European countries have restricted gun laws in the wake of school massacres, gang violence and other gun-related crimes:

_Finland announced plans Wednesday to impose stricter restrictions on firearms, including raising the minimum age for handgun ownership from 15 to 20. The proposal was prompted by two school massacres within a year in which lone gunmen opened fire on classmates and teachers.

_Germany, where a gunman killed at least 11 people Wednesday, raised the legal age for owning recreational firearms from 18 to 21 following a 2002 shooting in Erfurt that killed 16 people, including 12 teachers.

_Belgian lawmakers passed strict new gun control laws in 2006 in reaction to the racially motivated shooting deaths of a toddler and her black baby sitter in Antwerp.

_Swiss citizens are demanding a referendum aimed at confining army weapons to military compounds and banning private purchases of pump-action rifles and automatic weapons — following a spate of suicides and homicides.

_The Portuguese Parliament is currently discussing a government proposal to tighten gun laws, including denying bail to anyone suspected of a gun crime.

_Denmark's government said last week it will raise the penalty for illegal gun possession as part of a crackdown on gang violence that has killed three people and injured 25 in recent months.

_European Union lawmakers proposed tighter gun control across the bloc last year, including guidelines saying that only people over 18 not deemed a threat to public safety could buy and keep guns. EU members have until 2010 to adopt the measures.

Apparently it hasn't occured to them that strict gun laws haven't prevented gun attacks in, say, Britain. But I guess they have to ban something that's not already on the books.

Some Pork Is More Equal Than Others

It looks like reform is on hold.

Pulled between his campaign rhetoric and his own party’s congressional barons, President Barack Obama largely sided with his Hill allies in unveiling an earmark proposal Wednesday that shies away from any strict crackdown on the practice.

Obama proposed further transparency for the spending goodies prized by many members of Congress – but stopped far short of the kind of serious limits reformers wanted.

“Rather than trying to fine tune a fundamentally flawed process, we should take aggressive steps to prevent unauthorized earmarks,” said Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.), a leading anti-earmark critic on the Hill.

Feingold’s GOP partner – and Obama’s former presidential rival – went further.

“The president’s rhetoric is impressive, but his statement affirms we will continue to do business as usual in Washington,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has led the fight against earmarks. “The President could have resolved this issue in one statement – no more unauthorized pork barrel projects – and pledged to use his veto pen to stop them. This is an opportunity missed.”

Unfortunately, I have the feeling we'll be seeing more of those as time goes on.

"Everything's Just Fine"

Well, I feel better now:

A key economics adviser to President Barack Obama denies the administration is juggling too many things at once.

Head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, said the administration is moving methodically to restore American business health. In an interview Wednesday, Romer said Obama has communicated clearly that attacking the deep recession is his top priority.

She acknowledged the administration's response to the economy is inherently complicated, but said they have rolled out many specific strategies to tackle issues like home foreclosures and the current 'stress test' to determine the capital needs of troubled banks.

With all due respect, it sounds like the banks aren't the only ones that need a stress test these days...

Pelosi Air

Being Speaker of the House means being able to treat the military like your own personal airline.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has gone from frequent flier to jet-aircraft connoisseur, with aides berating military officials to get the best planes, e-mails revealed yesterday.

Pelosi, who clashed with the military to get nonstop service when she flies home to California with police protection on government planes, revealed a particular fondness for Gulfstream’s sleek G-5 - a plane glamorized in Hollywood films and rap videos.

“It is my understanding there are no G-5s available for the House during the Memorial Day recess. This is totally unacceptable . . . The speaker will want to know where the planes are,” a Pelosi aide wrote in an angry e-mail to the military.

An arrogance of one!

Living Inside Myself

When is a man his own state?

An Allen Township man accused of driving drunk wore a Coors Light sweatshirt to court today and offered a novel defense.

The law doesn't apply to him, Scott A. Witmer said, because he is a 'sovereign man.'

'It means I live inside myself,' Witmer, 44, told a curious Northampton County Judge Leonard Zito. 'I don't live in the state of Pennsylvania.'

Witmer was arrested by state police early Aug. 24 after he allegedly drove drunk from his 1309 Adams St. home after troopers responded to a domestic violence call. Police also charged him with several summary offenses and said he did not have insurance for his vehicle, lacked valid license plates, and was driving on a revoked license.

Accompanying Witmer's legal position was a 20-page motion he submitted in December in which he insisted the charges against him were unconstitutional. In the filing, he served notice on the court that to rule otherwise would be a 'blatant act of TYRANNY,' and akin to 'committing acts of treason, usurpation and tyranny.'

I'm all for individuality, but laws are there to hold people accountable for their actions. Of course, since Sovereign Man doesn't think he's a citizen, maybe he won't mind not having a citizens' rights.

The Invisible Ex-President

Where's Dubya?

Bush will be one of the quietist ex-presidents in modern times, both for being AWOL since Katrina and because, unlike Bill Clinton, he doesn't court publicity. Given the nation's collective short attention span, it's likely that by Memorial Day Bush will, except to the minority of never-say-die partisans (Keith Olbermann's the captain of that brigade), have vanished from the scene.

They really do miss him. Heh.

Brewed In The U.S.A.

Why free markets and beer go good together:

In 1979, a clerical error in the 21st Amendment was corrected, and for the first time in nearly 50 years it became legal to brew small batches of beer at home. Home brewers who had little interest in cutting costs or making beer with mass appeal began brewing big, flavorful beers in a wide range of styles. Many of these home brewers decided to turn their passion into small businesses, and microbreweries began popping up all over the country.

Today, although mainstream beers still dominate the market, more than 1,400 breweries in the U.S. produce more styles of beer than anywhere else in the world, and American beers routinely dominate international beer competitions.

And the little breweries shall lead them...

Havana Been Bery, Bery Good To Me

Cuba's non-persons are getting some overdue recognition:

Havana on Tuesday debuted a baseball video game which includes famous Cuban-born defectors long expunged from official memory here after they abandoned the Communist island to play in the United States.

The country's first baseball video game, MVP Cuba 1.0, features a number of Cuban stars who triumphed in the US major leagues, including star pitchers Orlando Hernandez -- nicknamed 'El Duque' -- and Jose Contreras.

The game was unveiled at a state information science center over the weekend, according to Juventud Rebelde daily newspaper.

I wonder if this has anything to due with Obama's plans to reach out to Cuba? At any rate, it's a small sign that the age of Fidel really is over.

It's A Greedy Man's World

It's apparently mens' fault:

It is interesting to note that Pope Benedict has recently suggested that there is a close connection between original sin and the greed that has created the current economic crisis. It is also notable that the credit crunch has been created by a profession that is almost exclusively male. In the line-up of failed bankers, not a single woman's name has appeared. Male greed has proven to be a murderous sin, destroying the livelihoods of millions, bringing down economies and social institutions and threatening starvation to the most vulnerable people on earth.

Apparently she never heard of Leona Helmsley. If more men are involved in the economy, then we are also still the main producers and providers. The Tina Beaties of the world may despise us, but the world still needs us for the things we do right.

Subsidizing The Green

When it comes to green jobs, the boondoggle that is ethanol is the elephant in the room:

The most successful green jobs program to date is one that no environmentalist wants to brag about: the conversion to corn-based ethanol. A recent United Nations report estimated that the heavily subsidized U.S. ethanol industry provides employment for 154,000 Americans, about five times as many as the wind power industry and nearly 10 times as many as the solar industry. That goes a long way to explaining why, despite mounting evidence showing that corn ethanol is a failure (some would say a disaster) on the environmental front, U.S. policy appears to be on cruise control. At its base, corn ethanol is not a green policy so much as a jobs policy—and its success in that respect has made it almost impossible for the government to change course.

A change in administrations doesn't necessarily change the subsidy culture that has been in place for decades-only what gets subsidized.

Up For Review

While Obama may be making newbie mistakes, there's one issue where he's in the right.

Calling into question the legitimacy of all the signing statements that former President George W. Bush used to challenge new laws, President Barack Obama on Monday ordered executive officials to consult with Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. before relying on any of them to bypass a statute.

But Obama also signaled that he intended to use signing statements himself if Congress sent him legislation that had provisions he decided were unconstitutional. He pledged to use a modest approach when doing so, but said there was a role for the practice if used appropriately.

'In exercising my responsibility to determine whether a provision of an enrolled bill is unconstitutional, I will act with caution and restraint, based only on interpretations of the Constitution that are well-founded,' Obama wrote in a memorandum to the heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch. The document was obtained by The New York Times.

Bush tended to treat the presidency like a monarchy, where he claimed that he could write a decree, as it were, and make it so. So this is good news.

When Confidence Is Too High

A distinction between false confidence and the real thing:

Healthy economies have confident consumers and businesses; if we short up confidence, goes this misguided thinking, things will improve. But healthy economies also have expanding economic activity, gaining jobs, wage improvements, active home sales, free credit activity. Confidence flows from the improvements in these basic economic activities; it is not an isolated state of mind independent from the rest of the universe.

False confidence is a lot like false expectations. If they're too high, you're setting yourself up for failure. It's all well and good to try and talk up the economy to reassure people, but realism has its place, too.

The Post-Bush Blogging Blues

It's tough to be a liberal blogger these days.

Liberal bloggers were the cyber cheerleaders for Barack Obama in the 2008 race for the White House. But now that he has won, these 'netroots' activists face a major challenge: criticizing the new president and his administration.

It is an interesting dilemma for liberal bloggers who pride themselves on being independent, especially as it relates to the Democratic Party and its leaders.

Former President Bush served as the glue for the often divided liberal blogging community, whether it was their opposition to the Iraq war and domestic spying or frustration about Bush's approach to education and health care.

Liberal bloggers spoke early and often about holding the Bush administration accountable, but will they do the same to the Obama White House?

'I think our challenge is that line from destructive criticism to constructive criticism, because there is going to be criticism,' Markos Moulitsas, founder of DailyKos.com, said in a recent interview. 'The issue is how we manage that and it's a fine line and it's very tough sometimes.'

Be careful what you wish for...heh. Really, though, from a progressive standpoint you could argue that Obama actually isn't moving fast enough, isn't spending enough, hasn't changed policy on Guantanamo fast enough, isn't getting us out of Iraq fast enough, etc. And the Republicans are making easy targets these days. So it's not like liberals will go out of business. They'll just have to be more willing to keep up the criticism of their own-if they can.

Where Have All The Faithful Gone?

Why are the Republicans still in trouble? Maybe because of this:

The percentage of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.
Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:

• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, “the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion,” the report concludes.

Maybe this explains the nutbar image that many American Christians have. Only the nutcases are left.

The Yoo Papers

It really is as bad as it looks.

Sources at the department who have examined this report state that it echoes some of the harshest criticisms that have appeared in the academic literature, but the report’s real bombshell, they say, will be its detailed disclosure of Yoo’s dealings with the White House in connection with the preparation of the memos. It is widely suspected that the Yoo memos were requested as after-the-fact legal cover for draconian policies that were already in place (“CYA memos”). If the Justice Department internal probe concludes this is the case that could have clear consequences for the current debate surrounding the Bush administration’s accountability for torture.

The question is, no that this stuff is coming to light, what can be done about it now that the perpetrators are out of power?

Robot Fever

Speaking of wingnuttery, from the Christianist front we get this:

Two well-known conservative Christian commentators who spoke at the rally described a breakdown of society should gay couples be allowed to marry -- including a rise in single-parent households and in the number of dependents wanting Social Security and health insurance benefits.

David Gibbs III, a lawyer who in 2005 fought to keep brain-damaged Terri Schiavo on life support, told rally participants gay marriage would "open the door to unusual marriage in North Carolina.

"Why not polygamy, or three or four spouses?" Gibbs asked. "Maybe people will want to marry their pets or robots."

Hey, if they look like the Cylon babes I'm game...

Killing For Jeebus

Good grief:

A 24-year-old ski lift operator who fatally shot the general manager of the Eldora ski area was determined to kill co-workers who weren't Christian, according to court records obtained Thursday.

The documents, filed Wednesday in Boulder District Court, said witnesses told authorities that Derik Bonestroo walked into a building at work, fired a gun into the ceiling and said: 'If you're not Christian, you're going to die.'

General manager Brian Mahon was shot and killed Dec. 30 at the ski area west of Nederland, Colo., in Boulder County. Witnesses said when Bonestroo asked Mahon's religion, Mahon said 'Catholic' and Bonestroo shot him twice: in the chest and head. Mahon is believed to have died instantly.

What can I say? There are nuts all over.

Who's On Spending First?

Obama tries to clarify:

Well, I just think it's clear by the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system. And the thing I constantly try to emphasize to people if that coming in, the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it. I have more than enough to do without having to worry the financial system. The fact that we've had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene is not an indication of my ideological preference, but an indication of the degree to which lax regulation and extravagant risk taking has precipitated a crisis.

He's right in that Bush got there first. Still, this doesn't bode well for the man who said his policies were going to be different.

Bloggin' In The Years: 1862

From a reporter's account of the Battle of Hampton Roads:

Yesterday morning the fight began, and the Battery, after engaging the Merrimac and the two rebel gunboats, in a five hours' action, put them all to flight, the Merrimac slinking off "in a sinking condition." The timing of the action is really so nice that it sounds like a romance, and one might well be incredulous, were not our tidings official, and were it not known that the Ericson Battery sailed from New York last week for Fortress Monroe, with the express purpose of going up to Norfolk and bearding the monster in his den. Her arrival was certainly in the very nick of time, and the result one which does honor not only to the officeers and men, but to the ingenious inventor who shaped the victorious creation of naval art.

A knight for the high seas, then, with armor plating as its shield and the turret as its sword. A thousand such knights will now soon join the fray, hopefully ending the war sooner, as well as changing the face of naval warfare forever.

Havana Handout

Obama really is reaching out these days:

President Barack Obama is poised to offer an olive branch to Cuba in an effort to repair the US's tattered reputation in Latin America.

The White House has moved to ease some travel and trade restrictions as a cautious first step towards better ties with Havana, raising hopes of an eventual lifting of the four-decade-old economic embargo. Several Bush-era controls are expected to be relaxed in the run-up to next month's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago to gild the president's regional debut and signal a new era of 'Yankee' cooperation.

The administration has moved to ease draconian travel controls and lift limits on cash remittances that Cuban-Americans can send to the island, a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of families.

'The effect on ordinary Cubans will be fairly significant. It will improve things and be very welcome,' said a western diplomat in Havana. The changes would reverse hardline Bush policies but not fundamentally alter relations between the superpower and the island, he added. 'It just takes us back to the 1990s.'

I actually agree with lifting the embargo for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that Castro is likely gone and it would make sense to have a post-Castro policy that looks forward. But proceed with caution nonetheless.

The Runt That Roared

Mini-Me is making noises:

North Korea warned Monday that any move to intercept what it calls a satellite launch and what other countries suspect may be a missile test-firing would result in a counterstrike against the countries trying to stop it.

'We will retaliate (over) any act of intercepting our satellite for peaceful purposes with prompt counterstrikes by the most powerful military means,' the official Korean Central News Agency quoted a spokesman of the General Staff of the Korean People's Army as saying.

If countries such as the United States, Japan or South Korea try to intercept the launch, the North Korean military will carry out 'a just retaliatory strike operation not only against all the interceptor means involved but against the strongholds' of the countries, it said.
'Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war,' it added.

I'm confused. Shooting down a satellite for peaceful purposes is an act of war? Of course, war is peace in Mini-Me's pea brain...

Speaking With The Enemy

Is he crazy-or crazy like a fox?

President Obama is sending an additional 17,000 American troops to Afghanistan, as part of his effort to try to put a tourniquet on the hemorrhaging war effort there. He has ordered a strategic review of United States policy there, and tasked a diplomatic behemoth — Richard C. Holbrooke, architect of the Dayton accords — to try to do in Afghanistan what he did in Bosnia. And he has, within days of assuming the presidency, taken ownership of the war in Afghanistan, with all of the Vietnam-era references to quagmire that come with it.

But a central point is hovering above all the strategic reviewing of “Afpak” (Afghanistan-Pakistan) that is going on in Washington, Islamabad, Kabul, London, Paris and Brussels. Any conflict that has ever been solved involved the various sides coming to agreement, and Afghanistan, the theory goes, is no different.

“I think it is clear that you have to have a political solution to Afghanistan, and I wouldn’t rule anything off the table, including conversations with some aspects of the Taliban,” said Reuben Brigety, an Afghanistan expert at the Center for American Progress.

It is a point that European — particularly British — officials have pressed on the Americans for some time. With the Bush administration, one European diplomat said, “there was a complete ideological block to the notion of coming to any kind of deals with anything that could be called the Taliban. But now,” the diplomat added, speaking on condition of anonymity, “we’re in a different ballpark.”

Indeed, last Friday, in an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Obama opened the door to approaching elements of the Taliban, if his administration’s review recommends it. He cited an argument he attributed to Gen. David H. Petraeus that “part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us.” Mr. Obama added that “there may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and in the Pakistani region, but the situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex.”

A few years ago, this might have been unthinkable. But the situation has changed. If we can make deals with insurgents not to attack us in Iraq-and make them part of the political process in the bargain-there's no real reason why we can't do the same thing in Afghanistan. The Taliban took advantage of a power vacuum after the Russians left. Now that we've filled that vacuum, they're on the outside, looking to get back in. It might be in our long-term interests to bring them to the table. This is one area where Iraq really can be a working model for the rest of the region.

Choke 'N Puke

Being a trendy snob can make you sick? Who knew?

The number of people who have reported falling sick after eating at the Fat Duck has risen to 400 from 40 last week, when Chef Heston Blumenthal said he was temporarily closing his restaurant because of the health scare.

The Health Protection Agency and officials from the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead are investigating the complaints about the experimental eatery, west of London, which is famed for dishes such as snail porridge and bacon-and-egg ice cream.

[....]

The restaurant normally serves more than 80 people a day, and each spends on average about 220 pounds, Blumenthal said. The tasting menu costs 130 pounds for about a dozen courses such as the Sound of the Sea, where diners don earphones and listen to lapping waves while consuming seafood washed up on what looks like a beach. The sand is a mix of tapioca and Japanese breadcrumbs.

Hmm. It seems for the price of bus fare they could have gone to the seaside and gotten sick on the real thing for free.

Wired For Republican Sound

While the media can be criticized for a lot of things, being pro-stimulus apparently isn't one of them.

While the (stimulus) bill was being debated, the news media—and particularly television—focused almost entirely on the question of whether it was too big. The possibility that it was too small—which now seems likely—was seldom raised. As Krugman argues, it’s a mini-version of the press failure in the lead up to the Iraq War, with depressingly familiar dynamics.

I think the administration deserves a small amount of the blame for this for not starting the debate with a much more aggressive and expansive bill, kicking off the game with the goalposts more advantageously placed, as it were. But fundamentally it goes back to that issue of DC and the national political media remaining wired for the GOP.

Maybe the durn liberal media needs to be reminded that there's a new sheriff in town? At any rate, whether you're pro-stimulus or anti, it seems the beltway press has already made up its own mind. Nice objectivity you have there, guys.

Shoot Out The Lights

Has anyone else noticed this?

According to the United Nations, 2008 was the first year that more than half the world's population, some 3.3 billion people, was living in urban areas. Bigger cities mean more light at night from streetlamps, neon advertising, office lights kept on, bright stadiums.... (Across the U.S., you can see for yourself how the night has changed already—and how it may get worse.) Not only does all this light pollution obscure the stars, create driving hazards, and cause insomnia, but it can also disrupt animal-behavior patterns and confuse birds, which end up colliding more frequently with tall structures. Plus, there's all that wasted energy to consider.

Energy aside, it does seem we're afraid of the dark these days. Of course, with more of us unable to afford our light bills, maybe we'll learn to like it soon enough.

What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Them

The real price of declining newspapers may yet to be seen:

Already under ferocious attack from both left and right for a multitude of sins, real and imagined, the press is going to find its job even more difficult to do under economic duress. And as it retrenches in the face of financial pressures, [Tom Rosenstiel, director for Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism] says, 'More of American life will occur in shadows. We won't know what we won't know.'

I imagine honest journalists will still be able to do stories on the underreported online, and that the real loss is that of the newspapers' monopoly on information (not to mention their political clout). On the one hand, it is sad that a way of reporting life is going away. But that's the price of evolution-the dinosaurs go extinct, and new species take their place.

Earth 2

The hunt begins.

NASA's planet-hunting spacecraft, Kepler, rocketed into space Friday night on a historic voyage to track down other Earths in a faraway patch of the Milky Way galaxy.

It's the first mission capable of answering the age-old question: Are other worlds like ours out there?

Kepler, named after the German 17th century astrophysicist, set off on its unprecedented mission at 10:49 p.m., thundering into a clear sky embellished by a waxing moon.
Its mission will last at least 3 1/2 years and cost $600 million.

The goal is to find, if they're there, Earth-like planets circling stars in the so-called habitable zone - orbits where liquid water could be present on the surface of the planets. That would mean there are lots of places out there for life to evolve, said Kepler's principal scientist, Bill Borucki.

On the other hand, 'if we don't find any, it really means Earths are very rare, we might be the only extant life and, in fact, that will be the end of 'Star Trek.'"

So what happens if we do find our long-lost "neighbor?" Perhaps more importantly...what if they're Cylons?

Seriously, it's stuff like this that makes the real world as cool (or cooler than) science fiction.

Frozen Green

They may not be original, but at least they're consistent.

The top Republican in the House is seizing on the latest spike in unemployment to call for a freeze on government spending and to urge President Barack Obama to veto a $410 billion spending bill.

Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the jump in unemployment to 8.1 percent and the loss of 651,000 jobs in February is a sign of a worsening recession that demands better solutions from both parties.

Boehner criticized the spending bill as chocked full of wasteful, pork-barrel projects. The Senate postponed a vote on the bill until Monday amid the criticism.

Boehner said he hoped Obama would veto the bill. He urged the president to work with House Republicans to impose a spending freeze until the end of this fiscal year.

Keep tilting at those windmills, guys...

An Innocent Abroad

Hillary's excellent adventure overseas continues:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton opened her first extended talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov by giving him a present meant to symbolize the Obama administration’s vow to “press the reset button” on U.S.-Russia relations.

She handed a palm-sized box wrapped with a bow. Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift: a red button on a black base with a Russian word peregruzka printed on top.

“We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Clinton asked.
“You got it wrong,” Lavrov said.

Instead of “reset,” Lavrov said the word on the box meant “overcharge.”

Well, you could argue that at least it was an honest gift...

Planes, Trains, And Sawed-Off Dictators

Now Mini-Me is going after the airlines.

South Korean and foreign airlines rerouted their flights away from North Korean airspace Friday after the North threatened passenger planes amid heightened tensions on the divided peninsula, officials said.

The move—which will cost carriers thousands of dollars for each flight—comes after North Korea warned in its state-run media that it cannot guarantee security for South Korean civil airplanes flying near its airspace and accused the U.S. and South Korea of attempting to provoke a nuclear war with upcoming joint military drills.

It did not say what kind of danger South Korean planes would face or whether the threat meant the North would shoot down aircraft.

South Korea urged the North to retract the threat.

'The military threat against civil airplanes' normal flights is a violation of international norms and an inhumane act that cannot be justified under any circumstances,' Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon told reporters.

I'd say they have a right to threaten North Korean planes in response, but I don't think paper airplanes count.

These Are Not The Memos You Were Looking For

John Yoo just can't seem to help himself.

“These memos I wrote were not for public consumption,” Yoo told the newspaper. “They lack a certain polish. I think [it] would have been better to explain government policy rather than try to give unvarnished, straight-talk legal advice. I certainly would have done that differently, but I don't think I would have made the basic decisions differently.”

Yoo said it is the job of a lawyer to give a straight answer to the client, and he worries that kind of legal advice could be jeopardized:

“One thing I sometimes worry about is that lawyers in the future in the government are going to start worrying about, ‘What are people going to think of me?’ ” Yoo told the Register. “Your client the president, or your client the justice on the Supreme Court, or your client this senator, needs to know what's legal and not legal. And sometimes, what's legal and not legal is not the same thing as what you can do or what you should do.”

I guess it all depends on what the meaning of "Legal" is, right, John?

The Queen Fumbles

She probably meant it in a different way. But it doesn't sound good:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an audience Friday 'never waste a good crisis,' and highlighted the opportunity of rebuilding economies in a greener, less energy-intensive way.

Highlighting Europe's unease the day after Russia warned that gas flows via Ukraine might be halted, she also condemned the use of energy as a political lever.

Clinton told young Europeans at the European Parliament that global economic turmoil provided a fresh opening. 'Never waste a good crisis ... Don't waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security,' she said.

Maybe she's just taking over from Joe Biden in the gaffe department?

Mr. Pitt Goes To Washington

Hmmm. Trying to steal Obama's thunder?

This being the middle of the U.S. Capitol , no one screamed, but Pitt did stop foot traffic. Teenage pages stopped next to the Abraham Lincoln statue to gawk. Congressional interns who've spent their spring semester trying hard to be treated like adults snapped pictures with their cell phones and later stood in the halls comparing photos and wondering where Jolie was — apparently a few blocks away, down Pennsylvania Avenue , filming her CIA thriller, 'Salt.'

Somehow, the stodgy old Capitol had a different feel, at least for an hour or so. The rest of the afternoon people were speculating not on the Senate's cloture vote or the future of the economy. They tried to figure out how they could get a glimpse of Pitt leaving.

If the interns were looking to behave like adults I think they were in the wrong place to begin with...

Who Watches The Goofballs?

From an article on the new Watchmen film comes this tidbit:

It's March 3, 2009, a few hours before seeing and reviewing Watchmen, a film whose existence I've anticipated for over twenty years, and I'm at a PETA event at a strip club on my lunch hour as the radical pro-animal group unveils a new anti-fur campaign. I return to my office, which happens to be directly across the street from the movie theatre that will show the Watchmen screening. I have one voicemail, from a friend who works for DC Comics (for whom I wrote a few Justice League stories myself). He says that outside the DC Comics offices, a few blocks north of Times Square on Broadway, Mayor Bloomberg is parading with members of U2, temporarily renaming a street after them. I am not convinced New York will be made better off by this display.

I'm not sure how they're connected, except that it all seems to represent a mixture of the serious and the frivolous, the zeitgeist of the Obama era. Watchmen may have been more prophetic than Alan Moore realized.

Rock Bottom Blues

Are they finally getting it?

Republicans this week are processing two sobering new polls that found the party’s support reduced to a slim one-quarter of Americans. In the absence of a popular elected leader, its most visible figure is a polarizing radio host. Its strategic powerhouse is a still-divisive former House speaker forced from power more than 10 years ago.

And its hopes of demonstrating swift and visible change by pushing people of color to the fore have been dented by the stumbles of the party’s two most prominent non-white leaders, national Chairman Michael Steele and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that many prominent Republicans are forecasting a long winter.

“You think you hit bottom, and it can always go lower,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who said his party’s best hope is that President Barack Obama overreaches. “The Republicans just entered the wilderness – we’re going to wander around there for a little while before coming back stronger than ever.

“I have no idea where the bottom is just like I have no idea where the bottom is on the stock market,” he said.
....

The gap in trust and popularity is mirrored, prominent Republicans fret, by a vast gap between the parties’ infrastructure. Republicans also fear that they are outmatched by a Democratic publicity and fundraising machine honed in opposition, and on display this week in a successful effort to associate the GOP with radio host Rush Limbaugh. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is trying to fashion a role as the intellectual driving force of the GOP-in-exile, but he hasn’t held office since the 1990s.

Add in a politically popular and groundbreaking Democratic president in Obama, and even the Republicans’ most practiced brawlers feel the party is flat-footed.

“The Left has put together the most powerful political coalition I’ve ever witnessed,” said former House majority leader Tom DeLay, whose 1994 GOP coalition once might have vied for that honor. “Obama improved upon it in the presidential campaign, but the Republicans are still in denial.”

When even Tom DeLay admits that things have gone wrong, you know they've got a long way to go to find their way back. Right now the Republicans seem to be going through their equivelant of the seven stages. When acceptance finally comes, that will mark the beginning of their road to recovery.

Unfinished Business

The economy may be the main topic of discussion these days, but there's still a war on out there:

Obama could easily find himself in the same sort of hawk-vs.-dove debate that has boggled American Presidents from Vietnam to Iraq. Traditionally, Presidents favor more troops — and precipitously lose public support. In this case, Obama's margin for error is minuscule, given the enormity of the economic crisis. He simply can't get bogged down in Afghanistan. And he simply can't allow al-Qaeda and the Taliban free rein. And every option in between seems either a gamble or a fantasy.

I think eventually we will have to come to terms with the fact that we can't afford to stay in Afghanistan any more than we could afford to stay in Iraq. Quite frankly, I would rather have a President who is willing to take a gamble rather than one who relies on fantasy. It seems we had enough of that the last time around.

Let Them Eat Rice

The Revolution will be fed.

President Hugo Chavez seized a unit of American food giant Cargill on Wednesday and threatened to take over Venezuela's largest private company, renewing a nationalization drive as the OPEC nation's oil income plunges.

Chavez's clash with the food companies, demanding they produce cheaper rice, came less than three weeks after he won a referendum on allowing him to run for reelection and marked his first nationalization in seven months.

'I warn you this revolution means business,' said Chavez, whose government has struggled with lower oil income and minor food shortages this year.

The anti-U.S. president, who has nationalized swaths of the economy, is popular among the poor for pressuring companies to produce cheap goods and for government programs that provide subsidized food in city slums.

The moves to tighten the government's grip over the food supply were criticized by the private sector and many economists who say the state distorts the supply chain and contributes to food shortages.

Well, no Revolution was ever won on an empty stomach. It just wound up with one afterwards.

Hey, Teacher, Leave Those Grades Alone

Remember when it was just the kids who did stuff like this?

New Jersey principal was suspended and guidance counselors were put on the hot seat Wednesday over a grade-fixing scandal at Fort Lee High School. The school district's superintendent confirmed to CBS 2 HD that grades were changed and transcripts tainted, all without the knowledge of students, parents and teachers.

The deception appears to go back at least six years and was the focus of an emergency meeting of the school board on Wednesday night. Hardest hit by the scandal are Fort Lee Highs most academically gifted students.

As few as 10 of them had their grades improved or bad grades deleted. Stephanie Kim, an honors student at Fort Lee High, was at the meeting with her parents. She has applications pending at 10 top notch universities.

'My biggest fear is not getting into college,' Kim said. 'Truthfully, just the fact that this happened in the administration and students didnt even know about it.'

The cheating was discovered by the school's new director of guidance, who told Superintendent Raymond Bandlow about it on Tuesday. Bandlow suspended Fort Lee High School Principal Jay Berman, although his role in the scandal was not made clear.

Maybe they ought to go work in Congress, since they're so good with faking numbers...

Start Chopping

The axe is coming down hard.

Companies cut 697,000 jobs in the U.S. in February as the recession’s grip tightened, offering no sign the pace of the decline in payrolls is easing.

The drop in the ADP Employer Services gauge, a survey based on payroll data, was larger than economists forecast and followed a revised cut of 614,000 for the prior month.

Employers are cutting staff as demand plummets in the face of strained credit and battered housing and equity markets. The Labor Department may report in two days that employers cut payrolls in February for a 14th consecutive month, putting jobs losses in the current downturn at more than 4.2 million, according to a Bloomberg survey.

“We doubt any of these numbers have hit bottom yet,” Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics Ltd. in Valhalla, New York, said in a note to clients. “Employment is tanking right across the economy.”

This is part of the reason why I can't buy into the argument that Obama must fail. Because if he does, who will be there to pick up the pieces?

The Mouth that Rushed

Wolcott makes the case the Rush Limbaugh is more Moore than Moore:

During its Rovian/Fox News heyday, the right tried to make Michael Moore's mug the face of the Democratic Party, hold Democrats responsible for every egregious thing Moore said or did. It only partially succeeded because Moore was too independent an operator to be seamlessly morphed with Al Gore and John Kerry. But Limbaugh bleeds Republican red. He has been glorified and embraced as the perfect Ganesh by Newt Gingrich, CPAC, and the Bush family. He is the face and mouth of the conservative movement. A mouth that has swallowed Michael Steele whole, and has room for plenty more.

The way things are going, it looks like he'll swallow the movement whole and not leave a whole lot left to reconstitute itself. And thus it was the way the Frankenstein monster destroyed his creators.

Teenage Kicks

Don't people ever get tired of trotting out this stuff?

In an unusual piece of research, investigators at the University of Pittsburgh graded the sexual aggressiveness of lyrics, using songs by popular artists on the US Billboard chart.

The lyrics were graded from the least to the most sexually degrading.

They then asked 711 students aged 15 to 16 at three local high schools about their music preferences and their sexual behaviour.

Overall, 31 percent of the teens had had intercourse.

But the rate was only 20.6 percent among those who had been least exposed to sexually degrading lyrics but 44.6 percent among those highly exposed to the most degrading lyrics.

Well, at least they're not calling it the Devil's music. And by most accounts the kids have been having less sex anyway. Maybe some old fogies are just jealous because the kids are better at fantasizing than they were?

Pork Stew

Dude, where's my fiscal responsibility? Certainly not here:

Senate Democrats and Republican ate roughly the same amount from the government trough on a solo basis, although Democrats have one and half times as many members. Democratic members secured about $677 million in individual earmarks; Republicans brought home $669 million. Those solo figures, however, don’t tell the entire story, because about six billion more was requested by groups of lawmakers.

Methinks conservatives who believe the Republicans would be better on spending hope too much. There are more than enough glass houses in both parties to go around.

Report From Wingnuttia

If you believe Limbaugh, the biggest enemy conservatives face is...other conservatives:

The American conservative project faces a problem of faction from people 'within our own movement seeking power to dominate it, and worst of all to redefine it,' [Limbaugh] warned. And he wasn't having any of that: 'The Declaration of Independence does not need to be redefined and neither does conservatism. Conservatism is what it is and it is forever. It's not something you can bend and shape and flake and form.'

That captured the mood of CPAC to a tee. On the whole, the conservative movement views the last two elections not as a failure of conservatism but a failure of nerve....

But what if the American people think they had good reason for tossing the Republicans out of office? And what if they don't hold conservatism entirely blameless?

What, indeed? But we've seen this pattern from both sides before when either one loses an election and experiences a major realignment. It's always blamed on those who weren't ideologically pure enough, or righteously angry enough, to win. But that's the wrong response, IMO. Right now the movement is running purely on emotion, which might be great for venting but doesn't really do anything in terms of providing long-term solutions and alternatives to the liberals. In essence, the Cult of Limbaugh is just as bad as the Cult of Obama. It's about personality figures, not ideas-which Rush himself said are apparently unecessary anyway.

The Depression Diet

The economy may have one thing going for it: making us thinner in spite of ourselves:

Americans are spending $164 billion less (in 2007 dollars) in January 2009 compared to January 2008. Out of that, $112 billion is user-operated transportation--purchases of cars and trucks, and spending on gas and oil.

But another $56 billion of decline came from food! That is to say, adjusted for inflation, real personal consumption of food fell by $56 billion. That's the second largest contributor to the decline in personal consumption.

On the other hand, McDonald's seems to be doing brisk business. So we may still be a nation of lardasses-but lardasses on a budget.

Select-A-Tot

Are we ready for this?

A US clinic has sparked controversy by offering would-be parents the chance to select traits like the eye and hair colour of their offspring.

The LA Fertility Institutes run by Dr Jeff Steinberg, a pioneer of IVF in the 1970s, expects a trait-selected baby to be born next year.

His clinic also offers sex selection.

UK fertility experts are angered that the service will distract attention from how the same technology can protect against inherited disease.
....

Dr Steinberg said: "I would not say this is a dangerous road. It's an uncharted road."

He said the capability to offer such services had been around for years, but had been ignored by the medical community.

"It's time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand."

But isn't the question not whether the technology will be used, but should? Shades of Aldous Huxley.

The Grab Bag

Historian Burt Folsom, in comparing some current governors' refusal to take stimulus money to governors who said no to Federal money during the Depression, says:

One of the many dangers of the stimulus bill is that it will remove incentives for states to solve problems they created and encourage states to look to Washington to try to secure more money than they pay in taxes. This is not responsible constitutional government, but grab bag politics and democracy at its worst.

The culture of dependency on the nanny state is one of the great dangers of succumbing to temptation. Unfortunately, if there's one thing big government is good at, it's temptation.

Bloggin' In The Years: 1933

It seems to have become the perfect cure for Depression blues:

Everywhere he moves he crushes out lives. He finally discovers Ann, and being a perspicacious ape, he decides that the safest place for himself and Ann is the tower of the Empire State structure.

Needless to say that this picture was received by many a giggle to cover up fright. Constant exclamations issued from the Radio City Music Hall yesterday. 'What a man!' observed one youth when the ape forced down the great oaken door on the island. Human beings seem so small that one is reminded of Defoe's 'Gulliver's Travels.' One step and this beast traverses half a block. If buildings hinder his progress, he pushes them down, and below him the people look like Lilliputians.

Does Kong represent the audience's collective frustration at the centers of wealth and big business in the Big Apple? Or is it just a shaggy ape story? Whatever the case, Kong fever seems to have caught on.

Civil War II

The Republicans have problems-big ones. They're still reeling from the election, and they lack leadership and coherence as a group. But the Democrats' woes may yet be on the horizon.

Broadly speaking, there is a long-standing conflict inside the Democratic Party between gentry liberals and populists. This division is not the same as in the 1960s, when the major conflicts revolved around culture and race as well as on foreign policy. Today the emerging fault-lines follow mostly regional, geographical and, most importantly, class differences.

Gentry liberals cluster largely in cities, wealthy suburbs and college towns. They include disproportionately those with graduate educations and people living on the coasts. Populists tend to be located more in middle- and working-class suburbs, the Great Plains and industrial Midwest. They include a wider spectrum of Americans, including many whose political views are somewhat changeable and less subject to ideological rigor. . . .

Although peace now reigns between the Clintons and the new president, the broader gentry-populist split seems certain to fester at both the congressional and local levels – and President Obama will be hard-pressed to negotiate this divide. Gentry liberals are very “progressive” when it comes to issues such as affirmative action, gay rights, the environment and energy policy, but are not generally well disposed to protectionism or auto-industry bailouts, which appeal to populists. Populists, meanwhile, hated the initial bailout of Wall Street – despite its endorsement by Mr. Obama and the congressional leadership.

If the populists should prevail, they may do to the Democrats what populist Republicans did to their own gentry in the 1960s. A purge can be a good thing, if it helps a Party rediscover its grassroot origins later on.

Dude, Here's Your Deficit

Whatever happens with the stimulus, it's all theirs now:

Last fall the Democratic-controlled Congress refused to act on President Bush’s 2009 budget proposal, gambling that by delaying ratification of the budget until the new year, they would also have the Presidency and could write the budget exactly the way they wanted: without any Republican interference.

It worked out for them like they planned. However, the 2009 budget may be a case of “be careful what you wish for.” Barack Obama and the Democrats now own the 2009 budget.

Meanwhile, Bush will be grilling and clearing brush in Texas.

"Pardon Us While We Get Skins Thicker Than Facial Tissue"

It never ends with some people.

The art advisor to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged a visiting Hollywood delegation to apologise for 'insults and slanders' about Iranians in films, the ISNA news agency reported on Saturday.

'(Iranian) cinema officials will only have the right to have official sessions with... Hollywood movie makers when they apologise to the Iranians for their 30 years of insults and slanders,' Javad Shamaghdari said.

'The Iranian people and our revolution has been repeatedly unjustly attacked by Hollywood,' he said, citing '300' and recent Oscar nominated movie 'The Wrestler' as among offending films.

In 2007, the war epic '300', a smash hit in the United States for its gory portrayal of the Greco-Persian wars, drew the wrath of Iranians for showing their ancestors as bloodthirsty.
Similarly 'The Wrestler', was booed in Iran and heavily criticised for the scene of breaking and tearing of the Iranian flag by the picture's star, 2009 Oscar nominee Mickey Rourke.

'We will believe (US President Barack) Obama's policy of change when we see change in Hollywood too, and if Hollywood wants to correct its behaviour towards Iranian people and Islamic culture then they have to officially apologise,' Shamaghdari added.

If I told them what they could do with their request, would it get me banned in Iran? Probably.

Former Communists, Stimulate Thyselves

Western Europe seems to be in less and less of a giving mood these days.

European Union leaders, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, rejected a call by Hungary for a sweeping bailout of Eastern Europe, as the bloc struggled to find consensus on an approach to the spiraling financial crisis at a summit Sunday.

The global recession has greatly strained the bonds holding together the 27 nations that now make up the European Union, formed in the wake of World War II, and poses the most significant challenge in decades to its ideals of solidarity and common interest.

Ms. Merkel said she couldn't see the need for a broad grant of aid to Eastern Europe. 'The situation is very different' in Europe's economies. 'We cannot compare Slovakia nor Slovenia with Hungary,' she told reporters.

Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, who proposed a bailout package of up to €190 billion ($240.84 billion), warned that without aid a 'new Iron Curtain' would descend on Europe and again separate East from West. Hungary has been battered by declining demand for its exports and a plummeting currency -- straining Hungarians who borrowed in euros to buy houses that have now sunk in value.

I guess some welfare states are more equal than others...

Silence Is Golden

Well, at least he tried:

It's something few people can tell Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez: stop talking.

Chavez, whose speeches often stretch five hours or more, said on Sunday his doctor told him to stay quiet for three days to help a sore throat.

'I am a little affected by the intensive, continuous and permanent use of this cannon I've got here and the doctor has told me not to talk,' Chavez said to audience laughter.

Chavez immediately responded that silence was not the best medicine for him.

'I said 'listen friend, do what you can but how am I going to follow this treatment?' Three days without talking? I lasted one, not even one,' Chavez said at the start of a television show he presents every week.

I suppose there's always the hope that he'll eventually make himself too hoarse to continue. People who love to hear themselves talk are ultimately their own worst enemy.

AIG, Again

Didn't they learn anything? Apparently not.

American International Group Inc., the insurer deemed too important to fail, may get a commitment for as much as $30 billion in new government capital after a record quarterly loss, said two people familiar with the matter.

The insurer may also be allowed to make lower payments on government loans, said the people, who declined to be identified because there was no public announcement. New York-based AIG may forfeit part of stakes in its two largest non-U.S. life insurance divisions to lower the firm’s debt, the people said.

AIG, first saved from collapse in September with a package that grew to $150 billion, had to restructure its bailout after failing to sell enough units to repay the U.S. Firms including banks relied on AIG to back more than $300 billion of assets through derivative contracts as of Sept. 30, making the insurer a “systematically significant failing institution” that has to be propped up, according to the Treasury.

“The government has accepted all the downside with little chance of upside,” said Phillip Phan, professor of management at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in Baltimore. “They are trying to protect the global financial system from a complete meltdown.”

I'm sorry, but saving these cretins was a bad idea when Bush id it, and it's a bad idea now. But that's the thing about bad ideas in Washington-they tend to get passed from one administration to the next.

Maha Rushie Goes To Washington

OK, for better or for worse, here it is-Rush Limbaugh's now-famous appearance at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference. For the record, I actually agreed with a lot of what Rush had to say. It's the idea that he should be the next leader of the conservative movement that I'm skeptical of. He's a commentator-and the man he criticizes during this, Newt Gingrich, has, despite his own flaws, a proven track record as a leader. Available in several parts, at YouTube.

What's Old Is Newt Again

Don't call it a comeback; he's been here for years:

During the years when Tom DeLay and Karl Rove ruled Washington, conservatives wondered what they had to learn from a has-been who had been forced from power; now they wonder if he might have just a little more magic left under that schoolboy shock of white hair. “If you said to me that I could only consult with one individual, and my job was to bring the party back, Newt Gingrich would be the guy,” says Frank Luntz, the pollster who has worked with Gingrich going back to the 1994 Contract With America, the 10-point agenda that Republicans waved around on their way to the majority. “This guy would be the perfect ‘Behind the Music’ story, because he was on top, and then he lost it all, and now he’s back and bigger than ever. It’s perfect.”

With all due respect to Mr. Luntz, this is not your Clinton-era Republican Party. Newt is actually more moderate than most of the crowd that wants to retake the White House these days. His best role may be as an elder statesman rather than a radical revivalist.