Sasha tries to save the TV monkeys

I noticed that Sasha was paying a bit too much attention to the nature show I had on. A tiger was getting ready to pounce on a bunch of monkeys. Sasha's ears perked up. Then the tiger attacked, the monkeys fled, and Sasha flipped out. You have to go about a minute in before she flips out, but it's still fun to watch the first minute where you can see her paying more and more attention to the show.

Read More......

Greece is having a fire sale on islands

It's easy to see why people are angry in Greece. Why should everyone pay the price because of poor political leadership in the past and the banker ripoffs? The Guardian:

Now Greece is making it easier for the rich and famous to fulfill their dreams by preparing to sell, or offering long-term leases on, some of its 6,000 sunkissed islands in a desperate attempt to repay its mountainous debts.

The Guardian has learned that an area in Mykonos, one of Greece's top tourist destinations, is one of the sites for sale. The area is one-third owned by the government, which is looking for a buyer willing to inject capital and develop a luxury tourism complex, according to a source close to the negotiations.

Potential investors also looking at property on the island of Rhodes, are mostly Russian and Chinese. Investors in both countries are looking for a little bit of the Mediterranean as holiday destinations for their increasingly affluent populations. Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea football club, is among those understood to be interested, although a spokesman denied he was about to invest.

Greece has embarked on the desperate measures after being pushed into a €110bn (£90bn) bailout by the EU and the IMF last month, following a decade of overspending and after jittery investors raised borrowing costs to unbearable levels.

Read More......

Glenn Beck, novelist

So I'm looking through my Mystery Book Club offerings, and one of them is a novel, "hot off the press," by "TV firebrand Glenn Beck" called The Overton Window: A Thriller. If you know what the Overton Window actually is — something Glenn Beck has seriously abused — it attracts the mind, doesn't it?

Apparently, a "smart, handsome public relations exec [blah blah blah] meets a young woman consumed by the knowledge that the America we know is [blah blah blah]." Will he get [blah blah blah] in 14 rooms of the 12-room mansion? It's a fantasy — three guesses.

Hope you don't click the link. Oops, I didn't include one. Looks like you're on your own.

Thrillers are not easy to write — I know from experience. There's an actual skill involved. Think la Beck has mastered it? Me neither.

Good d*mn luck, M. la Beck. Hope the Overton Window opens wide for you.

Yours in good writing,

Gaius Read More......

92-year-old Sen. Robert Byrd in 'serious' condition

Robert Byrd is in the hospital. He's been hospitalized several times over the past few years. But, this time, Byrd's staff is reporting that his condition is "serious."

The Senate being the Senate, any Democratic absence has an impact. And, it sure looks certain that Byrd won't be in the Senate for the vote on Wall Street reform this week:

Sen. Robert Byrd (D., W.Va), currently Congress’s longest-serving member, has been hospitalized in “serious” condition, diminishing the chances of the Senate putting the financial-overhaul bill to a vote this week.

Byrd, aged 92 and currently Congress’s longest-serving member, was admitted to a Washington area hospital late last week for what was thought to be severe dehydration and heat exhaustion brought on by this summer’s near triple-digit temperatures. He was expected to spend just a few days in the hospital, but Byrd spokesman Jesse Jacobs said in a statement on Sunday that “other conditions have developed which has resulted in his condition being described as ’serious.’”

Developing "other conditions" doesn't sound good, especially for someone so frail.

Nate Silver explains West Virginia's laws on succession. Read More......

More on the G-20 and the markets

Following up this earlier post by Chris in Paris, it's starting to look like an important week coming up. This weekend we have the G-20 meeting in Toronto, with a divided group. Some call for tightening; others oppose it.

Adrian Pabst at the Guardian puts it this way (my emphasis):

Most European governments claim that slashing public spending now is essential to avoid a Greek-style meltdown and sustain the fragile recovery, otherwise financial market pressure will downgrade national bonds. That, in turn, would raise the costs of public borrowing and also increase long-term interest rates, thereby crowding out private-sector investment, which alone can create sustainable jobs.

That's essentially the argument underpinning Germany's recent austerity package of €80bn (£66bn) in spending reductions and tax increases until 2016 and also this week's Con-Lib emergency budget with 25% cuts by 2015. Across the EU, George Osborne's neo-Thatcherite approach has tipped the balance in favour of the deficit hawks who advocate swingeing cuts.

By contrast, the US, China, Russia and Brazil are adamant that cutting government spending too fast too furiously will jeopardise growth and could lead to long-term stagnation or a double-dip recession. They argue that the global credit crunch caused an economic slump that has bequeathed a deficiency of demand – a lack of total investment and consumption spending, compared with total economic capacity and full employment.

He continues (again, my emphasis):

Economically, "shock-and-awe" fiscal austerity has a strongly deflationary effect that cannot be offset by expansionary monetary policy, with baseline interest rates near 0%. Politically, austerity undermines the social bonds of trust and reciprocal help on which free, democratic societies rely. Mass unemployment and social unrest raise the spectre of nationalism and endanger the very foundations of democracy.

I'd like to underscore just for a moment those twin arguments. The first — with interest rates at the zero boundary, you can't offset deflation (a disastrous falling-price spiral) with expansionary interest rates. This argument should sound familiar — Krugman and others have been making it for a while now.

The second argument — austerity undermines the social contract. And when social groups are at each other's throats, little good can occur.

So what's a market to do? Literally — what will the markets do in this environment? On the one hand, Big Money loves squeezing the "small people". But if the small people can't buy groceries, they certainly won't buy big screens, and earnings will tank for all those big people who own most of the stock in the world.

So once more the Dow is hovering down at the magic 10,000 point. We're told this is due to fears of a double-dip recession:

Retail stocks fell Thursday as investors worried that the economy, which had been showing some signs of life, may be making a U-turn.

J.C. Penney, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Macy's and Red Lobster and Olive Garden owner Darden Restaurants were among the top decliners in the Standard & Poor's 500 index — each falling at least 5 percent. [my emphasis]

But if the Deficit Hawks get their way — at the G-20 and here at home — a double-dip is almost assured. And don't think of the Deficit Hawks as just the Germans; they're everywhere you turn over here.

So watch the news out of Toronto — and then watch the Dow this week. Big Money is in a quandary, torn between two goals — squeezing the smalls, or lining its pockets? Which will it choose?

Gaius Read More......

Income gap in US is increasing

When I look at the mild reform of the Obama administration, I can't help but wonder how they can't see this issue and take more serious action. How can it be so obvious to everyone else but not to the Larry Summers economic team? We've been moving in the wrong direction for decades and Obama can only stay the course.

The new CBO data — the most comprehensive data available on changes in incomes and taxes for different income groups — also show the following:

* In 2007, the share of after-tax income going to the top 1 percent hit its highest level (17.1 percent) since 1979, while the share going to the middle one-fifth of Americans shrank to its lowest level during this period (14.1 percent).
* Between 1979 and 2007, average after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent rose by 281 percent after adjusting for inflation — an increase in income of $973,100 per household — compared to increases of 25 percent ($11,200 per household) for the middle fifth of households and 16 percent ($2,400 per household) for the bottom fifth (see Figure 1).
* If all groups’ after-tax incomes had grown at the same percentage rate over the 1979-2007 period, middle-income households would have received an additional $13,042 in 2007 and families in the bottom fifth would have received an additional $6,010.
* In 2007, the average household in the top 1 percent had an income of $1.3 million, up $88,800 just from the prior year; this $88,800 gain is well above the total 2007 income of the average middle-income household ($55,300).

Read More......

Pope finds it 'deplorable' that Belgian police are actually investigating child rape cases

They just don't get it. They really think their jobs as priests make them immune from the law. On Friday, we posted the report that Belgian police conducted a series of raids on Catholic institutions to gather evidence in the growing child rape scandal in the country. That's often what police do when there's evidence of crime and a cover up.

Well, the Pope is in a snit over the fact that law enforcement officials are actually investigating the crimes. The Church covered up those sex crimes for decades in countries around the world. What's astounding is that Benedict really seems to think that the Church's law is on par with are country's laws -- even when criminal laws are broken. But, it's 2010, not the 16th Century:

The pope has called the raids carried out by Belgian police investigating priestly sex abuse "deplorable" and asserted the autonomy of the Catholic Church to investigate abuse alongside civil law enforcement authorities.

Pope Benedict XVI issued a message Sunday to the head of the Belgian bishops' conference, Monsignor Andre-Joseph Leonard. In it, he expressed solidarity with all Belgian bishops for the "surprising and deplorable way" in which Thursday's raids were carried out.

What's always been surprising and extremely deplorable is how the Catholic Church has handled the child rape scandal. This would have ended a long time ago if police in other countries treated the child raping priests like the criminals that they are. Read More......

Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

There are two major themes on the Sunday shows today. The Kagan confirmation hearings start this week, hence the Kagan nomination is the talk on some of the Sunday shows. Then, of course, we've got the McChrystal debacle and what that means for the never ending war in Afghanistan.

On Afghanistan, among others, we'll see CIA Director Leon Panetta doing the "This Week." From the Senate Armed Service Committee, we'll see its chair, Carl Levin, on CBS and its Ranking Republican, John McCain, on "Meet the Press." McChrystal's resignation put a spotlight on Afghanistan and a lot of people are wondering what the hell is going on over there.

Also, Michael Hastings, who wrote the McChrystal piece for Rolling Stone will appear on CNN's Reliable Sources.

On Kagan, from the Senate Judiciary Committee, we'll see its chair, Patrick Leahy, and its ranking Republican, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, on CBS

Just about anywhere you look today you'll see a Senator. There are ten of them making appearance today. That's 10% of the Senate.

The full lineup is here. Read More......

Fame

More perfect weather over here, finally. We woke up at 6AM and did a fun bike ride for a few hours and then met everyone for breakfast. The fields here in the area are mostly wheat and also some colza which is used for cooking oil. Read More......

BP blocking employees from speaking with Congress

Obviously BP is above the law.

The chairman of a House panel investigating the Gulf oil spill said Friday that BP won't let members talk to several employees who may have critical information about what led to the catastrophe.

Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., told The Associated Press that BP PLC has cited its own investigation as its reason for denying access to the employees.

BP spokesman David Nicholas said in an e-mail that BP "has not objected to providing access to any of the specific BP employees that the committee has requested, and we continue to cooperate with the committee." He would not elaborate.

Read More......