Friday Orchid Blogging

Phalaenopsis manii

This is a Phal. manii, or a close kin. Phals are the orchids people tend to buy at the supermarket, the "moth orchid," as it were. So manii's are in that same family, but they're a lot cooler. Only problem, they're not as floriferous as a plain old supermarket phal. So I don't really own them because I like big and showy. This photo I took last week at Al's Orchid Greenhouse out in Leesburg, VA. Al has great stuff, but unfortunately had a fire a few months back, so he's rebuilding his stock. Still, he has a lot of nice plants, so if you're in the area, and into such things, it's worth a visit. Well that's about it for this week. Enjoy. JOHN Read More......

Fed officials voice concerns over bailout and future risk

It's good to see Federal Reserve officials voicing their opinions, unlike Congress who hardly says anything about this radical change for the worse. By bailing out Wall Street the Fed is only encouraging more gambling and more risky behavior. For the millionth time, where are the sacrifices by Wall Street? How are they really changing their behavior? We deserve answers and so far Wall Street isn't saying anything and Congress isn't asking.

The comments by Richmond Fed President Jeffrey M. Lacker reflect a concern among people within the central bank and close to it that the emergency actions taken over a single weekend in March may have fundamentally recast the role of the institution -- but without the lengthy, deliberative process that normally would precede such a move.

"The danger is that the effect of recent credit extension on the incentives of financial market participants might induce greater risk taking," Lacker told the European Economics and Financial Centre in London, "which in turn could give rise to more frequent crises, in which case it might be difficult to resist further expanding the scope of central bank lending."

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Bush/McCain economics continue to hit housing

There are now 1,100,000 homes in foreclosure in the US. Even as a percentage of the overall number of home loans the number is going up. No matter what McCain's economic brain Phil Gramm tries to say for his big bank clients, these are terrible numbers that are directly tied to the banks that gambled with the futures of middle class Americans. Digging out of this hole won't be fast or easy but it will take even longer if we continue rewarding shameful, if not criminal, behavior of the banking industry. Who really believes McCain and Gramm would do anything but what the banks want? Read More......

Expect higher prices for all oil-based products

Crule oil futures closed at $138.5/barrel today.

Is there anything that's not going up? I can't wait to hear McCain say *he* will be the guy to jawbone Big Oil. Only last week Dow Chemical CEO raised prices 20% and warned of significant inflation driving up costs throughout the economy.

Besides gasoline, the Department of Energy calculates, there are 57 major uses of petroleum – everything from cosmetics to ballpoint pens, nylons, and even the waxes in chewing gum.

That is why the effect of high oil prices is now spreading well beyond the pump, where gasoline hit another record price of $3.98 a gallon on Wednesday. Now, consumers will have to brace themselves for other higher costs, since businesses such as Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble, and Colgate-Palmolive are raising prices on their products to recoup energy costs.

And here's another use for oil. Every product in America had to get to the store somehow, and that probably involved a vehicle using gasoline. Read More......

Will McCain ask Phil Gramm about UBS offshore investigation?

How is Gramm still involved in McCain's campaign? How many more scandals is McCain going to ignore before he pulls the plug on this guy? Not so surprisingly, the so-called liberal media somehow failed to mention that Phil Gramm is McCain's campaign co-chair and rumored choice for Treasury secretary when they wrote the story about the latest problems at UBS.

So much for McCain's big talk about change. It's business as usual, including yet another banking scandal right under his nose. Read More......

Oil sees biggest one-day increase EVER - climbs almost $11

Above $138/barrel. I think this is quickly becoming THE issue of the election. We are seriously screwed.

Oil prices have shot up more than $10 to a new record above $138 a barrel after a Morgan Stanley analyst predicted prices could hit $150 by the Fourth of July.

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Obama leads in battle for Latino vote

Wait, you mean losing a demographic of voters in the primary to your Democratic opponent does not equate to losing that same demographic in the general election to your Republican opponent? But the media kept telling us this was true. Funny, nobody could have predicted that there was no correlation. Oh wait, yes we did. LA Times:

A new Gallup Poll summary of surveys taken in May shows Obama winning 62% of Latino registered voters nationwide, compared with just 29% for McCain. Others have found a wide gap as well. The pro-Democratic group Democracy Corps compiled surveys from March through May that showed Obama with a 19-point lead among Latinos. And a Times poll published last month showed Obama leading McCain among California Latinos by 14 points.

Republicans say McCain's numbers among Latinos at the moment are disappointing...

Yeah, you think? Read More......

Video of Iceland Polar Bear being shot

I'd reported on this yesterday, via Andy Towle. The police in Iceland shot and killed an exhausted and starving polar bear, when they could have just tranquilized it. They then posed with the dead animal. The polar bear had swum 200 miles in search of land - because of global warming, polar bears are increasingly drowning because they don't have ice flows to rest on. There's now video of the shoot via an Australian paper. I captured a number of screen shots of the video, to the left - you can click the image to see a much larger version. These guys really are asses.

As an aside, this is the perfect issue for enviro groups to go nuts on in order to educate the public about global warming, as I've been saying for years. Drowning polar bears? Kind of a made-for-TV image. But they won't jump on it the right way because they're good liberals, and good liberals don't seize opportunities, they miss them. Sigh. Read More......

Why Clinton's non-concession speech shouldn't have been a surprise

Tuesday night, Senator Obama clinched the Democratic party's nomination for President of the United States, and Senator Clinton announced she was going to take some time to figure out what's next.

While the speech was in bad taste and has been very poorly received since, we should have seen it coming.

See, even though Senator Obama had been the frontrunner since January, you'd never know it listening to the media. Although Senator Obama took and maintained a significant lead in the delegate count - the only count that matters in a mixed primary process - reporters composed an alternate narrative. They kept Clinton very much in the mix up until the absolute possible moment by entertaining every ludicrous rules-bending, game-changing strategy her campaign threw on the table.

So when Senator Clinton lost - really lost - on Tuesday night, it should have come as little surprise to anyone paying attention that she refused to admit defeat. Mathematically, the race had been over for quite some time, and yet it hadn't mattered. The Clinton camp got a pass at every turn. Why should Tuesday have been any different?

We'll know tomorrow what's next, but I don't think putting Clinton on the ticket is a good idea for a variety of reasons, not the least of which her campaign has come to represent everything we should despise about politics - the lying, cheating, stealing ends-justify-the-means mentality. I feel we've got a real shot to turn it all around without the drag of the past hanging like an albatross around the neck of the party.

But that aside, today we've got blame to cast beyond the Clinton camp. Journalists need to take responsibility for what happened Tuesday night. Like a lax parent who never says no and is then somehow surprised when his kid misbehaves, the media needs to evaluate its role in allowing Senator Clinton to get to a place where she could stand in front of the nation and ignore reality. To accept and deliver the words she did Tuesday night, Clinton had to believe she still had a chance. She had to believe there was some game left to play, some angle left to manipulate.

And who could blame her? It worked for so long that there was no reason to suspect it wouldn't again. I'm all for telling both sides of a story, but not every story has two sides. Sometimes the math adds up, and the number's not negotiable. The media had a responsibility to hold Clinton accountable months ago, and it failed. Read More......

FLASHBACK: Nov. 12, 2007, Joe says Hillary isn't going to win the nomination

The morning of November 12, 2007, our deputy editor Joe Sudbay told me that he didn't think Hillary was going to win the Democratic nomination. I said, huh? He said, yeah. So I thought it would make an interesting, if not kooky, podcast. I decided to listen to the podcast again, since now we know the rest of the story. Joe's main point was that he had a sense that Hillary was stumbling. She was going to lose Iowa, and that would set her up to lose New Hampshire - and the rest would be downhill from there. In fact, Obama won Iowa but Hillary won New Hampshire. Joe thought it would be over by Super Tuesday, with Hillary losing. In fact, it wasn't. But she never got her mojo fully back after her loss in Iowa. Iowa put Obama on the map, destroyed Hillary's inevitability, and Hillary never caught up. You can listen to the podcast again here, if you like. Read More......

NY Bank ‘loses’ 4.5M unencrypted customer records

Your daily privacy outrage:

In yet another unbelievable story of data irresponsibility, the Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon lost two sets of unencrypted backup tapes containing private data belonging to 4.5 million individuals. Third-party vendors misplaced the tapes during transport to off-site locations. According to the bank, the tapes “included shareowner and plan participant account information, such as name, mailing address, Social Security number, and transaction activity.”

Responding to the bank’s delay in reporting one incident, which took place on February 27, 2008 but was not disclosed until the end of May, Connecticut Governor, Jodi Rell, said...

Fortunately for Mellon Bank, no in the Democratic party actually cares about privacy, so they should be fine. Read More......

Unemployment jumps, 49,000 jobs cut

Brought to you by the GOP and their lobbyist friends from Wall Street. Actually, that's one in the same, such as McCain campaign co-chair Phil Gramm who has been on the payroll at UBS as a lobbyist. UBS has been one of the worst hit banks during the subprime crisis.

U.S. employers shed jobs for a fifth straight month in May and the unemployment rate jumped to its highest in more than 3-1/2 years, partly because more people were trying to come back into the workforce, a Labor Department report on Friday showed.

The unemployment rate rose to 5.5 percent last month from 5 percent, its highest level since October 2004. Some 49,000 jobs were cut from payrolls in May, up from a revised 28,000 that were lost in April.

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Yet another policy position that shows McCain is, in fact, running for Bush's third term

In John McCain's widely panned speech on Tuesday, the GOP nominee ranted about the charge that he's running for Bush's third term. Pretty clear this is one argument that gets under his very thin skin:

You will hear from my opponent's campaign in every speech, every interview, every press release that I'm running for President Bush's third term. You will hear every policy of the president described as the Bush-McCain policy. Why does Senator Obama believe it's so important to repeat that idea over and over again?

The reason why Obama will repeats that idea over and over is because it's the truth. Not that complicated really. Today's Today's NY Times provides yet another vivid example of a Bush-McCain policy:

A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.

So, yes. Obama should repeat over and over and over and over that McCain is running for Bush's third term. Because, it is the truth. Read More......

Friday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

This was quite the week, huh? Obama and Clinton got together last night -- without having the media in tow. That probably bruised some of the egos of the egotistical press corps. Whatever. It was a good move and furthers us down the road to unity. Seems like Democrats are coalescing around Obama. Everyone is keeping their eye on the prize of defeating John McCain and preventing Bush's third term. It's impressive how quickly it's happening, too.

Last night, Obama was in Bristow, Virginia, which is one of the outer suburbs of D.C. The event was carried live on a couple of the local news stations during the 6 p.m. news hour. Great timing -- and it was a very good way to show the D.C. types what this campaign looks like and why he's going to win. Virginia is in play in '08. Team McCain should be worried, very worried.

So, yeah, it was quite the week. A very good week. Read More......

Banks now facing new real estate financial problems

Subprime loan defaults were bad enough, but now banks are dealing with fire sales to unload hundreds of millions and billions of dollars worth of loans to the real estate construction business. The bubble that Greenspan and the Republicans created has ravaged the system in countless ways that will not just go away. Remember, this is what the GOP wanted. McCain and his economic brain Phil Gramm planned it this way and they got it. Whatever banks wanted, they received. Despite the big talk about being an independent person McCain has always heavily sided with the banking industry who brought us to where we are today.

The health of the economy is heavily dependent on the willingness of banks and other financial institutions to lend to consumers and businesses. Many banks have already taken substantial losses, and either will have to pare their lending or raise new capital to rebuild their safety nets. The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department have been pressing banks to raise capital so as not to further reduce lending.

Banks with swelling portfolios of troubled loans tied to land and housing are struggling to unload some of their real-estate debt. IndyMac Bancorp Inc., a Pasadena, Calif., lender, is trying to sell $540 million in loans made to finance land purchases and housing construction projects. Winning bids on many of the loans were, on average, about 60 cents on the dollar, according to people familiar with the matter. But some winning bids were only about 20 cents on the dollar.

Cleveland-based KeyBank, a unit of KeyCorp., is trying to unload $935 million in loans tied to land and residential developments, while Wachovia Corp. is shopping a $350 million loan portfolio, according to two people who have seen the offerings. Representatives of the banks declined to comment.

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'Missing' pyramid unearthed at Saqqara

What an amazing place. I posted some photos a few weeks ago from my visit to Saqqara last August and was in awe of the beauty throughout that site. The video links on the article page say the pyramid was hidden for years because villages were on top of the old site. While in Luxor, I was told that there are many more important tombs yet to be discovered because of small villages overhead. What will they re-discover next?

Although archaeologists have been exploring Egypt for some 200 years, Hawass says only a third of what lies underground in Saqqara has been discovered.

"You never know what secrets the sands of Egypt hide," he said. "I always believe there will be more pyramids to discover."

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