Open thread

Okay, we're expecting a high of 68 next week in DC, and a high of the low 60s in Chicago. This is just whacked. Read the rest of this post...

Wachovia joins the billion dollar loss party

How many million will their CEO make for his failure? Read the rest of this post...

Oil up 41% in last twelve months

Overall, prices of imported goods including oil are climbing rapidly. The weak dollar is taking its toll and no matter how Cheney tries to spin it, the US economy can only take so many thrashings from so many directions.

Overall import prices climbed an unexpectedly steep 1.8 percent last month, more than double the revised 0.8 percent gain in September for the steepest monthly increase since a matching 1.8 percent rise in May 2006.

Costs for imported petroleum jumped 6.9 percent in October after rising a revised 4.6 percent in September. That was the largest monthly rise in imported oil prices since an 8.5 percent surge in March.

"Petroleum prices continued an upward trend over the past year, rising 41.4 percent for the 12 months ended in October," the department said.

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Cliff's Corner

The Week That Was 11/09/2007

Another week. More preposterousness to report.

I'm guessing most reading this are aware, and most likely have been for a while, that under the guise of "news" Fox has offered its viewers a steady stream of bias since its inception in 1996. And we're not just talking about run of the mill propaganda here.

More like the kind of truthiness that would emerge from a meeting between Nikita Khrushchev and Leni Riefenstahl with Rush Limbaugh's drug regimen serving as finger food.

From attacking African Americans to the faux-bravado of pushing for war with Iran, from demonizing bloggers to distorting environmental issues, theirs is quite a record of achievement at Fox in propagating propaganda that is as fair as a foul ball and as balanced as Sean Hannity's meds.

Today, we have a special surprise though. I bring you Fox, and most especially Joe McCarthy's tortured spirit Billy O'Reilly, providing soft porn. All day and night. Yes, you read that right.

The self-righteous, pompous, bloviators who deign to lecture on how we should behave in our personal lives, are in fact exploiting women, pandering to the lowest common denominator and pushing smut out on the airwaves on a daily basis!

And all this time I thought John Gibson was the second coming of Walter Lippmann and Michelle Malkin the next Elizabeth Cady Stanton!

So watch the video and enjoy how the moral censors at Fox allow their innermost fantasies to come out on their "news" channel. While attempting not to publicly harm any falafels, of course.

Read the rest of this post...

Details of new ENDA poll - 16% favor position of United ENDA

I finally got the details on the new poll showing that nearly 70% of gays support moving ahead with ENDA even if it doesn't include gender identity, whereas only 16% of gays support United ENDA's position of killing ENDA until transgender people can be included too. You can read the details in the attached 3 page memo (click the image), but one thing the memo doesn't include, and I got the answer from HRC (which got it from the polling firm) is that the margin of error is +/- 5%, which is pretty good for a poll of gay people (polls of gays are notoriously difficult because we don't know how many members of our community are closeted, so it's hard to do a fair sample since you can only sample those who are willing to be identified as gay). Having said that, this is important data because up until now there was no real data as to how the community itself, rather than activists, felt about the issue. Now we know. And when the number is nearing 70%, in our community, where divisiveness nears a virtue, that's a pretty large mandate. Read the rest of this post...

Pay $11,000 an eye (out of your own pocket) or go blind, what would you do?

It's time for massive federal regulation of the health care insurance industry. As a young 40-something myself, it scares the hell out of me that I have no idea what my health insurance does or doesn't cover, whether my health insurance can or can't drop me should I catch some horrible costly disease, whether I have a lifetime limit on my policy (which happened to a friend of Chris in Paris - caught something horrible, had $2m in medical payments, the company said bye-bye have a nice death), or the fact (that I just recently learned) that I lose my health insurance if I move to any other state from DC. Yep, I lose my coverage and have to start all over again, so the problems I've had with eyes, among other things, become "pre-existing conditions" and probably won't be covered. So I can never leave DC again (unless I move to Europe, where I'll be covered, but then can't ever come back to the states since I won't be covered). Then there's a member of my family who is now being told that she may have to pay $11,000 out of her own pocket, PER EYE, to have a cataract removed. She had insurance, HAS insurance, has ALWAYS had insurance, but because she changed employment a few years back, her insurance changed, and her eye problems may now be excluded pre-existing conditions - sorry! So it's potentially looking like $11k per eye or go blind at the age of 50. "Socialized medicine" ain't looking so bad when the alternative is being middle-class and going blind at 50. What is wrong with our country?

Here's a vaguely related story from the LA Times that got me thinking about the rant above. From the LA TIMES:

One of the state's largest health insurers set goals and paid bonuses based in part on how many individual policyholders were dropped and how much money was saved.

Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies, documents disclosed Thursday showed.

The revelation that the health plan had cancellation goals and bonuses comes amid a storm of controversy over the industry-wide but long-hidden practice of rescinding coverage after expensive medical treatments have been authorized.

Read the rest of this post...

Cat wrastlin' Friday!

Just because the Democrats are afraid to stand up to Bush, it doesn't mean the AMERICAblog cats-in-Paris are afraid of a bit of fur flying. Hey, they can spot lame duck with no public support when they see one.

Nice bear hug, Nasdaq! Read the rest of this post...

Pakistan 2007 = Iran 1979?

No, there is one huge difference. Pakistan has the nukes that we only fear Iran may have some day. Things are getting bad. They arrested Bhutto last night. And we've been supporting the regime for years. I hope the rumors of us having a contingency plan to grab Pakistan's nukes in case of a revolution are true. Otherwise, we're going to have our own revolution here at home if Bush is responsible for letting Islamic fundamentalists get nukes after all - by taking over Pakistan. Read the rest of this post...

Lead NYT editorial on ENDA

NYT:

Winning a majority in the House required a painful decision by the bill’s sponsors to jettison language extending the prohibition against employment discrimination to transgender individuals. As a result, some gay rights groups opposed the final bill.

We sympathize with the groups’ sense of injustice, but disagree heartily as to strategy. Transgender people should be protected from discrimination, and we hope they soon will be. It would have been regrettable, however, had the sponsors refused to compromise, and as a result, lost the chance to extend basic civil rights to the millions of Americans who would be covered by the current bill....

Throughout American history, civil rights have been achieved in incremental steps. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, barred race discrimination in public accommodations, an enormous step forward at the time. It wasn’t until the next year that Congress protected voting rights in a separate bill....

The reasons the White House has given for opposing the bill — that it would be too burdensome on businesses and that it would lead to too much litigation — echo the ones given by opponents of every previous civil rights bill to pass Congress in the past 50 years or so. That parallel should make Mr. Bush and other opponents reconsider whether they want to be on the side of bigotry, and on the wrong side of history.

Read the rest of this post...

Friday Morning Open Thread

Strong winds pounding the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands ahead of what is feared to be a big storm. Rotterdam has closed its storm surge walls for the first time and even here in Paris my garden is being blown around and plants are everywhere. Could be a nasty weekend.

What do we need to know this morning on your side of the pond? Read the rest of this post...

Curious George is toxic

Merry Christmas, kids. What five year old doesn't want a toxic holiday?

About 175,000 Curious George Plush Dolls were recalled Thursday, becoming the latest popular toy made in China found to be contaminated with dangerous levels of lead.

Manufactured by Marvel Toys, of New York, N.Y., the Curious George dolls contain excessive levels of lead in their surface paint, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

So is corporate America ever going to bother testing the rubbish they sell or do they prefer letting little Billy and Susie be guinea pigs while they cut costs and make an extra two cents? Corporate responsibility, anyone? Read the rest of this post...

Obama focusing on pension plan problems

As a 40-something year old, I ask, what the heck is a pension plan? I remotely know a few old time IBMers who have pension plans but that's about it. (IBM no longer even offers pension plans to incoming workers. They now offer 401K plans, as I recall.) I can't think of a single person in my group of friends of my generation or younger who will ever see a pension plan. If Obama wants to talk about how he's going to help average Americans build retirement plans through 401Ks or something new, great, but pension plans? Really?

It's obviously terrible what has happened with numerous corporate retirement programs (my father had parts of his changed after retirement) but overall, it impacts so few compared to the bulk of the population. A pension plan is an issue that I can relate to about as much as I can relate to a lifetime job with a single employer. If Obama wants to set himself apart from the pack (or at least get into competition) we need to hear about how the 401K/IRA generation is going to have new programs to help us build our futures. What about protecting 401K/IRA owners from over-charging by Wall Street?

There's plenty to work with around individual retirement plans and that's our future, so talk to us. We're listening, but need to hear something better than problems that have existed for decades and are about the past. Read the rest of this post...

Merrill Lynch under SEC investigation

Hiding bad information, in this case billions of bad subprime loans, doesn't go down well with the SEC. When you look at the extensive losses across the industry, it's probably not much of a stretch to guess that others will be having conversations with the SEC. If these allegations turn out to be true, this would be a highly disturbing turn of events.

Embattled investment bank Merrill Lynch & Co. acknowledged Wednesday that federal regulators are investigating matters related to its holdings of high-risk mortgage debt and said it is cooperating fully with the inquiry.

The staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission began the investigation on Oct. 24, the world's largest brokerage firm said in a regulatory filing. It did not provide details. Recent news reports have said the SEC inquiry includes deals that Merrill struck with hedge funds to allegedly cloak its vulnerability to so-called subprime mortgage debt. The SEC has not publicly commented.

As much as I applaud the SEC for taking action, why are we only seeing this now? Where was the oversight when we needed it? I can accept that losses happen and that "greed is good" keeps Wall Street moving, but considering the record-breaking numbers and industry wide involvement, shouldn't someone have stepped in a few years ago? How many more lessons do we need to see that regulation and oversight is needed. This is what we should expect from our leaders.

There's no need to squash legitimate business and to push businesses away from making profits but it's about time we get back to finding some middle ground because this just isn't working. We shouldn't have to re-learn bad experiences from our own history. Read the rest of this post...

In Pakistan, Bhutto is placed under house arrest

Well, that highly publicized phone call from George Bush to Musharraf really calmed down the crisis in Pakistan:

The opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was placed under house arrest this morning, her political party said. Streets were filled with police officers carrying batons and shields, and trucks blocked roads, trying to prevent access to a protest rally that Ms. Bhutto had helped organize in Rawalpindi, the garrison city adjacent to the capital of Islamabad.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf said Thursday, a day after President Bush called, that Pakistan’s parliamentary elections would be held before Feb. 15. But his security forces continued to widen their crackdown and jailed thousands of opposition party members before the rally, which is scheduled to start in the early afternoon today.

Read the rest of this post...