Juvenile coelacanth filmed for first time

It wasn't long ago that people thought this fish had been extinct for 80 million years. The fish is living in Indonesian waters and it's not alone. What a cool discovery. Read the rest of this post...

Greetings from Barcelona

This picture is much better blown up, but still, I like it - it was the view from the conference room where we had my panel discussion today about the blogs and their influence, and it's got a bit of a futureworld meets old Europe - which is very much Barcelona, and this conference (Personal Democracy Forum - Europe). It was an interesting panel with Mick Fealty, a very interesting Irish blogger, Nicolas Vanbremeersch, who was one of the top bloggers in France, but moved on to create his own Internet consulting business, and another blogger Heidi Nordby Lunde. I'm exhausted, it's 1240am and I only just got online for the first time in a day - the connection has been spotty here. Just very fascinating - I'll share more stories and insights when I actually get a chance to breathe. Need to hit the sack. But it really is very exciting to see the political blogosphere, and Netroots, growing worldwide. And it's really exciting, to me at least, to be able to meet colleagues in other countries, doing a lot of the same work, and being able to learn from them, and share some of what we've done. It's a small world... :-) (Now none of you will get that song out of your heads!) Read the rest of this post...

Goldman shareholders asking for bonus cuts

I've been wondering how long it would take before shareholders turned on the excessive costs of payouts. With a forecasted average salary of over $700,000 per Goldman worker, it's not surprising that they are being called out first. With a cost of business like that, they better be delivering staggering numbers to shareholders. There has been a lot going on behind the scenes lately including a mild PR effort (surely prodded along by Warren Buffet) to improve their public image. Reining in this excess could also go a long way, even if it is going to be a small change. The Goldman name among Americans could hardly be any lower. Reuters:

Some of Goldman Sachs Group's largest shareholders have asked the company to cut the size of its bonus pool and pass along more of its profits to investors, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.

Although the shareholders are not pushing for a huge cut, they feel that Goldman should better reward shareholders for this year's rebound, the paper said.

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Crisis in US women's leadership

John met someone promoting equality for the new EU cabinet but as I mentioned earlier, we need to do much better with promoting women. The current numbers are rightly called a crisis, whether you are looking at business or government. Shouldn't we expect more?

The majority of Americans are comfortable with women leading in all sectors, but the reality is women hold only 18% of leadership positions across the 10 sectors we examined, including politics, business, law, sports, academia, journalism, religion, film/TV, nonprofit, and military.

In politics, for example, women have lost ground in the last decade as elected statewide executive officials and have made only incremental gains in Congress, where they currently comprise 17% of leadership. On a global scale, the U.S. ranks a dismal 71st out of 189 countries, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, in terms of women in legislatures, trailing behind nations such as Pakistan, Cuba, and United Arab Emirates.

At Fortune 500 companies, women hold only 15% of board seats, 16% of corporate officer positions, and a mere 3% of CEO positions, while women of color make up only 3% of board officers and 1.7% of corporate officer positions.

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Dallas Fed President: stop 'coddling' and break up 'too big to fail'

Hallelujah.

Fisher suggested the only way of ensuring that such financial giants do not pose recurrent problems is by making them smaller.

"This means finding ways not to live with 'em and getting on with developing the least disruptive way to have them divest those parts of the 'franchise,' such as proprietary trading, that place the deposit and lending function at risk and otherwise present conflicts of interest," Fisher said in prepared remarks to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

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Friday Afternoon Open Thread

It's a crazy day and John is having some internet connection challenges so pitch in and let everyone know what's happening. Read the rest of this post...

South Carolina discussing impeachment for Sanford

Couldn't happen to a nicer person. AP:

South Carolina lawmakers plan to formally consider impeaching Gov. Mark Sanford for the first time next week, the chairman of the committee beginning that work said Friday.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Harrison told The Associated Press he is appointing an ad-hoc committee of four Republicans and three Democrats who will begin meeting Tuesday. He said he expects to have a resolution to impeach ready before Christmas for the full Judiciary Committee to consider.

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Teabagger infighting leading to chaos

Splintered and infighting? Who could have imagined? Even more surprising is the claim that there is little management experience within the fractured group. It all sounded so dreamy a few short months ago.

Disagreements over those issues have spawned personal and institutional rivalries, at least one highly contentious lawsuit and — perhaps most significantly — resulted in the splintering of local, regional and national groups into a patchwork of hundreds of smaller groups that occasionally seem to be working at cross-purposes.

“These groups don’t play as well together as they should,” said Kevin Jackson, a St. Louis-based conservative author and activist who has spoken at dozens of tea party-type rallies and is traveling across the South with a convoy sponsored by the national Tea Party Patriots group.

“They’re fractured at the organization level, I think mainly because there are a lot of people who have not had managerial experience who all of a sudden are thrust into the limelight and become intoxicated with it. And when a potential rift comes up, instead of handling it and maybe agreeing to disagree, they splinter and go off on their own.”

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Democrats call for review of Federal Reserve

Absolutely. Clearly there is a danger in politicizing Federal Reserve decisions but looking at how the Fed handled the bailout of AIG and Wall Street, it's difficult to see how much worse it could have been. To date, Congress or the White House (either the current or the former) have hardly been impressive with taking control of the issue though the Federal Reserve does look like a black hole, accountable to no one. When billions are handed out with no strings, it's fair to ask questions and demand answers.

The group, led by Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., wants a congressional review of the Federal Reserve system. They want to allow congressional audits of the Fed as part of financial rules being debated by the House Financial Services and Senate Banking committees, according to a letter Wednesday to the committees' chairmen.

"Real financial regulatory reform cannot occur without an examination into the structure" of the Federal Reserve system, the letter says.

Details on which banks benefited from AIG's bailout never would have become known without demands from Congress, and a recent report shows flaws in the Fed's structure as a regulator, the lawmakers wrote.

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Friday Morning Open Thread

John is in BCN and Joe has probably reached beautiful South Africa by now where they are heading into summer. Joelle and I arrived in Jo'burg around this time of the year back in 2002. After six months in and out of the country we hated to leave and only did so because our tickets were expiring. The blue skies in southern Africa are amazing and star gazing at night is spectacular. From small villages to big cities, we found the people there to be very warm and kind. And then there's the wild life that is so enjoyable and so present throughout the country. One of the toughest parts of visiting for us was to see the impact of HIV/AIDS. Statistics don't tell the full story and were highly questioned by many. It was impossible to travel the countryside without seeing fresh graves in every cemetery. The contrasts there are everywhere.

John's post below about gender equality will hopefully be a hot issue over this way. Northern Europe is so progressive on the issue and Zapatero's Spanish government has been quite good but elsewhere in Europe it's embarrassing. Then again, look at the numbers in the US either for Congress or the work world. We all need to do a lot better.

So what's happening out there? Start threading... Read the rest of this post...

Online campaign takes on gender inequities in EU government

I'm sitting in the hotel lobby in Barcelona talking to an interesting English guy, Jon Worth, who, along with a small group of friends, just launched a campaign to push for more women on the European Commission. As Jon tells it, the European Commission is kind of like the Cabinet for the European Union (it's all a bit confusing).

Here's Jon's explanation on the Web site, it pretty much tells the story:

The idea of this website is simple. Every 5 years a new team of European Commissioners is chosen, normally as a result of a messy behind the scenes deal between the Member States. Last time this happened in 2004 we were lucky to end up with 8 female Commissioners. This time around it looks like the gender balance will be even worse.

We believe in gender balance. Neither men nor women should be under-represented in political bodies. Especially not in one of the most important political bodies of the European Union, the European Commission, representing half a billion European citizens. To challenge this we are proposing a Commission of 26 competent women!

This is one of the reasons I travel - you can really meet some fascinating people who are very much like yourself, in terms of working on the same issues and via the same vehicles (in this case, getting a small group of friends together to do online advocacy on an issue they care about). But it's not simply about meeting like minds. Hopefully we can share best practices, what works, what doesn't, and serve as a resource in the future for progressives around the world. It really is incredibly cool (to me). It's why I react so strongly against people who treat foreign travel as something snobby. It's a gift, being able to travel abroad, for sure. But it shouldn't be looked down on, ever.

We limit ourselves as a country, sometimes, with our small-mindedness. But that discussion is for another day. Read the rest of this post...

EU chooses Belgian as president

Maybe invading a country and partnering with George Bush wasn't such a great idea for Tony Blair after all. If he bring peace to the Middle East, maybe he deserves a second look but for now he's going to have to work a little harder at solving problems instead of creating them. The new EU president will be Herman Van Rompuy who is not exactly a household name.

Originally an economist, he has been a career politician though without any great claim to fame and a one year stint as Belgian PM. Previous comments about Christianity being an important principle in Europe is sure to worry many. The Guardian:

Europe's eight-year quest to establish a simpler and more democratic regime came to a dramatic climax tonight when the Belgian prime minister, Herman Van Rompuy, and Britain's Cathy Ashton, were appointed as the two top officials embodying the new system.

In a surprise move that saw Gordon Brown abandon his campaign to have Tony Blair made first president of the European Council, Lady Ashton, the current European commissioner for trade, became Europe's foreign minister or high representative for foreign and security policy.

Rompuy, a Flemish Christian Democrat, who had been Belgium's prime minister for less than a year, became president of the European Council, the first permanent leader who will chair EU summits and represent the EU abroad.

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