Lose billions, make millions

While it's only normal to lose your job after such losses - something the Bush team never could comprehend - the payouts on Wall Street are eye popping. Merrill Lynch is forking out $161 million and now Citigroup is giving away $40 million to their failed CEO. It's just friends taking care of friends and they'll just find a way to throw the costs onto small customers. Read the rest of this post...

Would the real Colbert campaign killer please stand up?

Who is the fearless team that was afraid of a comedian?

Well, during the last day or so behind the scenes, the Clinton folks, who play hardball, have been shopping around to some writers (not this one) a story idea that a couple of prominent Obama supporters had lobbied the South Carolina Democratic Party's executive council last week to keep Stephen Colbert off the state's primary ballot, which they succeeded in doing.

When you think about it, that's probably a good idea. Colbert, a funny fellow who plays a political talk show host on his Comedy Central show, got Doritos to sponsor his candidacy and claimed to be showing the fundamental hypocrisy of the political system by trying to run in both parties' primaries.

He's good for a laugh, and normally serious Tim Russert even had him on the normally respectable "Meet the Press," for a faux serious candidate interview. The "truthiness," as usual these days, is that Colbert's "campaign" provided priceless free publicity for his TV program and new book.

The Clinton folks may also have wanted Colbert off the ballot too, because each vote for...

the comedian is one less for the real politicians. More likely, Clinton leads in South Carolina polls and Obama needs more votes to catch her. And polls indicate he appeals to roughly the same younger, college-educated crowd as Colbert does. So his operatives lobbied against the distracting Colbert candidacy.

So with this update to the previous post about Obama sinking the SS Colbert, I again ask is this petty or practical? Could be both. Read the rest of this post...

After cutting veterans' benefits, and quite literally leaving vets to die at Walter Reed, Bush says Dems are bad on vets' issues and he's the hero

Bush fails our vets repeatedly, the Dems refuse to call him on it publicly in any kind of coordinated way, so Bush turns around and blames Dems for the very problems he's caused and they're trying to fix. We begged the Dems, publicly and privately, to jump all over the vets' issue, and they didn't. Just add it to the litany of issues - from privacy to Osama - that the Dems have repeatedly dropped the ball on.

I swear, the Democrats deserve every single bit of pain they get. They're absolutely useless. Heads need to roll in this party, bad. The current crop of members, leaders, and consultants have no idea, nor desire, to fight back. They deserve to lose. A serious, serious bloodletting is needed in our party. Now. Read the rest of this post...

Ask me your questions, for my next podcast

I think I'd like to try an experiment for my next podcast. If you guys can figure out how to do it, send me a sound file via email with a question for me (make the subject of the email "podcast question"):

I'll then grab a handful of your questions and answer them during the next podcast. The questions can be about politics, or anything really, and I'll pick and choose what I think is interesting. If you can send me the actually sound file of you asking the question, then I can weave you asking the question into the show. When you email me, make sure you let me know how you want to be identified (real name, first name only, comments pseudonym, or what - and let me know your city, since I think it'd be nice to be able to say "Suzie in Seattle asks..."). This may be interesting, it may not. But let's try. Also, if anyone can't figure out how to do the audio recording, you can email me your written question and we can do it the old fashioned way too. Read the rest of this post...

Comcast is not going to like this

The FCC is - gasp! - going to open up competition with cable TV. There is absolutely no reason why TV should be as costly as it is in the US. Comcast has been effective with their political lobbying and the result to consumers has been bloated and increasingly expensive cable bills. How many people in the US have monthly cable bills that are under $45 and include cable TV, phone service, and high-speech Internet? In Europe, it's common.

As I have mentioned quite a few times, when France can offer numerous options for phone/internet/TV that are lower than the US, there's something seriously wrong in the US. Even with the strong euro, the deals over here are still attractive at 30 euro or roughly $44 dollar per month. The offers are all about the same with high speed internet, phone calls around the world and a block of standard TV channels plus VOD and pay channels. Here are a few: 9Telecom, Free.fr, Alice (TelecomItalia), Club Internet, and too many more to even list here. Yes, competition in France (at least in this industry) puts the US to shame.

Cable costs in the US are high because they have been allowed to dominate the market without competition. The US used to be known for competition but the GOP has let that drift across countless industries. This move by the FCC is not a bad start but let's see what else they're planning. Read the rest of this post...

Morning Open Thread

Joe is out at the BlogWorld conference in Vegas, so I'm going to assume he's not up yet. Read the rest of this post...

UK to try new (old) program to address opium in Afghanistan

If you are a poor farmer in Afghanistan (or for that matter, Laos, Myanmar, etc) and you can either grow crops that sell or crops that don't sell, what are you going to do? It doesn't even make sense to ask poverty-level farmers to do the "honorable" thing in the anti-drug crusade and go hungry. Being pragmatic has gone out of fashion in Washington over the last few years but at least Gordon Brown is giving it a go.

Gordon Brown is planning a radical scheme to subsidise farmers in Afghanistan to persuade them to stop producing heroin, as part of a wide-ranging drive to re-energise policy in the conflict the prime minister now regards as the front line in the fight against terrorism.

The Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown has admitted that the rise in opium production in the country means Britain "cannot just muddle along in the middle" and must come up with more imaginative ideas on opium eradication.

Ministers are looking at what Lord Malloch-Brown describes as a system of payments loosely along the lines of the common agricultural policy to woo the Afghan farmers off opium production. The government is conducting joint research on suitable economic incentives with the World Bank.

A similar strategy was rolled out in northern Thailand in the late 1980's with reasonable success. Today the former poppy growing region is one of the nicest regions to visit in Thailand. The Thai royal family (the Princess Mother, in particular) took a leading role in the program that helped replace poppy fields with coffee and macadamia nuts. (Here is a great PDF download about about the program.) The program helped promote those products as well as other locally produced goods so instead of growing poppy (for heroin) they grow and produce other products to feed themselves. The end result are farmers who can grow products that are in demand that do not add to the drug trade problems. They also created one of the most spectacular public gardens in the world, The Mae Fah Luang Garden.

This is an obvious situation where pragmatism will produce greater results compared to the moralizing sledgehammer approach that has been failing year after year in Afghanistan.

UPDATE: Check out the Mae Fah Luang Garden photos on Flickr. What a stunning garden and orchids to die for. Read the rest of this post...

E-Trade takes a seat at the party!

Wow, even E-Trade gets a seat at the table with the big boys. Yes, $3 billion more in rubbish and better still, an SEC investigation. Hooray! Just like Merrill Lynch! Who would have guessed that little old E-Trade was swimming in the cesspool of the subprime fiasco as deep as everyone else?

That's OK though because the deep and continuing financial problems are only tied to a few other firms including Merrill Lynch (Fortune 500 rank #22), Bank of America (Fortune 500 rank #9), JPMorgan (Fortune 500 rank #11), Wachovia (Fortune 500 rank #46), Capital One, Bear Stearns (Fortune 500 rank #138), Citigroup (Fortune 500 rank #8), UBS (Global 500 rank #36), WAMU, Morgan Stanley (Fortune 500 rank #20 + 2007 Most Admired Companies).

With such pedigree, who could believe that Deutsche Bank CEO is calling this "worst crisis that I have seen in my 30 years." What does he know anyway? Dick Cheney, says the US economy is resilient and we all know how often he's been spot on about everything. Who are you going to believe? Read the rest of this post...

Blog World and Blog Awards. Congrats to Joe.My.God

I'm out in Las Vegas for the Blog World Expo. Did a session called "Right vs. Left: Who's Winning the Battle of the Blogosphere?" on Friday morning. On the panel were Jerome Armstrong from MyDD, Jeralyn Merritt from Talk Left, three conservative bloggers (Hugh Hewitt, Dean Barnett, John Hinderaker) and Henry Copeland from Blogads. It got a little heated here and there. But clearly, we're winning the battle.

Last night, Joe.My.God won the 2007 Weblog Award for best GLBT blog. It's a great blog. Last spring, Michael Crawford a.k.a. Bloggernista (where I always seem to find the very coolest things) posted a video of Joe that I found very moving. It's definitely worth a watch -- and you'll understand why Joe won.
Read the rest of this post...