Lula and Berlusconi need therapy

Fantastic generalization by the Brazilian President and besides sounding like an ignorant racist, he's factually wrong. The last time I checked, disgraced but wealthy Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O'Neal is African-American. The economic crisis has little to do with race and everything to do with excessive greed and mismanagement. Brazil or any other country in the world is no stranger to greed and mismanagement. Criticism of the failed policies is fine and well deserved but let's stick to the facts and address the issues.

Brazil's president blamed "white people with blue eyes" for the world economic crisis and said it was wrong that developing countries should pay for mistakes made in richer countries, sparking accusations of racism.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has criticized the European Union and the US for tariffs on products from developing countries and has advocated a bigger say for developing countries in decisions on the world economy, pointed a finger to Western bankers.

"This crisis was caused by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes, who thought they knew everything and now show they know nothing," Lula da Silva said after a meeting with the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the country's capital of Brasilia.

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Chrysler backs away from advertising on O'Reilly after ThinkProgress protests

Chrysler now joins UPS in distancing itself from O'Reilly after he reportedly had his cameramen stalk a woman, ThinkProgress writer Amanda Terkel. Read the rest of this post...

GOP leader Rush Limbaugh wants to change the word "dike" because it makes him uncomfortable when talking about the flooding in N. Dakota

From Towleroad:

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So the Catholic church is fine coddling Nazi-sympathizers and enabling pedophiles, but not okay with Obama

At some point, the leadership of the Catholic church needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. The church leadership has enabled pedophiles, and they're currently embracing a Holocaust revisionist, but the LA Times reports today that they draw the line at inviting the President of the United States to a graduation ceremony. They look ridiculous. Why don't they just admit that they're Republicans. They serve conservative politics, not the Lord. Well, they also serve themselves (and possibly someone a lot lower), otherwise they wouldn't be enabling pedophiles and Holocaust deniers. Oh for the days when a man of the cloth actually cared about doing good. Read the rest of this post...

Redoubt keeps erupting

For the past week or so, Redoubt, the volcano in Alaska, just keeps blowing its stack. Ash drifted into Anchorage yesterday.

The Anchorage Daily News has an amazing photo display including some great night time shots from Friday's eruption.

The volcano's continued eruptions have resulted in a whole new round of criticism of Governor Bobby Jindal:

Thanks to "something called volcano monitoring," to use the denigrating language of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, passenger jets did not fly into ash clouds when Alaska's Mount Redoubt erupted earlier this week.

Volcanic ash creates conditions akin to flying into a sand blaster. A KLM flight lost power in all four engines after it flew into the cloud created by a 1989 eruption of Redoubt.

The plane dropped by more than two vertical miles before its crew could restart the engines and land in Anchorage. No wonder Alaska Airlines canceled 19 in-state flights.... after Redoubt sent an ash plume 60,000 feet into the sky.

The eruptions of Redoubt carry a lesson that Jindal did not learn back when he was a Rhodes Scholar: Don't sneer at science.

It's been a long-standing GOP talking point to sneer at science. That's deadly. Every time the volcano blows, it's a reminder of how dangerous Jindal and his GOP colleagues are. Read the rest of this post...

The global leadership crisis

If anyone can step up to this challenge, it's Obama, but it's obvious that changes need to be made. Is this a matter of Americans embracing Obama and his plan or will Obama need to make changes? More from David Rothkopf of the Carnegie Endowment:

Here in the United States, there is Barack Obama. At a time of great crisis, there are invested in him -- as they were in Roosevelt -- the hopes of a nation and of the world. He has embraced the example of Lincoln, surrounding himself with powerful, independent-minded advisers. But as we watched his news conference last week, and as we listen to Geithner's testimonies and see the administration's economic team in action, we have to wonder: Will they emerge as the leaders we need, with new ideas, courageous enough to shape new institutions? The record so far is mixed.

Obama has made missteps in his first two months, and we can only guess whether they are due to his learning curve or his predisposition. The president's economic team is so uniformly drawn from one time and place -- Bob Rubin's farm team -- that they look like a poster child for the early warning symptoms of groupthink. Geithner & Co. have floundered in breaking free of the ideas that dominated in the 1990s, but they have also been bold about reintroducing government's role where it must be greater. Thus far, there is as much to worry us as there is to comfort us. Soon, we will have to judge this crew and, if they fall short, demand change yet again.

But to paraphrase Roosevelt, Obama can only be as great a president as the people let him be. If citizens had turned on Roosevelt early, he would have faltered, along with the nation's recovery. Because what is often lost in such discussions is the idea that leadership implies collaboration. We get the leaders we demand and thus deserve. (As the United States and England were making Roosevelt and Churchill, Germany and Italy were making Hitler and Mussolini.)

I might take exception with Churchill in this context. It was only after every other "standard" approach and political team had tried and failed that the Brits ushered in Churchill. Churchill was considered a political outsider and considered a last resort when we became PM in 1940. Read the rest of this post...

Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

Basically, there's one show to watch tomorrow. Obama is on "Face the Nation."

Okay, Geithner is on two shows, but seriously, who is going to make news? I don't think the Secretary of the Treasury will upstage his boss. Now, John McCain may try to outdo Obama, but he'd have to do or say something really crazy -- not that McCain isn't capable of doing just that.

Here's the lineup:

ABC's "This Week" — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
___
CBS' "Face the Nation" — President Barack Obama.
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NBC's "Meet the Press" — Geithner; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
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CNN's "State of the Union" — Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command; Richard Holbrooke, U.S. envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan; Sens. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C.

"Fox News Sunday" _ Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper; Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation.

"Meet the Press" is a real dud these days. I don't know anyone, maybe outside of the execs at NBC, who thought David Gregory was a good choice to replace Russert. Those NBC execs were wrong. Read the rest of this post...

Earth Day dinner

Joelle packed some candles for dinner with friends visiting from Toronto and we enjoyed a wonderful dinner over candlelight. It was a bit of a struggle initially because nobody had a lighter or matches (they were staying at a rented apartment) but eventually our hosts came through after trying different pieces of paper on the electric burner.

A fantastic meal - which is never easy in a strange kitchen - with a tasty dessert that took advantage of fresh rhubarb and raspberries and of course, cream.

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IOC with another profile in courage

What better way to solve the embarrassing problem of asking the Olympics to uphold the values that it claims to encourage? Little remains of what limited credibility the International Olympic Committee had following their bribery scandals and then the choice of Beijing. For all of the big talk from the IOC and western leaders, the reality is that the Olympics did nothing to further the cause of opening China. A bubble trade economy perhaps forced Beijing to change their approach with the west but the Olympics? Not at all. Now the IOC is making sure they can avoid any problems in the future with any of their host country choices. And when I say "problems" I mean legitimate and well deserved criticism.

International torch relays ahead of the Olympics have been scrapped by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

It follows the controversy that surrounded the Beijing Olympic relay which was dogged by protests as the torch made its way around the world.

The 2008 relay's London leg was hit by several incidents and criticism over China's 'torch police' security staff.

Organisers of the 2012 London Olympics have already said they had no plans to take the torch outside Britain.

Hat tip to Matt BH for catching this latest sad IOC story. Read the rest of this post...

Judge to issue subpoenas against Bush team of torture

It's a judge in Spain, but this could be interesting to watch. He's the same judge who sought and caught Pinochet. I might wonder about why the US has failed to pursue possible human rights violations at home, but I'm sure political leadership is already occupied with pursuing a fair deal for the Wall Street bailout, since they've been leading the way there as well.

Criminal proceedings have begun in Spain against six senior officials in the Bush administration for the use of torture against detainees in Guantánamo Bay. Baltasar Garzón, the counter-terrorism judge whose prosecution of General Augusto Pinochet led to his arrest in Britain in 1998, has referred the case to the chief prosecutor before deciding whether to proceed.

The case is bound to threaten Spain's relations with the new administration in Washington, but Gonzalo Boyé, one of the four lawyers who wrote the lawsuit, said the prosecutor would have little choice under Spanish law but to approve the prosecution.

"The only route of escape the prosecutor might have is to ask whether there is ongoing process in the US against these people," Boyé told the Observer. "This case will go ahead. It will be against the law not to go ahead."

The officials named in the case include the most senior legal minds in the Bush administration. They are: Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel and attorney general; David Addington, former vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff; Douglas Feith, who was under-secretary of defence; William Haynes, formerly the Pentagon's general counsel; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who were both senior justice department legal advisers.

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The protectionist hypocrisy game

Thankfully someone else has noticed this little game as well. If there is a country who isn't playing the game, I've yet to see them. Too bad the media too often helps promote this false story instead of calling them out.

Chinese-owned Minmetals has been blocked from acquiring the key asset in its $2.6 billion bid for OZ Minerals because the South Australian gold and copper mine was too close to a sensitive Australian defense facility, reports The Australian.

In addition, there's also trouble with a proposed $28 billion investment in Rio Tinto and some of its key mining projects by Chinese-owned Chinalco. The Australian government has labeled Chinalco a state-run firm. Under Australian law, state-run firms seeking to buy Australian companies have higher hurdles to jump than private ones.

And let's not forget China.

China, of course, shouldn't escape blame. It recently blocked Coca-Cola Co.'s bid to buy its biggest domestic juice maker -- China Huiyuan Juice Group Ltd. On March 24, Chinese officials denied the decision was aimed at protecting a national brand, but few believe that line .

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