US to start taxing foreign visitors

As if the time consuming and annoying visa documents weren't enough, now the US wants to punish foreign visitors even more. Whatever idiot thought this was a good idea needs to travel a bit. Start the clock on how soon other countries start punishing American travelers. Goodness knows it's important to curtail international travel and remain as insulated as possible.

The European Union is strongly criticizing a congressional proposal to charge a $10 fee to some visitors to the United States and suggesting it may carry a price for U.S. travelers.

If it passes, the EU says, some U.S. travelers to Europe could face retaliation.

The fee now under consideration in Congress would finance a new U.S. program to promote travel, a burden that the EU believes Americans should bear.

"Only in `Alice in Wonderland' could a penalty be seen as promoting the activity on which it is imposed," the European Commission's Ambassador to Washington, John Bruton, said in a statement Friday.

Read the rest of this post...

UK justice minister confirms oil deal discussions with Lybia

We're quite used to oil deals ourselves but releasing a convicted terrorist in exchange for oil and business deals is no better when other countries do it. The moral compass of the Labour government (both Blair and Brown) hasn't been functioning for years. CNN:

Ultimately, convicted bomber Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi was released on compassionate grounds because he is dying of cancer, a decision that Scottish, British and Libyan officials have said was not linked to oil or trade.

In an interview published Saturday in The Daily Telegraph, Straw said trade and the interests of oil giant British Petroleum were factors in the prisoner transfer agreement.

"Yes, (it was) a very big part of that," Straw told the paper. "I'm unapologetic about that. ... Libya was a rogue state. We wanted to bring it back into the fold. And yes, that included trade because trade is an essential part of it and subsequently there was the BP deal."

Straw's adviser said Saturday that Straw's quotes were accurate, but he emphasized that al Megrahi was not released under the terms of that deal.

Read the rest of this post...

Fox TV to address important issue of nation's dancing, instead of presidential address to joint session of congress

Faux News strikes again. The network is nothing more than a propaganda organ for the Republican party. Honestly, it's not clear why a political party is permitted to own a TV network, which is basically what FOX is - at the very least, the entire network is one big political donation to the Republican party. Imagine if a TV network spent all of its time helping Democrats, the Republicans would destroy it. Read the rest of this post...

Obama completing new banking rules

Definitely a good idea and worthy of praise.

The Obama administration is moving forward with one of its most fundamental financial reforms, a plan to constrain the growth and risk-taking of giant banks and other firms.

The plan is the keystone of the administration's broader effort to reverse a generation of public policy that strongly favored the emergence of behemoths such as Citigroup. The government now wants to pressure such firms to become smaller, more stable and less likely to need the sort of massive federal bailouts that have defined the current economic crisis.

Regulators would require all financial firms to hold larger capital reserves against unexpected losses. The largest firms would be forced to set aside even greater reserves, the rough equivalent of requiring a racehorse to carry more weight.

The days of "bigger is better" in the banking industry need to be put in the past. Sure they wrapped up mega-deals which enriched the dealmakers but beyond that, there are few clear examples where such deals (which were only possible due to size and crazy credit) provided real value or benefit. The big banks loved having more small time chumps as customers to help finance their deals but the benefits to small customers never materialized. It's time to put the Republican dream of unregulated mega-banks to rest. Read the rest of this post...

2,000 students at Washington State University appear to have Swine flu

Students have only been back a week. That's how quickly this spreads. Wow. Read the rest of this post...

Treasury to finalize TARP lobbyist rules

Heaven forbid these regulations would be included from the start, because that might make too much sense. Once again, this ship sailed long ago. The TARP recipients already used the TARP money to lobby Washington to get everything they wanted, which was no changes of substance. (Pay caps for TARP recipients was horribly implemented as well as the rules only apply to some, thus creating a two-tiered banking system of haves and have-nots.)

Nice work there by Geithner and Treasury. And again, this is Obama's team so like any leader, he deserves the credit or the blame for programs under his administration. That Paulson would ignore any oversight is understandable (disgusting, though they are his friends) but for Obama and Geithner to continue the "ignorance is bliss" policy is not what I expected from the person touting change. More of the same is not change.

The U.S. Treasury Department is expected to soon issue final lobbying restrictions for companies receiving taxpayer funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, two sources familiar with Treasury's thinking told Reuters on Friday.

The Treasury's new rules, first announced in January, are expected to severely restrict the department's contacts with lobbyists in connection with applications for TARP investments in individual banks and other companies.

The Treasury has indicated that the rules will use as a model the approach taken to shield from lobbyist influence the disbursements from Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus program.

Read the rest of this post...

The best explanation of how health care reform got totally f'd up

Matt Taibbi has the best explanation I've seen of how we got to where we are in the health care reform debate (i.e., who's to blame). With all due respect to Rolling Stone, I tried to take just a short excerpt. It was impossible. It's a great article, and a long one, please go and read the entire thing - you will finally understand the health care debate, the details of of the actual plans and who screwed us:

We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad....

The House versions all contain a public option, as does the HELP committee's version in the Senate. So whether or not there will be a public option in the end will likely come down to Baucus, one of the biggest whores for insurance-company money in the history of the United States....

Last spring, when he met with Rep. Lynn Woolsey, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Obama openly said so. "He said if he were starting from scratch, he would have a single-payer system," says Woolsey. "But he thought it wasn't possible, because it would disrupt the health care industry."

Huh? This isn't a small point: The president and the Democrats decided not to press for the only plan that makes sense for everyone, in order to preserve an industry that is not only cruel and stupid and dysfunctional, but through its rank inefficiency has necessitated the very reforms now being debated. Even though the Democrats enjoy a political monopoly and could have started from a very strong bargaining position, they chose instead to concede at least half the battle before it even began....

Once single-payer was off the table, the Democrats lost their best bargaining chip. Rather than being in a position to use the fear of radical legislation to extract concessions from the right — a position Obama seemingly gave away at the outset, by punting on single-payer — Republicans and conservative Blue Dog Democrats suddenly realized that they had the upper hand. Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would now give away just about anything to avoid having to walk away without a real health care bill....

One of the reasons for this chaos was the bizarre decision by the administration to provide absolutely no real oversight of the reform effort. From the start, Obama acted like a man still running for president, not someone already sitting in the White House, armed with 60 seats in the Senate. He spoke in generalities, offering as "guiding principles" the kind of I'm-for-puppies-and-sunshine platitudes we got used to on the campaign trail — investment in prevention and wellness, affordable health care for all, guaranteed choice of doctor. At no time has he come out and said what he wants Congress to do, in concrete terms. Even in June, when congressional leaders desperate for guidance met with chief of staff (and former legislative change-squelcher) Rahm Emanuel, they got no signal at all about what the White House wanted. On the question of a public option, Emanuel was agonizingly noncommittal, reportedly telling Senate Democrats that the president was still "open to alternatives."

On the same day Emanuel was passing the buck to senators, Obama was telling reporters that it's "still too early" to have a "strong opinion" on a public option. This was startling news indeed: Eight months after being elected president of the United States is too early to have an opinion on an issue that Obama himself made a central plank of his campaign? The president conceded only that a "public option makes sense."

This White House makes a serial vacillator like Bill Clinton look like Patton crossing the Rhine....

In many ways, the lily-livered method that Obama chose to push health care into being is a crystal-clear example of how the Democratic Party likes to act — showering a real problem with a blizzard of ineffectual decisions and verbose nonsense, then stepping aside at the last minute to reveal the true plan that all along was being forged off-camera in the furnace of moneyed interests and insider inertia. While the White House publicly eschewed any concrete "guiding principles," the People Who Mattered, it appeared, had already long ago settled on theirs. Those principles seem to have been: no single-payer system, no meaningful public option, no meaningful employer mandates and a very meaningful mandate for individual consumers. In other words, the only major reform with teeth would be the one forcing everyone to buy some form of private insurance, no matter how crappy, or suffer a tax penalty. If the public option is the sine qua non for progressives, then the "individual mandate" is the counterpart must-have requirement for the insurance industry....

All that's left of health care reform is a collection of piece-of-shit, weakling proposals that are preposterously expensive and contain almost nothing meaningful — and that set of proposals, meanwhile, is being negotiated down even further by the endlessly negating Group of Six. It is a fight to the finish now between Really Bad and Even Worse. And it's virtually guaranteed to sour the public on reform efforts for years to come.

Read the rest of this post...

Saturday Morning Open Thread

Good morning. It's a beautiful day here in the District of Columbia. I'm heading out for a run shortly. We're doing 15 miles today as part of our training for the Marine Corps Marathon, which is at the end of October. By, "we" I mean my running partner, Courtney, and me. This will be our sixth marathon together. It's a great day for running. No humidity. Not too hot. And, we've got plenty to discuss for the next two and a half hours. Our long runs usually double as venting sessions about the issues of the day -- and there are so many issues to vent about right now.

Tim Beauchamp, a.k.a. cowboyneok, has provided us with another original poem this morning. Tim also writes on the blog, Pink Panthers Blog!, (which is currently in the middle of an upgrade.) As I've said before, I've learned from writing on the blog that using fewer words can often be a harder challenge. Yet, a poet like Tim can use few words and short sentences to create amazingly powerful images:

The Monarch

I told you
I love you
You were afraid
it was the heat
of the moment
I could pour
my emotions
let you
bathe in them
Surely know
fluid feeling for you
is far from physical
Let opium fragrance
carry you above
fields of doubt
float gracefully over
stagnant ponds
Find me in meadows basking
in the aura
of your soul
Light upon me
Melt into one
fullness felt
before with you
Take my pollen, butterfly
Caress my stamen
with silken wings
If ever you sense
sweeter syrup
in flowering fields
never regret
spread monarch wings
against the azure sky
I will always be
part of you.

-Timothy Beauchamp

Okay, let's get this Saturday rolling... Read the rest of this post...

Youssou N'dour live

His music always makes me smile and brings back memories of driving across the stunning continent of Africa. One of these days I have to make it to his native Senegal. Read the rest of this post...

European Union failing to support remaining bluefin tuna

The few that are left are on life support yet that fails to register in Brussels. The Mediterranean was once full of life but today it's empty. Name the fish that used to call the sea its home and then try to locate one. On the French coast and into Italy I looked in horror as people of all ages swim into the sea with high powered spear guns. All I see are tiny fish with the largest possibly being half a foot. There's a severe lack of minimum standards and regulation of the sea. Even the fish merchants along the coast sell tuna from the Indian Ocean and swordfish from far away as neither exist in any substantial way. Having grown up along the Chesapeake Bay I know a dying body of water when I see one as well as what a rejuvenated sea can look like as well.

The EU needs to wake up and start getting serious on the subject of marine life before it's completely gone. Commercial fishing fleets never know when to say when so it's up to the government to set and enforce those standards. The Independent:

A proposal to ban the sale of bluefin tuna is being fiercely opposed by Malta, the capital of the lucrative global business, and by its representative in Brussels, the fisheries commissioner, Joe Borg.

Spain and Italy are also believed to be resisting an application to bar trade in bluefin under the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), which would cut off exports to the main market, Japan.

The European Commission will decide next week whether the EU will submit the application to a Cites committee meeting in March.

Conservationists fear that support from Britain, France and other northerly European nations for decisive action is wavering amid the objections.

The Commission is divided, with Brussels sources saying Mr Borg is fighting his environment counterpart, Stavros Dimas, who supports a ban.

Read the rest of this post...

France's foreign minister pushes for banker bonus controls

Something has to be done though it's highly doubtful the G20 or even the US and EU are going to work out anything together. Would a second dip change anything? It would be comforting to think so but that's probably not going to happen either. Lots of talking though by officials but remember that in Europe, London is the place. France is a much smaller bankers town so of course the talk is bigger. Until London moves from talk to serious action, even within Europe there won't be much change. Right now it is both the US and UK who are the primary obstacles as they have been the primary leaders in this sector.

France's finance minister, Christine Lagarde, in London for tomorrow's meeting of top finance officials from the G20 leading countries, said: "Governments are responsible to the people, not to the City. The City cannot be above the rules."

She said she was pleased with the publicity given today to the joint letter from French president Nicolas Sarkozy, German chancellor Angela Merkel and Gordon Brown which pledged to explore ways to control excess bonuses in the financial sector.

"That augurs well for a rapprochement," she said. "This is a key moment. We cannot allow a return to business as usual. The public across Europe have been flabbergasted, horrified at the amount of compensation paid to traders in financial markets when only eight months ago they were asking for public money."

Lagarde stressed France was determined to push through action at international level to restrict bonuses in spite of a lack of keenness on the part of the United States and Britain. "You can rely on President Sarkozy to push this through," she said.

Or at least talk about it and then tell others about how much he talked. Read the rest of this post...