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A cry in the wilderness — Marshall in the comments: "I'm tired of being constantly disappointed" — brings me to this:



Posted for fun (or as my own cry in the wilderness). My favorite line — "This is my blogging knife." We're all getting there, Allison (h/t Digby).

GP Read the rest of this post...

Vladmir Putin fires dart at gray whale in a very manly way

My god he's such an extremly macho, macho man. On the manliness scale he's up to 11. It's been a few years since his last manly outing so thankfully he's doing something new and rugged in the wild.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin fired darts from a crossbow at a gray whale off Russia's Far Eastern coast on Wednesday in the latest in a series of man-versus-nature stunts designed to cultivate the image of a macho leader.

Putin held his balance in a rubber boat that was being tossed around in choppy waters off the Kamchatka Peninsula, and eventually hit the whale with a special arrow designed to collect skin samples.

"I hit it at the fourth try!" a beaming Putin, kitted out in black-and-orange waterproof suit and black beanie, yelled to a camera crew from the boat.

As laughable as Putin's behavior is, we did have Americans buy into Bush cutting back trees and brush as well as Reagan living on a ranch. Gullible people aren't limited by borders. Read the rest of this post...

Does the US economy need some simple 'plumbing' changes or is it more serious?

Forget the plumber and find some architects to rebuild before it gets even worse. It's an interesting discussion so click through for a lot more from this former chief economist at the IMF.

This deeper critique is posed probably in its sharpest form by Arianna Huffington in her new book, “Third World America” (in the spirit of disclosure, let me note that I am a contributing business editor at The Huffington Post). Her point is that we should not think of the last financial crisis in isolation, but rather as the outcome of a longer-run pattern of behavior.

Excessive consumer debt is an outcome of prolonged inequality – in trying to remain middle class, too many people borrowed too much, while unscrupulous lenders were only too willing to take advantage of such people.

Raghu Rajan, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary, also have new books with related themes that link persistent inequality of income to the onset of financial crisis through various mechanisms. Mr. Rajan’s “Fault Lines” is more about the global economy (and overspending at the level of the American economy); Mr. Reich’s “Aftershock” focuses on the social and political impact of the crisis (and why, without addressing inequality, our financial problems will recur).

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Digital devices deprive the brain of downtime

And in science news:

It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.

Just another day at the gym....

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

Turns out the brain needs to think, not just process input. Who'd have thought that could be true? (h/t Nebris)

GP Read the rest of this post...

Taibbi on the summer of their discontent

Matt Taibbi, a perennial fave at Maison Chez Nous, has a long, thoughtful post about the Tea Party candidates in particular, and the summer in general. It's worth the ten minutes it will take to read it, and makes a number of points.

One is that the Tea Party crowd seems to have won this election cycle. He cites several examples, saying this about McCain (my emphasis):

In Arizona, John McCain trounced a Tea Party candidate named J.D. Hayworth by over 30 points in a primary race that was largely interpreted by the media as a repudiation of Tea Party values. I'm not sure they're right about that. McCain had to spend $20 million to fight off Hayworth – a staggering number for a Senate race – and beyond that, he had to bend himself completely ass-backwards issue-wise in order to maintain what’s left of his cred with right-wing voters.

That $20 million figure surprised me. Matt goes on to review the summer:

In fact if you follow Fox News and the Limbaugh/Hannity afternoon radio crew, this summer’s blowout has almost seemed like an intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts “warning” Hutus that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in “self-defense.” A sample of some of the stuff we’ve seen and heard on the air this year:

[insert well-phrased list here]

Taibbi doesn't believe that Fox and friends are trying to inspire race war — he chalks up their agitprop to "material expediency: overcoming the real threat of new financial regulations after the crash, winning elections, and making TV profits." But his catalog is telling.

The analysis is well considered; check it out. I especially like his ending suggestion, since it parallels one of mine:

I'm beginning to wonder why effective boycotts against these hate-media channels, and particularly Fox, haven’t been organized yet. Why not just pick out one Fox advertiser at random and make an example out of it? How about Subaru and their unintentionally comic “Love” slogan? I actually like their cars, but what the f---? How about Pep Boys and that annoying logo of theirs? Just to prove that it can be done, I’d like to see at least one firm get blown out of business as a consequence of financially supporting the network that is telling America that its black president wants to kill white babies. Isn't that at least the first move here? It's beginning to strike me that sitting by and doing nothing about this madness is not a terribly responsible way to behave.

Rule 17: When there are many, start with one and stick with it. Shamelessly stolen from Walter Reuther, whose UAW always struck just one automaker per negotiating season; and almost always won.

Hint: This would make a perfect action opportunity for some organizer. From Matt's lips to your ears.

GP

UPDATE: From MG1 in the comments, foxnewsboycott.com. The list of advertisers is divided: A–L here, and M–Z here.

The boycott main page suggests McDonalds, but I don't see them on the list. So how how about a suggestions contest? The ideal candidate is high-profile and deserving. Suggestions welcome; reasons appreciated. Thanks! Read the rest of this post...

Federal Reserve pushes for delay in bailout disclosure

It's hard to imagine what the former NY Federal Reserve President (at the time of the bailout) and current Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner wants to hide. Having transparency during the administration that promoted "change" would have been nice though maybe that was asking for too much. Bloomberg:

The Federal Reserve Board sought to delay the court-ordered release of documents identifying banks that might have failed without the U.S. government bailout while it considers an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Fed asked the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York yesterday to delay implementation of a ruling that compels the central bank to release the documents.

“The stay is necessary to permit the board to consult with the Department of Justice regarding an appeal to the Supreme Court,” Fed spokesman David Skidmore said.

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GOP plan to repeal health care reform would add $455bn to the deficit

Oops. From CBO's letter:

Finally, you asked what the net deficit impact would be if certain provisions of PPACA and the Reconciliation Act that were estimated to generate net savings were eliminated—specifically, those which were originally estimated to generate a net reduction in mandatory outlays of $455 billion over the 2010–2019 period. The estimate of $455 billion mentioned in your letter represents the net effects of many provisions. Some of those provisions generated savings for Medicare, Medicaid, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and some generated costs. If those provisions were repealed, CBO estimates that there would be an increase in deficits similar to its original estimate of $455 billion in net savings over that period.

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Enviros 'feel stabbed in the back' over 'dastardly move' by Obama admin.

The environmentalists now have their own version of the DOMA brief from the Obama administration. Via NYT's Greenwire:

The Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to toss out an appeals court decision that would allow lawsuits against major emitters for their contributions to global warming, stunning environmentalists who see the case as a powerful prod on climate change.

In the case, AEP v. Connecticut, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a coalition of states, environmental groups and New York City. The decision, handed down last year, said they could proceed with a lawsuit that seeks to force several of the nation's largest coal-fired utilities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Reading the article evoked a lot of memories of June 12, 2009 when we read the Obama administration's despicable DOMA brief. This part sounds really familiar:

Matt Pawa, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the case, said he and his colleagues expected the White House to stay out of the matter. During a meeting with more than 30 administration lawyers at the solicitor general's office on June 24, it seemed they had "a lot of friends in the room," he said.

"We feel stabbed in the back," Pawa said. "This was really a dastardly move by an administration that said it was a friend of the environment. With friends like this, who needs enemies?"

Top attorneys at environmental advocacy groups are buzzing about the brief, sources say. Some feel betrayed by a White House that has generally been more amenable to environmental regulation than its predecessor.

"This reads as if it were cut and pasted from the Bush administration's briefing in Massachusetts," said David Bookbinder, who served as the Sierra Club's chief climate counsel until his resignation in May.

Welcome to our world. The Obama administration's DOMA brief actually was written by the Bush administration.

Now, what these environmentalists don't understand -- yet -- is that Team Obama isn't really on their side. Not in the way they think, anyway. It's a tough lesson and hard to swallow. The gays learned it early on, between Rick Warren and the DOMA brief.

(Mr. Pawa and Mr. Bookbinder should be prepared. They'll see a lot of their colleagues in the environmental movement make excuses and apologize for what the Obama administration did.) Read the rest of this post...

Kabul, the arrival (Videoblogger BicycleMark checks in from Kabul)

NOTE FROM JOHN: My friend Mark Fonseca Rendeiro, a rather prolific and good videoblogger pen-named BicycleMark, is on his way to Afghanistan for a month. I've asked Mark if he'd consider blogging about his experience here on AMERICAblog, and he's graciously accepted. Here is Mark's second post, on landing in Kabul for the first time. His first post, from yesterday, is here.
_________________

It is perhaps the most internationally built international airport the world has ever known. From the moment your flight lands, the equipment, the buildings, the vehicles, all have some kind of text or flag referring to the country that donated it. What Kabul international airport lacks in terms of facilities it makes up for with one of the finest collections of international aid and military flying machines I have ever seen. Spanning the decades since the 1960's, I start to wonder if someone hasn't been dumping their old military helicopters out back behind the main terminal.

My choice of cheap airlines puts me as only 1 of 4 foreigners on this flight, I really feel the drawback of this as I'm at the end of the customs line while dozens of Afghan men very slowly load their amazingly massive suitcases, crates, jugs of liquids and rugs through the x-ray machine. By the time my tiny suitcase and I reached the machine the customs official seemed to look at me as if to say "where's your massive jug?"

The ride from the airport features a whole lot of machine gun nests and a few Humvee, all manned by Afghan military. Overhead a Blackhawk helicopter flies by, for some reason I wonder if it is American, I wonder if the pilot is from New Jersey.

Speaking of which, up ahead there are several Jersey barriers and Afghan military with machine guns, the blue sign next to them reads "Ring of Steel". If you ever want to make your neighborhood sound 100x cooler, put up a sign that reads "Ring of Steel", a sense of excitement as well as caution came over me. Though it passed fairly quickly as I noticed no one seems to act much different in the Ring of Steel, people walk the streets, figures in Burka's seem to be begging (Is that really what I saw?), and guards stand outside their gates with their machine guns.

After walking through a perfectly beautiful flower garden-court yard, past a pomegranate tree, I'm greeted by the gentlemen at the front desk. "Welcome to Kabul!" I'm handed a form which asks, among other things, for my nationality. As I put the pen to paper I say, "Today I'll be American," making a reference to the fact that I have more than one nationality. Before I could laugh at my own poor excuse for a joke, the gentlemen says with confidence, "Today you are our guest, no matter your nationality, and we are happy you are here, helping our country."

In that moment it didn't seem rehearsed or disingenuous, it just seemed like a man who doesn't judge anyone by where they come from but rather, their commitment to helping others. As I opened the door to my cozy room with a view of a pear tree, I thought to myself: this is a good start.

Note: No photos yet, I'm still not fully aware of when is a good/bad time or where, to photograph. Read the rest of this post...

Dean Baker: Simpson isn't just offensive; he's also ignorant about Social Security

Most of the commentary on ex-Senator Alan Simpson's Macaca Moment has focused on the Macaca, on the utter offensiveness of it.

But as Dean Baker points out, Simpson is also profoundly ignorant about Social Security, not a feature in the co-chair of a commission that sees its duty as "fixing" the program. Mr. Baker:

I was also a recipient of one of Simpson’s tirades. As was the case with the note he sent to Carson, Simpson attached a presentation prepared for the commission by Social Security’s chief actuary. Simpson implied that this presentation had some especially eye-opening information that would lead Carson and myself to give up our wrong-headed views on Social Security.

While I opened the presentation with great expectations, I quickly discovered there was nothing in the presentation that would not already be known to anyone familiar with the annual Social Security trustees’ report. [...] It was disturbing to see that Simpson seemed surprised by what should have been old hat to anyone familiar with the policy debate on Social Security. After all, he had been a leading participant in these debates in his years in the Senate....

His determined ignorance in the face of the facts is the most important reason why he is not qualified to serve on President Obama’s commission.

Baker also discusses Simpson's ignorance of the world of Social Security recipients, hinted at in Simpson's "people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree" comment. (Only your crowd, Mr. Simpson, drives their Lexus to the mailbox, as it were.)

It's important, I think, not to lose sight of this point — Alan Simpson is profoundly unqualified to do his job, and should be fired for that reason alone.

Team Change? It's not too late to reconsider. It's your retirement too that we're discussing.

(Digby says the same thing here. And Jane has an important summary and update here; a must read.)

GP Read the rest of this post...

Wall Street banks maintain healthy appetite for risk even after reform

Washington let Wall Street continue to call the shots and decided what is best for the US so there's little reason to be surprised. Too many people forget that modern bankers make their bloated bonuses by rolling the dice. The days of conservative bankers is long gone so the sooner Washington accepts the reality of high risk, high bonus as a central part of the problem the sooner this problem will go away.

The new spin by the banking industry is that no, they won't use their own money for gambling but only the money of those gosh darned clients who are begging for high risk and who want to use their own cash. Uh huh. How could there possibly be a problem there? After all, Wall Street has never been known to find a small gap in the law and then open it up a mile wide and drive trucks through it until their business revolves around that previously little opening.

To think that the Obama economic team or Congress - either party - did not see this as a possibility is hard to believe. The Obama economic team is flooded with Wall Street leftovers who were looking for work after Citi imploded so it's hard to believe that these former Wall Street insiders missed this.

When Congress passed a new financial regulation bill last month, it sought to prevent federally insured banks from making speculative bets using their own money. But that will not stop banks from making bets that some critics deem risky, even as the rules go into effect over the next few years.

That is because many such bets — on the direction of the stock market or the price of coal, for example — are done on behalf of clients. So, the banks say, they will continue to be allowable despite the new restrictions.

Indeed, several trades that were made on behalf of clients went bad for the banks even as the new rules were being debated in Washington this year. JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, for example, each lost more than $100 million on transactions handled for customers in the period from April to July.

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Jane Mayer on the hard right-wing Koch family

Joe in DC did an excellent piece yesterday on the hard right-wing Koch family, and their funding of ... I'm still stunned ... the DLC. (Money enables Repubs and neuters Dems.)

And right on time, here's Rachel Maddow interviewing Jane Mayer on her new Koch family article, which Joe referenced. The interview is long, fact-filled, and fascinating. Watch and learn; my notes at the end.



Rather than gloss the main points of the interview, I'd like to gloss the meta-point.

Right-wing billionaires have been drinking our milkshake for literally generations. If it's not the Koch crew, it's Scaife. If not Scaife, it's Ahmundson. Or any of a dozen others.

They're motivated; wealthy beyond your understanding (literally; most Americans can't begin to comprehend the wealth of the very wealthy); driven by the kind of fire that burns in angels, demons, and those with OCD; and they're in it for the very long term.

They think back to McKinley and forward to the adulthood of their grandchildren. (You may want to click that last link; ick.)

That's their billionaires. Where are our billionaires? Selling off Air America because it didn't turn a profit fast enough. You want a poster boy for our billionaires? George Soros is a "former member of the Carlyle Group."

We will not win unless we clean out the Democratic party. And we will not win until our billionaires stop sending patrol boats against their billionaires' battleships. If you consider yourself one of our billionaires (I know you're out there), consider this a call to action. Seriously.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Anthem Blue Cross gets clearance for up to 29% rate increases in California

It's a good thing the public option was never promoted. Who ever would have gone for such obvious socialism? Corporate socialism is just dandy but when it bleeds into the government, no way. It's much better to support rate hikes that are providing some of the highest executive compensation plans in the country. LA Times:

California insurance regulators cleared the way Wednesday for Anthem Blue Cross to implement scaled-back rate hikes after a previous increase was canceled amid an uproar over its size.

Anthem said it intends to put the new rates — averaging 14% and as high as 20% — into effect Oct. 1 for nearly 800,000 individual California policyholders.

Regulators also allowed one of Anthem's nonprofit competitors, Blue Shield of California, to move ahead with rate increases — averaging 19% and as high as 29% — for 250,000 individual policyholders.

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Thursday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Joe Biden is keeping up the pace while Obama is on vacation. Today, according to the Daily Guidance, he's heading to Manchester, NH "to mark a Recovery Act milestone."

The President returns from the Vineyard over the weekend. On Tuesday night, he's giving an address about Iraq to the nation from the Oval Office. (Note to White House media team: I know you're all geniuses, but that Oval Office address on the oil spill was a real dud. This one needs to be much, much better. Better speech. Better delivery. Work on it, please.)

Yes, Ken Mehlman is gay. Yes, it's good that he's helping to raise money for the marriage equality. He should -- and it's the least he could do. He spent a good part of the last decade politically bashing gays. This is another example of how quickly our society is changing. (Team Obama should realize how more and more out of touch their looking every day.)

Okay....what else? Read the rest of this post...

Regulation never works, except when it does

Once again, the Republican myth of self-regulation is a key part of the problem. Whether it's food safety, insurance, banking, you name it, the fantasy world that has been a key component of GOP policy since the Reagan years has repeatedly been proven to be a joke. Unfortunately consumers keep having to pay the price for bad policy. In theory the Democrats could and should start running harder against self-regulation but their cooperation over the years was critical for any of this legislation to succeed. NY Times:

Faced with a crisis more than a decade ago in which thousands of people were sickened from salmonella in infected eggs, farmers in Britain began vaccinating their hens against the bacteria. That simple but decisive step virtually wiped out the health threat.

But when American regulators created new egg safety rules that went into effect last month, they declared that there was not enough evidence to conclude that vaccinating hens against salmonella would prevent people from getting sick. The Food and Drug Administration decided not to mandate vaccination of hens — a precaution that would cost less than a penny per a dozen eggs.

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Home sales plummet

WSJ:

U.S. home sales plummeted in July to a level not seen in more than a decade, spurring fears of renewed weakness in housing prices and the broader economy.

Sales of previously owned homes fell 27.2% from June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.83 million, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday, the lowest level since the industry group started its tally in 1999.

The expiration of a home-buyer tax credit in the spring was expected to damp buying, though less severely. Economists said the sales drop—together with a corresponding rise in the inventory of unsold homes—meant another decline in housing prices was on the horizon. House prices had stabilized last year after declining since 2006.

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WikiLeaks to release CIA paper on Wednesday

After that rape thing, I suspect WikiLeaks is only going to do more of this now.

WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website that infuriated the Pentagon when it published thousands of classified military reports, said it will release a fresh set of documents Wednesday.

The group posted on its Twitter page Tuesday: "WikiLeaks to release CIA paper tomorrow." It did not specify a time.

The website set off a firestorm recently when it posted some 76,000 U.S. documents related to the war in Afghanistan. The group has said it has another 15,000 documents, which it plans to release soon.

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Consumers cutting corners on prescriptions to save money

From Consumer Reports:

Consumers, in a turn of the tables, have given their doctors a checkup and the diagnosis looks pretty grim: They think doctors are too cozy with big pharma, according to the 2nd annual prescription drug survey conducted by Consumer Reports National Research Center. The survey of more than 1,150 adults who currently take a prescription drug found that the vast majority object to the payments and rewards pharmaceutical companies routinely dole out to doctors because they feel these are negatively influencing how they treat patients.

In the past year, 39 percent reported taking some action to reduce costs. Some of these actions were potentially dangerous. Overall, 27 percent failed to take a drug as prescribed, for example, by not getting a prescription filled (16 percent), taking an expired medication (12 percent), or sharing a prescription with someone else to save money (4 percent).

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