Month: July 2010

by Jacob Davies You can tell from the first sentence that this story isn’t going to end well: Timothy McCollough freely admits that he stopped making payments on his Chase Manhattan credit card in 1999. He says he did not have the means to pay after he was disabled by a head injury that cost … Read more

by Jacob Davies Back on the Well (in the stone age of the Internet), there was a tradition of having an introductions thread when a new forum was opened. The hosts and the regular users would introduce themselves and invite any new members to do likewise. The nice thing about it was that even if … Read more

by Jacob Davies I’m often surprised to read or hear from Americans who believe that the US has fallen behind other industrialized countries in output or standard of living. Sometimes people even believe that China is about to eclipse the US in standard of living. Now, anyone who’s read what I have to say knows … Read more

by Eric Martin The ADL on the contemplated expansion of the mosque near the World Trade Center: We regard freedom of religion as a cornerstone of the American democracy, and that freedom must include the right of all Americans – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other faiths – to build community centers and houses of worship. … Read more

by Eric Martin Kevin Drum calls attention to some alarming recent scientific evidence of global warming's effects on our ecosystem.  This one has to do with the health of the world's oceans, and it borders on cataclysmic: So, anyway, as temperatures rise the plankton die. As plankton die, they suck up less carbon dioxide, thus … Read more

by Eric Martin Adam Serwer highlights only the most recent encroachment on civil liberties undertaken by an executive branch that is, in this regard, as avaracious in its appetites with Democrats in charges as with Republicans: Civil libertarians have been trying to add more restrictions to the FBI's National Security Letters since their use exploded … Read more

by Jacob Davies Via Ezra Klein, a novel argument from the hydraulic-fracturing natural-gas industry: if you knew what we were doing, you wouldn’t let us do it… so we have to keep it secret. Here’s the industry’s appointed spokesman: Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma said the new requirements could effectively end onshore natural gas production. … Read more

by Jacob Davies You have to hand it to the New York Times: they really know how to pick a perfect link-bait case study. This one is a classic: Tremaine Edwards, 35, a former computer technician who had been unemployed for two years before he was hired in May by Gallery Guichard, a private gallery … Read more

–by Sebastian I don't like to bleg.  But I do like to help my friends out.  I have a friend who is one of the long term unemployed.  He had a great job in a bio-tech field and went through one of that field's fairly routine layoffs expecting to get hired somewhere else right away.  … Read more

by Eric Martin This might interrupt the steady flow of flowers and candy from the lucky liberated: As the US draws down its troops and supplies, which should culminate in a total withdrawal by 2012, funds for humanitarian relief operations in Iraq are dwindling at an alarming rate. US funding generally comprised 30-56% of total funding for … Read more

by Eric Martin Adam Serwer suggests that the seemingly jarring claim by Tennesse gubernatorial candidate Ron Ramsey that "Islam is a cult" should not really surprise anyone.  He might be right: If you're surprised by this remark, it's because you're not reading what they're reading. The right-wing media is full of sentiments like this, bigoted remarks you … Read more

by Jacob Davies We may not be the New York Times, but we can still have fancy interactive features: The gradual squeeze of everyone but the upper 10% is like trying to get out the last of the toothpaste from the tube. Now I know that income share isn’t the whole story: in theory, at … Read more

by Eric Martin This is, apparently, what socialism under the reign of ObaMao looks like (The blue bars that is.  The red bars are capitalism in all its glory): $6,400 more for people with $500,000 in adjusted gross income, with cuts for earners with $150,000 or less doesn’t seem too outrageous to me.  Chart from the Wall … Read more

by Jacob Davies There’s a schizophrenia over Social Security among those who would like to see it done away with. On the one hand, the payroll taxes that fund Social Security – and have been subsidizing the rest of the budget for 25 years – don’t count as “taxes” when it comes to asserting that … Read more

by Eric Martin This item from Friday should not be allowed to slide down the memory hole: Long before an eruption of gas turned the Deepwater Horizon oil rig into a fireball, an alarm system designed to alert the crew and prevent combustible gases from reaching potential sources of ignition had been deliberately disabled, the … Read more

by Eric Martin Yet another example of stark anti-Muslim bigotry from high ranking Republican Party officials.  This one from Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, a leading Republican gubernatorial candidate, in response to question surrounding the growing opposition to the addition of a Muslim community center to a mosque already built in that state (via): …Ramsey proclaimed his … Read more

by Eric Martin As I'm sure many readers are aware, Wikileaks released a massive trove of classified reports on the Afghan war effort over the weekend (see the Wikileaks report here, and media coverage here, here and here).  The Wikileaks expose reveals a history of the conflict that often contradicts official Obama and Bush administration statements – with … Read more

by Jacob Davies Optimism is a fine thing, even in dark times. Things generally will return to getting better sooner or later, and despair is useless in helping get there faster. But there is optimism and optimism; “One day I’ll get a job so I won’t stop looking” is the good kind. “We can’t pay … Read more

by Eric Martin My time flies.  Last month, his 8th, he started crawling.  Now he's like a little marathoner – of crawl.  And, naturally, his instinct is to make a b-line for whatever it is he shouldn't be going near.  He used to be such a good baby: But then, nothing makes him happier than … Read more

by Eric Martin Paul Krugman comments on a recent Karl Rove op-ed that addressed the Iraq war and related political implications: Karl Rove now tells us that his “biggest mistake” was not fighting back against the perception that the Bush administration deliberately misled us into the Iraq war. His main evidence that nothing like that happened is the … Read more

by Eric Martin Note to politicians in Washington: If you want to reduce the budget, vote for the public option. From the CBO (via Matt): CBO estimates that the public plan’s premiums would be 5 percent to 7 percent lower, on average, than the premiums of private plans offered in the exchanges. The differences between the … Read more

by Eric Martin Isn't Newt Gingrich supposed to be the intellectual, the "ideas man," the not-as-loony-as-Sarah Palin option in the GOP?  Apparently not: There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to … Read more

by Eric Martin Barry Ritholtz tackles a question via email regarding a topic that has been discussed on this Site with some regularity (via): “Can you support your position, in a fast, easy way, why the US housing boom was NOT caused by Fannie and Freddie, or the CRA? I understand all the factors you … Read more

by Eric Martin The increasingly vocal campaign to prevent a mosque from being built near the Ground Zero site in New York City is an unseemly mixture of ignorance, irrational fear, naked bigotry and opportunistic political demagoguery.  It also represents a blunder in terms of counterterrorism policy. Unsurprisingly, Sarah Palin has thrust herself to the forefront of this effort, with her characteristic mangling … Read more

by Jacob Davies Chicago, in 1948: (Via the Ebert Club; no link.) This video reminds me of driving through St Louis on the way back from Milwaukee. Unexpectedly, knowing nothing of what to expect, downtown St Louis was a spectacular metropolis rising out of an endless plain; the civic buildings rival the Parthenon, as if … Read more

by Eric Martin Yet another reminder of why stronger regulation of industry, and stiffer penalties for infractions, are required, and why industry self-regulation/de-regulation as championed by the GOP is such a spectacularly bad idea: Directed by supervisors, miners at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine commonly disabled monitors that could detect methane gas before the explosion that killed … Read more

by Eric Martin Glenn Greenwald links to Britain's former chief intelligence official observing what was, really, the logical result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: Britain's support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan radicalized many Muslims and triggered a big rise in terrorism plots that nearly overwhelmed the British security services, the former … Read more

by Jacob Davies (We just moved over the weekend and we’re still buried in boxes, so I haven’t had a chance to post here the last few days, but this is a quick* post on some issues related to taxation.) * Quick, and therefore not short. Pithiness is hard. (Pissiness, on the other hand…) In … Read more

by Eric Martin Liel Leibovitz views and transcribes a rather telling video shot of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who, presumably, thought the cameras were off: In it, Netanyahu dismisses American foreign policy as easy to maneuver, boasts of having derailed the Oslo accords with political trickery, and suggests that the only way to deal … Read more

by Eric Martin Is there any doubt that Summers and Geithner have been disastrously incompetent in terms of managing the economic downturn?  Not that Rahm helped much. I can only hope that Simon Johnson is right, and that Geithner's opposition to Elizabeth Warren will prove his undoing.  Obama needs a financial team overhaul, or at … Read more

by Eric Martin Having previously railed about the excessive deference shown by politicians toward local police forces, and the obsession with appearing "tough on crime," New York Governor Paterson deserves credit for these two initiatives: Today he will be signing a bill prohibiting the NYPD from storing the personal information–names, addresses, social security numbers–of individuals … Read more

by Eric Martin Kevin Drum performs a neat and tidy evisceration of previously popular GOP misinformation regarding the supposed impact the estate tax would have on family farms, and the prospect of family farmers would be forced to sell their farms by the "onerous" burden of the estate tax.  The short answer: the estate tax wouldn't actually force any such sales, … Read more

by Eric Martin So I pumped around six posts, chosen from a range of many years, into this "who do you write like" machine thingy and each time, without fail, the answer was: David Foster Wallace.  Although I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I've never read his work, on the upside, you can't credibly accuse me … Read more

by Eric Martin Matt Yglesias reacts to news about the Obama administration's growing concern with the radicalized insurgency in Somalia – the result of a process of radicalization that was the predicted outcome of the Bush administration's decision to back Ethiopia's invasion of its longtime rival in the name of "helping" Somalia and, ironically, combatting radicalization: At … Read more