Obama's 'don't call it a stimulus' economic development plan - CSMonitor.com
When is a stimulus plan not a stimulus plan?
When there’s a midterm election coming up and you’re getting hit hard about big government spending, that’s when.
The Obama administration this week is rolling out a multipart economic, um, development program...
In a survey of 27 nations conducted from 1998 to 2001, the country where the highest proportion agreed with the statement "people are rewarded for intelligence and skill" was, of course, the United States. (69 percent). But when it comes to real as opposed to imagined social mobility, surveys find less in the United States than in much of (what we consider) the class-bound Old World. France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain—not to mention some newer nations like Canada and Australia—are all places where your chances of rising from the bottom are better than they are in the land of Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick.
Election Spending Sets Records: No Recession Here
This year's volatile election is bursting with money, setting fundraising and spending records in a high-stakes struggle for control of Congress amid looser but still fuzzy campaign finance rules.
Still fuzzy. But looser.
Wait. What?
Inventor sets world record for 'fastest piece of furniture' - Telegraph
Perry Watkins, an inventor from Buckinghamshire, is thought to have set a
world record for the fastest piece of furniture after driving his dining
table down a racetrack at more than 113mph.
I've been reading newspapers since I was six - since, in fact, the third day of Dick and Jane (dude! that story is booooring!) when I decided to look at the newspaper at home that evening (we subscribed to two, a morning and an evening paper, like a lot of other people did in the mid-40s) just to see if there were any words there I knew. Turned out, there were. There were lots of words there I knew or could figure out pretty easily and what's more, there was a story there that was a whole lot more interesting than Dick and Jane. It was called World War II. And it had pictures and maps and went on for years.
So it came as a shock to me to notice the other day that at the iTunes store, the iPhone app for the New York friggin' Times is rated 12+ for, among other things, "Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes," (a description that makes Infrequent/No Sense At All, but WTF). That means, children, somebody thinks you have to be 12 years old or better before you should be allowed to read the news.
But the Boston Globe app is rated 4+. Seriously, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Safe, Retiring House Democrats Owe More Than $2 Million In DCCC Dues
As the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) battles to keep ahead of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), a handful of Democrats who are either in solidly safe seats or retiring have yet to pay their dues to the House fundraising arm -- funds that would go toward boosting the election chances of their vulnerable colleagues.
The Huffington Post obtained the dues sheets for several of these House members. In total, they owe $2,134,509 in unpaid dues to the DCCC. All members, except Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), have enough cash on hand to cover the balance....
Hub escort service cheers Craigslist ad shutdown - BostonHerald.com
A Boston woman who runs an escort referral business is cheering the suspension of Craigslist’s adult services ads, saying prostitutes will be safer without them and her business likely will improve.
“My business will definitely pick up,” said Julie, who advertises a “premiere” Boston-based escort service on Google and withheld her last name for legal reasons.
Broader U-6 Jobless Rate up to 16.7%: Why the Jump? - Real Time Economics - WSJ
The comprehensive gauge of labor underutilization, known as the “U-6″ for its data classification by the Labor Department, accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs....
The U-6 figure includes everyone in the official rate plus “marginally attached workers” — those who are neither working nor looking for work, but say they want a job and have looked for work recently; and people who are employed part-time for economic reasons, meaning they want full-time work but took a part-time schedule instead because that’s all they could find.
Right. It turns out there is an official Labor Department measure of "labor underutilization" that's never mentioned in the press - well, never except this time in the Wall Street Journal that I've seen - and it's a whole lot worse than the one that is mentioned, as you can see.
Paris metro body heat to help warm building - Yahoo! News
PARIS (Reuters) – The warmth generated by human bodies in the Parisian metro will help heat a public housing project in the city centre, the capital's largest owner of social housing said on Friday.
Chumps on the Front - WWII: Intense Propaganda Posters - Photo Gallery - LIFE
One of history's most insightful critics of propaganda, George Orwell -- himself a propagandist for the BBC during World War II -- wryly observed: "All the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."
The Great Jobs Depression Worsens, and the Choice Ahead Grows Starker | TPMCafe
If there was ever a time for bold government action it is precisely now. Obama should be storming the country, demanding the largest responses to the jobs emergency in history. He and the Dems should be giving Republicans hell for their indifference to all this.
Instead, Obama is all over the map -- a mosque controversy, an Israeli-Palestinian peace talk (that may take years to complete if ever), a symbolic withdrawal from Iraq, and lots of little tax-cutting ideas.
Senate and House Democrats, meanwhile, are on the defensive. Polls even suggest Dems may lose the House and possibly even the Senate in November....
AccuWeather.com - Weather News | Earl to Bash Nantucket, Cape Cod, Boston Tonight
Tomorrow I'm going to get organized. I was going to get organized today but I was worried about Hurricane Earl. OK, not really, but it works as an excuse.
I'm back to using Google Reader and there's a link to Reader stuff in the sidebar now, which makes more space in the main part of the blog for important stuff like this.
I'm trying to figure out social networking. I think I maxed out on social networking sometime in the early 90s but there is a lot more of it going around these days - I clicked on a list labeled "share" today and it must have had eight or nine hundred choices. I'm thinking of starting a social networking site for weird, anti-social old men. Instead of followers we could have stalkers. Would that be cool or what? What's with the followers anyway? I don't want followers. Friends is a stretch.
You can see, I need to get organized. Tomorrow.
We can't just go around regulating stuff just because it makes you sick. What are you, some kind of wimp? Shut up and eat your meat solutions. (Yeah. Read the article.)
Beef Recall Intensifies Fight for Tighter Rules - NYTimes.com
Under federal rules, it is illegal to sell ground beef containing a more common strain of the bacteria, E. coli O157:H7, which has been responsible for thousands of illnesses, many deaths and the recall of millions of pounds of beef over the years. But federal regulators are now considering whether to give the same illegal status to at least six other E. coli strains, including O26, which can also make people violently sick.
The meat industry has opposed such a change, saying it is not needed....
The Modern Whig Party - Whig History
The writings of the Radical Whigs played a significant role in the development of the American Revolution.
Not wigs. Whigs. Really. But modern ones.
Survey: Employers still shifting insurance costs to workers | McClatchy
WASHINGTON — An annual survey released Thursday finds that workers are paying, on average, about $482 more for job-based family health insurance this year as companies force employees to shoulder more of the burden of health care costs.
The premium hike, up 14 percent from last year, means that workers are paying nearly all of a $495 increase in the average cost of family coverage this year....
Bumper-to-bumper as epic China traffic jam returns | Raw Story
BEIJING -- A huge traffic jam stretching at least 75 miles reappeared in northern China Thursday, with thousands of cargo trucks stuck in a bottleneck, state media said.
State television broadcast images of a long line of mostly cargo trucks inching slowly through Inner Mongolia on a major highway leading toward Beijing that has come to symbolize China's serious traffic problem.
Serious problem? Ya think?
BP Says Curb on Drilling Would Imperil Payouts - NYTimes.com
BP is warning Congress that if lawmakers pass legislation that bars the company from getting new offshore drilling permits, it may not have the money to pay for all the damages caused by its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The campaigns of Lieutenant Governor Timothy P. Murray and state auditor hopeful Guy Glodis scrambled yesterday to explain their tax delinquencies, just a day after state Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill acknowledged that he had failed to pay as much as $15,000 in state taxes that his committee owed on interest income over the past decade.
Ferrari recalls 458 Italias after a spate of fires | World news | The Guardian
Ferrari recalled more than 400 luxury Italia cars today after reports that a design fault could cause them to catch fire....
After sending its engineers around the world to investigate the reports of "thermal incidents", Ferrari asked the owners of more than 1,200 of the supercars, including around 50 in Britain, to bring them in for modification work.
Could a Peanut Paste Called Plumpy'nut End Malnutrition? - NYTimes.com
“Poverty is a business...there’s money to be made.”
In Somali Civil War, Both Sides Embrace Pirates - NYTimes.com
For years, Somalia’s heavily armed pirate gangs seemed content to rob and hijack on the high seas and not get sucked into the messy civil war on land. Now, that may be changing, and the pirates are taking sides — both sides....
This seems to be beginning of the West’s worst Somali nightmare, with two of the country’s biggest growth industries — piracy and Islamist radicalism — joining hands.
Meghan McCain’s Dirty Sexy Politics Speed Read - The Daily Beast
The Morning After the Election
“Plans for winning? Oh, we had lots of those. My father had spent the last two years talking about nothing else—all the things he was going to do when he won, the things to fix, the war, the economy, health care. But now the talking had stopped. The rallies were finished. And I woke up in my parents’ guest apartment in Phoenix alone in bed and wearing my gold glitter dress and a smeared game face of election night makeup.” (pg 173)
Could have done just fine without that, thanks.
Gates, in Iraq, Takes the Long View - NYTimes.com
RAMADI, Iraq —On the day of a formal military ceremony marking the end of United States combat operations in Iraq, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said that history had still to judge whether America’s involvement in the seven-year-old war was worth the cost.
DUBAI (Reuters) – A heated U.S. debate over a planned Islamic center near New York's World Trade Center site is seen by Middle East media, scholars and citizens as more of a domestic American issue rather than an attack on their faith....
The U.S. row is perceived as much less of an affront to Islam than Switzerland's vote to ban minarets and France's moves to forbid the full face veil, observers say.Party on.
...the impact of Hurricane Earl...should be minimal for Western Massachusetts.
