(Image: Daniel Cardenas; original)
7.31.2010
The buck stops with that guy over there, whatzisname, Obama says
Shirley Sherrod to sue Andrew Breitbart after conservative blogger sparked race flap over speech
"We were reminded this past week that we've still got work to do when it comes to promoting the values of fairness and equality and mutual understanding that must bind us together as a nation," Obama said at the National Urban League conference.
"Many are to blame," he said, adding, "including my own administration."
It is, by the way and certainly IMO, a really bad idea for Shirley Sherrod to sue that Breitbart guy, whether it's her own idea or somebody's putting her up to it, same thing. A lawsuit will get twisted around into an argument over the 1st Amendment rights of the press, and Sherrod will wind up looking bad no matter how justified her complaint.
Screwed
Op-Ed Columnist - A Sin and a Shame - NYTimes.com
As Professor Sum studied the data coming in from the recession, he realized that the carnage that occurred in the workplace was out of proportion to the economic hit that corporations were taking. While no one questions the severity of the downturn — the worst of the entire post-World War II period — the economic data show that workers to a great extent were shamefully exploited.
7.30.2010
Woohoo! Maybe we can get another shootout going!
Billy The Kid To Be Pardoned, 130 Years Later? - CBS News
(AP) The showdown between frontier lawman Pat Garrett and notorious outlaw Billy the Kid has fascinated the American public for nearly 130 years with its classic, Old West storyline.
As it turns out, the feud isn't completely over.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is considering granting a posthumous pardon to Billy the Kid, angering descendants of Garrett who call it an insult to recognize such a violent outlaw.
No hope and very little change
UNDERNEWS: OBAMA TO HAVE FIRST CHILD SOLDIER TRIED SINCE WWII
Chase Madar, Counterpunch - Come October, a military commission in Guantánamo will try Omar Khadr, a Canadian national captured outside Kabul in 2002, when he was just 15 years old. This will be only the third Gitmo trial and the Obama administration’s first, and there won’t be anything kinder and gentler about it.
But give our government credit for breaking new ground: no nation has tried a child soldier for war crimes since World War II, and the decision to prosecute Khadr has drawn protests from UNICEF, headed by a former U.S. national security adviser, as well as every major human-rights group.
Maybe they just couldn't afford Brownie
BP hiring former FEMA head for Gulf recovery - Yahoo! News
Incoming BP CEO Bob Dudley was in Biloxi to outline his company's long-term efforts to help the Gulf. The company said they include hiring former Federal Emergency Management Agency head James Lee Witt and Witt Associates, a public safety and crisis management consulting firm. BP did not say how much Witt would be paid.
The fix is in
From the ESPN story, "What's lurking in your stadium food":
Sports fans don't always see such health threats when ordering a $5 hot dog and $6 beer at a professional sports stadium or arena....
Poke around until you find Wrigley Field on the map and find this little bit of Chicagoness:
Chicago health inspectors inspect vendors while the stadiums are empty, when no workers are preparing or serving food.
It's The City That Works.
Catastrophize?
UNDERNEWS: ARMY TO BRAINWASH TROOPS
Lester said the program would develop “communication skills, cognitive reforming skills and help soldiers not to catastrophize..."
To hell with it; I'm going back to bed.
7.29.2010
Wait. What?
Bill Kurtis, Walter Jacobson To Anchor CBS 2 News At 6 PM - cbs2chicago.com
CHICAGO (CBS) ―The legendary team of Bill Kurtis and Walter Jacobson are returning to CBS 2 to anchor the 6 p.m. newscast, station boss Bruno Cohen announced on Thursday.
These guys were legendary, as CBS puts it, in the 1980's. So what is this: News for Geezers?
Why do people go to football games?
Video Technology Added at New Meadowlands Stadium - NYTimes.com
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — How do you keep football fans as regular visitors to stadiums when the television coverage of every play is so good?
For the Giants and the Jets, the answer, perhaps surprisingly, is more and better video than people can get at home. This season, the New Meadowlands Stadium will offer fans free smart-phone applications that they can glance at to see video replays, updated statistics and live video from other games — and that will work only inside a stadium.
Because the TV's better there.
OK then
Saggy pants foolish but legal, NYC judge rules - Yahoo! News
NEW YORK – Wearing saggy pants is not a crime...
Can we move on?
Slow deep
From: AP survey: A bleaker outlook for economy into 2011 - Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON – The U.S. economic recovery will remain slow deep into next year, held back by shoppers reluctant to spend and employers hesitant to hire, according to an Associated Press survey of leading economists.
The problem with this kind of report is that it makes shoppers sound downright petulant when, in fact, a good ten percent of them are unemployed and very likely a similar number underemployed, and millions without homes and millions more with no retirement savings left - and what's more the median length of unemployment in the U. S. is 25 months (that's two years, darlin', and that's median) right now (Krugman lays it all out here). Reluctant is not the word.
7.28.2010
Apple extends its waiting list to 17 more countries, yikes!
iPhone 4 Arrives in 17 More Countries This Friday:
iPhone 4 will be available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland this Friday, July 30.
iPhone 4 is currently available in France, Germany, Japan, the UK...
Ah ha! Oh ho!
Apple has posted an update to Safari and the new version enables extensions (yeah, I know, Firefox, blah blah) and one of the few extensions now available is a blog editor called Scribefire which we are using right now this minute, and if it works well, that's another problem solved.
Maybe.
We are, as you may have observed, easily amused.
But we are never bored
Improbable Research - Although boredom very rarely escapes the notice of those suffering from it, constructing a purely technical instrument for reliably recognizing boredom in humans is currently rated as a non-trivial task. But recently, a team from George Mason University, the University of North Carolina, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Naval Research Lab, Washington, DC have between them devised a provisional system for doing just that.
link: UNDERNEWS: GREAT MOMENTS IN RESEARCH: HOW TO RECOGNIZE BOREDOM
Do. Not. Miss. This.
The 7 Greatest Stories in the History of Esquire Magazine... in Full
link: Best Esquire Magazine Stories - Top Articles in History of Journalism - Esquire
The end of...well, something
BARCELONA, Spain – Lawmakers in Catalonia outlawed bullfighting Wednesday, making this Spain's first major region to do so after an impassioned debate that pitted the rights of animals against preserving a pillar of traditional culture.
link: Spanish region says adios to bullfighting - Yahoo! News
7.27.2010
Noted
"The past is best left in the past. That's what the past is for."
-William Dietrich in The Barbary Pirates
So it's not just the secret documents then?
BAGHDAD — The U.S. Defense Department is unable to properly account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil money tapped by the U.S. for rebuilding the war ravaged nation, according to an audit released Tuesday.
And:
The audit found that the U.S. continues to hold about $34.3 million of the money even though it was required to return it to the Iraqi government.
Having trouble hanging on to things, are we?
Who, me? says Pakistan
ISLAMABAD, July 27 (Xinhua) -- The Afghan war report posted by the WikiLeaks website, alleging that Pakistani intelligence services were backing Afghan militants against U.S. forces, have enraged Pakistanis as they consider it an attempt to pressurize and malign Pakistan in war against terrorism.
link: WikiLeaks' reports about Afghan war enrage Pakistanis
New to the book list...
…the third and, hopefully, last of the summer's book about where all the money went is Joseph Stiblitz's "Freefall : America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy" The other two books: Michael Lewis's "The Big Short" and Andrew Sorkin's "Too Big to Fail". All three are currently on the list (see sidebar, right). Taken together, the three books tempt one to argue the American financial industries, all dumped into a big box called Wall Street, have done more harm to more people than the boogeymen of international terrorism ever dreamed of - and instead of getting bombed, got bailed out.
"Freefall," the most scholarly of the three books, is not an easy read. It summarizes (all of this stuff was duly reported in by the news media over time, but in case you weren't paying attention then) the causes of the financial melt-down that took place in 2008 and the remedy of making Wall Street whole - or at least as close to whole as possible - and screw the little guy pursued by both the Dubya and Obama administrations. All of which makes this book a seriously depressing - nay, angry-making - read.
Lewis's "The Big Short" describes the role mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps played in the whole debacle (and is the most readable of the three); Sorkin's "Too Big to Fail" is about the behind-closed-door dealmaking that resulted in Lehman Brothers' demise and Goldman Sachs's entirely un-miraculous survival, the bailout of AIG, and other horror stories. Oh yeah, and did we mention screwing the little guys?
For a little leavening, we recommend "The Jungle," also currently on our reading list (and free from gutenberg.org), Upton Sinclair's seminal 1907 novel about the Chicago stockyards and the exploitation of immigrant labor, political corruption, and - of most concern to the reading public - the goodness of meat.
7.26.2010
New home sales up!
WASHINGTON – Sales of new homes jumped last month, but it was the second-weakest month on record.
link: New home sales up, but sales remain slow - Yahoo! News
(Emphasis mine.)
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