Marco A Garcia

Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) speaks his mind about Palin and the McCain campaign's handling of her candidacy. Ensign says that "certainly" Biden is "much more qualified" than Palin, though he does offer the caveat that he also believes McCain is more qualified than Obama.

500,000+ Banking Passwords Stolen By Sinowal Trojan Horse, So Far

500,000+ Banking Passwords Stolen By Sinowal Trojan Horse, So Far [Sinowal]

from Consumerist by Ben Popken

Security researchers uncovered over half a million bank account logins stolen via a sophisticated trojan horse known as Sinowal. The data goes back to 2006, an unusual longevity for a trojan horse. Not mentioned in the news reports: who's to say this is the only cache? [NYT]

Friday, October 31, 2008

Vote Watchdogs Warn of Troubles on Election Day

Lawsuits have already been filed over efforts to purge rolls and challenging voter identification laws. "This one is the meltdown scenario," one activist says.

Washington and Los Angeles - Counting down to an election day expected to draw a record-shattering turnout, voting-rights watchdogs are sounding the alarm that a repeat of the Florida fiasco of 2000 could occur in any of a dozen battleground states.

Lawsuits are already flying in many of these states.

Bush Administration Makes a Last Push to Deregulate

from TPR: The Public Record | In-Depth, Incisive, Independent Reporting

White House to ease many rules.

The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.

The new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era and could be difficult for his successor to undo. Some would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms.

EXCELLENT ARTICLE ABOUT ALAN GRENSPAN, AYN RAND, OBJECTIVISM AND THEIR CONNECTIONS TO THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, and the 'Credit Tsunami'

Last week the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform skewered Dr. Alan Greenspan, the rainmaking economist, for his dominant role as former chairman of the Federal Reserve in what he called the "once-in-a-century credit tsunami". The immoderate capitalist philosopher, Ayn Rand, with whom Greenspan had a decades-long friendship, is being called the inciter of Greenspan's Tsunami, while Randians call her the decrier.

Ayn Rand is the mother of Objectivist philosophy. Objectivism is both an economic and ethic ideology that seems to contradict every conventionally held standard of morality; prizing selfishness over selflessness, greed over generosity, and individualism over the collective good. Followers abhor big government, even taxes, and believe that the separation of economy from government is as natural as the separation of church and state; Objectivists are Atheists -- though not hedonists -- and hold the economy to be a sacred institution, with Rand's philosophic works as hallowed canon.

Rand was born in 1905 Russia. Having nearly starved under the Bolsheviks after the Communists confiscated her father's pharmacy, she subsequently begat Objectivism, which can be clearly delineated from her hatred of the communist system. In 1926 she left Russia for good for America, the land of freedom and free inquiry. The only Russian values Ms. Rand seemed to have brought to her new country were Atheism, and the love of writing unending, but captivating works of literature.

She is best known for her novels The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, which begat the take-off Alan Shrugged, a biography by Jerome Tuccille which chronicles Greenspan's life not just as the maestro mega-banker who was doted on by both Republicans and Democrats, but as a Jazz-playing Rand acolyte.

Their intellectual bond spurred rumors that he was one of her younger partners (he was 21 years her junior) in infidelity (she was married to actor Frank O'Connor for fifty years) before she became involved with Nathaniel Branden, another prominent member of the early Objectivist gang who was even younger than Alan. Tuccille does not believe that she would have been sexually attracted to him; she used to refer to him as "the undertaker" because of the dark suits, white shirts, black ties, and dark horn-rimmed glasses that marked his style as a young man. Greenspan was, according to Tuccille "an object of fun for her at the time."

The two met through Greenspan's first wife, the artist Joan Mitchell, in 1951. He became fascinated by Rand's free market ideology, and began attending weekly salon meetings hosted in her apartment in 1953, which featured draft readings of Atlas Shrugged – which he later defended in a letter published in the New York Times to respond to a bad review.

Alan became a champion of a completely free market under Rand's influence. He believed that responsible investors and business men will practice in such a way that benefits their own interests, and that regulations disturb the natural balance created by mutual self interest. He even penned several articles in the 1960's that Rand edited that are considered brilliant Objectivist works in their own right.

One of those articles, "Gold and Economic Freedom", was published in a 1966 issue of The Objectivist. In it in he came out strongly against the very concept of a Federal Reserve, favoring an entirely privatized banking system, writing that; "…gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other."

Rand agreed. Her death on March 6th 1982 (Greenspan's 56th birthday) saved her from seeing him take hold of the fed five years later. According to Tucille, Greenspan's biographer, Rand never saw it coming. In fact, when Greenspan was appointed to head Richard Nixon, then Gerald Ford's Council of Economic Advisers in 1974, Rand called him her "man in Washington", and attended the swearing in.

Greenspan was in attendance at Ms. Rand's funeral in the March of 1982, but was less public about Objectivism during the time that he was the longest serving chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987-2006. He did tell Senator Paul Sarbanes during his confirmation hearings that he "may be the only person on the Federal Reserve who believed in the gold standard. I've never changed that opinion, Senator." He also told the senator that he believed in a sunset law for the Fed, "even if it means eliminating my own job." Tucille quipped, "Ayn Rand is probably spinning in her grave screaming, 'Check your premises, Alan.' "

Now, three years after his retirement from the fed, he was confronted last week by Representative Henry A. Waxman (D- Ca), who is chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, with this question:

"You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis, you were advised to do so by many others, and now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?"

To which Greenspan humbly conceded; Yes, I've found a flaw." He then clarified "...a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works... I was shocked because I'd been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."

If there was any doubt as to which ideology had somehow failed him, he said; "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations -- specifically banks and others -- were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms." Greenspan also said that he was "very distressed" and "shocked", and he professed; "I still do not fully understand why it happened, and obviously to the extent that I figure out where it happened and I -- I will change my views. The facts change; I will change."

The crisis in the mortgage industry and the financial meltdown, which Greenspan is being held largely responsible for, is being blamed on deregulation, which would be one step towards an Objectivist ideal. According to experts like Eric Daniels, a researcher at the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, Greenspan was not responsible for the legislation passed in the 1990s that modified decades old regulations on the insurance, commercial banking, and investment banking industries. In fact, Daniels wonders why Greenspan did not turn the tables on Waxman to say: "You're the guys who pass the laws that exacerbated this crisis. I just ran the Federal Reserve." An Objectivist himself, he believes that Greenspan is being blamed for the wrong problem. Daniels faults the Congress for the Community Reinvestment Act, which compelled banks to loan money to those who were formerly deemed unacceptable credit risks -- even against the bank's own entrepreneurial interests. Daniels blames Greenspan for a different fault -- the Fed's policy of manipulating interest rates that led to artificially low rates and higher and riskier borrowing.

The Clemson Institute's executive director, C. Bradley Thompson, also holds Greenspan partly responsible, but not Objectivism. He said of Greenspan; "He's a serial bubblist responsible for a series a bubbles, series of ups and downs." But then, said Thompson "anybody who is a fed chairman is going to do a lousy job." He claims Greenspan was so seduced by political power, that he was willing to forego the ideals that he himself penned in "Gold and Economic Freedom", which had become incorporated into Objectivist thought.

He believes that the eighty-two-year-old has long abandoned true Objectivism, which mandates total acceptance of the entire Rand oeuvre.

And in fact, under Greenspan the Federal Reserve did cut interest rates in 2001 to limit the economic damage caused by the dot-com bubble burst -- an imposed limit on the market that is decidedly un-Objectivist.

With lower interest rates on loans, lending frenzied, and the quality of the borrowers, along with our economy, went spiraling down.

Not only do Thompson, and the Randian community rejects blame that is increasingly being mounted on the philosopher's legacy, but also they hold her to be the prophetess of our crises, citing her 1957 philosophic novel, Atlas Shrugged, as scripture. In the novel a character named Eugene Lawson, known as "the banker with a heart", gave loans to anybody who came to him with need. He bankrupted his bank, and with it a whole region of the United States, because of his misguided altruism. Acts of altruism that lack self-interest are considered immoral in Randian ideology.

Objectivists have long considered the Community Reinvestment Act to be the same kind of bungle.

Asked about the Randian solution to the crises, Yaron Brook, Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, replied that only a true laissez faire market, not the mixed market economy that Greenspan presided over, would ultimately succeed.

Ironically, the Ayn Rand Center is a non-for-profit institution.

Lori Gross is a freelance journalist based in New York. Her reporting and translation has been featured in New York magazine, and JTA newswire. Her background is in theology with additional expertise in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which she studied at Bennington College and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She speaks Biblical and modern Hebrew, and can be reached at LoriLGross@Gmail.com.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

"Members of Congress are starting to question whether banks that got billions in government bailout money will use some of it to pay year-end bonuses to executives and other employees."

Bank compensation, part one

from BailoutSleuth by Chris Carey

Members of Congress are starting to question whether banks that got billions in government bailout money will use some of it to pay year-end bonuses to executives and other employees.

BailoutSleuth decided to take a look at compensation levels for the top officers at those banks, to see how much they were paid in recent years and whether the companies have made any adjustments in response to plunging profits or eroding asset values.

We'll start with four banks that got $25 billion each by selling preferred stock and warrants to the Treasury Department. The companies on that list are Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp.

Although Bank of America got $15 billion in direct government investment, it is in the process of buying Merrill Lynch Inc., which received an additional $10 billion.

Under the compensation rules in the Treasury Department's $700 billion rescue program, companies that receive government money can take tax deductions on only the first $500,000 of each executive's pay. That figure includes bonuses and stock awards.

Our survey of executive compensation at the banks participating most heavily in the program shows that pay levels for every one of their top officers far exceed the government's deductibility threshold. In fact, the lowest full-year compensation package we found at the four banks mentioned above was $3.99 million, for one of Wells Fargo's senior executive vice presidents.

Here is an overview of executive pay levels at the four companies that received the most government money (click on charts to view larger versions in a separate window):

WELLS FARGO

Richard M. Kovacevich, chairman of Wells Fargo, received $22.9 million in total compensation in 2007, down from $29.8 million a year earlier. His package included a salary of $995,000 and non-stock incentive compensation of $5.7 million.

The next five highest-paid executives at Wells Fargo got a combined $34.5 million. Their individual compensation ranged from $3.99 million for Carrie L. Tolstedt, the senior executive vice president of community banking, to $12.6 million for President John G. Stumpf.

Wells Fargo's proxy filing shows that Mark C. Oman, senior executive vice president for home and consumer finance, was the only listed officer who got no incentive bonus. He nevertheless had $6.42 million in total compensation, including stock options the company valued at $5.1 million.

Wells Fargo's stock has fared better in the downturn than the stock of most other banking companies. Its shares fell 12.1 percent in 2007, but have made up much of the lost ground this year, gaining 9.7 percent through Wednesday.

The bank had profits of $3.75 billion for the first half of this year. That compares with $8.06 billion for all of 2007 and $8.42 billion for all of 2006.

Wells Fargo agreed last month to buy ailing Wachovia Corp. for $15.1 billion. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. had initially enlisted Citigroup to buy the bank, but Wells Fargo made a higher offer.

CITIGROUP

Charles Prince, Citigroup Inc.'s former chairman and chief executive, got $15.1 million in total compensation in 2007, barely half of the $29.1 million that he received in 2006. Prince was ousted last November as the company's bad investments in mortgage-backed securities took a heavy toll on its earnings and balance sheet.

Prince left Citigroup with stock and other benefits then valued at more than $95 million.

The next five highest-paid Citigroup executives split $48.7 million in 2007, with individual amounts ranging from $7.6 million to $19.4 million. The cash portion of their salary and bonuses ranged from $1.51 million to $14.5 million.

Two members of that group - Sallie Krawcheck, head of Citigroup's wealth-management business, and Michael Klein, head of its global banking business -- left the company after Vikram Pandit replaced Prince as chief executive.

Krawcheck had compensation of $7.14 million in 2007, and Klein received $7.86 million.

Citigroup's stock fell 44.8 percent in 2007, and is down an additional 54.3 percent his year.

Pandit got restricted stock and options valued at $48 million as a sign-on bonus. However, the decline in Citigroup's share price has slashed the value of the stock, and the options currently could not be exercised at a profit.

An earlier deal with Citigroup proved far more lucrative for Pandit. The bank paid $800 million earlier last year for Old Lane LP, a hedge fund that he founded in 2006 with partner John Havens, now head of Citigroup's investment banking operations. Pandit's share of the proceeds was $162.5 million.

In May of this year, Citigroup allowed investors to withdraw their money from the $4 billion-plus fund, and in June it shut down the fund and rolled its remaining assets into the parent company.

Citigroup posted a loss of $7.6 billion for the first half of 2008. That compares with earnings of $3.62 billion for all of 2007, and $21.5 billion for all of 2006.

JPMORGAN CHASE

James S. Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, collected $27.8 million in total compensation in 2007. That package included a salary of $1 million and a bonus of $14.5 million. Dimon had total compensation of $39 million in 2006.

Dimon's compensation last year included a grant of 269,431 shares of stock that JPMorgan Chase valued at nearly $10.7 million in March. The decline in the company's stock since then has reduced the market value of the shares by $1.1 million.

The options issued to Dimon and other executives in 2007 have at an exercise price of $46.79 a share, according to the company's proxy filing. With the decline in the company's stock, none of the options could be exercised at a profit today.

Two other JPMorgan executives made more than $20 million each in 2007. William T. Winters, co-head of the company's investment banking unit, had total compensation of $21.2 million. Steven D. Black, the other co-head, got $20.9 million.

The remaining two officers covered by the company's proxy filing had

combined compensation of $25 million. Although stock awards accounted for much of the pay listed for Winters, Black and the other two executives. each received between $4.25 million and $9.2 million in salary and bonus.

JPMorgan Chase's stock fell 6.9 percent in 2007, and is off 15.2 percent so far this year. The bank's profits also have been declining. It posted net income of $4.29 billion for the first half of 2008. That compares with $14.4 billion for all of 2007 and $15.4 billion for 2006.

JPMorgan Chase agreed in September to buy most of the assets of Washington Mutual. The deal for that failing, Seattle-based bank was facilitated by the FDIC.

BANK OF AMERICA

Kenneth D. Lewis, Bank of America's chairman and chief executive, collected $16.4 million in total compensation in 2007, down from $25.6 million the previous year. His pay package for 2007 included $1.5 million in salary, a $4.25 million cash bonus,

restricted stock valued at $4.25 million and stock options valued at $2.9 million.

Bank of America's stock fell 18.8 percent in 2007 and has fallen a further 42.8 percent this year.

The next five highest-paid Bank of America executives got $34.4 million in total compensation, with the individual amounts ranging from $5.63 million to $8.5 million. The compensation for each was down 30 percent or more from 2006.

Bank of America reported profits of $4.62 billion for the first half of 2008. That compares to $14.9 billion for all of 2007, and $21.2 billion for 2006.

THE WAXMAN LETTER

Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who heads the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, sent letters this week to the chief executives of nine banks slated to receive $125 million in aid from the Treasury Department.

He requested information on their compensation and bonus plans, noting that public filings show that those companies spent or reserved $108 billion for those purposes in the first nine months of 2008 - nearly the same amount as last year.

Waxman noted that some news reports suggesting that year-end bonuses would be bolstered by the infusion of federal money.

"While I understand the need to pay the salaries of employees, I question the appropriateness of depleting the capital that taxpayers just injected in the banks through payment of billions of dollars in bonuses, especially after one of the financial industry's worst years on record,'' he wrote.

Treasury, FDIC Considering Plan To Guarantee Millions Of Mortgages

Treasury, FDIC Considering Plan To Guarantee Millions Of Mortgages [Money Meltdown]

from Consumerist by Meg Marco

The Washington Post says that the Treasury Department and the FDIC are considering a plan to guarantee millions of mortgages. According to the WaPo, the plan under consideration would encourage lenders to reduce borrowers monthly payments based on the homeowner's ability to pay. To attract lenders into the program, the government would guarantee to repay the lender for a portion of its loss if the borrower defaulted on the reconfigured loan.

It would cost between $40 billion and $50 billion, sources said.
The program is being discussed as members of Congress are voicing frustrations that the $700 billion rescue program thusfar has been aimed at helping banks, but not homeowners.

While Treasury and FDIC officials have reached an agreement on the principles of the program, the White House is resisting, according to the sources, who declined to be identified because the negotiations are ongoing.

Treasury, FDIC Crafting Plan to Rework Millions of Mortgages [Washington Post]

October 29th Presidential Forecaster Consensus

from Open Left - Front Page by Chris Bowers

Current Forecaster Consensus: Obama 353, McCain 157, Toss-up 28

With six days and a couple hours before the polls start to close, I thought it would be helpful to put together a consensus of the six "small media" polling aggregation sites I frequent the most: Electoral-Vote.com, fivethirtyeight.com, Pollster.com, Open Left (of course), Real Clear Politics, and TPM Election Central. There is a consensus around the current status of 46 states, plus D.C. Here are the only four states where these six websites do not agree with each other:

Indiana: 538, Pollster, Open Left and TPM show McCain slightly ahead in Indiana, but Real Clear Politics and Electoral-Vote show Obama slightly ahead.
Missouri: 538, Pollster and RCP all have Obama slightly ahead in Missouri, Electoral-Vote and Open Left show an exact tie, TPM shows McCain slightly ahead.
Montana: 538, Pollster, RCP and TPM show McCain ahead in Montana, but Electoral-Vote and Open Left show an exact tie.
North Dakota: Open Left, Pollster and TPM show Obama slightly ahead. Electoral-Vote shows an exact tie. 538 and RCP show McCain ahead.

That's it. These six forecasters agree on every other state. North Carolina is on the edge, and losing it would knock Obama down to 338 electoral votes. In the next closest blue state, Florida, Obama leads by 2.7% to 3.4% in according to every forecaster. After that, in the remaining 311 blue electoral votes, Obama leads by at least 5.8% in every state according to every forecaster. This is what I meant earlier today about all forecasters showing a state by state Obama lead that is both deep and broad.

So, no matter which forecaster you choose, Obama has 311 solid electoral votes with only six days remaining. Is it closer? Sure, a little bit. Is Obama still solidly ahead? Yep.

What McCain/Palin hath wrought

Images from the campaign: What McCain/Palin hath wrought

from Crooks and Liars by David Neiwert

Some images from Campaign '08:

thumb_mediumObama Yard Sign_dfef2.JPG

In Idaho Falls, Idaho. Video here

From New Mexico.

Location uncertain. Via Smoking Gun.

Bells, Tennessee.

Ad seen at Right Wing News.

A picture says a thousand words.

“Clean” coal’s dirtiest secret: Part II

"Clean" coal's dirtiest secret: Part II

from Scholars and Rogues by Wendy Redal

Mountaintop removal coal mining at Kayford Mountain, Boone County,
W. Va. Photo: Vivian Stockman, courtesy of SouthWings Air

Part II: Almost Heaven Level: The Mechanics of Moving Mountains

In the heart of Appalachia, knobs, gaps and hollers define the undulating green landscape. Life is old, travel is slow, and it's a daunting job to get a bus full of journalists up the steep, rutted dirt road through Cabin Creek Hollow to Larry Gibson's cabin on Kayford Mountain. But no photos or descriptions of the devastation we are about to witness can do justice to a close-up look at a mountaintop removal mining operation. That is why we are here. That is what Larry wants to provide for reporters on this Society of Environmental Journalists field trip to the coalfields of southern West Virginia in October 2008, in hopes that we will be a conduit for the story he spends his life telling.

Larry's cabin on Kayford Mountain

Larry Gibson: standing against Big Coal

Larry has been facing down the coal industry for more than three decades, fighting for the survival of this mountain that has been his family's home for 230 years. Much of the original homestead was seized by devious land companies in the early 20th century, but 50 acres remain. Back in 1993 a spokesman for the Sago Mine told Larry the property was worth $1million an acre to the coal industry, but he was offered $140,000 for all of it. He chose to put it in a land trust instead, and keep it as a base from which to fight against the destruction that now surrounds him and threatens many similar locations in the region.

"My mother gave me birth," he said, "but these mountains give me life…There should be something in your life that money can't buy. To me, it was my heritage, my culture, my way of life, of the Appalachian people."

Larry Gibson

Larry is a lone hold-out on this mountain, which was once home to 60 families before the industry bought them out. He tells visitors, "I don't need your help getting off this mountain; I need your help staying on it."

He used to stand on this land and look up at green summits rising more than 3000 feet, surrounding the collection of cabins in the woods. Now, this lone forested flank at 2400 feet is the highest point around. The mountains encircling it have been blown up with millions of tons of dynamite in order to remove the shallow coal seams that lie buried within the layers of rock.

If I hadn't heard the sounds of heavy equipment in the distance – the grinding engines of earthmovers and massive dump trucks beeping in reverse – I might never have realized what lay just a few hundred yards up a wooded rise from Larry's cabin. We would discover it, he said, by walking through "Hell's Gate," the barrier marking the property line between his family's land and the Samples Mine, where a subsidiary of Massey Coal has blown away 900 feet and 7500 acres of Kayford Mountain over the last four years. Another 6000 acres on adjacent Coal River Mountain are slated for the same fate. The first blast there went off the week before our arrival, Larry said, even though the permits are not yet final.

Appalachians near the Blue Ridge Parkway

Central Appalachian Range in its natural state

Ancient landscapes, lost forever

To understand the atrocity of mountaintop removal mining, you must first have a sense of what is being eradicated. In central Appalachia, lush hardwood forests cover the slopes in a mélange of green, beech, buckeye and maple, ash, shagbark, hickory and oak, tulip tree and flowering dogwood. Beneath their leafy canopy lies an understory of shrubs like mountain laurel and rhododendron, and hundreds of flowers and herbs, including medicinal plants such as ginseng and goldenseal. Moss and fungi thrive where water is plentiful, as do an amazing assortment of freshwater fish, salamanders and frogs. Deer and black bear drink from the clear streams that fill the narrow valleys, forming the headwaters for the rivers of the Eastern seaboard.

Fall foliage near Larry's cabin

One of the most biodiverse places on the planet, this region and its ecosystems have been a long time in creation. Some of earth's most ancient mountains comprise this range, birthed 300 million years ago when North America and Africa were still connected: the Appalachians were formed as part of the same mountain chain as the Anti-Atlas in Morocco.

Deep within their folded slopes lie some of the world's richest carbon deposits, the product of millennia of compression, the anthracite and bituminous coalfields that hold much of the U.S.'s most plentiful fossil fuel stores.

Intensive efforts to retrieve that coal have been a defining part of the natural and cultural landscape in Appalachia since the Civil War. Where Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia & West Virginia share borders, beauty and pain have resided side by side for 150 years. Coal barons of the 1920s sought to smash miners' unions in a push to increase production and profits from underground mines, but today's captains of industry have managed to find a way around the cost and conflicts associated with labor while taking coal out of the earth via a faster mode. In so doing, they are undoing the earth's geology and devastating whole ecosystems. They call it mountaintop mining. Opponents call it mountaintop removal.

We walk through a golden tracery of lacy maples and red sumac to Hell's Gate, a low black bar, and approach the rim of a vast pit. As bleak and gray as the clouds overhead, it stretches 270 degrees around us to the horizon. It is as if we have come to an overlook of the surface of the moon. Few people are present except us. Most of the work is being done not by miners, Larry tells us, but by heavy-equipment operators.

$But a fraction of the minescape panorama SEJ tour members viewed at Kayford Mountain$
But a fraction of the minescape panorama SEJ tour members
viewed at Kayford Mountain

How to move a mountain

Destroying mountains to extract coal requires surprisingly little manpower. Just 19 men do what it used to take 650 to do in an underground mine, Larry says. "It is the most barbaric form of mining I've ever witnessed in my life."

First, the trees are clear-cut and removed. The trees on Kayford Mountain were burned, Larry said, though occasionally they are sold for timber in some operations. Explosives are then buried in the ground and detonated. The mountaintop shudders and shakes apart into rubble. Ten to 12 blasts a day split the air at the Samples Mine, just a portion of the 3 million pounds of dynamite exploded every day in Appalachia, Larry said. He added that a single blast in 1999 costing $1 million was the largest non-nuclear blast to be detonated since World War II. Only on Sundays is the mine quiet, when Larry can hear the birds. There used to be 147 species native to Kayford Mountain, but just 39 remain, he said, according to a group of birders who monitor their numbers.

The blasting is hard on other animals, too, Larry says. He tells us that 14 bears were killed on the side of his land, tracked in to the mine zone via radio collars, but never out again.

Huge dump trucks haul away the rock, topsoil and waste that become
valley fill. I am standing next to the front tire.

After the blasting is finished the loose debris – or 'overburden' – is placed into enormous dump trucks that hold 240 tons and placed into adjacent valleys as "fill." Once enough rock is removed to get at the coal seam, it is ripped out by gigantic drag lines and scooped into buckets big enough to hold 24 small cars. Then the process begins again. Each successive blasting round creates a deeper incursion into the mountain until ultimately it resembles a ravaged crater like the Samples Mine.

At the Four Mile Mountain Mine, our second stop, we learned that 25-30 feet of rock are blasted away to reach coal seams that are typically 10-18 inches deep and about 400 feet long. It seems like a lot of effort for a relatively little amount of coal versus rock. That tells you something about how lucrative coal is, and how cheaply it can be mined using these low-labor methods.

Andrew Jordon, CEO, Pritchard Mining

Andrew Jordon, CEO of Pritchard Mining and immediate past chair of the West Virginia Coal Association, told reporters at the site that much of the coal removed in mountaintop mining could not be accessed via traditional underground mining methods, and that which could would require a much greater expense and threat to human safety if surface mining methods were avoided.

Once the coal is removed, it is washed and loaded into trucks and eventually onto trains for transport across the country. Left behind are millions, even billions, of gallons of sludge. Black, stagnant and laden with toxic metals, the waste liquid is injected into old underground mines or impounded behind huge earthen dams that comprise "valley fills." Hundreds of feet high, these piles of rock and dirt are often dumped into seasonal streambeds, wiping out the flow of water and affecting adjacent stream quality for more than 100 miles downstream.

Bill Raney, president of the WVCA, takes issue with this notion of "dumping." "A valley fill is one of the most sophisticated structures in earthmoving engineering," he said. And as for streams obliterated when such fills are placed in hollows?

Brushy Fork impoundment on the the west side of Coal River Mountain, WV; built to hold 8 billion tons of coal sludgel

Brushy Fork impoundment on the the west side of Coal River Mountain,
WV; built to hold 8 billion tons of coal sludge. Photo: Vivan Stockman,
courtesy of SouthWings Air

"Those aren't streams," said Rocky Hackforth, Pritchard's vice president of operations and general manager at Four Mile. Because they only run when it rains, for instance, they are "ephemeral streams," a term Raney offered, and thus do not meet the definition of a "navigable" waterway off limits to dumping under the Clean Water Act. Currently, law exists to prohibit mining activity within 100 feet of a stream. But the law is blatantly flouted on a regular basis by mountaintop removal operations that skirt the Act through claims that such ephemeral run-offs are exempt from the legal provision.

"Reclaimed" Kayford Mountain MTR site

The semantics of reclamation

Reclamation standards require that mining companies restore the land to a close approximation of its "original contours," including reinstating streams, but in most cases what results is merely a layer of grass seed tossed over the topsoil-barren moonscape. And even industry leaders admit that attempts to recreate vital streams that offer a natural habitat for fish and other aquatic life have been less than successful.

Jordon's operation has received recognition for industry best practices in reclamation, however, and a survey of the no-longer-active sections of the Four Mile Mountain mine show 10- to15-foot tall native trees that appear to be coming back nicely. "Our success rate with reforestation has been very, very good," Jordon said.

Of 6000 acres under lease to Pritchard, 2200 have been mined and reclaimed so far. "We're here to recover the resources that we've been blessed with in West Virginia and then to put it back," Jordon said.

But to suggest that such replanting will do anything more than provide a veneer of green for decades to come defies reason. It has taken a thousand years to generate the layer of topsoil on the Appalachians, and thousands more to evolve the multitude of species of flora and fauna that reside in the undisturbed forest. Just because wild turkeys and deer "immediately" return to the reclaimed site, according to Hackworth, it's hard to imagine convincing anyone that the scale and scope of damage inflicted has been mitigated.

Twisted Gun golf course, Mingo County, W. Va. Recreation in one of the
poorest counties in one of the poorest states in the nation.
Photo: Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

In other cases, there is no mandate to restore the land to any semblance of its original character under the Interior Department's 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act if a "higher and better use" can be demonstrated. This includes economic uses of flat property deemed to benefit the public with the construction of airstrips, schools, prisons, shopping centers and golf courses. The previous, largely vertical landscape was only useful for hunting or timber, while flattened mountaintops expand the range of uses and thus the value of the land, say proponents.

Larry Gibson, and many residents of coal country whose mountain roots and cultural heritage go back centuries, disagree.

At any rate, less than 5 percent of mountaintop removal sites have undergone any sort of economic development, despite the former coal mines being touted by industry and government as 'gold mines' for commercial growth.

The National Mining Association now estimates that 14 to 15 percent of the nation's coal production comes from mountaintop removal mining. In Appalachia, the number of surface mines now exceeds underground operations. The effects of such extreme methods on the face of the land in Appalachia are profound. But the effects on Appalachia's people are also deeply disturbing, as Part III of this series will examine.

Coming up:

Part III: The poor are always downstream
Part IV: The tenacity of hope

McCain Campaign Pre-Emptively Ejecting Potential Non-Supporters from Audience

from Don't Tase Me, Bro! by Phil Leggiere

None of the nearly two dozen people thrown out of a McCain appearance at the Univ. of Northern Iowa wore "protest" clothing, held any anti-McCain banners or shouted out any slogans, much less were pegged by the Secret Service as potentially violent threats. Yet they were preventively removed before the rally by campus security at the request of the campaign.

Iowa State Daily reports

Audience members escorted out of Sen. John McCain's, R-Ariz., campaign event in Cedar Falls questioned why they were asked to leave Sunday's rally even though they were not protesting.

David Zarifis, director of public safety for the University of Northern Iowa, said McCain staffers requested UNI police assist in escorting out "about four or five" people from the rally prior to McCain's speech.

Zarifis said while the people who were taken out weren't protesting or causing problems, McCain's staff were worried they would during the speech.

"Apparently, they had been identified by those staffers as potential protesters within the event," Zarifis said. "The facility was rented by the RNC for the McCain campaign, so it's really a private facility for them. We assisted in their desires to have those people removed."

Lara Elborno, a student at the University of Iowa, said she was approached by a police officer and a McCain staffer and was told she had to leave or she would be arrested for trespassing.

"It was a very confusing, very frustrating situation," Elborno said. "I said that I had a right to be there, I wasn't doing anything disruptive -- I was sitting, waiting for the rally to start."

She said McCain staffers wouldn't tell her why she was being asked to leave and when she got outside, she saw "a group of about 20 people" who had all been asked to leave.

Elborno said after seeing the people who were asked to leave, she was concerned that McCain's staffers were profiling people on appearance to determine who might be a potential protester.

"We may be a big tent, but traitors are not welcome in it. Period."

Good Riddance: Lieberman likely to lose committee chairmanship

from Crooks and Liars by SilentPatriot

Perhaps this is why HolyJoe is now trying to make nice?

The Hill:

Democratic leaders are discussing a major reshuffling of Senate committee chairmanships, according to multiple sources, and the proposed changes include ousting Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) from his coveted chairmanship.

Lieberman, a former Democrat who supports Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for president, is likely to lose his gavel on the Homeland Security Committee he has chaired since January 2007, say the sources who see him being replaced by Sen. Daniel Akaka (Hawaii), the committee's third-ranking Democrat.

Memo to Harry Reid and the rest of the Democratic caucus: We may be a big tent, but traitors are not welcome in it. Period.

McCain's economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin's gaffe: Obama's health care plan better for America

from Crooks and Liars by John Amato

(photo WT)

McCain's economic adviser makes Obama's case for him and against McCain's bogus 5000 dollar tax credit as his health care plan.

Younger, healthier workers likely wouldn't abandon their company-sponsored plans, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's senior economic policy adviser.

"Why would they leave?" said Holtz-Eakin. "What they are getting from their employer is way better than what they could get with the credit."

dday elaborates on it...

"it is a greater tragedy when racial stereotypes have influenced ICE’s perception with the idea that all Latinos/as can be considered an immigrant."

ICE'd: Another US Citizen Detained and Deported

from Scholars and Rogues by E Rocha

With all the excitement of this historic election, it is normal to overlook other news that normally would not have been missed; especially, the flagrant abuse of power by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Throughout Chertoff's tenure as Homeland Secretary, I have said countless of times, as long as Homeland Security and ICE continues their "round them all up, ask questions later" policy, it will always be an open season on all Latinos/as, regardless of their citizenship.

It is ironic with less than a week for the election, I am proven correct again. According to the Los Angeles Times, ICE once again mistakenly detained a US citizen. Guillermo Olivares Romero, 25, was held in a detention center for two weeks.

Federal authorities have released a Los Angeles man from immigration detention after acknowledging that he is a U.S. citizen.

Guillermo Olivares Romero, 25, was held at an Otay Mesa detention center from Sept. 25 until Oct. 9, when an American Civil Liberties Union attorney presented his birth certificate, school and vaccination records to immigration authorities. He was released that day.

In an interview with HOY (h/t to el profe of Latino Like Me), Olivares said "No me creyeron. … Me decían que yo era mexicano porque me parecía a los mexicanos." (They didn't believe me. They told me I was a Mexican because I looked like a Mexican.)

If it wasn't for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Olivares would probably have spent more than two weeks detained in the privately run Corrections Corporation of America's Otay Mesa detention center. Olivares was only released after ACLU provided ICE with his birth certificate, vaccination and health records, and old school records.

This is not the first time Olivares had problems with immigration. Olivares first encountered with immigration officials was in 2000, when Border Patrol did allow him to cross the border because he was accused Olivares of trying to sneak his cousin in by allowing him to use his birth certificate. Olivares was only allowed to cross after his mother came down with his birth certificate.

Later in 2007, unbeknownst to him, Olivares did not realize he was being deported when he was serving time in a state prison awaiting his deportation. It was not until he was handed over to ICE. Immigration officials told Olivares he has signed a document acknowledging he was a Mexican National, even though he insisted he was not. The document in question is ICE's voluntary departure order.

One of the most commonly heard complaints are the tactics used by ICE to pressure detainees to sign papers, whether they understood them or not. If they refuse to sign, guards tend to exert psychological pressure with verbal threats and physical intimidation. If ICE is claiming Olivares signed this form and was suddenly surprised he was being deported, it sounds like what he experienced the same treatment many undocumented immigrants have reported..

Olivares decided to live with relatives in Jalisco but when he wanted to return because his father was ill, he was denied entrance. Desperate to see his father, he crossed illegally and was caught and deported the same day that his father died. When his mother tried to help him get in legally, Border Patrol, did not believe he was a UC citizen, and that she was his mother.

When Olivares and his mother tried again last month, ICE once again tried to force him to sign "deportation papers." However, this time he refused and demanded to see a judge. It was at this time; ICE arrested him and shipped him off to the detention center near San Diego.

As usual, ICE does not think they did anything wrong because he told ICE he is a Mexican. According to Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for ICE claims Olivares said he was born in Guadalajara, Mexico and that his criminal record from the California Department of Corrections also shows that he was born in Mexico.

This is not the first time ICE deported a US born Latino. Last year, ICE detained and deported Pedro Guzman, a mentally disabled man, to Mexico, where he spent 89 days alone in an unfamiliar place. Again, ICE also said Guzman had falsely contended that he was Mexican.

While ICE can provide evidence to show that Guillermo Olivares Romero and Pedro Guzman contended they were Mexican citizens, however, there are certain incidents they cannot spin. There is mounting evidence demonstrating ICE has a pattern of targeting people based on a person's skin color or a person's Spanish surname, such as the incident with Marie Justeen Mancha, a Mexican-American US, citizen who was home alone in Southeast Georgia when four federal agents stormed into her house, shouting "police! Illegals!"

The unfolding record of ICE's deportation protocol is further evidence that comprehensive immigration reform must be made top priority during the next Administration. It is also vitally important for the next president and the new Homeland Secretary to investigate of the inhumane tactics practiced by ICE. There is a human tragedy in people who are wrongfully deported and detained. However, it is a greater tragedy when racial stereotypes have influenced ICE's perception with the idea that all Latinos/as can be considered an immigrant.

Palin's Unprepared Energy Speech

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BgbFMgF5nk

So Sarah Palin delivered a joke of a speech on energy policy today. It was basically a non-event, but there was some humor to come from the difference between the speech as prepared for delivery and the speech that she actually delivered.

Over at ThinkProgress's Wonk Room, Brad Johnson went through the entire speech and identified the portions that Palin ad libbed, yielding gems like this, swapping out "McCain administration" for "our administration":

And In a McCain our administration, we wi'll authorize and support new exploration and production of America's own oil and gas reserves -- because we cannot outsource the solution to America's energy problem.

And In a McCainour administration, we will set this nation on a course to build 45 new nucular reactors by the year 2030.

That's right. Even Sarah Palin doesn't like saying "McCain."

You can read the full text here, but beware, it's a disturbing journey to go insider her mind!

"smoking gun proving Chase has no intention of expanding lending, rather using TARP money to acquire other banks and plug holes in its balance sheet"

The 'Waxman Letter'

from Mr. Mortgage's Guide to the TRUTH! by admin

Blow back from the lack of controls on the $700 billion TARP bank bailout is intensifying following Nocera's New York Times story . In this great story, he has found the smoking gun proving Chase has no intention of expanding lending, rather using TARP money to acquire other banks and plug holes in its balance sheet.

Today, Rep. Waxman sent a short and sweet letter to Jamie Dimon and the eight other favorite children banks regarding their $108 BILLION in bank compensation and bonuses to be paid this year. He simply wants to find out whether the tax payers $125 billion injection will be funding these nine bank's bonus pools for the worst year for the financial sector in history.

I still think that TARP may change considerably in the coming weeks where this tax payer hand out does have some strings attached. At present, it is a blank check for Paulson and the banks. -Best Mr Mortgage

When you are at it, read Noe Nocera's story on the bailout: So, When WIll Banks Give Loans?

Sorting out the truth on the economy

from Politifact.com stories

SUMMARY: This wraps up our series on key issues of the presidential election. This time, the economy. In a six-week series, we've examined issues from the presidential campaign. For each topic, we distilled the candidates' positions and presented some key rulings. Part 1 was taxes. Part 2 was Iraq. Part 3 was energy. Part 4 was health care. Part 5 was national security and foreign policy. This week, we take on the economy. Read all our rulings on the economy here.

THEIR PAST POSITIONS AND THEIR PLANS

John McCain

• Supported the Bush administration's $700-billion plan to buy troubled securities.

• Advocates reduction of corporate taxes to spur economic growth.

• Proposes new $300-billion plan for the government to buy subprime mortgages and convert them to fixed-rate mortgages.

• Proposes a suspension on rules that say people age 70½ must begin cashing in retirement accounts, so they may avoid locking in recent losses.

• Wants to eliminate taxes on unemployment benefits.

• Will guarantee all savings, beyond normal limits, for six months.

• Cut the capital gains tax by half, to 7.5 percent, for two years.

Barack Obama

• Supported the Bush administration's $700-billion plan to buy troubled securities.

• Offers a $500 tax credit to workers; will raise taxes on singles who make $200,000 or more and couples who make more than $250,000.

• Favors a temporary $3,000 tax credit to businesses for each new job created.

• Will temporarily allow people to withdraw up to 15 percent of their retirement money, to a maximum of $10,000, without penalty. (Normal taxes apply.)

• Favors mandatory 90-day freeze on some foreclosures.

• Wants the federal government to lend money to states and local governments in need of credit.

Key rulings for McCain

• On Obama's plan: Attacking Obama's point that his tax plan protects 95 percent of working Americans from higher taxes, McCain said, "It's not truthful in the respect that 50 percent or 40 percent of the American people — of taxpayers — American citizens don't pay taxes, federal income taxes." We consulted the nonpartisan experts at the Tax Policy Center. They said that the percent of taxpayers with zero or negative individual income tax liability will be 38 percent in 2009. That's pretty close to 40 percent, the low end of the range McCain said. We rate his claim Mostly True.

• On blame for the financial crisis: In an October debate, McCain said, "The Democrats in the Senate and some members of Congress defended what Fannie and Freddie were doing. They resisted any change." McCain rightly notes that the 2005-06 efforts to regulate Fannie and Freddie were Republican-led and opposed by the Democrats, but McCain's attempts to depict those efforts as an early warning that could have lessened the current credit crisis don't wash. Even if the 2006 effort to strengthen oversight had succeeded, it's debatable whether it would have averted the subprime crisis. We rate his statement Half True.

Key rulings for Obama

• On the economy: In a Democratic debate in April, Obama said, "We're seeing greater income inequality now than any time since the 1920s." The U.S. Census compiles data on income distribution on a year-to-year basis. Since 1967, it's clear that the top 5 percent of all households are capturing a growing share of the nation's aggregate income. From 1917 to 1998, the income share of the top 10 percent dropped and then began rising again, following a U-shaped curve, according to a historical analysis of U.S. tax returns by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez published in 2003 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Piketty and Saez found that economic inequality grew further by 2005. That year, the top 1 percent of Americans — people with incomes of more than $348,000 — received their largest share of national income since 1928. We find Obama's statement to be True.

• On McCain: Obama attacked McCain's economic philosophy in a Nevada speech, saying that McCain economic adviser Phil Gramm is "the architect of some of the deregulation in Washington that helped cause the mess on Wall Street." First off, Phil Gramm might view the title "architect of deregulation" as a compliment, though he might prefer the title "architect of regulatory efficiency." As a U.S. senator, Gramm promoted two bills that curtailed regulation: the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. But these bills had other supporters, and President Bill Clinton signed both into law. Now, the Wall Street carnage is still being autopsied, but most Wall Street watchers agree that light regulation allowed irresponsible lending and mortgage fraud to go unchecked. Finally, Gramm is no longer a chief adviser to the McCain campaign. He resigned in July. So there's some truth here, but it also seems like Obama is exaggerating to make a point. We rate it Half True.

Palin's 2012 Plans Leaves McCain Campaign "Speechless"

from Crooks and Liars by Nicole Belle

Popout

It looks like someone is just putting in the motions this week, biding her time for her next chance in the spotlight. I'm sure the McCain campaign appreciates the hell out of this.

BLITZER: And this just coming into the "Situation Room," the Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin now speaking out openly about her intentions in 2012 if, if she and John McCain were to lose this contest next Tuesday. In an interview with ABC News, Sarah Palin is now saying, she would be interested in remaining a serious national political figure, going ahead to 2012. She was asked what happens in 2012 if you lose on Tuesday, would you simply go back to Alaska? Elizabeth Vargas of ABC News asked her and Palin said this, and I will read it to you verbatim according to an ABC News transcript: "Absolutely not," Sarah Palin says. "I think that, if I were to give up and wave a white flag of surrender against some of the political shots that we've taken, that ... that would ... bring this whole ... I'm not doin' this for naught," and that is a direct quote from Sarah Palin. Clearly, leaving open the possibility that she would be interested in leading the Republican Party in 2012 if she and John McCain were to lose this presidential contest right now. Let's go to Dana Bash. She has been covering the McCain campaign reaction from the rather blunt statement from Sarah Palin that she would in fact be interested in leading the Republican Party going forward after Tuesday if they lose?

BASH: I just got off of the phone, Wolf, with a senior McCain adviser and I read this person the quote and I think it is fair to say that this person was speechless. There was a long pause and I just heard a "huh" on the other end of the phone. This is certainly not a surprise to anybody who has watched Sarah Palin that she is interested in potentially future national runs, and she is being urged to by a lot of people inside of the Republican Party if they do lose, but it is an "if" and people inside of the McCain campaign do not want any discussion that has an "if" in front of it six days before the election, they don't want any discussion at all, any kind of hypothetical talk about running for the next time around. So certainly, this is not at least initially being received well inside of the McCain campaign.

BLITZER: I am not surprised, not surprised at all. It is one of those "wow, she is talking about 2012 if we lose," that is not supposed to be something that you say. You are supposed to say, "well, I'm not looking ahead, I'm not looking ahead only to Tuesday," and those are the talking points she's supposed to be saying, but she is obviously blunt and she is looking ahead if something were to happen on Tuesday that she wouldn't be happy with.

McCain Robocalling Arizonans

from The Washington Independent by Matthew DeLong

It's official: Sen. John McCain has committed resources to defend his home state of Arizona.

In the wake of a slew of polls that show the race in the Grand Canyon State tightening in recent weeks, Talking Points Memo reports that several of its Arizona readers reported receiving a McCain campaign robocall today.

McCain's robocall, which was played to us over the phone by Mary Joe Bartel, a retiree who lives south of Tucson, attacks Obama as unprepared to defend the country from terrorism, singling out Joe Biden's recent remarks about the likelihood of Obama being tested by an international crisis early in his first term.

Here's the script:

I'm calling for John McCain and the RNC because Barack Obama is so dangerously inexperienced, his running mate Joe Biden just said, he invites a major international crisis that he will be unprepared to handle alone.

If Democrats win full control of government, they will want to give civil rights to terrorists and talk unconditionally to dictators and state sponsors of terror. Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the experience and judgment to lead America. This call was paid for by the Republican National Committee and authorized by McCain-Palin 2008.

The news says a lot about the state of the McCain campaign. With Obama throwing money around like it's his job, and with McCain struggling to keep pace, the campaign can hardly afford to redirect money from battleground states to go on the air with television or radio advertising in Arizona.

But McCain's strategists must be at least somewhat concerned about McCain's home-state standing, or they wouldn't risk signaling weakness by taking this action. The robocalls will allow McCain to spread his message cheaply in Arizona. Unfortunately for him, it is highly questionable how effective the calls may be.

The McCain campaign is releasing memos saying the race is "functionally tied" — but its actions suggest McCainland is privately worried about the possibility of an electoral blowout.

Republican Voter Suppression: A Guide

from TPMmuckraker by Kate Klonick and Zachary Roth

There are so many Republican gambits designed to make voting more difficult -- specifically for Democrats, of course -- that it can be hard to keep track of them all. So here's a handy -- and by no means comprehensive -- guide to what's happening in some of the key swing states.

Ohio
The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month denied a bid by the state GOP to force Democratic secretary of state Jennifer Brunner to provide local election officials with lists of new voters whose registration information did not match that on other government documents. Voting-rights advocates had feared that making Brunner hand over the lists could lead to a slew of GOP challenges, forcing hundreds of thousands of voters to cast provisional ballots. Republican leader (and Ohioan) John Boehner -- with help from the White House -- has asked the Department of Justice to step in, but few observers expect DOJ to take any action so close to the election.

New Mexico
The state GOP earlier this month held a press conference at which it released the names of 10 voters it said had voted fraudulently in a Democratic primary in June. After ACORN helped established that the voters, almost all Hispanic, were in fact legitimate, TPMmuckraker and others reported that GOP lawyer Pat Rogers apparently hired a private investigator, who intimidated some of the voters by going to their homes to question them about their voting status. Rogers, the P.I. and the state party are now being sued for voter intimidation by several voting-rights groups.

Indiana
The Lake County GOP sued to shut down early voting centers set up by the county election board in Democratic-leaning cities in the northern part of the county. A judge declined to shut down the sites, though an appeal is scheduled to be heard later this week. But in the meantime, early voting at the centers has been proceeding. In addition, the Republican secretary of state, Todd Rokita, has called on law enforcement to prosecute ACORN for submitting 1400 suspicious-looking voter-registration forms in the county.

Nevada
The chair of the state GOP wrote to Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller, asking him to require newly registered voters to cast provisional ballots if they correct mismatches in their voter information at the polls. Miller responded with an interpretation of state law that rejected the GOP's request.

Pennsylvania
The state GOP has filed a lawsuit designed to cast doubt on 140,000 voter-registration applications submitted by ACORN in four counties. Among other things, it would require the state to provide additional provisional ballots in the counties at issue. Democratic Secretary of State pedro Cortes has called the "frivolous", saying it's designed to undermine confidence in the system. The court has not yet ruled on the suit.

Montana
The state GOP announced earlier this month that it was formally challenging the eligibility of 6,000 people in Democratic-leaning counties, based in discrepancies in their addresses. After it emerged that among the challenged voters were a World War II veteran who had moved across town that year, and a member of the Army Reserve about to ship out to Kuwait, the move was condemned even by some prominent Republicans in the state. The challenge was withdrawn, and the man behind, it, Jacob Eaton, the party's executive director, quit.

Florida
In early September, Secretary of State Kurt Browning, a Republican, instructed election officials to reject voter registration applications that do not pass a computer match test. Voter rights groups say the system can disqualify voters based on nothing more than a missing middle initial on their voter form, and that the late date of the order could cause additional confusion. They fear the move could disenfranchise tens of thousands of legitimate voters. And in a rare case of a Republican making voting easier, Governor Charlie Crist yesterday ordered extended hours for early voting centers, after long lines were reported in many parts of the state.

Wisconsin
Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen filed suit against the state's election board, demanding that it confirm the eligibility of tens of thousands of new voters. A county court threw the suit out. But Van Hollen soon announced the formation of a "voter fraud task force", which would involve stationing 50 state prosecutors and other law-enforcement agents at the polls on election day, a move state Democrats have denounced as an effort to intimidate voters. In a recent interview with CNN, Van Hollen admitted that the GOP "may have asked lawyers in my office to file the lawsuit."

Colorado
A voting-rights group, filed a lawsuit against Republican Secretary of State Mike Coffman, alleging that over 35,000 voters were purged from the rolls illegally. The suit, which was heard in court today, claims that voters have been removed from the rolls based on a faulty system for identifying illegitimate voters, and within 90 days of the election -- both of which violate the federal Voting Rights Act. Coffman, who is running for the U.S. Congress in this election, denies that any rules were broken.

Fox And Friends Laughs At Murder Or Something

Fox And Friends Laughs At Murder Or Something [Videuhoh]

from Gawker by Hamilton Nolan

What exactly is happening over at Fox and Friends, America's drunkest morning show? As far as we can tell, this clip shows Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy playing the "Who Can Stare At Each Other Longest Without Laughing?" game while reporting on a killer earthquake in Pakistan. Then they just start showing murder scene video for no reason, which really causes extensive sputtering. Why is the Fox and Friends control room making Brian Kilmeade appear to support death? Click to watch.

This is the hot new trend of late October:openly racist white people for Obama! It began with random tales of canvassers talking to voters who plainly said they were "voting for nigger."

Racists For Obama [Trends]

from Gawker by Pareene

This is the hot new trend of late October: openly racist white people for Obama! It began with random tales of canvassers talking to voters who plainly said they were "voting for nigger." Now, this kind of amazing photo of a home in Indiana with an Obama sign and a Confederate Flag has been making the rounds in the Tumblrverse. There are more illustrative anecdotes below!

Politico's Ben Smith wrote a story rounding up the stories of voters who "wouldn't want a mixed race marriage" for their children but are still voting for Obama. It featured this awesome Paul Begala quote:

"If you go to a white neighborhood in the suburbs and ask them, 'How would you feel about a large black man kicking your door in,' they would say, 'That doesn't sound good to me,'" said Democratic political consultant Paul Begala. "But if you say, 'Your house is on fire, and the firefighter happens to be black,' it's a different situation."

Does Paul ask this question of people regularly? He must be a great dinner companion.

For further evidence of racist support of Obama, consider the working-class white Philly neighborhood of Fishtown—where the anecdote linked up top hails from. The Philadelphia City Paper has a whole feature on the community, and their totally unrepentant casual tribal racism, and their willingness to vote for Barack Obama:

Consider Patrick McGowan, a union carpenter whom I met at Murph's bar on Girard, just a block down from the Fishtown for Obama office. McGowan said he was voting for Obama.

"Everyone's voting for him," he said.

Would race be an obstacle?

"Not at all — not for anybody who's a working man paying taxes," he assured, adding: "First of all, he's not all black. And maybe if a black person gets in there to be president, it'll keep all the crybabies from crying discrimination."

Sure, buddy. Thanks for voting!

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg has an amusing/scary column today on why racists should vote for Obama.

What you want is Obama to become president. That would make all your dire predictions seem prescient (that means "knowing the future"). The fear that makes a person embrace Nazi ideology in the first place will be ramped up exponentially (that means "fast").

And what would Obama do as president? He would make decisions, some good, but others bad, and think how those bad decisions will reverberate among people such as yourselves. They would be evidence, not of the missteps of one politician, but a blanket indictment of the entire Black Race. Think of it. The Thing You Fear Most, sitting in the Oval Office, greeting visitors, greeting Girl Scouts, for the love of God! Think about it. Posing for photographs with young, tender Girl Scouts, shaking their small white hands, asking them about cookie sales . . .

Think of what that would do for recruitment. It wouldn't just be you and your buddy Hrolf taking videos of each other brandishing your dad's hunting rifle in menacing poses. You could have real meetings, attract actual followers. The plan for world domination that you so laboriously wrote out in 11th grade detention would come to fruition at last!

Obviously, you want Obama elected — the nation will soon realize what it has done, the pendulum will swing the other way — your way. At long last! Ausgerechnet jetzt!

Ha ha... ha?

But before you get too excited over people voting their economic self-interest over their racial prejudices, just remember that Joe the Plumber has a record deal, so America is still doomed.

"She's a professional "futurist"—essentially, a lady who's learned how to milk money out of corporate CEOs by telling them about "trends" that she's spotted. "

Famous Business Lady Likes Magic Salvia Space Travel [Faith Popcorn]

from Gawker by Hamilton Nolan

Do you know who Faith Popcorn is? If not, consider yourself 2.4% wiser. She's a professional "futurist"—essentially, a lady who's learned how to milk money out of corporate CEOs by telling them about "trends" that she's spotted. Like her spiritual cousins, the "brand consultants," she has created an entire bullshit industry out of thin air, and become rich. Cheers to her. So anyhow, wanna know Faith Popcorn's latest important trend? Yea, it's smoking dope and traveling through space on the internet:

[Faith Popcorn]:We are going to be doing a lot of traveling on the Internet. Get me out of here — wheeee. And we're going to be taking drugs with that travel.

WWD: Drugs, what do you mean?

F.P.: Facilitated travel. Like salvia, which is an herb. There are going to be induced or supported [Internet] trips. So we're going to learn a lot from the Seventies.

Ha, yes. And here is exclusive video of Faith Popcorn at work:

hilarious salvia trip first time

"According to Think Progress, as governor, Palin vetoed $275,000 in funds for the Special Olympics Alaska."

Palin Cut Funds for Special Olympics

from The Washington Independent by Laura McGann

In response to my story this morning on how Gov. Sarah Palin couches her discussion of special-needs children in anti-abortion rights language, several readers have pointed out that Palin's record as governor of Alaska isn't as stellar on the issue as she has trumpeted. That's more evidence that the discussion isn't really about disabled kids.

According to Think Progress, as governor, Palin vetoed $275,000 in funds for the Special Olympics Alaska.

Think Progress also points out that Palin has claimed she allocated additional funding for special-needs education, though the bill's sponsor, Rep. Mike Hawker, says she had nothing to do with it.

The crowds I watched in Florida, North Carolina and Virginia roared their approval at Palin's talk on special-needs children. But most of the talk that resonated was more symbolic than specific. "John [McCain] and I have a vision of America where every innocent life counts," she said. "Where everyone has a chance to contribute and every child is cherished. And that's the spirit I want to bring to Washington, D.C."

For her supporters, maybe it isn't the actions for special-needs children that matter so much as what the undercurrent of her words mean.

"If McCain is really concerned about Khalidi, he should explain why the International Republican Institute, which McCain chaired at the time, gave an organization headed by Khalidi a grant of nearly $500,000 in 1998."

McCain Pushes Obama Link to Islamic Terror

from The Washington Independent by Matthew DeLong

I've been doing my best today to ignore the McCain campaign's current non-issue du jour — the release of a video showing Sen. Barack Obama's attendance at a going-away party for a pro-Palestine professor, Rashid Khalidi. But it looks like this is all that matters to Sen. John McCain.

In April, The Los Angeles Times published a story that included a description of a videotape of a 2003 party for Khalidi as he was preparing to leave his job at the University of Chicago for his current gig at Columbia University. Obama, then an Illinois state senator, was at the party and gave a moderate speech about bringing opposing sides together, according to the Times.

In an interview this morning with Radio Mambi, a popular Spanish-language radio station in South Florida, McCain apparently seized on a 2005 New York Sun report alleging that former Weatherman and fellow Chicagoan William Ayers was also at the party. This was not reported in The Times story.

McCain also claimed that Khalidi was a spokesman for Yassir Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization, a charge Khalidi has denied. McCain joined other conservatives in calling on the Times to release the video.

However, the newspaper says the videotape was shared on the condition that it not be released. To release it would signal to all future potential sources that The Los Angeles Times will give them up at the first sign of pressure.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin happily jumped on the bandwagon today, referring to The Times as the Obama campaign's "pet newspaper." (No word yet on how The New York Times is taking this news.)

The whole thing is clearly a distraction. If McCain is really concerned about Khalidi, he should explain why the International Republican Institute, which McCain chaired at the time, gave an organization headed by Khalidi a grant of nearly $500,000 in 1998.

But the convergence of Obama, Ayers and someone with an Arabic name is a perfect bundle for McCain, particularly in South Florida — home to lots and lots of Jews. People weren't really buying the Ayers-Obama tie, but with Khalidi in the mix, the new implication is: Obama is connected to Ayers, a former domestic terrorist; both are connected to a Muslim who reputedly was connected to the PLO, which was viewed by Israel as a terrorist organization. Ergo, Obama is connected to Islamic terrorism. Throwing a representative of the elite liberal media into the narrative doesn't hurt either.

However, if McCain really wants people to believe that Obama has connections to terrorism, he should stop pussy-footing around the issue and come out and say it – so the American people can judge the merits of the claim openly and honestly.

"Ask Utah Jazz and Megaplex Theatres owner Larry Miller, who is refusing to screen Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno"

Fan Rant: Utah Jazz Owner Bans 'Zack and Miri'

from Cinematical by Erik Davis

I will never understand why we're so afraid of sex in this country. It boggles my mind. Not only are we deathly afraid of sex, but we're also afraid of words. Combine a scary word and a film that carries a sex scene or two and you have what some would argue was an act of terrorism. Seriously. Ask Utah Jazz and Megaplex Theatres owner Larry Miller, who is refusing to screen Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno because he feels "it's very close to an NC-17 with its graphic nudity and graphic sex."

To take a page from Eric D. Snider, who took a page from SNL's Weekend Update ... really? Really, Larry Miller? So you have no problem screening Saw V in your movie theaters and exposing your customers to over-the-top violence and gore, but Zack and Miri is off limits? Really? Seriously? And you'll also screen films like The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, which use raunchy, foul-mouthed language and feature rampant drug use, but you won't screen a film that has -- what? -- one to three scenes of nudity and "pretend" on-camera sex? Really? And this man is allowed to own an entire chain of theaters? Seriously? Really?

Now, it's been over a month since I last saw Zack and Miri Make a Porno, but trust me on this one folks -- the on-screen nudity is tame and rather harmless. And if you're ponying up the cash to see a flick directed by Kevin Smith that includes the word 'Porno' in its title, then something tells me you're expecting a little bit of dirty. We here at Cinematical call on Mr. Larry Miller to admit his moronic faults, screen Zack and Miri Make a Porno in all of his theaters and write an apology note to Kevin Smith, his fans and myself for having to waste over 300 words on this idiot.

Oh, and I hope the Utah Jazz have a miserable season.

[via NY Post]

"We salute you, brand consultants! You are the hustlers of a new generation."

Pepsi's New Logo A Bargain At Several Hundred Million Dollars [Marketing]

from Gawker by Hamilton Nolan

This economic downturn has, surprisingly, not killed the "branding" industry, which exists for the sole purpose of allowing graphic design majors to soak clueless corporate behemoths out of millions of dollars for what amounts to a few tweaks of a computer design template. We salute you, brand consultants! You are the hustlers of a new generation. Pictured is the inanimate, non-dynamic, old Pepsi logo; and after the jump, the "more dynamic and more alive" new logo that Pepsi just rolled out at a cost that will eventually total hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide:

Everything is different now.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Obama may take Arizona

BREAKING NEWS: Arizona Officially Within Two Points!

from Emptywheel by bmaz

McCain reacts to the news!

Earlier, I made a pitch to get Barack Obama to come to Arizona on the basis of the closing polls:

Obama does indeed have a real shot, and suddenly a lot of people nationally have caught on to that fact. Pollster.com. DKos. Chuck Todd and MSNBC. And, best of all if you know Arizona politics over the last three plus decades or so, Bruce Merrill and the Cronkite8 poll. Dr. Merrill is the gold standard in Arizona polling, and he has a phenomenal record for accuracy.

Well, the preliminary word is in from Dr. Merrill. Hold onto your hats folks, we got us a neck and neck horserace!

Merrill's brand new poll, taken from sampling over the weekend and Monday, in it's entirety, is to be released tonight at 7:00 pm local Arizona time and has McCain up by two little itty bitty points: McCain 46% Obama 44% and Obama still seen as closing with a full week left and undecideds still expected to break significantly Obama!!!!!

Bruce Merrill is a native Arizonan, has been teaching at Arizona State since 1971, and has been doing the absolute finest and most accurate polling of Arizona races for many decades. He really is the gold standard here.

This is fantastic news! Unless, of course, you are John McCain.....

'Reports said some hedge fund traders were in tears."

Mother of all short squeezes

from Politics in the Zeros. Anti-war, global warming, peak oil, progressive politics by Bob Morris

Bloomberg chart

Volkswagen stock has been heavily shorted. This means traders borrowed shares, sold them, expecting to buy them back at a cheaper price and pocket the profit. It closed at about 200 on Friday.

Over the weekend, Porsche they would increase their share of Volkswagen stock to 75%. The stock exploded upwards, closing today at over 900. Reports said some hedge fund traders were in tears.

The math. You short 100 shares at 200 and pocket 20,000. The stock goes to 900. You are out 70,000 ((200*100) - (900*100)) and will have almost certainly gotten a margin call to either make up the difference in cash in the account by the end of day or margin clerks will buy back the stock at the market and you take the loss. That's why (some) traders were in tears…

The Chicago Public Library has added video to its Downloadable Media Catalog page. According to Library Director Mary Dempsey, any downloaded programs would be available for a three-week period after which they would delete themselves

Chicago Public Library Adds Movie Downloads, Addresses Budget Cuts

from Chicagoist by Marcus Gilmer

Strapped for cash? Had to cancel the Netflix membership? The Chicago Public Library has added video to its Downloadable Media Catalog page. According to Library Director Mary Dempsey, any downloaded programs would be available for a three-week period after which they would delete themselves. The catalog features around 530 titles currently but looks to expand in the near future. This comes on the heels of yesterday's announcement that circulation at area libraries is up 28 percent. The bad news? Not even the library is immune from budget cuts: late fines are going to double and five employees are being laid off. In addition, 443 vacant full- and part-time positions are being eliminated, but there is no indication that library hours will be cut.

"Palin simply knew nothing about national and international issues. Which meant, as one such adviser said to me: “Letting Sarah be Sarah may not be such a good thing.”"

Draper Blog Dishes on McCain Camp

from The Washington Independent by Matthew DeLong

For those who dare not look away from the rapidly evolving soap opera that was formerly known as the McCain-Palin campaign, GQ reporter Robert Draper has started a blog on the final days of the presidential race.

Draper, who recently published in the New York TImes Magazine the definitive account of the campaign's struggle to find a message, marks his blogging debut with an entry that unloads some of the too-hot material on the McCain-Palin rift that he collected in the course of writing the piece. A sample:

I'm sympathetic to [McCain advisers Toby] Eskew and [Nicolle] Wallace, and not just because they're decent people. They've held their tongue from leaking what a couple of McCain higher-ups have told me — namely, that Palin simply knew nothing about national and international issues. Which meant, as one such adviser said to me: "Letting Sarah be Sarah may not be such a good thing."

It's a grim binary choice, but apparently it came down to whether to make Palin look like a scripted robot or an unscripted ignoramus. I was told that Palin chafed at being defined by her discomfiting performances in the Couric, Charlie Gibson, and Sean Hannity interviews. She wanted to get back out there and do more. Well, if you're Eskew and Wallace, what do you say to that? Your responsibility isn't the care and feeding of Sarah Palin's ego; it's the furtherance of John McCain's quest for the presidency.

We'll have to wait and see if Draper's blog turns into a daily dish-fest. If it does, Draper may open himself up to criticism for dumping gasoline on a fire that already has the potential to destroy what's left of the McCain campaign. But few reporters were granted anywhere near the access Draper had to the highest levels of the campaign, and the rest of us can be forgiven for bookmarking his blog in eager anticipation of what juicy details will come next.

(Via Politico's Jonathan Martin)

Joe Biden should have told the truth: Sarah Palin is a Marxist

from Scholars and Rogues by JS OBrien

Vice-presidential candidate Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) ran into a buzzsaw of an interview from Barbara West of WFTV-TV, Channel 9, in Orlando, Fla on October 23. West is the wife of Wade West, a GOP political and media consultant, and her bias was evident as she made more than one statement of opinion, as though it were fact, then proceeded to ask a question related to that opinion/faux fact. The exchange making the rounds most often in the blogosphere is this one:

West: "You may recognize this famous quote: 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.' That's from Karl Marx. How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around."

Biden: "Are you joking? Is … is this a joke?"

West: "No."

Biden: "Is that a real question?"

West: "That's a real question."

Biden, of course, being caught by surprise, could say little that would be of much use on a television screen. He could have made the point that all taxation does, in some manner, spread wealth. Even soldiers are paid from tax dollars and, while they earn their pay, there's no question that they are being paid from taxpayer's wealth. Anyone being paid to serve taxpayers, from dog catchers to police, are part of a wealth spreading scheme of some sort.

What Biden should have done, had he not been blind-sided, was to make the point that all Obama is doing is adjusting the progressive income tax structure that was supported by none other than Adam Smith, the patron saint of free markets, and introduced to the US, originally, by Republican Abraham Lincoln. Later, the progressive income tax was supported so heavily by Republican Teddy Roosevelt that the Constitution was amended to accommodate the income tax, and Roosevelt made it clear, in a speech delivered in 1910, why he thought a progressive tax was the right way to go.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered, not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective, a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

When it comes to redistributing wealth, good ol' Republican Teddy was pretty clear, wasn't he? Maybe Teddy Roosevelt was a Marxist.

What about Republican Ronald Reagan, the modern patron saint of conservatism? Reagan was a big supporter of the earned income credit (EIC), a distribution from wealthy taxpayers to less wealthy ones, saying it is, "the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress." Both Reagan and George Bush the First increased funding for the EIC. Are they both Marxists?

But perhaps the most effective response might have gone like something like this:

Barbara, I'm glad you asked that question, because words like "socialist" and "Marxist" are getting tossed around by people who are afraid of losing an election, hoping that these words will sway enough votes to get them into the White House, riding on a lie.

The fact is, Barbara, that if there is a socialist or Marxist in this race — and I don't really believe there is — then it has to be Sarah Palin.

In Sarah Palin's state of Alaska, every citizen gets a check from the government every year for doing absolutely nothing. Not for work. Not for anything they've earned. They get that check just for breathing and living in Alaska. Last year, that check amounted to $3,269 per taxpayer. And all for nothing.

Do you know where Alaska gets that money? They get it mostly from the oil companies that pump oil from the state. More than half of Alaska's total tax revenues come from separation taxes, which are basically taxes on oil and minerals taken from the ground. Another 25% or so comes from corporate taxes. Because companies are paying so much, Alaska citizens pay no income or state sales taxes.

But they do get a check generated from the wealth those big companies generate. And there is no other state in the Union that doesn't require either a sales or income tax from its citizens, yet gives them a check every year from money those citizens didn't earn.

I don't really think Sarah Palin is a Marxist, Barbara. I think that's a word made up by desperate people who will do anything to win - even tear our country apart by demonizing their opponents. But if there is a Marxist in this race, Sarah Palin would have to be the one.

Maybe we could get Michele Bachmann to investigate Sarah for being un-American.

Sen. Barack Obama to appear on “Daily Show” after prime time address tomorrow night.

Breaking News!!

from The Washington Independent by Ari Melber

Sen. Barack Obama to appear on "Daily Show" after prime time address tomorrow night.

""A former chairman of the House science committee told Brevard County leaders Monday that NASA's next rocket is "on the chopping block" and that a new administration may abandon the Ares I as successor to the space shuttle. "

Bob Walker: Ares I Could Be on Chopping Block

from NASA Watch by kcowing

Grim outlook for Ares, says Beltway insider, Orlando Sentinel

"A former chairman of the House science committee told Brevard County leaders Monday that NASA's next rocket is "on the chopping block" and that a new administration may abandon the Ares I as successor to the space shuttle. The next president may look instead to use military rockets to launch NASA astronauts, said Robert Walker, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who, as a Washington-based lobbyist, represents Brevard County. Walker told county commissioners; U.S. Reps. Tom Feeney, R-Oviedo, and Dave Weldon, R-Indialantic; and representatives of the local aerospace community that the word in Washington and at recent space conferences was "that Ares I could be on the chopping block." Afterward, in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel, he elaborated: "The discussion I am hearing in the space community is that Ares will certainly be reviewed by the next administration."

WFTV's Barbara West gives us the view from Planet Bizarro

Wingnut News: WFTV's Barbara West gives us the view from Planet Bizarro

from Crooks and Liars by David Neiwert

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neJAroXH4Mg

The Jed Report put together this little video mashup of WFTV's Barbara West, giving us a nice side-by-side contrast of her respective interviews with Joe Biden and John McCain.

You can see the full Biden interview here and the full McCain video here. The latter is especially instructive in that we see just how far out there West is; mostly she's obsequious to the point of outright cheerleading with McCain, and her idea of a "tough" question for him is to ask him why he's not being wingnutty enough!

OTOH, you've just gotta love when she quotes Marx and then asks Biden why "spreading the wealth" isn't Marxist. Someone's been drinking the Bircher Kool Aid, which is in fact a direct ticket to Planet Bizarro.

Well, over at Firedoglake, they have a petition up asking for the station to apologize for sponsoring such bizarre behavior and such biased treatment. Go sign it.

WaPo Knocks Down The Latest McCain-FOX-Drudge Lie

Early morning viewers of FOX & Frienders were greeted with a (false) story about some radio interview Barack Obama gave in 2001. If you had been watching, here's what you would have seen on your screen:

FOX Drudge

McCain-land pimped the Drudge-FOX story (which they probably fed to Drudge in the first place). Washington Post took a look at McCain-land's claims, and here's what they came up with:

In other words, Obama says pretty much the opposite of what the McCain camp says he said. Contrary to the spin put on his remarks by McCain economics adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, he does not express "regret" that the Supreme Court has not been more "radical." Nor does he describe the Court's refusal to take up economic redistribution questions as a "tragedy."

Another day, another lie.

Sarah Palin on socialism in Alaska: "where it's collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth"

Oh No, Sarah Palin Is A Socialist Too!

It's not just John McCain -- Sarah Palin is a socialist too! Hendrik Hertzberg notes (emphasis added):

A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist--Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine--that "we're set up, unlike other states in the union, where it's collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs."

The Top Ten Reasons Conservatives Should Vote For Obama

from http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/the-top-ten-rea.html
10. A body blow to racial identity politics. An end to the era of Jesse Jackson in black America.

9. Less debt. Yes, Obama will raise taxes on those earning over a quarter of a million. And he will spend on healthcare, Iraq, Afghanistan and the environment. But so will McCain. He plans more spending on health, the environment and won't touch defense of entitlements. And his refusal to touch taxes means an extra $4 trillion in debt over the massive increase presided over by Bush. And the CBO estimates that McCain's plans will add more to the debt over four years than Obama's. Fiscal conservatives have a clear choice.

8. A return to realism and prudence in foreign policy. Obama has consistently cited the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush as his inspiration. McCain's knee-jerk reaction to the Georgian conflict, his commitment to stay in Iraq indefinitely, and his brinksmanship over Iran's nuclear ambitions make him a far riskier choice for conservatives. The choice between Obama and McCain is like the choice between George H.W. Bush's first term and George W.'s.

7. An ability to understand the difference between listening to generals and delegating foreign policy to them.

6. Temperament. Obama has the coolest, calmest demeanor of any president since Eisenhower. Conservatism values that kind of constancy, especially compared with the hot-headed, irrational impulsiveness of McCain.

5. Faith. Obama's fusion of Christianity and reason, his non-fundamentalist faith, is a critical bridge between the new atheism and the new Christianism.

4. A truce in the culture war. Obama takes us past the debilitating boomer warfare that has raged since the 1960s. Nothing has distorted our politics so gravely; nothing has made a rational politics more elusive.

3. Two words: President Palin.

2. Conservative reform. Until conservatism can get a distance from the big-spending, privacy-busting, debt-ridden, crony-laden, fundamentalist, intolerant, incompetent and arrogant faux conservatism of the Bush-Cheney years, it will never regain a coherent message to actually govern this country again. The survival of conservatism requires a temporary eclipse of today's Republicanism. Losing would be the best thing to happen to conservatism since 1964. Back then, conservatives lost in a landslide for the right reasons. Now, Republicans are losing in a landslide for the wrong reasons.

1. The War Against Islamist terror. The strategy deployed by Bush and Cheney has failed. It has failed to destroy al Qaeda, except in a country, Iraq, where their presence was minimal before the US invasion. It has failed to bring any of the terrorists to justice, instead creating the excrescence of Gitmo, torture, secret sites, and the collapse of America's reputation abroad. It has empowered Iran, allowed al Qaeda to regroup in Pakistan, made the next vast generation of Muslims loathe America, and imperiled our alliances. We need smarter leadership of the war: balancing force with diplomacy, hard power with better p.r., deploying strategy rather than mere tactics, and self-confidence rather than a bunker mentality.

Those conservatives who remain convinced, as I do, that Islamist terror remains the greatest threat to the West cannot risk a perpetuation of the failed Manichean worldview of the past eight years, and cannot risk the possibility of McCain making rash decisions in the middle of a potentially catastrophic global conflict. If you are serious about the war on terror and believe it is a war we have to win, the only serious candidate is Barack Obama.

former GOP Senator Charles Mathias endorses Barack Obama

The Top Ten Reasons Conservatives Should Vote For Obama

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYQPPH6b4Vo

I recognize that that there might not even be ten conservatives who regularly read this site, but on the chance that there are, or if you happen to know any who are persuadable, please encourage them to read Andrew Sullivan's list of the top ten reasons conservatives should cast their ballot for Barack Obama on November 4.

Update (3:40AM): Via teacherken, former GOP Senator Charles Mathias endorses Barack Obama.

Update (4:19AM): Republicans for Obama ad placed in USA Today.

"It's pitting one group of working people against another, and against the poor. Divide and conquer. It's all they have left."

Sarah Palin in Des Moines, IA: Whipping Up Fear of Communism

from Crooks and Liars by Heather

Sarah Palin in Des Moines whippin' up fear of communism if heaven forbid Obama gets elected...you betcha'.

Partial transcript courtesy of Sam Stein over at the HuffPo but I thought a bit more of this fear fest was worth sharing than they posted there.

See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else. If you thought your income, your property, your inventory, your investments were, were yours, they would really collectively belong to everybody. Obama, Barack Obama has an ideological commitment to higher taxes, and I say this based on his record... Higher taxes, more government, misusing the power to tax leads to government moving into the role of some believing that government then has to take care of us. And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us. Now, they do this in other countries where the people are not free. Let us fight for what is right. John McCain and I, we will put our trust in you.

This is pretty rich coming from someone who had no problem "spreadin' the wealth around" from the oil companies to the citizens in Alaska. Complaints of "big government spenders" ring pretty hollow from someone who left her small town $20 million in debt.

And to make this whole thing all the more lovely, at the 2:38 mark in the video, it sounds like one of her supporters yells out "He's a n**ger".

Please.Make.It.Stop. I've had enough of the fear mongering and the race baiting.

I don't know about anyone else, but to me this whole meme they've latched onto with the "spreading the wealth around" comments, and the latest cries of socialism, or communism, or whatever "ism" of the day they want to try to slap onto Obama ... it all just reeks of racism. The dog whistle they're blowing for the folks this hits home with is this: "Obama wants to give your hard-earned tax dollars to all of the lazy Negroes who want to sit home all day and collect welfare while you white people have to go to work every day to support them."

Of course, this is not what Obama is advocating when he promotes tax breaks for the middle class. I truly hope that most of this country has grown as weary of this type of class warfare as I have.

It's pitting one group of working people against another, and against the poor. Divide and conquer. It's all they have left.

"Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,"

The Endorsement From Hell

John McCain isn't boasting about a new endorsement, one of the very, very few he has received from overseas. It came a few days ago:

"Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election," read a commentary on a password-protected Islamist Web site that is closely linked to Al Qaeda and often disseminates the group's propaganda.

The endorsement left the McCain campaign sputtering, and noting helplessly that Hamas appears to prefer Barack Obama. Al Qaeda's apparent enthusiasm for Mr. McCain is manifestly not reciprocated.

Time to Fix the Bailout of all Bailouts

from The Washington Independent by Mary Kane

Economist and former Labor Sec. Robert Reich, who spoke out early and forcefully in opposition to the $700-billion Treasury Dept., rescue plan, is back again, this time calling to "Amend the Bailout of all Bailouts."

Instead of quickly passing a stimulus package, Congress should concentrate on putting some conditions on that bailout, Reich said, considering Wall Street's recent tendency to treat it as a trip to the candy store. Banks are hoarding cash for takeovers and otherwise using it for their own purposes, rather than lending it to consumers as the bailout intended, The New York Times noted.

As TWI's Matthew Blake noted, insurance company AIG executives spent $443,000 for a weeklong retreat at a resort and spa, just after getting an $85 billion bailout from the government.

In the middle of accepting billions of dollars of taxpayer money, the securities industry is still planning on awarding $20 billion in bonuses to top performers this year, with some getting the same amount they did last year — before they were partially nationalized.

I guess that's Wall Street's way of rewarding executives for their massive and unprecedented failures. From Reich:

Paulson's taxpayer-financed bailout continues to put money into the wrong pockets. So another item Congress should get to as soon as it returns: amend the Bailout of All Bailouts (the so-called "Troubled Asset Recovery Program") to force big banks to loan out at least 50 percent of the amounts they receive in cash from the government. In addition, because dollars are fungible — that is, a dollar received from the government functions the same as any other dollar of bank assets — the big bank beneficiaries of the bailout should be barred from (1) paying lobbyists who have anything whatever to do with administration or implementation of the bailout; (2) buying up other financial institutions; (3) paying dividends to shareholders; or (4) paying any bonuses or severance packages to any executives — as long as the bailout continues. There's simply no excuse for using taxpayer dollars for any of these purposes.

He's got a point.

If Wall Street continues to play around the taxpayer money from this rescue bill, an already skeptical public is going to get even more angry — and rightly so. In return for accepting all the help is an implicit guarantee that the financial-services industry will face more regulation. With the kind of behavior Wall Street has already exhibited, the hammer may come down sooner, and harder, than first imagined.

Whirlpool to cut 5,000 jobs

Whirlpool Corp. said Tuesday it will cut about 5,000 jobs by the end of 2009 because of the global credit crisis and its expectation for continued reduced demand in North America and Europe. The nation's largest home appliance maker also reported that its earnings fell 7 percent during the third quarter on lower unit volumes and higher material costs. Whirlpool lowered its earnings outlook for the year.

Honda reports 41% drop in profits

OKYO -- Honda reported a 41 percent drop in quarterly profit Tuesday on declining sales and a stronger yen, forcing Japan's second-biggest automaker to lower its forecasts for the full year. Honda Motor Co., with its fuel efficient Civic and Accord models, has avoided the deep problems of its money-losing American rivals. But the latest results show that even that Honda appears to be suffering some from a global slowdown sparked by the U.S. financial crisis.

Not shocking: BP reports record $10b profit for the quarter - that's just 3 months!

BP reports record $10b profit

LONDON (Reuters) – British oil major BP Plc (BP.L) may have marked the oil industry's high point by reporting a record $10.0 billion third quarter replacement cost profit on Tuesday, as the recent collapse in crude prices ensures a tougher outlook. Europe's second-largest non-government controlled oil company by market value said the forecast-beating earnings showed a turnaround under Chief Executive Tony Hayward was delivering results.

BP shares were up 2.11 percent at 447.75 pence, retreating from opening highs at around 472 pence but still outperforming the DJ Stoxx European oil and gas sector index (.SXEP) at 4:58 a.m. EDT.

"They are particularly impressive results," said Jason Kenney, oil analyst at ING in Edinburgh. "We will just have to see how long the oil price stays low or lower."

BP added that, even though oil prices may fall further, it remained committed to growing dividends. Investors had feared these could come under pressure after crude fell from a record above $147/barrel in July to around $64 now.

"We think the current turmoil may in fact create opportunities for us and we will look at those very closely," Hayward said in a statement.

A spokesman said this could include acquisitions of rivals or oil and gas fields.

As usual the main driver of earnings was BP's upstream oil and gas production unit, which benefited from a 54 percent rise in the Brent crude price to an average $115.09/barrel in the third quarter, compared to the same period in 2007.

PRODUCTION IMPROVES

The London-based company said oil and gas production rose slightly in the quarter compared to a year earlier, to 3.664 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, while analysts had expected a small drop.

A spokesman said the production result was due to a good performance at its Thunder Horse platform in the Gulf of Mexico. "The well performance is amazing there," he said.

BP said that adjusting for the impact of production-sharing agreements, under which BP's oil entitlement falls as prices rise, production rose 5 percent.

BP's previously troubled refining unit reported a big jump in profits to $1.97 billion from $371 million in the same period last year.

Analysts say BP has made good progress on restructuring its crude processing division which has been a key area of underperformance relative to rivals in recent years.

"In refining and marketing they have a restructuring plan underway and that looks as if it has helped the results there," said oil analyst Tony Shepard at brokerage Charles Stanley

The replacement cost result, which strips out unrealized gains or losses related to changes in the value of fuel inventories, included a net gain of $1.147 billion related to non-operating items.

Excluding such items, the underlying replacement cost result was $8.882 billion, ahead of an average forecast of $6.90 billion in a Reuters poll of 10 analysts.

BP said its quarterly dividend would be 14 cents per share, up from 10.825 cents a year earlier.

In September, BP resolved a dispute with its oligarch partners in TNK-BP over control of Russia's third-largest oil producer, by conceding some control to the billionaires.

This removed worries that BP might lose its half share of the business altogether but a collapse in Russian stockmarkets and worries about Russian relations with the west after Moscow's invasion of Georgia in August has weighed on BP's shares.

BP shares trade at a price earnings ratio of 4.906 times, based on Reuters consensus estimates for 2009 earnings, compared to 4.932 times for Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSa.L) and 8.067 times for Exxon Mobil (XOM.N).

(Additional reporting by Paul Hoskins and Phil Waller; Editing by Paul Bolding and Chris Wickham)

"how the securitization of debt, and its accompanying greedfest, directly led to banks selling subprime mortgages"

Evil Wall Street exports boomed with "fools" born to buy debt

from Politics in the Zeros. Anti-war, global warming, peak oil, progressive politics by Bob Morris

The title of this post sounds like it should come from a socialist site. But it doesn't. It's from Bloomberg, and comprehensively explains how the securitization of debt, and its accompanying greedfest, directly led to banks selling subprime mortgages - and we all know what happened after that.

Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With `Fools' Born to Buy Debt

By Mark Pittman

Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Tom Bosh lowered the telephone receiver into its cradle, making a decision on the way down. ``We're not buying any more,'' he told his traders at Bank of New York Co. ``Nothing.''

It was May 2007, and Bosh, who managed $25 billion from the bank's 13th-floor trading room above Times Square, had just hung up on Ralph Cioffi at Bear Stearns Cos. a dozen blocks away. Bosh had invested $50 million in notes from an issuer Cioffi controlled, and he was ready to pull the plug.

``I had a bad feeling,'' Bosh, 45, recalled. ``Cioffi was just bulldogging everyone. He was saying, `These assets are good, the collateral is paying down, and I know more than you.' That type of attitude.''

Bosh's premonition, a month before two of Cioffi's funds blew up, struck a death knell for structured finance, the system Wall Street banks devised to fuel more than two decades of unprecedented borrowing. The system allowed financial companies to lend beyond their capacity and outside the reach of regulators -- until it crashed this year.

While the collapse was most visible in the stock markets, the cause was the loss of confidence in the world's biggest bond market, structured finance. So far, it has led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the disappearance or takeover of more than a dozen banks, including three storied Wall Street firms, and almost $3 trillion in government expenditures and guarantees to contain the contagion.

Biggest U.S. Export

The bundling of consumer loans and home mortgages into packages of securities -- a process known as securitization -- was the biggest U.S. export business of the 21st century. More than $27 trillion of these securities have been sold since 2001, according to the Securities Industry Financial Markets Association, an industry trade group. That's almost twice last year's U.S. gross domestic product of $13.8 trillion.

The growth over the past decade was made possible by overseas banks, which saw the profits U.S. financial institutions were making and coveted the made-in-America technology, much as consumers around the world craved other emblems of American ingenuity from Coca-Cola to Hollywood movies. Wall Street obliged, with disastrous results: two-thirds of a trillion dollars in bank losses, about 40 percent of them outside the U.S.

``Securitization was based on the premise that a fool was born every minute,'' Joseph Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia University in New York, told a congressional committee on Oct. 21. ``Globalization meant that there was a global landscape on which they could search for those fools -- and they found them everywhere.''

Eager Adopters

European banks, in particular, were eager adopters. Securitizations in Europe increased almost sixfold between 2000 and 2007, from 78 billion euros ($98 billion) to 453 billion euros, according to the European Securitization Forum, a trade organization.

Three Icelandic banks borrowed enough to buy $228 billion of assets, most of them securitizations, turning the country's financial system into a hedge fund. All three banks have been nationalized by the government, leading Prime Minister Geir Haarde to advise citizens to switch from finance to fishing.

In Germany, one bank, Landesbank Sachsen Girozentrale, bought $26 billion worth of subprime-backed investments, putting the state of Saxony on the hook for $4.1 billion.

In Japan, Mizuho Financial Group Inc., the nation's third- largest bank, acquired an entire structured-finance team, which proceeded to lose $6 billion issuing mortgage-backed securities.

Shadow Banking

The damage reaches all the way to Australia, where the town council of Wingecarribee, a municipality outside Sydney with a population of 42,000, bought $20 million of securities from Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Now, Lehman is in bankruptcy, the town council is in court and the securities are worth about 15 cents on the dollar.

Securitization is a shadow banking system that funds most of the world's credit cards, car purchases, leveraged buyouts and, for a while, subprime mortgages. The system, which pools loans and slices up the risk of default, made borrowing cheaper for everyone, creating a debt culture that put credit cards in wallets from Seoul to Sao Paolo and enabled people to buy luxury cars and homes. It also pumped out record profits for banks, accounting for as much as one-fifth of their revenue over the last decade.

Beginning about three years ago, investment banks revved the system's engine to boost earnings. They raised revenue by funding more subprime mortgages and cut costs by relying increasingly on the $4.2 trillion sitting in U.S. money-market funds. As it turned out, those decisions would prove fatal.

`Powerful Technology'

``It's a powerful technology that has been driven beyond the speed limit,'' said Juan Ocampo, a former consultant at New York-based advisory firm McKinsey & Co. who wrote a 1988 book popularizing structured finance. ``For the last five years, instead of going 65 mph, they've been gunning it to 140 mph, 150 mph.''

Before the invention of securitization, banks loaned money, received payments and profited from the difference between what the borrower paid and the bank's funding cost.

During the mid-1980s, mortgage-bond traders at Salomon Brothers devised a method of lending without using capital, a technique at the heart of securitization. It works by taking anything that has regular payments -- mortgages, car loans, aircraft leases, music royalties -- and channeling the money to a trust that pays bondholders principal and interest.

Off-Balance-Sheet

The word ``securitization'' implies safety. Investors with less appetite for risk buy higher-rated securities and get paid first at lower interest rates. Those with a bigger appetite get paid later and receive more interest.

Securitization's biggest innovation was the use of off-balance-sheet accounting. If a bank couldn't sell a bond or didn't want to, the asset could be sold to a trust within a so-called special-purpose entity, incorporated in a place such as the Cayman Islands or Dublin, and shifted off the books. Lending expanded, and banks still booked profits.

With this new technology, a bank could originate $100 million in loans, sell off some to investors, transfer the rest to a special-purpose entity and not have to hold any capital. The profit could be as much as 1.25 percentage points of the amount loaned, or $1.25 million for every $100 million issued.

``The banks could turn a low return-on-equity business into one that doesn't use any equity, which was the motivation for this,'' said Brad Hintz, a Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst and former chief financial officer at Lehman. ``It becomes almost like a fee business because it requires no capital.''

`Capture the Prize'

Like most new products, securitization found a market at home before going abroad. Bankers at Salomon and First Boston Inc. raced from bank to bank to convince issuers it was the wave of the future.

William Haley remembers a 10 a.m. meeting in 1987 at Imperial Thrift & Loan Association in Glendale, California. As Haley, at the time a 33-year-old Salomon banker, and his team walked into the conference room to make a pitch, the First Boston team was walking out.

``We exchanged some knowing looks and then tried to beat the pants off them,'' said Haley, who now works at RBS Greenwich Capital Markets Inc., a firm specializing in mortgage-backed securities that is owned by Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. ``There was a fierce desire to capture the prize.''

First Boston

First Boston, housed in the same New York office tower as McKinsey, was first out of the gate in March 1985 with a $192 million computer-lease securitization for Sperry Corp., a predecessor of Unisys Corp. The bank then oversaw a series of auto-loan securitizations, including a $4 billion issue by General Motors Acceptance Corp. in October 1986, the biggest corporate debt issue at the time.

Haley's project was a $50 million deal for Banc One Corp. called Certificates for Amortizing Revolving Debts, or CARDs. It was the first credit-card securitization and a blueprint for the $358 billion of such securities now outstanding. The transaction also gave the banks a way to securitize their own assets and get them off their balance sheets, which allowed the money to be lent all over again.

The strategy was detailed in Ocampo's 282-page book ``Securitization of Credit: Inside the New Technology of Finance,'' which he co-wrote with McKinsey consultant James Rosenthal. Ocampo, who received an MBA from Harvard after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Rosenthal, a Harvard Law School graduate, argued that banks could be more profitable if they used securitization.

McKinsey Book

The authors examined six of the first asset-backed transactions and gave readers a step-by-step guide for how to repeat them. They said that banks that didn't embrace the new technology would be at a disadvantage, and they predicted it would become the dominant form of financing.

``The McKinsey book helped with credibility with issuers,'' said Haley. ``It wasn't that easy in the beginning. Conferences now have thousands of people, but I remember once in Beverly Hills, I gave a speech and there were maybe 25 people in the audience. They were furiously taking notes, however.''

The new technology was spread around the world by the people who worked on the First Boston and Salomon teams. Salomon's group was led by Patricia Jehle, who later founded Bear Stearns's asset-backed unit. Another member, Michael Hutchins, started the first team at a European bank when he went to Zurich-based UBS AG in 1996. A third, Michael Normile, moved to Merrill Lynch & Co., where he ran its securities business, then switched to London-based HSBC Holdings Plc in 2004. Haley built similar teams at Lehman, Chase Manhattan Bank and Amsterdam-based ABN Amro Bank NV.

Hard Sell

First Boston's team included Walid Chammah, 54, who went on to head debt and equity capital markets at Morgan Stanley and is now co-president of that firm. Joseph Donovan, the banker responsible for the GMAC relationship, went to Smith Barney in 1995, to Prudential Securities in 1998 and two years later took over the asset-backed group at Credit Suisse First Boston after Zurich-based Credit Suisse bought First Boston.

Donovan remembers traveling to Europe for First Boston in the early 1990s, trying to convince Volkswagen AG in Wolfsburg, Germany, and Renault SA outside Paris of the benefits of securitization. It was a hard sell. Europeans, he said, didn't take out auto loans.

``We tried over and over,'' Donovan recalled. ``We were trying to get more issuers, and there weren't any.''

`50-Year Pedigree'

By the time Donovan went to work for Credit Suisse in 2000, European attitudes had changed. Home-mortgage securitizations were especially appealing, he said, because European banks didn't need a ``50-year pedigree to compete.''

``You don't need a whole equity-research department and relationships with CEOs and CFOs,'' Donovan said. ``You basically needed good computers and distribution. You can always buy a Fannie, Freddie or Ginnie Mae pool. You just go online and buy it. You can't buy a Ford Motor Credit deal, because you have to know people.''

CSFB went from third in underwriting structured finance in 2000, behind Lehman and Salomon Smith Barney, to first in 2001, when it issued $96.3 billion in securities. Its market share increased 50 percent to 12.7 percent. The bank fell to fourth place in 2005, although its volume soared to $144.5 billion.

Exporting Debt

As securitization caught on, borrowing increased. U.S. consumer debt tripled in the two decades after 1988 to $2.6 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve. Foreign banks used the new technology to expand lending, seeking borrowers on their home turf.

``One of the things the United States exported overseas was a debt culture,'' Haley said.

While consumers were snapping up credit cards, Nicholas Sossidis and Stephen Partridge-Hicks at Citibank in London were figuring out a way to sell the new bonds. Their solution: Alpha Finance Corp., the first off-balance-sheet structured investment vehicle, or SIV.

Alpha was created in 1988 as a way for Citibank, and later Citigroup Inc., to vertically integrate its business like an oil company. The raw material was found in a loan, refined into a security, then sold to a SIV at a profit.

Citigroup, formed in a merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group Inc., which owned asset-backed pioneer Salomon, also got a new product to sell: capital notes that boast returns of more than 20 percent a year. Owners of these notes receive all the excess return when borrowers pay their bills on time, though they are the last to be paid when times get hard.

Citi SIVs

In the beginning, SIVs were small and cautious. Alpha was capitalized with $100 million of equity that supported $500 million of commercial paper and medium-term notes. The SIV could hold only debt rated A- or higher and didn't take any currency or interest-rate risk, according to a 1993 Fitch Ratings report.

Alpha was followed by a slew of SIVs with names such as Beta Corp. and Five Finance. By 2007, Citigroup's SIVs had $90 billion of assets, equal to the stock market value of PepsiCo Inc., making up about one-fourth of the entire SIV industry.

In 2003, the bank was sued by creditors of Enron Corp. for its role in setting up entities that enabled the Houston-based company to move assets off the balance sheet for Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Skilling. Citigroup paid $1.66 billion in March to settle the lawsuit. Skilling, a former McKinsey consultant, was convicted of accounting fraud and is serving a 24-year prison sentence.

Mismatched Funding

Starting around 2005, securitization began to rely more on short-term money-market funds for financing. This was especially true for securities made by pooling other bonds, known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. Investors were loath to buy long-term debt of issuers that didn't have a track record, so new issuers sold asset-backed commercial paper that matured in less than a year. While money markets are the cheapest way to finance, they can also be the most dangerous for borrowers because they can mature as soon as the next day.

``What happened in 2005 was that because of subprime and some other changes, commercial paper and asset-backed securities offered a bigger spread than anything that had ever been in the market before,'' said Deborah Cunningham, chief investment officer of Federated Investors in Pittsburgh, who oversees $235 billion in commercial paper. ``It was hundreds of basis points, as opposed to 10 or 20 basis points before.''

SIVs, banks and CDOs sold trillions of dollars of asset- backed commercial paper between 2005 and 2007 in maturities ranging from nine months to overnight. In the U.S., the amount outstanding marched higher almost every week beginning in April 2005, peaking at $1.2 trillion for the week ending Aug. 8, 2007.

`Huge Appetite'

Once money-market funds began to be tapped for financing, Ocampo said, ``it created a huge appetite for high-yield assets, far more than could be originated on a sound basis.''

To accommodate the demand, banks funded more subprime mortgages, with an average life of seven years, replacing car loans with an average life of three years and credit-card bonds paid off within 18 months.

Among conservative lenders, that rang an alarm: Bankers are taught to avoid such mismatched funding, in which a lender has to pay back money before the borrower has to pay the principal.

``Most of the terrible things happening now are because of the presence of money-market assets, taking what used to be long-term funding and making it short-term,'' Bruce Bent, 71, who started the first money-market fund in 1970, said in an interview in July.

Reserve Funds

Bent, chairman of New York-based Reserve Funds, said he didn't buy any asset-backed commercial paper until 2007, when the market froze in the wake of the collapse of the Bear Stearns hedge funds. That's when his Reserve Primary Fund began buying castoffs of asset-backed commercial paper at cut-rate prices from other funds.

Yet asset-backed securities weren't Bent's undoing. His fund also owned $785 million in Lehman debt, bought before the firm filed for bankruptcy Sept. 15. In the two days following the bankruptcy, Reserve clients asked to pull about $40 billion from the $62.5 billion fund, and its net asset value fell to 97 cents. It was the first time that a money fund ``broke the buck,'' or fell below $1, in 14 years. The fund is now being liquidated, and Bent hasn't given an interview since.

Reserve Primary Fund's implosion, and the subsequent seizing up of two Commonfund portfolios used by universities and endowments to hold cash, triggered a panic in U.S. money markets, cutting off this form of credit to industrial companies and banks. No one could be sure whether the banks held securitizations that had dropped in value, making them insolvent. That set off a series of bank takeovers and bailouts around the world, including a $64 billion capital injection by the U.K. government into that nation's financial institutions and 400 billion euros in loan guarantees pledged by Germany.

`Absolute Disaster'

``We've created an absolute disaster,'' said Nouriel Roubini, a New York University professor of economics, who predicted the failure of investment banks in a paper he wrote in February titled ``Twelve Steps to Financial Disaster.'' ``The reputation of the United States as a financial center and a leader has been tarnished significantly.''

Also tarnished, if not blackened, is the securitization business itself. Sales of European asset-backed securities, including bonds for car loans and credit cards, fell by 40 percent to 12.7 billion euros in the second quarter, and CDO sales fell by two-thirds to 10 billion euros. In the U.S., mortgage bonds issued by entities not affiliated with the government plummeted to $10.8 billion in the first half of the year, one-twentieth of the $241 billion sold in the same period in 2007.

Cioffi, Bosh

The authors of the 1988 McKinsey handbook on securitization have moved on. Rosenthal, who declined to be interviewed, became a managing director at Lehman and is now in charge of information technology at Morgan Stanley. Ocampo received a patent for risk-controlled investing and founded an institutional fund-management firm, Trajectory Asset Management. The firm doesn't have any structured-finance obligations.

Bear Stearns's Cioffi, 52, was indicted on charges of misleading investors by assuring them that his hedge funds were healthy when he knew they weren't. Cioffi, who now works out of his home in Tenafly, New Jersey, has pleaded not guilty. He declined to comment.

The Bank of New York's Bosh lost his job when his company was merged with Mellon Corp. in June 2007. He's still looking for work.

``You try to do the right thing,'' Bosh said in an interview this month. ``And this is what happens.''

(TOMORROW: A Lehman-Assisted Bank Overdose in Germany.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Pittman in New York at mpittman@bloomberg.net

"if you can't pay off your balance in full every month, please make more than the minimum payments otherwise you'll be debt forever and ever"

Capital One Explains Minimum Balance Calculation Changes [PR]

from Consumerist by Ben Popken

Capital One wrote to explain why they were changing lowering the minimum balance calculations, as we posted about yesterday. Pam Girardo in Capital One External Communications wrote:

Last March, Capital One's credit card operations became regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in an effort to consolidate our major subsidiaries under the same Regulator. Prior to March, we were regulated by the Federal Reserve or the Office of Thrift Supervision. The OCC has different minimum payment calculation requirements than the Fed and OTS.

I hope this context is helpful.

Got it. Remember folks, if you can't pay off your balance in full every month, please make more than the minimum payments otherwise you'll be debt forever and ever. This chart shows what I'm talking about.

PREVIOUSLY: Capital One Changes Minimum Balance Calculations (Photo: taberandrew)

"three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama"

McCain call center workers stage protest

Slashdot | Setbacks Cast Doubt On NASA's Ares Project

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents. Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being "dangerously weak on crime," "coddling criminals," and for voting against "protecting children from danger."

Williams' daughter told her that up to 40 of her co-workers had refused to read the script, and had left the call center after supervisors told them that they would have to either read the call or leave, Williams says. The call center is called Americall, and it's located in Hobart, IN.

"They walked out," Williams says of her daughter and her co-workers, adding that they weren't fired but willingly sacrificed pay rather than read the lines. "They were told [by supervisors], `If you all leave, you're not gonna get paid for the rest of the day."

The daughter, who wanted her name withheld fearing retribution from her employer, confirmed the story to us. "It was like at least 40 people," the daughter said. "People thought the script was nasty and they didn't wanna read it."

A second worker at the call center confirmed the episode, saying that "at least 30" workers had walked out after refusing to read the script.

"We were asked to read something saying [Obama and Democrats] were against protecting children from danger," this worker said. "I wouldn't do it. A lot of people left. They thought it was disgusting."

This worker, too, confirmed sacrificing pay to walk out, saying her supervisor told her: "If you don't wanna phone it you can just go home for the day."

The script coincided with this robo-slime call running in other states, but because robocalling is illegal in Indiana it was being read by call center workers.

Representatives at Americall in Indiana, and at the company's corporate headquarters in Naperville, Illinois, didn't return calls for comment.

"these incidents call into question McCain’s assertion in his 2002 book, “Worth the Fighting For,” that he has never intervened with federal regulators since Keating Five, and he only involves himself when there is a clear public interest."

McCain Pushed for Land Deal for Keating Associate

from The Washington Independent by Matthew DeLong

According to McClatchy, six years after the Keating Five scandal, Sen. John McCain pressured U.S. Forest Service employees to approve a potentially lucrative land swap that would have benefited some big donors — including a former associate of Charles Keating Jr.

The story began when a plan to purchase a 2,154-acre property just north of Phoenix, Ariz. and convert it into a golf course surrounded by several hundred luxury homes was scuttled due to opposition from local environmentalists. According to McClatchy, John Lang, the developer who sought to buy the property, known as Spur Cross Ranch, enlisted McCain's help to arrange a land swap to trade the plot for 1,700 acres of land in the Tonto National Forest, just outside the wealthy community of Scottsdale's city limits. The property's owners included Carl Lindner — who, with Keating, had been accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of fraud in 1979.

Correspondence obtained by McClatchy and interviews with former Forest Service officials show that McCain not only explored a three-way swap involving state and federal land, but also sought support for the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund to buy Spur Cross.

Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck and his underlings objected both to surrendering lands in the Tonto forest, which bordered the ranch, and to managing a large Spur Cross park in Maricopa County. They said the ranch would rate as a low priority for the Conservation Fund.

[Forest Service Southwest Regional Chief Eleanor] Towns said that, while she was still head of the Forest Service's national real-estate office in early 1998, Lang and Scottsdale Mayor Samantha Campana stopped by her office and raised the idea of a swap. Assuming her new job a short time later, she said, she mentioned Lang's visit in an introductory chat with McCain, who told her to use her "best professional judgment" in considering trading forestlands for Spur Cross.

But Towns said that after she took over the regional post in the spring of 1998, McCain aide Deb Gullett phoned her several times to press for an exchange.

"She was aggressive, she was at times rude and she was hell bent on getting that land exchange done," said Towns, who's now retired. "She said, 'The senator wants this land exchange done.'"

Hearing those words, Towns said, she told Gullett of McCain's instruction to use her best judgment, said that if he intended otherwise he should phone himself and slammed down the phone…

In the summer of 1998, McCain sent letters asking the Arizona Land Trust and the U.S. General Services Administration to identify properties that could be swapped.

His office also circulated draft legislation that would've forced the Forest Service to yield unspecified lands in a complicated exchange that would bypass the usual environmental impact study.

Jack Fraser, a leading conservationist who since has died, later said in a letter to McCain that his draft bill "was a sweetheart deal for the developer but . . . would have been a nightmare for the public interest."

According to the article, McCain dropped his interest in the deal when the Scottsdale city council voted against the deal.

Federal Election Commission records show that in the three years beginning in mid-1997, McCain's Senate campaign and his 2000 presidential campaign received more than $9,000 from Lindner, developer Lang and other backers of the deal. Several donations were made in close proximity to his Forest Service letters. His committees also got more than $25,000 from members of lobbying firms representing [Lindner's] Great American [Insurance Company's] parent, the American Financial Group, on various issues.

This year, the 89-year-old Lindner and his son, Carl H. Lindner III, have raised more than $300,000 for McCain's presidential campaign.

It is no secret in the Mountain West, where the federal government owns vast amounts of land, that land swaps often provide a vehicle for legislators to do favors for friends and contributors. A land deal that benefited a close business associate was at the heart of the controversy that led to the indictment of Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) on 35 felony counts.

This isn't the first land swap in which McCain's involvement has drawn attention. The New York Times reported in April that McCain's actions have repeatedly benefited Donald R. Diamond, a longtime donor, including McCain's assistance in a land deal in California that ultimately netted Diamond a $20 million profit.

Moreover, as the McClatchy article notes, these incidents call into question McCain's assertion in his 2002 book, "Worth the Fighting For," that he has never intervened with federal regulators since Keating Five, and he only involves himself when there is a clear public interest.

"This was a whopper of a crime that bailed out fabulously wealthy people who took risks that made them rich on the way up and now again on their ways down. "

"The Party's Over?"

from AfterDowningStreet.org - Impeach Bush and Cheney Now! by davidswanson

By Cindy Sheehan

The title for this piece was a very unfortunate statement that Nancy Pelosi made after she handed the banksters on Wall Street 700 billion dollars of our money. This was a whopper of a crime that bailed out fabulously wealthy people who took risks that made them rich on the way up and now again on their ways down. I don't know about you all, but I could have a heckuva party with 700 billion dollars!

One of the corporations that has now received around 100 billion dollars in federal bailout funds is AIG. This firm has continued to party all over the country: treating its associates to fabulous retreats at taxpayer's expense. Not only is AIG still partying hardy, but according to the Pelosi's recent financial statement, they own between 250-500 thousand dollars in AIG stock. Can we all say, conflict of interest?

I think it's about time that the establishment media here in San Francisco quit giving Ms. Pelosi a free pass on her unethical and non-progressive values and actions and start asking her some relevant questions. I think the new paradigm can begin this week when Nancy is on The Forum with Michael Krasny on KQED. We brainstormed a few questions that Michael could ask Pelosi…well more than a few!

• Why do you say that you are against the occupation of Iraq when you have given George Bush billions of dollars of "blank checks" to wage it?
• Why did you vote to give Bush the authorization to attack Afghanistan, when Afghanistan never attacked the US? Why did you vote for the freedom and Orwellian named stealing USA PATRIOT Act?
• What did you know about the administration's inhumane and grisly policy of torture and when did you know it? Why did you allow it to continue?
* Why do you support the No Child Left Behind Act that is effectively destroying our education system and allows for the active recruitment of our young people by military recruiters?
• Why did you give telecoms and BushCo immunity from warrantless wiretapping? Why did you destroy our 4th amendment by the FISA Modernization Act?
• Why did you give the banksters on Wall Street 700 billion dollars when people are starving and sleeping on our streets?
• What is your plan to pump liquidity into the people's economy to allow prosperity to gurgle up and no longer trickle up?
• Why did you take impeachment off the table when the Bush Administration have clearly committed high crimes and misdemeanors and why did you say on The View that you didn't know of any crimes Bush had committed after Congressman Dennis Kucinich charged him with 35 impeachable offenses? What are and what will the implications be for allowing BushCo to slink off unpunished?
• Why did you cave into the Republicans and allow the ban on offshore drilling to expire?
• Why do employees in your companies not belong to labor unions? Why do you support free trade agreements that oppress workers and destroy the environment?
• Why are you claiming in campaign literature that you obtained federal funds to clean up the Hunter's Point Naval station to help the community of Bay View, when the funds were to be used to decontaminate the area where you hope the new stadium for the 49ers will be placed?
* Why did your Congress not work to protect our elections from fraud and tampering of voting machines that can be easily compromised?
• Why haven't you held a town hall meeting in the district since 2006 but you have the time to sell books and fund raise all over the country?
• Why won't you debate your Congressional opponents? What are you afraid of?

I would love to tell Nancy Pelosi that her party is over, but I highly doubt that the establishment media here in San Francisco will suddenly grow some journalistic integrity and actually hold her feet to the fire where they belong.

I would also love to tell her this to her face, but like her best buddy, George Bush, she won't face me and answer questions about issues that truly affect us all.

--
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root---
Henry David Thoreau

www.CindyforCongress.org

"Here are the banks known to have selected for federal investments:"

The money list

from BailoutSleuth by Chris Carey

At least 27 banks have agreed to sell stakes in themselves to the Treasury Department under a federal plan to inject capital into the financial system.

The newest list of recipients includes Capital One Financial Corp. a big credit-card issuer based in McLean, Va.; Washington Federal Savings, a thrift in Seattle that recently reported its first quarterly loss in history; and Saigon National Bank, a small bank in Southern California which targets that region's ethnic Vietnamese.

The latest deals total $30 billion in investment by the Treasury Department. The agency has allocated $250 billion for the program, which calls for the government to provide capital to banks in exchange for preferred stock and warrants.

The investments announced since the program's inception earlier this month cover more than $160 billion of the available cash.

BailoutSleuth compiled this list of recipients from bank press releases and local media reports. We will make it a standing feature on our site, adding names and amounts as they become available.

Here are the banks known to have selected for federal investments:

Citigroup Inc. (New York) -- $25 billion

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (New York) - $25 billion

Wells Fargo & Co. (San Francisco) -- $25 billion

Bank of America Corp. (Charlotte, N.C.) -- $15 billion

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (New York) -- $10 billion

Merrill Lynch Inc. (New York) -- $10 billion

Morgan Stanley (New York) -- $10 billion

PNC Financial Services Group Inc. (Pittsburgh) -- $7.7 billion

Capital One Financial Corp. (McLean, Va.) -- $3.55 billion

Regions Financial Corp. (Birmingham, Ala.) -- $3.5 billion

SunTrust Banks Inc. (Atlanta) -- $3.5 billion

Fifth Third Bancorp (Cincinnati) -- $3.4 billion

BB&T Corp. (Winston-Salem, NC) -- $3.1 billion

Bank of New York Mellon (New York) -- $3 billion

Keycorp (Cleveland) -- $2.5 billion

Comerica Inc. (Dallas) -- $2.25 billion

State Street Corp. (Boston) -- $2 billion

Northern Trust Corp. (Chicago) -- $1.5 billion

Huntington Bancshares Inc. (Columbus, Ohio) -- $1.4 billion

First Horizon National Corp. (Memphis, Tenn.) -- $866 million

City National Corp. (Beverly Hills, Calif.) -- $395 million

Valley National Bancorp (Wayne, N.J.) -- $330 million

UCBH Holdings Inc. (San Francisco) -- $298 million

Washington Federal Savings (Seattle) -- $200 million

First Niagara Financial Group Inc. (Buffalo, N.Y.) -- $186 million

HF Financial Corp. (Sioux Falls, S.D.) -- $25 million

Saigon National Bank (Westminster, Calif.) -- $1.2 million

"Politically, McCain’s plan is so regressive, it’s not fair to his own candidacy. “McCain’s tax plan is so regressive that some liken it to a third term for President Bush."

New Obama Attack Hits McCain's Old Tax Plan

from The Washington Independent by Ari Melber

After starting the week with a final "closing argument" speech on Monday, Sen. Barack Obama returns to his starting argument today, with an address again hammering his rival, Sen. John McCain, as the second coming of President George W. Bush.

The Obama campaign is circulating the Democratic nominee's new remarks, which assail McCain for "doubling down" on Bush's tax cuts. Obama spoke at morning rally in Chester, Pa., that drew 9,000 people.

In the closing days of this campaign, my opponent is trying to distance himself from the president he has faithfully supported 90 percent of the time. He's supported four of the five Bush budgets that have taken us from the surpluses of the Clinton years to the largest deficits in history. John McCain has ridden shotgun as George Bush has driven our economy toward a cliff, and now he wants to take the wheel and step on the gas.

Putting aside the hyperbole in presidential campaigns, Obama is clearly arguing that McCain's tax proposal continues the Bush approach. Consider:

Bush's signature tax cuts were skewed toward the richest Americans; roughly 31 percent of the money went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. Yet under McCain's two proposed tax cuts, a staggering 58 percent of the benefits go to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. That finding is from a report by James Kvaal and Robert Gordon, policy experts at the Center for American Progress, about the "Bush-McCain-Norquist Tax Agenda." Tax activist Grover Norquist, a Republican insider, has crowed that McCain adopted his organization's "entire agenda" of slashing the corporate tax rate, vetoing all tax hikes, extending the Bush tax cuts and abolishing the alternative minimum tax.

I wrote that in a policy appraisal in July, concluding: "McCain's tax plan is so regressive that some liken it to a third term for President Bush. But that's just not fair to Bush." A new line in Obama's speech hits this point:

When it comes to the issue of taxes, saying that John McCain is running for a third Bush term isn't being fair to George W. Bush.

Politically, McCain's plan is so regressive, it's not fair to his own candidacy.

"Set your freedom fries down and step out of the vehicle."

'Constitution-Free' Zones Extend 100 Miles from the Border

from cryptogon.com by Kevin

Set your freedom fries down and step out of the vehicle.

Via: Wired:

Government agents should not have the right to stop and question Americans anywhere without suspicion within 100 miles of the border, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday, pointing attention to the little known power of the federal government to set up immigration checkpoints far from the nation's border lines.

The government has long been able to search people entering and exiting the country without need to say why, which is known as the border search exception of the Fourth Amendment.

After 9/11, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security the right to use some of its powers deeper within the country, and now DHS has set up at least 33 internal checkpoints where they stop people, question them and ask them to prove citizenship, according to the ACLU.

"It is a classic example of law enforcement powers expanding far beyond their proper boundaries – in this case, literally," said Caroline Fredrickson, who heads the ACLU's Washington, D.C., Legislative Office.

The ACLU says it has scores of complaints from citizens and wants Congress to investigate and roll back the buffer zone. According to a map the rights group released Wednesday, some 190 million citizens live within what the ACLU dubs the "Constitution-free Zone."

DHS spokesman Jason Ciliberti says the ACLU's description of the zone as "Constitution-Free" couldn't be further from the truth and that the check points follow rules set by Supreme Court rulings.

"We don't have the abilitty to just set up checkpoints willy-nilly," Ciliberti said. "The Supreme Court has determined that brief investigative encontuers do not constitute a serach or seizure."

When citizens or visa holders encounter a checkpoint, most are waived on after showing identification, but if an agent suspects the person is not lawfully in the country, the agent can detain the person until the agent's investigation is satisfied.

The government has long had the power to set up such check points, but has recently expanded the number of permanent and 'tactical' check points and deployed them in areas they hadn't before — such as near the Canadian border.

The courts, however, are not on the ACLU's side — and have regularly ruled that the Fourth Amendment's protections don't extend to the border area, airport screening or even to laptops at the border.

a top McCain adviser one-ups the priceless “diva” description, calling her “a whack job.”

McCain Adviser: Palin's a 'Whack Job'

from The Washington Independent by Matthew DeLong

After several days of internecine finger-pointing and name-calling within the McCain campaign, Politico's Mike Allen reports that an adviser in the McCain faction stepped up the attack on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's faction. From today's edition of The Playbook:

***In convo with Playbook, a top McCain adviser one-ups the priceless "diva" description, calling her "a whack job."

Now, I'm not a political strategist, but I'm pretty sure calling your own vice presidential candidate a "whack job" is a bit too mavericky even for the McCain campaign. Something tells me this won't be particularly helpful in convincing people to put Palin one heartbeat away from the presidency.

This is perhaps one of the stupidest and most unprofessional things I've ever seen. Someone ought to remind the McCain campaign that the election is not officially over yet. There will be plenty of time for casting blame and writing tell-all books after Nov. 4.

In the meantime, the McCain team might want to pretend it still has a chance of winning this election — even if it doesn't believe it.

"Desperate, Aas scoured medical literature, and finally hit upon an old Norwegian folk remedy — the poo cure"

Dr. Aas' Miracle Poo Cure

from mental_floss Blog by Ransom Riggs

It's often been observed that the human body is something of a wonderland for bacteria — vast colonies of which live on your skin, in your mouth, and inside your intestinal tract, which is home to one of the densest bacterial populations on Earth. It's the latter which has been the focus of an ongoing and intensifying battle in guts across America; in this age of antibiotics, strains of dangerously immune "superbugs" are proliferating, and when they find their way inside a host, they can be tough to get rid of. What results is tantamount to a war inside you — between the "good" bacteria and the "bad" — inside a vast-but-tiny universe that doctors are only beginning to understand.

His name is Dr. Johannes Aas, and he's a gastroenterologist. Not long ago, a patient of his was battling a nasty infection that wouldn't go away, caused by a potent and largely antibiotics-immune bacterium called C. difficile. It's inside many of us, but is usually kept in check by the population of beneficial intestinal bacterium, or flora, which digest our food and provide nutrients to the body. But if the balance of this ongoing battle is tipped — say, by a dose of antibiotics which kills the beneficial flora but not the C. difficile — then the bad guys can take over, producing a toxin that causes serious diarrhea and over time can destroy the colon lining. In other words: bad news.

From Physorg.com:

Patients like this used to be rare. But C. difficile is one of a growing number of microorganisms that have become resistant to antibiotics, while at the same time becoming more common and virulent. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hospitalizations from C. difficile infections increased by 23 percent each year between 2000 and 2005. Death rates tripled between 1999 and 2004.

Dr. Aas' patient was facing serious side effects, and even death. Desperate, Aas scoured medical literature, and finally hit upon an old Norwegian folk remedy — the poo cure. Definitely low tech, and a bit nasty-sounding, it involves injecting a bit of stool into a patient, in the hopes that someone else's flora can replace their own, and tilt the battle of the bacteria back toward the side of good.

Here's how the procedure, and the recovery, went down:

On a crisp fall day, she sat in the exam room with an opaque tube running through her nose, down her throat and into her stomach.

"We just need that little brown bag," said Dr. Timothy Rubin, a gastroenterologist who works with Aas. He meant the stool sample from Jolliffe's husband, which was being processed in the lab. It was mixed with water and filtered to take out the organic matter, leaving a dark brown liquid that contained billions of bacteria.

When the little bag arrived with the sample inside, Rubin used a large syringe to inject the liquid through the tube and into Jolliffe's stomach. It was over in less than a minute.

"All I felt was cold," she said.

Rubin says that when Aas first told him about the procedure he thought it was unusual, yes, but also brilliant. "He kept it simple, inexpensive and available to anyone," he said.

The funny thing is, scientists only understand why the poo cure works in the most rudimentary way; little is known about the universe of bacteria in our guts, though new research is underway, including a project nicknamed the "bacteria genome project," which hopes to identify all the microscopic combatants inside us.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Ted "A Series of Tubes" Stevens Found Guilty

Slashdot | Ted "A Series of Tubes" Stevens Found Guilty
techmuse writes "According to a series of tubes sites, Senator Ted Stevens has been found guilty of lying about free home renovations that he received from an oil contractor. He faces up to 5 years in jail, and the outcome of his current reelection bid is now in doubt. 'The conviction came after a tumultuous week in the jury room. First there were complaints about an unruly juror, then another had to be replaced when she left Washington following the death of her father. Finally, jurors on Monday discovered a discrepancy in the indictment that had been overlooked by prosecutors. Jury deliberations in this historic trial have at times been as contentious as some of the proceedings The Justice Department indicted Stevens on July 29, and the Alaska Republican took a huge legal gamble and asked for a speedy trial in order to resolve the charges before Election Day. Judge Emmet Sullivan complied with Stevens' request, and in less than three months from the time of his indictment, Stevens was found guilty.'"

"According to recent research, at age 39 our brain reaches its peak speed, and it's all downhill after that."

Slashdot | Brains Work Best At Age of 39
Scientists at the University of California Los Angeles are reporting that while some people may think "life begins at 40," all it seems to do is slow down. According to recent research, at age 39 our brain reaches its peak speed, and it's all downhill after that. "The loss of a fatty skin that coats the nerve cells, called neurons, during middle age causes the slowdown, experts say. The coating acts as insulation, similar to the plastic covering on an electrical cable, and allows for fast bursts of signals around the body and brain. When the sheath deteriorates, signals passing along the neurons in the brain slow down. This means reaction times in the body are slower too."

Bit by bit, the new rocket ship that is supposed to blast America into the second Space Age and return astronauts to the moon appears to be coming undone."

stoolpigeon writes with this excerpt from an Orlando Sentinel article about the Ares program, which paints a bleak picture of the program's future: "Bit by bit, the new rocket ship that is supposed to blast America into the second Space Age and return astronauts to the moon appears to be coming undone. First was the discovery that it lacked sufficient power to lift astronauts in a state-of-the-art capsule into orbit. Then engineers found out that it might vibrate like a giant tuning fork, shaking its crew to death. Now, in the latest setback to the Ares I, computer models show the ship could crash into its launch tower during liftoff. "

"the Obama-Biden ticket maintains a strong lead in the race for daily newspaper endorsements, by 177 to 69, nearly a 3-1 margin, and with an even wider spread in terms of those paper’s circulations."

Massive list of Obama endorsements

Massive list of Obama endorsements

In not much of a surprise, John McCain picked up the endorsement from Michigan's conservative-leaning Detroit News last Thursday and the Grand Rapids Press yesterday. But nationwide, the Obama-Biden ticket maintains a strong lead in the race for daily newspaper endorsements, by 177 to 69, nearly a 3-1 margin, and with an even wider spread in terms of those paper's circulations.

At least 35 papers have now switched to Obama from Bush in 2004, with four flipping to McCain.

From the Detroit News:

"During these perilous times, the nation needs an experienced, proven leader in the White House. Sen. John McCain is best equipped for the job.

The Republican presidential candidate has the character, pragmatism and independence necessary to lead a united America past our poisonous partisan divisions and into a more civil and productive future.

Seemingly a snub to the Arizona senator, the Ann Arbor News — which had endorsed George W. Bush in 2004 — announced its decision not to endorse a presidential candidate this year.

From the Ann Arbor News:

"When this newspaper decides not to endorse a candidate in an election, it's usually because we believe neither is qualified for the office.

In this year's presidential race, that's not the case. Both Barack Obama, a Democrat, and John McCain, a Republican, are qualified to be president.

Yet when we look at this pair, we see two seriously flawed candidates who have run very disappointing campaigns. And although it's possible that either man will turn out to make an excellent president, we find ourselves unable to work up sufficient enthusiasm to endorse either one."

The Detroit Free Press endorsement of Barack Obama last week also wasn't a shocker, as even it states in its endorsement that its pick was predictable. Here's a snippet from that endorsement:

"Despite his relatively short time in public office, Obama, 47, has over the course of the general election campaign steadily articulated a progressive, pragmatic vision for this country, keyed to opportunities for the middle class, and demonstrated time and again that his approach to things is grounded in deliberation and reflection. He's a man clearly open to ideas and willing to search for the right answer to a problem rather than pursuing the expedient one.

His mantra of "change" is rooted in a well-grounded perspective on governing and leadership.

These qualities will serve well a country that's hungry for a unified, hopeful vision."

Obama has also picked up the endorsements of the Detroit-based Michigan Chronicle,The Muskegon Chronicle, the Bay City Times, Lansing State Journal, Livingston Daily, Battle Creek Enquirer and the Saginaw News.

Outside Michigan, Obama was also endorsed on Thursday by the Philadelphia Daily News and the New York Times, which are still no surprise from the Democratic-leaning papers. However, the Times offers a particularly glowing endorsement:

"Mr. Obama has met challenge after challenge, growing as a leader and putting real flesh on his early promises of hope and change. He has shown a cool head and sound judgment. We believe he has the will and the ability to forge the broad political consensus that is essential to finding solutions to this nation's problems."

According to the Times' interactive timeline, the daily hasn't supported a Republican since 1956 when it endorsed Dwight D. Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson.

History was also made in Hartford, Conn., and in Chicago. The Hartford Courant endorsement of Obama was announced over the weekend — only the second time in the paper's 244-year history that it has endorsed a Democratic candidate for president, while the Chicago Tribune's endorsement of Obama was the first time for that paper to endorse a Democrat for president. The McCain campaign said this was expected in a hometown newspaper.

In McCain's home state, the Republican-leaning Arizona Republic endorsed McCain over the weekend, ending much speculation over which candidate that paper might favor.

Below is my tally of state-by-state newspaper endorsements. A "(B)" denotes that the paper voted for Bush in 2004, "(K)" denotes that it voted for Kerry in 2004, "(N)" signifies "no endorsement" in 2004, and the numbers that follow are the paper's circulation if available.

BARACK OBAMA
177 daily newspapers total
More than 16,172,397 daily circulation total

ALABAMA
The Florence Times Daily (B)
Tuscaloosa News (K): 32,768

ALASKA
Anchorage Daily News (B)

ARKANSAS
Arkansas Times (K)

CALIFORNIA
The Argus (Fremont) (K): 26,749
Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek) (K): 183,086
Daily Breeze (Torrance) (B): 66,599
Daily News (Los Angeles) (K): 137,344
Daily Review (Hayward) (K): 30,704
The Fresno Bee (K): 150,334
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (Ontario) (B): 53,903
La Opinion (Los Angeles) (K): 114,892
Long Beach Press Telegram (B): 85,595
Los Angeles Times (N): 773,884
Marin Independent-Journal (K): 31,909
Merced Sun Star (K): 15,015
The Modesto Bee (K): 78,001
The Monterey County Herald (K): 28,933
Oakland Tribune (K): 96,535
Pasadena Star-News (B): 27,894
San Gabriel Valley Tribune (B): 40,051
San Mateo Daily Journal: 14,800
The (Stockton) Record (B): 57,486
The Sacramento Bee (K): 288,755
San Bernardino Sun (B): 54,315
San Francisco Chronicle (K): 370,345
San Jose Mercury News (K): 234,772
San Mateo County Times (K): 25,982
Santa Cruz Sentinel (K): 23,290
Tri-Valley Herald (B): 29,759

COLORADO
Aspen Daily News (K): 12,500
The Aurora Sentinel (K): 46,000
Boulder Camera (K): 28,994
Cortez Journal (K): 6,700
The Denver Post (B): 225,193
The Durango Herald (K): 8,870
Gunnison Country Times (N): 4,000
Ouray County Plaindealer (K): 3,000
Vail Daily: 10,525

CONNECTICUT
The Day in New London
Hartford Courant
New Haven Register (B): 72,613
Norwich Bulletin

DELAWARE
The News Journal (Wilmington) (K): 110,171

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
The Washington Post (K): 673,180

FLORIDA
Daytona Beach News-Journal (K): 99,627
Lakeland Ledger (B)
Miami Herald (K): 240,223
Naples Daily News (B): 66,272
Orlando Sentinel (K): 227,593
The Palm Beach Post (K): 164,474
Sarasota Herald-Tribune (K): 114,904
St. Petersburg Times (K)

GEORGIA
Atlanta Journal-Constitution (K): 326,907

The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer (B)

HAWAII
Honolulu Star-Bulletin (K): 64,305

IDAHO
Idaho Statesman (K): 61,927

ILLINOIS
Chicago Tribune (B): 541,663
Chicago Sun-Times (K): 312,274
Daily Herald (Arlington) (K): 143,152
Lake County News-Sun (Waukegan) (B): 16,899
Rockford Register Star (K): 55,913
Southwest News-Herald (K): 9,300

INDIANA
The Journal Gazette (Fort Wayne) (K): 64,304
Palladium-Item (Richmond) (B): 15,453

IOWA
Des Moines Register (K)
The Hawk Eye (Burlington) (K): 18,921
Mason City Globe Gazette (B): 17,666
Quad-City Times
The Storm Lake Times (K): 3,200

KENTUCKY
The Ledger Independent (Maysville)
Lexington Herald-Leader (K):109,624
Louisville Courier-Journal (K)

LOUISIANA
The Times-Picayune (N)

MARYLAND
Baltimore Sun (K)

MAINE
Bangor Daily News (K): 55,627
Brunswick Times-Record (K): 9,317

MASSACHUSETTS
The Boston Globe (K): 350,605
Berkshire Eagle
North Adams Transcript: 5,949
The Standard-Times (New Bedford) (K): 30,306

MICHIGAN
Battle Creek Enquirer
Bay City Times
Lansing State Journal (K) 65,886
Livingston Daily
Detroit Free Press (K): 308,944
Michigan Chronicle (Detroit) (N): 31,872
The Muskegon Chronicle (K): 41,114
Saginaw News 50,000

MINNESOTA
The Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (K)
St. Cloud Times (K): 25,868

MISSOURI
Columbia Daily Tribune (K): 18,131
The Kansas City Star (K): 252,785
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (K): 255,057

MONTANA
Billings Gazette 47,105

NEVADA
Las Vegas Sun (K): 174,341

NEW HAMPSHIRE
Concord Monitor (K): 19,885
Nashua Telegraph (K): 24,272

NEW JERSEY
Asbury Park Press (Neptune) (B): 140,882
Bergen Record

NEW MEXICO
Las Cruces Sun-News (B): 21,341
Santa Fe New Mexican (K): 25,249

NEW YORK
Albany Times-Union
Buffalo News (K): 178,365
Daily News (B): 703,137
The Daily Star (Oneonta) (K): 14,391
el Diario (K): 53,856
Glens Falls Post-Star
The New York Times (K) 1,048,109
Poughkeepsie Journal (B)
Rochester Democrat & Chronicle
Syracuse Post-Standard

NORTH CAROLINA
Asheville Citizen-Times (K): 50,160
Charlotte Observer (K) 215,379
The Daily Reflector (Greenville) (K): 21,703
Durham Herald-Sun (N): 32,845
News & Observer (Raleigh) (K): 176,083
Wilmington Star-News (K): 47,620

OHIO
Akron Beacon-Journal (K): 119,929
The Blade (Toledo) (K): 119,901
Dayton Daily News (K): 116,690
Hamilton Journal-News (B): 19,432
Middletown Journal: 17,285
The Repository (Canton) (B): 65,789
The Times-Reporter (New Philadelphia) (B): 22,428
Springfield News-Sun (K): 24,684
The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) (N): 330,280

OKLAHOMA
Muskogee Phoenix (K)

OREGON
Corvallis Gazette-Times: 12,092
The Daily Astorian (Astoria) (K): 8,263
Mail Tribune (Medford) (K): 30,349
The Oregonian (Portland) (K): 304,399
Register-Guard (Eugene) (K): 67,400
Statesman-Journal (Salem) (K): 47,152
Yamhill Valley News-Register (McMinnville) (B): 10,921

PENNSYLVANIA
The Daily Item (Sunbury) (N): 24,879
Erie Times (B)
The Express-Times (Easton) (B): 44,561
Harrisburg Patriot-News
Philadelphia Daily News (K)
Philadelphia Inquirer (K): 334,150
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (K): 214,374
York Daily Record (B)

RHODE ISLAND
Providence Journal (B) 149,094

TENNESSEE
Chattanooga Times (K): 71,716
The Commercial Appeal (Memphis) (K): 146,961
The (Nashville) Tennessean (K): 161,131

TEXAS
Austin American-Statesman (B): 170,309
The Eagle (Bryan-College Station): 21,654
Fort Worth Star Telegram (B)
Houston Chronicle (B): 494,131
Longview News-Journal (K): 27,590
The Lufkin Daily News (K): 12,225

UTAH
The Salt Lake Tribune (B): 121,699

VERMONT
Bennington Daily
Burlington Free Press (K): 41,901
Brattleboro Daily
Randolph Daily

VIRGINIA
Falls Church News-Press (K): 30,500

WASHINGTON
The Columbian (B): 44,623
The News Tribune (Tacoma) (K): 111,778
The Olympian (Olympia) (K): 30,755
Seattle Post-Intelligencer (K): 129,563
The Seattle Times (K): 220,883
Tri-City Herald (K): 40,830
Walla Walla Union-Bulletin (K): 13,624
Yakima Herald-Republic (B): 38,077

WEST VIRGINIA
The Charleston Gazette (K): 48,061
Huntington Herald-Dispatch (K): 27,463

WISCONSIN
The Capital Times (Madison) (K): 16,335
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Stevens Point Journal
Wisconsin State Journal (Madison) (B): 87,930

JOHN McCAIN
69 daily newspapers total
More than 4,139,700 daily circulation total

ARIZONA
Arizona Republic (B)

CALIFORNIA
Bakersfield Californian (B) 59,433
The Desert Sun (Palm Springs, Ca.)
Napa Valley Register (B): 16,283
Riverside Press-Enterprise (B): 164,189
The San Francisco Examiner (B): 80,000
San Diego Union-Tribune (B): 288,669

COLORADO
Mountain Valley News (Cedaredge): 2,000
The Daily Sentinel (Grand Junction) (B): 31,349
Daily Times-Call (Longmont) (B): 21,127
The Pueblo Chieftain (B): 49,169

CONNECTICUT
The Register Citizen (Torrington) (B): 8,217

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
The Washington DC Examiner (N): 100,073

FLORIDA
Bradenton Herald (K): 48,618
Cape Coral Daily Breeze: 2,015
Palatka Daily News: 11,000
Tampa Tribune: (N)220,522

IOWA
The Messenger (Fort Dodge) (B): 16,355

MARYLAND
The Baltimore Examiner (N): 50,000

MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Herald (B): 182,350
The (Lowell) Sun (B): 44,439
The Eagle-Tribune

MICHIGAN
The Detroit News: 188,171
Grand Rapids Press

MINNESOTA
The Journal (New Ulm) (B): 7,920

NEBRASKA
The Lincoln Journal-Star
McCook Daily Gazette: 5,903

NEW HAMPSHIRE
Foster's Daily Democrat (B): 22,547
Union Leader (Manchester) (B): 51,782

NEW MEXICO
Roswell Daily Record: 11,700

NEVADA
Las Vegas Review-Journal (B): 174,341

NEW HAMPSHIRE
Claremont Eagle Times

NEW YORK
New York Post (B): 702,488

NORTH DAKOTA
Fargo Forum (B): 48,303

OHIO
The Cincinnati Enquirer (B)
Columbus Dispatch (B): 199,524
The (Findlay) Courier (B): 22,319

OKLAHOMA
Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise: 18,400
The Oklahoman

OREGON
Bend Bulletin (B): 32,455

PENNSYLVANIA
Lancaster New Era
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (K)
Philadelphia Inquirer (K)
Public Opinion (Chambersburg) (N): 16,679
The Sentinel (Lewistown) (B): 11,863

SOUTH CAROLINA
The State (Columbia) (B)

TENNESSEE
The Chattanooga Free Press (B): 71,716
The Jackson Sun (K): 32,121
The Leaf-Chronicle (Clarksville) (B): 20,354

TEXAS
Amarillo Globe-News (B): 44,764
Beaumont Enterprise (B): 45,684
Corpus Christi Caller-Times (K): 53,368
Dallas Morning News (B): 368,313
Galveston Daily News
Kerrville Daily Times: 8,971
The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal (B): 49,094
San Antonio Express-News (B): 225,447
Times Record News (Wichita Falls) (N): 28,888
Tyler Morning Telegraph: 35,598

VIRGINIA
Bristol Herald
The Daily News Record (Harrisonburg): 30,908
Daily Press (Newport News) (K): 91,508
Lynchburg News & Advance
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Waynesboro News-Virginian
The Winchester Star (B): 20,218

WASHINGTON
Centralia (Wash.) Chronicle
(Spokane) Spokesman-Review (B): 89,779

WEST VIRGINIA
Parkersburg Daily
Wheeling News-Register (B): 12,821
Weirton Daily

WEEKLIES / COLLEGE

BARACK OBAMA
Arkansas Times (Little Rock)
The Bowdoin Orient (Bowdoin College)
The Chronicle (Duke University)
Cincinnati CityBeat (Ohio)
City Newspaper (Rochester, NY)
EPG News
Hoy
Hunterdon Review (Clinton, NJ)
Independent Weekly (North Carolina)
Metro Santa Cruz (California)
Minnesota Daily
New York Observer (New York)
News-Register (McMinnville, OR)
The Pacific Northwest Inlander (Spokane, WA)
San Diego CityBeat (California)
Santa Barbara Independent (California)
Santa Monica Mirror (California)
The Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg)
Windsor Beacon (Colorado)

JOHN McCAIN
The Garden City News (New York)
Lampasas Dispatch Record (Texas)
River Falls Journal (Wisconsin)
Wharton Journal-Spectator (Texas)

CHOOSING NOT TO ENDORSE
Abilene Reporter-News
Ann Arbor News (B)
Colorado Springs Gazette
Fort Meyers News-Press (Florida)
Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star (B) (Virginia)
Indianapolis Star (B)
Mountain Home News (Idaho)
Springfield News-Leader
The Record Searchlight (California)
Waco Tribune Herald (Texas)

A similar list is compiled by the trade magazine Editor & Publisher.

"Palin's allegation that Obama wants to "experiment with socialism" seems designed less to inform than to inflame."

Invoking the red menace

from Politifact.com stories

The McCain campaign went from tiptoeing around allegations that Obama is a socialist, to outright calling him one.

SUMMARY: The McCain campaign went from tiptoeing around allegations that Obama is a socialist, to outright calling him one.

Sen. John McCain's campaign has seized on Sen. Barack Obama's offhand remark that he wants to "spread the wealth around" to allege Obama is a socialist.

Even in the context of a heated presidential campaign, that's a remarkably incendiary accusation. It's become a standard part of the McCain campaign rhetoric, uttered by surrogates and candidates alike.

Gov. Sarah Palin's remarks in Springfiled, Mo., are a good example: "Senator Obama says that he wants to spread the wealth, which means — you know what that means," she said at a rally on Oct. 24, 2008. "It means that government takes your money, (handed) out however a politician sees fit. Barack Obama calls it spreading the wealth, and Joe Biden calls higher taxes patriotic. And yet to Joe the Plumber, he said it sounded like socialism. And now is not the time to experiment with socialism."

She has repeated the line in Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and most recently in Leesburg, Va., on Oct. 27, 2008. It consistently evokes boos and jeers from a crowd protective of the American system of government.

But is Palin stoking their anger honestly?

Socialism refers most commonly to a system in which the government owns the means of production and distribution of goods. That is, the state truly is responsible for creating and spreading the wealth. Let's look at the root of Palin's claim — Obama's Oct. 12, 2008, exchange with plumber Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, who has come to be known simply as Joe the Plumber — and see if that's what Obama was suggesting.

Wurzelbacher approached Obama on the street in his Holland, Ohio, neighborhood, and said he was close to buying a plumbing company that makes $250,000 to $280,000 a year. He complained that Obama would tax him more, punishing his success.

Obama responded that he was raising the top tax rate so he could decrease taxes for those who make less than $250,000.

"It's not that I want to punish your success," Obama said. "I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance at success too."

"Seems like you would be welcome to a flat tax then," Wurzelbacher said.

"You know, I would be open to it except for here's the problem with a flat tax," Obama countered. "You'd have to slap on a whole bunch of sales taxes on it. And I do believe that for folks like me who have worked hard but, frankly, also been lucky, I don't mind paying just a little bit more than the waitress who I just met over there who — things are slow, and she can barely make the rent. Because my attitude is if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's going to be good for everybody. If you've got a plumbing business, you're going to be better off if you've got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you. And right now, everybody's so pinched that business is bad for everybody. And I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

So when Wurzelbacher brought up a flat tax, Obama responded by endorsing progressive taxation – the principle of taxing those with higher incomes at a higher percentage than those with lower incomes. And it is in that context that Obama said he wanted to "spread the wealth."

Progressive taxes do indeed spread the wealth a bit. But they do so much more modestly than government owning the means of production.

Few serious policy makers — including McCain — consider progressive taxation socialist. In fact, on the Oct. 26, 2008 edition of NBC's Meet the Press, McCain stood by a comment he made in 2000 that "there's nothing wrong with paying somewhat more" in taxes when you "reach a certain level of comfort."

"You put into different, different categories of wealthier people paying, paying higher taxes into different brackets," McCain told host Tom Brokaw, as if to say progressive taxes are a no-brainer.

Indeed, progressive taxation has been a cornerstone of American tax policy since the federal government first collected an income tax in 1863. It was based on the Tax Act of 1862, which President Abraham Lincoln signed, and which imposed a "duty of three per centum" on all income over $600, and five percent on income over $10,000.

Obama's proposed top tax rate of 39.6 percent, (up from today's 36 percent) is considerably higher than that. But it's not particularly high in the context of modern times; as he pointed out to Wurzelbacher, it's about what top earners paid in the Clinton years. In 1987, the top tax rate was 38.5 percent. In 1944, it was 94 percent on the top portion of the highest incomes.

So no, Obama's tax increase on those making more than $250,000 would not represent a transformation of the U.S. system of government. His desire to "spread the wealth" through progressive taxation makes him no less a capitalist than McCain, or Lincoln. Palin's allegation that Obama wants to "experiment with socialism" seems designed less to inform than to inflame.

Obama levels 'closing argument'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF5ZkgNNBQE

Obama levels 'closing argument'

ALLENTOWN, Pennsylvania (AFP) – White House front-runner Barack Obama traded barbs with John McCain over their plans for the stricken US economy as the presidential campaign entered its final full week.

With just eight days to go until polling, the pair were campaigning in the rust-belt states of Ohio and Pennsylvania after a weekend battleground blitz through western states tilting towards Obama , 47.

"After decades of broken politics in Washington, eight years of failed policies from (President) George Bush, and 21 months of a campaign that has taken us from the rocky coast of Maine to the sunshine of California, we are one week away from change in America," Obama told supporters in Ohio.

The Illinois senator, vying to become the country's first African-American president, hammered McCain on the November 4 election's defining issue -- the economy -- but also appealed to voters to choose "hope over fear."

"It's about a new politics -- a politics that calls on our better angels instead of encouraging our worst instincts," he said in a retooled stump speech that aides said was Obama's "closing argument" as the campaign climaxes.

McCain, 72, meanwhile, speaking after meeting of his top economic advisers and business leaders in Cleveland, again accused Obama of secretly plotting to raise taxes across the board.

"Today he claims he'll tax the rich; but we've seen in the past that he's been willing to hit people squarely in the middle class."

Later McCain attempted to reignite fears of "socialism" by citing a 2001 interview given by Obama where he appeared to lament the failure of the civil rights movement to bring about greater financial equality.

"That is what change means for Barack the Redistributor: It means taking your money and giving it to someone else," he told a crowd of around 2,000 at a sports hall in Dayton, Ohio.

Obama's camp responded swiftly, rejecting McCain's comment as a "false, desperate attack."

Obama earlier berated his Republican foe for sticking to what he called the discredited economic policies of the profoundly unpopular Bush.

"When it comes to the economy ... the plain truth is that John McCain has stood with this president every step of the way," the Democrat said.

"At a moment like this, the last thing we can afford is four more years of the tired, worn-out old theory that says we should give more to billionaires and big corporations and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else."

Obama, fired up by an astonishing prowess at fundraising, was to follow up his Ohio speech with a 30-minute advertisement airing on national networks at huge expense on Wednesday evening.

McCain's electoral map is shrinking as he battles to hold on to states won by Bush in 2004 such as Iowa, where Sunday he shrugged off national and pivotal state polls that suggest Obama will triumph a week from Tuesday.

Monday's Gallup tracking poll of likely voters nationwide gave Obama a lead of 50 percent to 45 percent over McCain. Broader polls of registered voters give the Democrat a double-digit margin.

McCain began the final full week of campaigning in Cleveland before heading later to Pennsylvania, where white working-class voters proved resistant to Obama during his primary battle with Hillary Clinton.

The White House contenders flew east after sparring in the western states of Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, which could seal victory for Obama if he can win all the states that Democrat John Kerry captured against Bush in 2004.

But the Democrat is also pursuing a multi-pronged strategy to keep the Arizona senator on the ropes in Republican bastions out east including Virginia and North Carolina.

The strategy appears to be bearing fruit. A new Washington Post survey said Obama now leads McCain in Virginia by 52 percent to 44 percent. The state has not backed a Democrat for the White House since 1964.

"Where nothing can go wrong… go wrong… go wrong…"

Thirteen Election Integrity Experts: E-Voting Problems and How to Stop Them

from AfterDowningStreet.org - Impeach Bush and Cheney Now! by davidswanson

By Jim Cirile, Velvet Revolution, Alternet

"Where nothing can go wrong… go wrong… go wrong…"

So went the tagline for "Westworld," the chilling 1973 thriller about a resort where the androids go off the rails. Fiction? Hardly. In 2008, we have our own version of an electronic frontier fraught with machine failure. It's called the U.S. electoral system, a decentralized mess where often partisan local officials manage the voter registration rolls and have the power to purchase any voting system they please, often with no real oversight or meaningful security testing procedures.

"Clean" coal's dirtiest secret

from Scholars and Rogues by Wendy Redal

Part I: An Ugly Overview
A few days ago I stood on the rim of what was once Kayford Mountain in southern West Virginia. Razed, stripped and gutted, the mountain is now a 7,500-acre blast zone devoid of vegetation, a massive gray scar that looks like the surface of the moon.

Journalists survey the Samples Mine at Kayford Mountain, West Virginia

Journalists survey a mountaintop removal mine operation at Kayford Mountain, WV. Photo: Dennis Dimick

Some 470 mountaintops in central Appalachia look like Kayford. Once blanketed in hardwood forest, their ancient slopes laced with clear streams and inhabited by more species than any place outside the tropics, nearly a million acres of these mountains have become casualties of America's addiction to cheap energy.

The coal industry has been using mountaintop removal, a radical form of strip-mining, since the 1970s. By clear-cutting the forest and blasting away the rock beneath, mining companies are able to recover shallow seams of coal and expend far less on labor than conventional mining methods involve. The millions of tons of debris left over after the coal is extracted are dumped into adjacent valleys, obliterating 1,200 streams to date and polluting hundreds more. Residents of these remote mountain hollers have been displaced by explosions, dust, flooding and intimidation. As their homes are destroyed, their unique culture and traditions, so closely tied to place, are also endangered.

I traveled with a busload of reporters on a field trip organized by the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) last week to get a close-up look at mountaintop removal mining, and to hear from residents, activists and industry personnel in the process. This series unveils what we learned, and with it, a moral challenge to reject the notion that coal taken via such means can ever be "clean," regardless of how it is burned.

Aerial shot of Samples Mine at Kayford Mountain.
Photo: Theresa Burriss, via SouthWings Air

Most Americans don't know about this form of environmental destruction that author Wendell Berry has called "the ecological equivalent of genocide." Berry, 74, a resident of rural eastern Kentucky where mountaintop removal has been practiced since the 1970s, spoke Sunday at the Society of Environmental Journalists (www.sej.org) annual meeting in Roanoke, Va., suggesting that civil disobedience may be the only means left to effectively resist this "permanent damage to the world." The political process hasn't worked, since state governments in coal country, like Kentucky's, are "wholly owned subsidiaries of the coal industry," Berry said.

And if the Bush Administration has its way, mountaintop removal mining will become even more widespread. Earlier this month the Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) moved forward on a proposed change to the Stream Buffer Zone rule that would overturn the restriction in place since 1983 that forbids mining impacts within 100 feet of a stream. The proposal has now gone to the Environmental Protection Agency for approval, before being published into law. While the existing buffer zone rule has been widely disregarded by mining companies, and legal follow-up is rare or inconsequential, a change in the ruling would effectively encourage as rampant practice what is now done subversively. Comments to the EPA Administrator are being taken through Nov. 23.

Coming up in this series:

Part II: Almost ~~heaven~~ level: the mechanics of moving mountains
Part III: The poor are always downstream
Part IV: The tenacity of hope

Half of Doctors Routinely Prescribe Placebos [NYT]

Half Of Doctors Routinely Prescribe Placebos [Your Health]

from Consumerist by Meg Marco

The New York Times says that half of doctors responding to a nationwide survey admitted to routinely prescribing placebos.

Most of the doctors in question said that they used vitamins and headache pills, but some also prescribed antibiotics and sedatives. The study says that in most cases the doctors described these prescriptions to patients as "a medicine not typically used for your condition but might benefit you."

From the NYT:

Dr. William Schreiber, an internist in Louisville, Ky., at first said in an interview that he did not believe the survey's results, because, he said, few doctors he knows routinely prescribe placebos.

But when asked how he treated fibromyalgia or other conditions that many doctors suspect are largely psychosomatic, Dr. Schreiber changed his mind. "The problem is that most of those people are very difficult patients, and it's a whole lot easier to give them something like a big dose of Aleve," he said. "Is that a placebo treatment? Depending on how you define it, I guess it is."

But antibiotics and sedatives are not placebos, he said.

Of course, placebos have shown to be effective. The NYT says that 30 percent to 40 percent of depressed patients who are given placebos get better, which is almost as good as the results from real anti-depressants.

Half of Doctors Routinely Prescribe Placebos [NYT]

'As Palin describes it, Obama's plan is downright communist (everything you own would "collectively belong to everybody") and would lead to what HuffPo's Sam Stein calls a "nightmare communist state.""

Palin's Bizarre Rant Against Obama's Tax Policy

from Crooks and Liars by SilentPatriot

Palin hit the trail in Iowa last week and took her criticism of Barack Obama's tax policy to a whole new level. While the standard criticism thus far of Obama's plan is that it's a "job-killer" or even vaguely "socialist", Palin made abundantly clear on the stump that she thinks it's much, much worse than that. As Palin describes it, Obama's plan is downright communist (everything you own would "collectively belong to everybody") and would lead to what HuffPo's Sam Stein calls a "nightmare communist state."

"See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else. If you thought your income, your property, your inventory, your investments were, were yours, they would really collectively belong to everybody. Obama, Barack Obama has an ideological commitment to higher taxes, and I say this based on his record... Higher taxes, more government, misusing the power to tax leads to government moving into the role of some believing that government then has to take care of us. And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us. Now, they do this in other countries where the people are not free. Let us fight for what is right. John McCain and I, we will put our trust in you."

Taxes have always been a ripe issue for demagoguery, but Sarah Palin is taking it about eight steps further.

ow there’s a video to top them all — and it turns out Obama has seriously underestimated McCain’s breakdancing prowess. Behold, the dance-off:

Obama-McCain Dance-Off Video

from The Washington Independent by Ari Melber

Sen. Barack Obama not only thinks he has better policies than Sen. John McCain — he says he has better moves, too.

"I'm convinced I'm a better dancer than John McCain," he confided to Ellen DeGeneres last week. Obama's dancing on her talk show has become an enduring hit on YouTube, as I noted, and another video making the rounds online features a mash-up of the presidential debates with "So You Think You Can Dance."

Now there's a video to top them all — and it turns out Obama has seriously underestimated McCain's breakdancing prowess. Behold, the dance-off:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSJIORWj4tw

"it appears the administration is using its last two months to further weaken air pollution controls."

Bush's Last-Minute Environmental Deregulations

from The Washington Independent by Matthew Blake

The Clean Air Act is one of the signature laws that gives regulatory authority to the Environmental Protection Agency.

But the Bush administration, especially under EPA head Stephen Johnson, has weakened ozone standards and ignored a U.S. Supreme Court order to use the law to regulate greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Even though Johnson and the EPA have been pilloried for their actions, it appears the administration is using its last two months to further weaken air pollution controls.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that EPA will loosen pollution curbs on power plants:

Under current policy, power plants that make upgrades to operate longer and increase emissions must install pollution-control equipment.

The proposed rules, which seek to make it easier for older power plants to extend their life span and upgrade without installing costly new equipment, are tired to an hourly rate of emissions. As long as a power plant's hourly emissions stay at or below the plant's historical maximum, the plant would be treated as if it were running more cleanly, even if its total annual emissions increased as plant operators stepped up operations.

Some in Congress are incensed, especially Barbara Boxer, (D-Calif.), chair of the Senate environment committee, and Henry Waxman, (D-Calif.), chair of the House oversight committee.

Boxer and other Democrats on her committee have already called for Johnson to step down. She promises an investigation of any air-pollution rule changes made in the next two months.

Waxman fired off a caustic letter to Johnson last week that itemized the 18 air-pollution decisions the EPA has made that a federal court subsequently overturned.

The message from Waxman and Boxer is clear: Johnson has lost credibility, and his last-minute decisions won't survive congressional scrutiny or the courts.

The administration apparently has some confidence that its decisions will be upheld. That — or it just wants to lock in its anti-regulatory legacy for posterity.

LA Times says that Amazon.com had a mask depicting democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama listed under the search term "terrorist costume."

Amazon Lists Barack Obama Mask Under "Terrorist Costume" [Ugly]

from Consumerist by Meg Marco

The LA Times says that Amazon.com had a mask depicting democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama listed under the search term "terrorist costume." The listing has since been pulled but the LA Times has a screengrab.

This has, of course, offended Sen. Obama's supporters, (and presumably, lots of other people as well) as it is, you know, offensive.

Perhaps for the sake of appearing bipartisan, the LA Times also noted the prices of several other political costumes for sale on Amazon.

For comparison purposes, a Hillary Clinton mask is going for only $6.95 (down from $12.99). Even with her 18 million votes. The Sarah Palin mask, however, is going for $25 (Deluxe versions cost 98 cents more, but it's eligible for free shipping).

The Joe Biden T-shirts and life-size cutouts (sorry, no mask) have been marked down. The John McCain page offers paper masks for 99 cents and a rubber one for $12.90 (marked down from $16.99).

Amazon.com listing had Barack Obama Halloween mask under 'terrorist' [LA Times] (Thanks, Everyone!!)

"It’s time that everybody realized that Milton Friedman and Reaganomics is a totally failed policy and until we do realize it, we are doomed to keep repeating it"

Email of the Day: Reaganomics is a totally failed policy

from Crooks and Liars by John Amato

From the C&L inbox, Rick writes:

I loved your recap of the McCain interview with Brokaw. Just wanted to point out that not only did Reagan raise taxes during a recession, but Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993 a year after his election. We were mired in the worst recession since the depression at the time. Not one GOP Congressman or Senator voted for Clinton's tax raise at the time and they all claimed it would ruin the economy, the same as now. Well, as you know, Bill raised taxes and we saw the greatest growth in our history along with record surpluses that will probably never be equaled. Under Reagan we saw the beginning of the deregulation era that brought us the savings and loan crisis, the Enron debacle and this current banking crisis that we find ourselves in today. When Reagan took office in 1980 our total debt was under 1 trillion dollars. Today it is 11 trillion and we had surpluses under Clinton. So under Reagan, Bush 1 and Bush 2 we increased our national debt from 1 trillion to 11 trillion.

It's time that everybody realized that Milton Friedman and Reaganomics is a totally failed policy and until we do realize it, we are doomed to keep repeating it. It's remarkable that more so called experts have not addressed the failed "deregulation" policies of the GOP as the main contributor to this collapse of our banking system.

The tragic news which we've all suspected would turn out true has been confirmed: the body of the boy found in a white SUV this morning is Julian King

Found Boy Was Shot

from Chicagoist by Marcus Gilmer

The Trib is reporting sources say that the boy found in the white SUV this morning, believed to be missing 7-year-old Julian King, was killed by a gunshot wound. The Hudson family was to identify the body this afternoon, and CPD Superintendent Jody Weis will be holding a press conference at 4 p.m. today. Also of note, the Amber Alert for Julian is no longer active.

Update - The tragic news which we've all suspected would turn out true has been confirmed: the body of the boy found in a white SUV this morning is Julian King according to law enforcement sources. We still await the 4 p.m. Jody Weis press conference.

Update II - Weis confirmed it in his currently ongoing press conference. Weis's reason for not finding the car for a few days? "It's a big city." Other officials insist that police responded within minutes of being notified of the crime scene.

"what Pickens has to say when asked to reflect back on his role in bankrolling the insipid swift boat smear campaign against John Kerry"

T. Boone Pickens, Unrepentant Character Assassin

from Crooks and Liars by SilentPatriot

60 Min: Pickens Swift Boat
icon Download | Play icon Download | Play

T. Boone Pickens has been in the news a lot lately pushing his so-called "Pickens Plan" which seeks to reduce America's reliance on foreign energy imports. Some aspects of the proposal are laudatory and actually quite brilliant, and some aspects are just downright stupid. But this post isn't about the merits of the idea; it's about what Pickens has to say when asked to reflect back on his role in bankrolling the insipid swift boat smear campaign against John Kerry. On this front, the billionaire oilman reveals his true, slimy colors. In this 60 Minutes profile, the cameras follow Pickens to the 2008 Democratic National Convention and capture his visibly uncomfortable encounter with the man he spent $3 million destroying.

60 Minutes:

"You spent $3 million funding an advertising campaign that, in some people's mind, was representative of dirty politics, smear politics, character assassination, all of that. At this stage, do you have any regrets?" Rose asks.

"None," Pickens says.

Asked if he'd do it over again tomorrow, Pickens says, "What I knew then, I know that same thing now. And nothing has changed my mind."

More and more reasons to hate Debbie Schlussel and her asshole cunt face - she is a right wing nut moron and is anti-union. Just like Mccain, the right and WalMart.

America's Retailers to Staff: If Obama & Dem Congress Win, We're Screwed

from Debbie Schlussel by Debbie

By Debbie Schlussel

This is a very important negative on Obama, which isn't getting nearly enough play.

The fact is that if conventional wisdom says Obama is stronger for the economy than McCain, the conventional wisdom is ignoring what is appropriately nicknamed, "The Employee No Choice Act."

If will have significant ripples throughout our economy,with a lot of store closings and lost jobs. If you think things are bad now, wait until this happens:

Retailers are meeting with store managers to warn how a strong showing for Democrats in the Nov. 4 election could cause what they fear would be more economic pain for their companies, in particular by potentially making it easier for unions to organize stores.

Obamaconomics . . .

The companies are worried about presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama's stated support for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would do away with secret balloting and allow unions to form if a majority of employees sign cards favoring unionization. The legislation, retailers fear, would have improved chances of becoming law under a Democratic administration.
The legislation passed the House last year but died amid a Senate filibuster and a threatened presidential veto. The issue in this election is whether Democrats, who hold a 51-49 majority in the Senate, can win the presidency and gain enough seats to prevent Republicans from using procedural motions, such as filibusters, to thwart legislation.

The bill was crafted by labor as a response to more aggressive opposition by companies to union-organizing activity and as a way to shield workers from antiunion pressure from their employers.

Home Depot Inc. in recent weeks has held meetings between its employee-relations managers and all the company's salaried employees, including district managers and store managers, on how the Free Choice legislation would change the union-organizing process.

"We think the most basic element of any democracy is the vote by secret ballot, and this bill effectively eliminates that right," said Home Depot spokesman Ron DeFeo. . . .

Target Corp. Chief Executive Gregg Steinhafel said his staff has been working to educate senators about how the bill would hurt retailers by raising costs and lowering sales.

"We call it the Employee No Choice Act," he told analysts this week. "We think it could be very damaging to all of American business, and we stand strongly opposed to it."

If the Democrats control both houses, they will pass this law and Obama will sign it. Unions will engage in gestapo tactics to pressure those who won't sign cards or vote for bringing in the unions. I wouldn't be surprised if employees who oppose unions are victims of vandalism and physical attacks. This is that dangerous.

Again, just wait until this passes. Again, more stores will close, and more people will be out of work. They won't have money to spend at your business and/or employer. And then, we really will be forced into a depression.

Things will get really bad. I shudder at the prospect.

If you are turned off by social conservatism, if you equate McCain with Bush, and/or if all you care about is the economy, this is reason number one to vote for John McCain.

Two men have been charged with making threats against presidential candidate Barack Obama.

ATF Says Plot Foiled to Assassinate Obama, Others

from Pensito Review by Jon Ponder

Skinheads:

Two men have been charged with making threats against presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tennessee and Paul Schlesselman, 18, of West Helena were charged in a federal complaint last Friday of illegal possession of a sawed-off shotgun, conspiracy to rob a federal firearms licensee, and making threats against a major candidate for the Office of President.

According to the complaint, Cowart and Schlesselman met via the Internet through a mutual friend last month, with both men claiming to have very strong beliefs regarding "White Power" and "Skinhead" philosophies.

The complaint said the pair discussed robbing a gun shop in order to gather weapons and ammunition to use in a 'killing spree.'

On October 20, 2008, Cowart allegedly traveled from Tennessee to Arkansas to pick up Schlesselman in order to carry out their plan.

According to the complaint, the defendants further discussed their killing spree to include targeting a predominately African American school, and to continue their spree until their final act of violence, which would be to attempt to assassinate Obama.

Officials said Cowart and Schlesselman stated that they would be willing to die during their attempt.

The pair was arrested on October 22, 2008 by the Crockett County, Tennessee Sheriff's Department.

Cowart and Schlesselman appeared in court Monday, and are scheduled to appear again at a detention hearing on October 30th.

Two more absolutely spectacular ads by progressive organizations.

More Great Independent Ads

from Open Left - Front Page by Mike Lux

Cross-posted on Huffington Post

Two more absolutely spectacular ads by progressive organizations.

The first, a reprise of an ad that VoteVets did in some races in 2006, is going up in the GA Senate race, and could make a huge difference.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeuY6z_gamI

The 2nd one is on the Presidential race, referring to McCain's little gambling habit and his ties to the gambling industry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0quZvrS9NQM

You can give to VoteVets here.

You can give to Campaign Money Watch here.

"the best he can do is jab whatever undecided voters who are left with a racist nerve with the hot poker of Rush's vile and divisive bigotry."

Rush Limbaugh paints Obama as a Black Panther!

from Crooks and Liars by John Amato

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6UozDeukdI

Rush Limbaugh can't give it up. He's all about teh Race all the time. As he has said earlier: Rush Limbaugh Says Angry Blacks Are In 30 Year Plot To Train Black Children as Militants.

Well if John McCain won't permit Sarah "Rogue Maverick" to lob the old, rehashed Jeremiah Wright diatribe across the goal line as a final Hail Mary to a failed campaign, certainly no one can stop comedian Rush Limbaugh from doing her dirty work!

Limbaugh: "What we have here is an angry young black guy who arrives in Chicago as a 1960s radical..."

A C&L emailer says: So, our next president is a member of the Black Panthers now. Ugh. What. Next?! Rush, a man who has openly worshiped the president who made trickle-down economics the centerpiece of the republican party can't find the courage to just explain to his listeners why it's still better than a paradigm shift in politics as we know it toward the middle class.

While the country hears closing arguments on the most important vote of a generation and Obama proves he is the one to lead us out of the failed Reaganomics wilderness that has sapped our country dry ... the best he can do is jab whatever undecided voters who are left with a racist nerve with the hot poker of Rush's vile and divisive bigotry.

Joe Lieberman vows that John McCain will live to at least 85 years of age, presumably to deflect concerns about a Palin Presidency.

Strangest Election Promise Ever

Joe Lieberman vows that John McCain will live to at least 85 years of age, presumably to deflect concerns about a Palin Presidency.

The election is November 4th!

Phony Virginia Flier Tells Dems To Vote November 5

from TPMmuckraker by Zachary Roth

A phony flier, purporting to be from the Virginia Board of Elections, is circulating in the African-American-heavy Hampton Roads region of the state, falsely informing people that, because of expected high turnout, Democrats should vote on November 5th.

The election is November 4th.

State election officials informed the local press of the flier, which was posted on the website of The Virginian-Pilot, and is designed to look like an official announcement. It even uses images of the state board logo and the state seal, both of which are available online.

It reads:

Due to the larger than expected voter turnout in this years [sic] electoral process, An [sic] emergency session of the General Assembly has adopted the following emergency regulations to ease the load on local electorial [sic] precincts and ensure a fair electorial [sic] process.

All Democratic party supporters and independent voters supporting Democratic candidates shall vote on November 5th as adopted by emergency regulation of the Virginia General Assembly.

All Republican party supporters and independent voters supporting Republican candidates shall vote on November 4th as precribed [sic] by law.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause but felt this was the only way to ensure fairness to the complete electorial [sic] process.

State police are looking into the flier's provenance, according to election officials. It can be a federal crime to attempt to obstruct someone from voting.

Virginia, where Barack Obama currently leads, is a crucial swing state in the election.

John McCain's health care proposal would endanger women's access to health care coverage and would fail to fully cover women's health needs

McCain's Health Plan Is "Worse for Women"

John McCain's health care proposal would endanger women's access to health care coverage and would fail to fully cover women's health needs, a joint study by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund revealed last week.

The study, titled "Worse for Women," focused on two key aspects of McCain's proposals.

NOW: Investigating an Urgent Healthcare Problem