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Ninety Years of Economic Progress

In what was the British East Africa Protectorate – ten million people face starvation, partly because farmers in crucial food-producing areas who fled their homes last year have not returned, instead withdrawing deeper into their ethnic enclaves, deeper into fear. At the same time, public confidence in the Kenyan government is plummeting. Top politicians have been implicated in an endless string of scandals involving tourism, fuel, guns and corn.

También ayuda a estimular el mifarmaciaespana.com de la mujer logrando una relación muy satisfactoria para ambos. Esta planta se considera un aproximación para la disfuncion erectil depende de la causa. Con una gran cantidad de trabajo todavía se está haciendo en la tecnología, hacer que las personas y luego hacer las cosas que no queremos.

Resources:

Wikipedia: Kenya
New York Time: Starvation and Strife Menace Torn Kenya

966 replies on “Ninety Years of Economic Progress”

DOJ Memos Reveal Legal Thinking Behind Controversial Bush Terrorism Policy.

The Justice Department today released nine national security legal opinions written by the Bush administration, and revealed that in the weeks before President George W. Bush left office, an administration attorney had disavowed all of them.

The newly released memos deal with warrantless wire tapping, executive power and the seizure of terrorism suspects, all of which were issues on which the Bush administration received criticism from civil liberties advocates.

On Jan. 15, 2009, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury wrote a “memorandum for the Files” stating that the opinions were no longer being relied upon and that they were “not consistent with the current views” of the Office of Legal Counsel.

The release of the memos today appears to be a tacit admission that many of the legal findings made by the Justice Department in weeks and months after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, giving Bush extradordinary executive power, were flawed.

YES! 😈

more of this story on ABC News

Poor old conservatives, they really are getting wedged by the old fat cheese, Rush “Limburg”, aren’t they?

David Brooks is in full lament mode:

Moderates now find themselves betwixt and between. On the left, there is a president who appears to be, as Crook says, “a conviction politician, a bold progressive liberal.” On the right, there are the Rush Limbaugh brigades. The only thing more scary than Obama’s experiment is the thought that it might fail and the political power will swing over to a Republican Party that is currently unfit to wield it.

Those of us in the moderate tradition — the Hamiltonian tradition that believes in limited but energetic government — thus find ourselves facing a void. We moderates are going to have to assert ourselves. We’re going to have to take a centrist tendency that has been politically feckless and intellectually vapid and turn it into an influential force.

(NYT)

…Firstly, let’s question this “limited but energetic government” mantra. It’s bullshit. Government has expanded inexorably under both parties since, well, forever, but just look at what the Idiot Decider spent it on: war on a whim and pissing it up against the wall of Halliburton and the like, endless expansion of military spending that was a colossal waste and all the while reducing revenue by cutting the taxes of those who need the extra bucks the least.

yeah, conservatism needs a makeover David, tell us what we don’t know!

You’d think the last eight years didn’t happen when these guys drone on about the great conservative tradition being overturned by this liberal populism.

FFS, Brooks, you guys lost because your idiot president ran the country into the dirt, trashed the constitution and let the most egregious corruption fester on Wall Street.

A dose of liberalism, in extra large suppository form will be good for you.

Now bend over David, it will not hurt too much! LOL

Or would you like an eternity in Rush Limburg purgatory?

Guinea-Bissau president assassinated

Guinea-Bissau’s army has denied staging a coup after soldiers assassinated veteran President Joao Bernardo Vieira in apparent reprisal for a bomb blast which killed the head of the military.

The army pledged to respect “constitutional order” and called on the population to stay calm in the wake of the killings, which were roundly condemned by the international community.

Late on Monday, soldiers were out in force at checkpoints up to 15 kilometres outside the capital, including main roads into Bissau and towards neighbouring Senegal as well as an airbase by the international airport.

Soldiers gunned Vieira down as he fled his home about 0400 GMT on Monday following turmoil in which the army chief was killed in a bomb explosion hours before, uniformed officials said.

Afternoon ticsters. Puter has been in puter sick bay for a couple of days.
Hope you Mexicans are keeping safe and ready to bolt at a moments notice.
Kirri talking about the fat slug Limbaugh i noticed that the Pundit had a couple of messages for him today as well.LOL

101
Chris
Hope the release of those memos leads to bigger and better things so to speak.

Ah, thanks Gaffy, it’s good to see one’s ideas mirrored in so expressive a form as the Rude Pundit’s! LOL

Rush (the fat stinking cheese) Limburg has made a play, a national wank fest of festering rightwing scumbaggery and he’s copping it from all and sundry…especially the Pooh Bah pundits (like Brooks) and the Neoconservative Aristocrats like Frum. They are howling like monkeys that Rush is so ‘low brow’, a mere ‘entertainer’ (so what was Reagan? An intellectual???? LOL) and a populist who does not understand the nuances of conservative thought. (Ask yourself, could Rush articulate why waterboarding is NOT torture in fine legalese? Nup, I thought not.)

God, this is like a real living Colbert sketch, or Jon Stewart on cocaine, and must be giving the left the best hard on it’s had since they were rooting for Bill, and he was rooting for them! LOL

Love it.

The GOP are like the idiot opposition here.
Barry has wedged them nicely and there is the makings of one good shitfight in the GOP coming up.

So what happens when two high-profile Republicans try to distance themselves from Limbaugh — the Republican base erupts and condemns their own leaders. Can’t win for losing in the GOP these days………………………………………
This is not going to end well for the GOP…if Republican leaders want to maintain the support of their own base (the only supporters they have). And the early returns indicate that wingnuts are indeed angry as hell and eager to reject Cantor and Steele. How dare they dis the Great and Powerful Rush?

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Cantor-Steele-repudiate-R-by-the-web-090302-105.html

23
Kirri
There has been a bit more action in the case you are referring to.
They sure as hell do not want to give way on it.
Apparently they released the files to Haramain’s lawyers in 2004 and when they realised they had fucked up they sent the FBI round to reclaim them.
Could be the sequel to OK coral.

In other words, the government lawyers threatened to physically remove the document from the court files if the Judge insists that he has the right — as he already ruled he has — to allow Al-Haramain’s lawyers to see it.

“It’s a not-so-thinly veiled threat to send executive branch authorities (the FBI? the Army?) to Judge Walker’s chambers to seize the classified material from his files!” wrote Jon Eisenberg, Al-Haramain’s lawyer, in an e-mail on Saturday. “In my view, that would be an unprecedented violation of the constitutional separation of powers. I doubt anything like it has happened in the history of this country.”

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=84252

110
Gaffhook

Gotta say, this case has some very disturbing vibes to it, and just why the Obama crew are doing it like this is very hard to fathom.

Stay tuned to this one, eh?

Chris @113- it is a little hard to miss you with such obvious devotion to this site.
And Gaffers and Kirri- are you seriously trying to imply that Obama is holding on to GB’s executive power abuse because he is morphing into some kind of MegaPower Ranger and just wants the Junk? Or do you think he may be trying to sure up some stuff we don’t even know about yet?
frankly, I don’t know how the guy finds the time to clean his teeth.

Chris B at 112

Catrina. Did you know our blogg no longer appears in Google?

Just between you and me Chris – ranking in Google is not one of my quality of life metrics.

By Post Author

116 Catrina I mean can’t be found in Google. It could be before. Its just disappeared. Although if I type in Chris B and Kirribilli Removals we appear in that other site which we won’t mention. Way back in April 2008.

Obama Offered Deal to Russia in Secret Letter.
President Obama sent a secret letter to Russia’s president last month suggesting that he would back off deploying a new missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help stop Iran from developing long-range weapons, American officials said Monday.
The letter to President Dmitri A. Medvedev was hand-delivered in Moscow by top administration officials three weeks ago. It said the United States would not need to proceed with the interceptor system, which has been vehemently opposed by Russia since it was proposed by the Bush administration, if Iran halted any efforts to build nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles.

read the entire article in The NY Times

122

President Obama sent a secret letter to Russia’s president last month.

ROTFLMAO
I was suddenly reminded of childhood.

Can you keep a secret, I don’t believe you can.
You mustn’t cry, you mustn’t spy.
Just do the best you can.

So much for secret letters eh?
Just send it to the NYT…..They’ll never tell. :mrgreen:

paddy- lol!

well, we are all in one piece and it’s quite cool and still. Got a bit scary in the middle of the night when the change went through but nothing serious. Hopefully it’s all over.

Oh good, I can go back and google for Kirribilli Removals and homunculus and find the term of abuse I used for you know who!

Think I’ll try it right now…

Oh joy, the wonders of the intertubes! Even one’s invective is preserved in aspic, and forever suspended in the cyber-ether:

“you are a completely ignorant troglodyte homunculus”

…I’d forgotten the full phrase, so happy to get it back again.

I think I used it originally to tell geegee what a nong he was when he howled in protest whenever I said the US was headed for a financial meltdown.

Do you think he ever regrets his own stupidity?

I just heard a headline on the ABC2 morning business show…”regulators say they could have done more to halt the financial crisis”

Hahahahahahhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa………………………..

Oh christ, that’s enough to make you weep!

NOW they tell us! LOL

127
Good to hear you’ve made it through another “interesting” night jen.
I must admit, there was one particular moment last night, when I reached for the brandy and wondered if the roof would stay on.
(And round this part of the woods, we don’t generally call anything less than 40 knots a gentle breeze.) 😆

Let’s hope the next few days brings us a bit more rain and all those thousands of internal refugees can begin to piece their lives back together.

Kick ’em in the goolies Steve:

Dr Steve Keen: The RBA didn’t even see this crisis coming because they were too busy obsessing about the rate of inflation. I mean, Blind Freddy could tell by looking at the data on debt that there was a financial crisis coming our way. So they were raising interest rates trying to fight off inflation when the more serious danger was a debt catastrophe, which we are now clearly in around the globe. They didn’t start cutting rates until after they had already added to the debt burden, compounding the level of debt with higher interest rates and now they’re stopping because they believe there’s no problem.

(business spectator)

…ouch! That hurts!

But Keen gets bragging rights, and may yet even bag the big one: his bet with Rory Robertson that Aussie home prices will take a hefty reversion to the mean.

Dear me Kirri, Steve Keen’s certainly not a happy bunny when it comes to the RB.
Kick em in the goolies indeed. 🙂
BTW
That link’s dead. But a search for “back after these messages” bore fruit. (reg req)

DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN BULLSHIT

“Rising star” is such an American phrase, melding as it does imagined terror hierarchies with the lingo of celebrity tabloids. In fact, one problem with empire-speak, and imperial thought more generally, is the way it prevents imperial officials from imagining a world not in their own image. So it’s not surprising that, despite their best efforts, they regularly conjure up their enemies as a warped version of themselves – hierarchical, overly reliant on leaders, and top heavy.

In the Vietnam era, for instance, American officials spent a remarkable amount of effort sending troops to search for, and planes to bomb, the border sanctuaries of Cambodia and Laos on a fruitless hunt for COSVN (the so-called Central Office for South Vietnam), the supposed nerve center of the communist enemy, aka “the bamboo Pentagon”. Of course, it wasn’t there to be found, except in Washington’s imperial imagination.

http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KC03Df02.html

Ripper article. Kirri.
(got it for free from the homepage, paddy. Clearly, you are not a an intertube whisperer. 🙂

The below Steve ‘Sock it to ‘em” Keen excerpt crystallises why now is not a good time to go into debt to buy ANYTHING.

Down the road apiece one’s own “block of land” in a pocket of the biosphere that provides energy independent shelter, food, water and community will be not only of life-sustaining “value”, but will be considerably less expensive for those whose present net worth is liquid……. or can be converted to cash in a jiffy.

“JF: What are the risks of ( RBA) taking too long to respond?

SK: The risk is deflation. For the last 10 years, the risk has been deflation. I’ve been saying since 1995 the danger is excessive debt in a milieu of low inflation, because if you then have a deleveraging event take place, people get in a panic to pay down their debt … businesses begin cutting their margins to guarantee extra turnover for them at the expense of their competitors, but everybody does it at the same time of course, and what you get is a fall in prices.”

It didn’t take long for the RBA to have egg on it’s face after yesterday’s decision.

”This is inevitably the first quarter of Australia’s recession, that it’s currently in,” said Matt Robinson of Moody’s Economy.com.

”It makes a mockery of the comment from RBA yesterday that Australia hasn’t seen the sizeable contraction in demand that other economies have seen.”

(In reference to the contraction in GDP for the December quarter.)

http://business.smh.com.au/business/recession-fear-as-gdp-shrinks-20090304-8nw6.html

136
Wow Ecky, that’s an absolute cracker of an article re: The American Empire.
I haven’t read anything that good on the doublespeak business for ages.
Perhaps it’s one of the benefits of a new administration.
Critics can now begin to have a serious discourse about the lunacy of empire.
Heck, the previous 8 years have been so insane, trying to talk sense about US foreign policy has often seemed depressingly pointless.

Justice Dept. May Release More Terrorism Memos.
One day after releasing a set of Bush administration memorandums claiming sweeping presidential powers to bypass legal constraints when fighting terrorism, Justice Department officials said on Tuesday that they may soon disclose further secret opinions about interrogation, surveillance, and other national security policies.

more in the NY Times

115
Jen

I am not sure what he is up to with this one. It is purely in this case about the secret wiretapping etc and we know that he voted to let the Telcos etc off the hook while he was running for POTUS.
Other things like torture memos and bush bastardry seem to be finding their way in to the public domain but for some reason they are fighting tooth and nail on this one.

It did say in the end of the article i linked to at 110 that they may be pursuing it until a higher authority makes a ruling and not the minions. Only time will tell there. Maybe Barry is playing a game with the Judiciary to see how transparent they may be going to be as to remaining attached to the imbecile doctrine.

“It might be fair to view this as just a consquence of fact that they find themselves in the funny position of having to reveal classified information to people they don’t want to before getting a higher court ruling on it,” he added. Then again, he added: “That’s at least one interpretation. We have good reason to be suspicious.”

Visa, Microsoft join EU fight against Internet child porn.
A new coalition of police, Internet providers, financial groups and NGOs was launched Tuesday to tackle the growing flow of child abuse pictures distributed online, the EU commission announced.

The European Financial Coalition (EFC) — led by Britain’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) and including MasterCard, Microsoft, PayPal, VISA Europe and the NGO Missing Children Europe — will work together in the fight against child abuse images.

On the law enforcement side, the EFC founding members also include Europol and the Italian National Postal and Communication Police.

“It is a reality that the rapid growth of the Internet has opened up a serious criminal market for images of child sex abuse,” said EU Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot.

“The European Financial Coalition will help identify and protect victims, and, above all, confiscate the profits from these criminal activities,” he added.

This is exactly what Conroy should be doing.
read the whole article on EU Business

Irish MEPs defect to liberal group.
MEPs from the ruling Irish Fianna Fail party are set to join the liberal group in the European Parliament after the upcoming EU elections.

“We will soon advance a proposal to join, for the first time, a pan-European party – the European Liberal, Democratic and Reform Party [ELDR],” Irish Taoiseach Brian Cowen said at a Fianna Fail congress in Ireland on Friday (28 February).
“Following June’s election, should everything progress as expected, we will then consider joining the parliamentary group [ALDE] to which the ELDR is affiliated.”

Graham Watson, leader of the liberals in the European Parliament, welcomed the potential new recruits.

“I am certain that any application from Fianna Fail to join the Liberals & Democrats will be well received. Fianna Fail MEPs would have no difficulty integrating into our group after the forthcoming European elections,” he said in a statement.

Four Fianna Fail deputies currently sit with the right-wing Union for European of the Nations (UEN) group in parliament, which has 43 deputies in total.

Irish Fianna Fail MEP Brian Crowley is co-chair of UEN, together with Cristiana Muscardini from Italy’s “post-fascist” Alleanza Nazionale party.

more of this article in the EU Observer

“And it’s one, two , three what are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn……next stop’s Afghanistan..”

Lyndon Johnson, despite a booming economy, lost his Great Society to the Vietnam War. He knew what he was risking. He would later tell Doris Kearns Goodwin, “If I left the woman I really loved — the Great Society — in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs… All my dreams…”
The United States is on its knees economically. As President Obama fights for his myriad domestic programs and his dream of an economic recovery, he might benefit from a look over his shoulder at the link between Vietnam and the still-smoldering ruins of Johnson’s presidency.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/opinion/03herbert.html?_r=2

http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/20090303_withdrawal_101/

———————————

Kirri, here’s one for that tangentially literate odious toad-amigo, homo homunculus, whose gravatar is a (Freudianly accurate) lap dog..
http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/67510
Tues March 3: OK, Chicken Little has had his two cents worth, what about Chicken Big ?
http://news.yahoo.com/edcartoons/tomtoles;_ylt=Ap3VnjGgKDE1TPkngR3QZNMxvTYC

http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/67475

Mon March 2:
http://news.yahoo.com/edcartoons/patoliphant;_ylt=AnLnqrJSRLyZkhb.rXbsSRvd.sgF

Tues March 3:
http://news.yahoo.com/edcartoons/bensargent;_ylt=AhCgWHk_UrG0IyzZiQVznNDV.i8C

http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/67520

http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/67476

http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/67425

top right of picture, obscured, Bobby Jindal
http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/67453

http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/67503

Pennsylvania is an increasingly Democratic state. In 2004, Kerry won the state by a hair; Obama won it with a handy ten percent lead. In 2004, twelve of nineteen Keystone Congressmen were Republican, as well as the two Senators. Now, eleven representatives and the junior Senator are Democrats. In 2004, there were roughly 500,000 more Democrats than Republicans in the state; during the extended primary last year, that lead expanded to well over a million. To Republican Pat Toomey, however, that’s clearly not enough. For this reason—at least, it’s the only reason that makes any sense—he announced yesterday that he’s considering a primary run against Arlen Specter.

read more on the Phillist

Nihilism Ain’t Just A River In Egypt.
As you may have noticed, I’m not exactly a David Brooks fan. But he was dead-on when he described Bobby Jindal’s anti-government rebuttal message as “nihilism.” Rush Limbaugh’s stated desire for Obama to fail (since echoed by Michelle Malkin, Rick Santorum, and Mike Pence) is in the same vein: Who cares what happens to the country, so long as we get to cut taxes and win elections.

That ideology served them well for almost 40 years, but now that they’re on the wrong end of the landslides, some conservatives are finally realizing how much damage its failure has inflicted on their brand. After 28 years of worshipping St. Ronnie and 8 years of cheering on The Decider, they’re desperately trying to pull their party out of the hole that they helped dig.

Great video as well.
more on this article on Fire Dog Lake

PA Pollster: “Specter is toast”.
New polling in Pennsylvania shows broad and deep dissatisfaction with Senator Arlen Specter, who is up for re-election in the blue-trending Commonwealth in 2010.

Asked whether they think Specter, a Philadelphia Republican, has done his job well enough to win re-election or whether they’d prefer a “new person” in that job, registered voters by a 53-38 percent margin said it’s time to give someone else a chance, according to the poll by Susquehanna Polling and Research. Eight percent were undecided.

read more on Fire Dog Lake

Congo’s mobile phone revolution signals a way out of poverty.

Increased access to handsets is transforming millions of lives in Africa.

MORE than half the global population now pay to use a mobile phone, according to a new UN report. With this surge in users has come a huge expansion in the mobile services available, from instant money transfers to public health advice to internet access. The fastest growth has been in Africa, where people such as Deograsias Mukeba, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, now find their phones indispensable.

rad the entire article in The Age

Paddy @ 135
Brilliant!
Before I retired I used to drink loads of the stuff at the office…..

It must be Conroy’s doing.

Airline under fire over ‘soft porn’ painted plane.
Some American airline customers are fuming that a new aeroplane paint job has turned the family holiday into an adults-only affair.

The Dallas-based airline Southwest Airlines unveiled the latest addition to its fleet this month, a Boeing 737 with a bikini-clad model painted on the fuselage. The temporary paint job is part of a promotional deal with Sports Illustrated to tout the magazine’s annual swimsuit issue.

Some passengers complain that they’re being forced to board an aircraft plastered with soft porn.

We have a similar one in Melbourne on the side of a bus. On the corner of Warrigul and North Roads. No telling how many accidents are caused there. The adjourning council wanted to have it banned. It has a few religious types on their council.

Ex-Taliban diplomat hooked on his iPhone.
Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef is a former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan. He spent almost four years in Guantanamo. He wears a black turban, has a thick beard – and is never without his Apple iPhone.

The ultra-conservative Taliban banned modern technology like the Internet and TV during its harsh 1996-2001 rule, but those items have boomed in Afghanistan since the regime’s 2001 ouster, helping to bring the country into the 21st century.

Zaeef, who reconciled with the Afghan government after being released from U.S. custody, says he uses his iPhone to surf the internet and find difficult locations, employing the built-in GPS. He even checks his bank account balance online.

more in The Age

Anti-tax haven bill coming: U.S. Senate aides.
Offshore tax havens used by rich Americans in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and other nations are targeted for shutdown by a bill to be offered in the U.S. Senate on Monday, said senior Senate aides.

In legislation that expands on a bill co-sponsored last year with then-Senator Barack Obama, Senator Carl Levin will propose a broad crackdown on tax avoidance schemes estimated to deprive the U.S. government of more than $100 billion a year.

The bill comes just two days ahead of a Senate hearing where a senior UBS AG executive is due to testify about an investigation of the Swiss banking giant.

“Offshore tax haven and tax shelter abuses are undermining the integrity of our tax system,” said Levin in a statement given to Reuters. “We cannot tolerate $100 billion in offshore tax abuses burning a hole through our budget each year.

“We can fight back against secrecy jurisdictions and shut down offshore tax abuses if we have the political will.”

Companion legislation is expected to be introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, the aides said.

read the whole article on Reuters

Australian topless bathing ban urged.
A group of conservative politicians is making headway towards a ban on topless bathing on some of Australia’s best known beaches.

Nothing like a good bit of free overseas publicity for out beaches. Video included. 😈
more on Reuters

Who’s “playing politics” with the U.S. Census?

Congressional Republicans and their right-wing allies are denouncing the Obama administration for “playing politics” with the 2010 Census. Sen. Judd Gregg even obliquely hinted that it might have been a factor in his withdrawal of his nomination as secretary of Commerce.

I have no idea whether or not it is true that the president and the Democrats are considering amending the formula for calculating the distribution of the nation’s population this time around. But I certainly hope so.

And as for “playing politics” with the issue, the GOP’s complaints are fraught with hypocrisy. After all, one of the first acts of the Bush administration when it took over the White House in 2000 was to rescind the Clinton administration’s plan to adopt a sampling technique in order to correct widely recognized flaws in the decennial enumeration of the population. I do not recall any Republican complaints at the time that the White House was “playing politics” with the census.

Almost all demographers agree the census count is flawed. Because of overcrowding, mobility and other factors in urban areas where much of the nation’s non-white population resides, approximately one of every 20 African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans are missed by the census counters, compared with one in 100 of non-Hispanic whites.

the whole article can be found on NJ.com

Stimulus Flows Into Patchwork of State Transport Projects.
Kansas will widen U.S. 69 to remove a bottleneck outside Kansas City, along with a few other expensive projects. Maryland will spend its money in smaller pieces, resurfacing dozens of rutted roads and highways. Colorado will build an interchange on Elk Creek Road in Jefferson County, complete with an underpass for the elk.
read more in the NY Times

Obama Gets Strong Support in Poll.
President Barack Obama enjoys widespread backing from a frightened American public for his ambitious, front-loaded agenda, a new poll indicates.

He is more popular than ever, Americans are hopeful about his leadership, and opposition Republicans are getting drubbed in public opinion, the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll suggests.

more in the Wall Street Journal

Ecky, the chicken has landed, and we now can see it’s NOT an eagle after all! LOL

It’s all unfolding like a nightmare from hell, and the land of free enterprise is about to reckon the cost of all that ‘freedom’.

Yes, we do really ‘hate your freedoms’ when they include the freedom to put hundreds of billions of casino chips, at taxpayer’s expence, on the table just to make yourself obscene salaries and then shrug your shoulders and put out your hands for more when it all turns to shit in a bucket.

Time to muster the masters of the universe into the pig pen and feed them some REAL swill for a while.

And yes Ecky, I hope the mutt chokes on them there chicken bones! (Although I doubt the memory extends back that far, it’s the advantage of that much dullness, self appraisal is not fettered by the facts.)

APOLOGY

It is true that in the past I have derided Mr. Rush Limbaugh as a total tosser, but after his recent address to GOP leadership operatives, Mister Rush sure made me see the error of my ways. The Party is blessed to be guided by a guy who knows how to call a spade a spade. I apologise for claiming that Rush Limbaugh is merely a doubleplusgood duckspeaker of renown and an utter fuck-wit and bully to boot. He is far more valuable and therefore worthy of esteem than that because Mr. Limbaugh is the future of the Grand Old Party. As long as he fulminates so fulsomely into his microphone, Rebublicans will have their best shot at getting their hands on the levers of REAL power again.

So, sorry, Mr. Limbaugh, hope I didn’t hurt you too much. Republicans need you just where you are because you are a legend and because you’re so big and strong. Seriously.
And I’m totally mesmerised by your body language….. know you aren’t fond of French, but savoir-faire, gravitas and dynamism are a rare and charismatic combination. Your fine analytical mind is the icing on the massive frame that so humbly understates your raw physical power. Michael J. Fox never had your moves, sir.

May your heath remain excellent. Going forward…….a long way.

http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2009/03/03/tomo/index.html

We dodged a bullet, well, close if you realise that 60,000 km is friggin’ close in the scheme of things:

At 12.40 yesterday morning, as the city slept, a previously unknown asteroid swept about 60,000 kilometres over the south-western Pacific.

In astronomical terms it was a close call. Estimated to be between 30 metres and 50 metres wide, it passed almost seven times closer than the moon.

“No object of that size, or larger, has been observed to come closer to the Earth,” said Rob McNaught, of the Siding Spring Observatory, near Coonabarabran.

In 1908 an object possibly up to 50 metres across flattened some 2000 square kilometres of Siberian forest.

(SMH)

Ecky, you’ve been down the road to Damascus again, ain’t ya? Seen the light? Seen the future? Had a vision of Rush and Sarah doin’ it on the big GOPper stage under frenzied spot lights?

It’s just too good to be true, eh? After McCain fizzled like wet fire crackers, what’s left but warmed over Dubbya and fossilized Reaganism served up with Hillbilly Heroin and Mooseburger?

God, it could not be funnier.

165
Kirri

We dodged a bullet, well, close if you realise that 60,000 km is friggin’ close in the scheme of things:

At 12.40 yesterday morning, as the city slept, a previously unknown asteroid swept about 60,000 kilometres over the south-western Pacific.

Never fear Kirri.
While we slept, Crikey’s resident physicist, Firstdogonthemoon was watching over us and calculating our chances of survival.
Mind you Pete the preacher looks a bit close for comfort.
http://media.crikey.com.au/Media/images/090304-first-dog-632a4be6-dda7-46b0-bf70-4bfc53668b59.jpg

And if you ask Rush he’ll tell you how good he is. Trouble is he is so busy windbaggin he can’t see whats hittin him.

Obama, Emanuel, and Steele know this. The Democrats would not have won the White House and Steele would not have beat out a pack of mostly Limbaugh fawning contenders for the RNC top spot if that hadn’t been true.

Still, Limbaugh has one powerful tool to bully, badger and cajole the GOP and saber rattle Obama. That’s the airwaves. He’ll exploit it to the hilt. But that won’t make him the boss of the GOP let alone any real threat to Obama. It’ll just make him an inviting and convenient strawman.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Limbaugh-Strawman-by-earl-ofari-hutchin-090303-786.html

Spot the odd one out from these headlines:

Wall Street Snaps Its Losing Streak

Fed’s Beige Book Paints Bleak Economic Picture

…don’t you love it?

Thousands more foreign bearers of God’s gift of Freedom (hegemonic missionaries) are preparing to bestow their benevolence upon grateful mountain-dwelling tribes, historically so welcoming of Macedonians, Mongols, Britons and Russians.

It’s important to appeciate that none of the taxpayer monies spent in Afghanistan could be better spent in the invaders’ States of origin. Citizens of those lands need to fortify THEMSELVES against homeland economic collapse rather than criticise the Military-Industrial-Complex for turning an honest buck.

http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/67537

On this mornings business show on ABC2, they showed a segment reporting on a south Chicago organisation, originally started by retired nuns, that lends to the poor. They’ve been refinancing houses for those who’s loans went to high rates and faced foreclosure. They only do 30 year mortgages and are profitable. 98% of their clients pay on time.

As the director said, it isn’t the borrower’s fault they got in trouble, it was the way the loans were originally structured. So they set amounts they can actually repay and they’re doing 2 billion worth of business.

Surprise, surprise, Wall Street was gouging the poor…whoever would have thought it?

Ecky, so you think we just might get bogged down in Afghanistan? Has that ever happened before? LOL

Maybe it’s time for the West to start its own jihad on mad military escapades and the governments who start them?

Spanking Spak and Spec.
Arlen “Scottish Haggis” Specter–whose political obituary was written yesterday in the form of a dismal poll result and a renewed threat from Pat Toomey–says we don’t need a truth commission because all the details on Bush era crimes are contained in some file cabinets that we need only waltz up to and empty out.

And in case you were wondering, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Presumably because he believes we need only waltz up to those file cabinets and take out the Cheney indictment, the sole contribution Scottish Haggis made in today’s Truth Commission Hearing was to enter this Hans von Spakovsky column into the record. Given that Hans von Spak accused Leahy of pitching a House Un-American Activities Commission, I can only interpret Haggis’ action as a profoundly cowardly attempt to get back in the good graces of the Club for Growth.

the rest of this article is on Fire Dog Lake.

Karl Rove Agrees To Testify.
A deal has been reached whereby Karl Rove will finally testify, under oath, before the House Judiciary Committee, according to chairman John Conyers’ office.

Rove has long avoided and ignored subpoenas in the past by claiming executive privilege — his deference now comes as a big victory for many Bush administration critics.

Here is the press release:

In an agreement reached today between the former Bush Administration and Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Karl Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers will testify before the House Judiciary Committee in transcribed depositions under penalty of perjury. The Committee has also reserved the right to have public testimony from Rove and Miers. It was agreed that invocations of official privileges would be significantly limited.

Yes! Yes! Yes!
more in The Huffington Post
One down, plenty more to go.

New Smoking Bill in Congress based on Compromise with Philip Morris.
Legislation was introduced to Congress this week by Rep Henry Waxman (D-CA) that would subject tobacco products to regulation by the FDA. This sounds like a good thing, coming from a revered public health advocate. The truth is that if cigarettes were evaluated by the same safety standards that FDA routinely applies to other products for human consumption, cigarettes would be immediately banned. That’s not how things will proceed under HR 1256.

The bill represents a compromise between Philip Morris and some of the more ‘reasonable’ anti-tobacco groups, including Center for Tobacco-Free Kids and the American Cancer Society. These organizations have a history of promoting legislation that offers incremental progress immediately in exchange for guarantees that block more comprehensive restrictions long into the future.

the entire article can be found on Op Ed News

GOP finds Pelosi an elusive target.
House Republicans have met the enemy — and she isn’t Nancy Pelosi.

As Democrats settle in on Rush Limbaugh as their Man in Black, GOP leaders are concluding that the speaker of the House doesn’t quite rise to the same political devil level.

Their solution: Goodbye, Nancy, Hello, Barack.

Former House Republican Majority Leader Tom Delay, speaking on MSNBC Tuesday night, summed up frustrations with using Pelosi as a proxy, urging his party to go after President Obama directly, even if it means locking horns with the most popular political figure in the country.

“This whole notion that we’re not going to take on Obama but take on Pelosi and [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid will get you nowhere,” The Hammer told Chris Mathews.

“That’s a minority mindset of playing on the ball field of the left. You need to stand up and fight. And that’s what Rush is doing and why people are gravitating towards him and support him.”

read more of this story on Politico

Obama says yes to Smart Grid.
Move over, Big Oil. There’s a new VIP guest in the White House: Silicon Valley.

Employees from some of the nation’s biggest high-tech companies bet heavily last year that famously tech-savvy Barack Obama would be good news for their bottom lines.

And it seems their wager paid off. Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill includes $4.5 billion in funding for the so-called Smart Grid, an ambitious plan to modernize the country’s electric grid that many Obama contributors are helping to shape.

Among the companies with significant stakes in the Smart Grid are technology giants Google, Microsoft and IBM, whose employees were top donors — and, in some cases, advisers — to Obama’s campaign last year.

Workers at Microsoft, along with family members and other associates, gave more than $800,000 to Obama, while people connected to Google contributed nearly $784,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And those with ties to IBM gave more than $517,000.

Executives at some of the companies also helped line Obama’s coffers. Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond gave $4,600, and so did Robert Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research. At IBM, three senior officials gave either $2,300 or $4,600, and at Microsoft, two senior officials each gave $4,600. IBM’s Michael Parham also was an Obama campaign bundler, committing to raise $200,000.

continuing one of my many themes, how computers can save the world.
find the whole article on Politico

Doesn’t she know he’s from the wrong side of politics?

Kennedy to be Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Wednesday that Queen Elizabeth II will bestow on Sen. Edward M. Kennedy an honorary knighthood

“I know that you will allow me to single out for special mention today one of your most distinguished senators, known in every continent and a great friend,” Brown told a joint meeting of Congress. “Northern Ireland today is at peace, more Americans have health care, children around the world are going to school, and for all those things we owe a great debt to the life and courage of Sen. Edward Kennedy.”

Lawmakers greeted the news that the 77-year-old Massachusetts Democrat will be designated a Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire, with cheers and a standing ovation from both sides of the aisle.

The type of honor for which Kennedy has been selected will allow him to place K.B.E. — for “Knight of the British Empire” — after his name but will not bestow the title of “Sir” on him. That title is reserved for subjects of the British crown.

For once they are giving it out for the right reasons. Apart from the Beatles who else could be more deserving of an award from the Queen.
find the whole article on CQ Politics

Paul Keating writes:

Global financial confidence, once destroyed, requires myr­iad positive events and a heavy convergence of them to counter ambient pessimism and gloom.

The recent series of government packages, notwithstanding their scale and speed, has had little demonstrable effect on the level of confidence or the outlook for ongoing activity. Indeed, the number of new and significant packages may begin to peter out as the public accounts of most countries can no longer cope with the growing burden of insolvency or assume further private sector risk. This context underlines the urgent need for the Group of 20 industrialised and developing nations meeting in London to construct a new paradigm to resuscitate the world financial and economic system.

What is needed is a new global economic and political settlement. The first priority should be to make the G20 a permanent gathering. The leaders should meet at least once a year and, in current circumstances, twice. A permanent G20 structure, representative of the major debtor and creditor countries and the most strategically powerful ones, will sound the death knell of the Group of Seven leading industrialised nations. This is two decades too late, but better late than never. ….more

http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20090305-A-chance-to-remake-the-global-financial-system.html#comments

It ain’t getting better any time soon:

One in five US homeowners with mortgages owe more to their lenders than their properties are worth, and the rate will increase as housing values drop in states that have so far avoided the worst of the crisis, a new study shows.

About 8.31 million properties had negative equity at the end of 2008, up 9 per cent from 7.63 million at the end of September, according to the study, released Wednesday by First American CoreLogic. The percentage of “underwater” borrowers rose to 20 per cent from 18 per cent.

Another 2.16 million properties could go underwater if home prices fall another 5 per cent, the study shows.

First American said the value of residential properties fell to $US19.1 trillion at year-end from $US21.5 trillion a year earlier, with half the decline in California. Forty-three US states and Washington, D.C., were included in the study.

NYT

Paddy, it is “news” when Cossie the Smirk breaks cover and appears on the telly to make some comment about the economy, but the MSM just seem to ignore the fact that Keating comes out with good analysis and excellent ideas periodically.

It’s the triumph of the vapid over substance, eh?

LOL
Ah yes Kirri. But then P.J. Keating isn’t going to be the next Prime Minister of the country……Is he now? :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

Maybe invite George Bush to run the G20. After all he knows so much about the G20.

Arlen Specter is in such trouble in Pennsylvania, he might quit. Giving the Democrats another seat.

Health care summit at White House a first step to overhaul.
Fifteen years after the last Democratic president failed to overhaul the nation’s troubled health care system, President Obama kicks off his effort to try again today by bringing all the major players together at the White House.

It’s a largely symbolic move, to be followed in the months ahead by tough negotiations over health care costs, access and quality. Even so, the White House has high hopes for the summit because of who will be in the room: consumers and providers, business and labor, insurers and drug makers.

read the rest of the article on USA Today

US Senate panel to question Swiss banker, secrecy.
The sanctity of the secret Swiss bank account — an icon of global finance — is under growing pressure in a tax investigation due to come into public view on Wednesday at a U.S. congressional hearing.

Senator Carl Levin, a long-time foe of offshore tax havens estimated to deprive the U.S. government of $100 billion in annual revenues, will convene the hearing before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that he chairs.

Levin will grill Mark Branson, a top officer at UBS AG (UBSN.VX)(UBS.N), over a tax case in which the U.S. government wants the giant Swiss bank to disclose the names of thousands of rich U.S. clients suspected of dodging U.S. taxes.

The Michigan lawmaker told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday that the hearing will also focus on a U.S.-Swiss tax treaty he described as having “very, very limited value.” He said, “You can’t rely on the Swiss. That’s the bottom line.”

This would be one part of the system I would only be too glad to see bite the dust.
the other part of this article can be found on Reuters

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