Later On

What Obama wants to do, via email from CAP:

Speaking Wednesday in Mesa, AZ — a giant Phoenix suburb that is a "poster child for foreclosure" — President Obama announced a plan to "help as many as nine million American homeowners refinance their mortgages or avert foreclosure. He asserted his plan would shore up housing prices, stabilize neighborhoods and slow a downward spiral that was ‘unraveling homeownership, the middle class and the American Dream itself.’" In addition to an investment of $200 billion for "strengthening confidence in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac," the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan will "pour more than $75 billion into arresting one of the root causes of the nation’s economic spiral" by helping homeowners obtain more affordable mortgage terms. This housing plan is the final leg of what Obama has "called a ‘three-legged stool‘ aimed at fixing the nation’s crumbling economy":  restoring the health of the job, credit, and housing markets. The $789 billion economic recovery plan signed into law on Tuesday is expected to "create or save three and a half million jobs over the next two years." Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner "unveiled a restructured plan to aid the ailing financial system" last week with more accountability and "limits on bankers’ bonuses." Only a combined government effort on all three fronts "has a chance" of turning the tide for the shrinking economy.

STAGES OF FAILURE: Center for American Progress analysts Andrew Jakabovics and David Abramowitz say that the recognition that "stopping foreclosures is good for all homeowners and the economy overall"  is "long overdue." They explain that the Bush administration went through "various stages of failure" instead of taking action on the staggering rise in home foreclosures that began in 2006. "First came denial" in 2007: "Bush administration policymakers insisted that the problem was small and the economy largely immune from troubles affecting the subprime loan sector." With foreclosures rising in early 2008, Bush officials decided to "blame the victim" and wait for the magic of the market to kick in: "The Bush administration’s message was mainly that the culprits were unscrupulous borrowers who needed to be punished for their moral failures by withholding of any help." Then, as "foreclosures surged" and credit markets collapsed in 2008, "laissez-faire policies morphed into power grabs and bailouts for buddies." Throughout, "vastly more attention was paid to the woes of the banking system" than to homeowners, considered "either the bad guys, or at most irrelevant to fixing the problem." Further, Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, ignored explicit direction from Congress to claim he didn’t have the authority to address bad home loans; "essentially none of the available hundreds of billions of dollars worth of TARP funding went to stop foreclosures." Paulson even rebuffed the chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair, when she requested $24.4 billion in Nov. 2008 "to create and implement an effective system of foreclosure-preventing modifications." As recently as Jan. 10, Paulson was still "reluctant to move ahead with a foreclosure plan," claiming it would not give "maximum bang for the buck."

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Good article by Robert Parry, which begins:

It was only a few years ago – when the Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House – that the U.S. news media offered up one-sided coverage of the Bush administration, relying on Republicans, right-wingers and pro-war military experts to shape what Americans got to see and read.

The reason for marginalizing Democrats and other critical voices, we were told, was that the Republicans were in power and it made no sense to have on guests or to quote experts who didn’t share in the power. The premium was to have Republican insiders explaining what was going on.

So, one might have thought that when the Democrats won control of Congress and the White House, Republicans would largely disappear from the TV chat shows and the news pages. After all, the Republicans today have even fewer representatives in Washington than the Democrats did during most of the Bush years.

But if you thought that, you would be wrong. Instead, the cable networks and the print media have been falling over themselves to get the views of Republicans and to disseminate those opinions widely to the American public.

During a key early stage in the battle over Barack Obama’s stimulus bill, the Center for American Progress examined the political affiliations of guests on major cable networks and found that Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 2-to-1. Suddenly, the premium was on the views of those out of power.

In other words, Republicans get to dominate the news programs when they’re in power and they get to dominate when they’re out of power. The one constant is that the U.S. news media bends over backwards to favor the Republicans; what changes is the rationale.

This dynamic was even more acute in the run-up to invading Iraq when CNN and MSNBC competed to out-fox Fox as the most aggressively flag-waving, pro-war network. Iraq War skeptics were decidedly not welcome, whether the likes of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter or Rep. Ike Skelton, who was a ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

If you raised questions about invading Iraq, you were a flake – and no self-respecting producer wanted to risk his/her career by allowing such a dissident opinion on the air. Media insiders took note of what happened to talk-show host Phil Donahue at MSNBC when he booked a few anti-war voices to dissent from the views of a majority of his pro-war guests.

There wasn’t much difference in the so-called prestige newspapers, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times…

Continue reading.

I refer not to the previous post, though that is indeed a good example of bad thinking, but to Rick Santorum:

Earlier this week, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) delivered "a lecture on Islam" at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Santorum argued that the American public knows too little about the Islamic faith, and to prove his point, he asked the students whether they knew the difference between Sunnis and Shi’as. Only three audience members raised their hands. Santorum said that "he believes Muslims’ religious views cannot be changed or altered, so Middle Easterners reject American, democratic ideals. ‘A democracy could not exist because Mohammed already made the perfect law.’" Ironically, Santorum betrayed his own ignorance of Islam by declaring that Muslims believe that the "Quran is perfect just the way it is, that’s why it is only written in Islamic." As a self-anointed scholar of Islam, it’s surprising that Santorum would assert that the Qur’an is "written in Islamic." It is, of course, originally written in Arabic. Islam is not a language, but rather a religion. Santorum concluded, "I think that if every citizen was fully informed about the war, it would create a commonality between faiths." Indeed, much work remains to be done.

I refer, of course, not to the gorgeous scenery but to the mean-spirited people who live there. An example, via an email from CAP:

In January, according to a recent leak, state Sen. Chris Buttars (R) gave an interview with a local ABC affiliate in which he compared gays to alcoholics and Muslim terrorists, and warned that gay people are "probably the greatest threat to America." "To me, homosexuality will always be a sexual perversion," Buttars said, adding, "They say, I’m born that way. There’s some truth to that, in that some people are born with an attraction to alcohol." Buttars later called gays "the meanest buggers I ever seen." Gays are "probably the greatest threat to America going down I know of," he said. Buttars also praised former President Bush because he allegedly "saved" America "for the foreseeable future" by appointing conservatives to the Supreme Court. Yesterday a Utah state House committee defeated a bill that would have granted same-sex couples rights of inheritance and medical decision-making, following the defeat of bills that would have allowed gay adoption and protected gays from housing and employment discrimination

Chris Hedges has an interesting post that begins:

We have a remarkable ability to create our own monsters. A few decades of meddling in the Middle East with our Israeli doppelganger and we get Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Iraqi resistance movement and a resurgent Taliban. Now we trash the world economy and destroy the ecosystem and sit back to watch our handiwork. Hints of our brave new world seeped out Thursday when Washington’s new director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he said, a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and 1930s.

It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. We will see accelerated plant and retail closures, inflation, an epidemic of bankruptcies, new rounds of foreclosures, bread lines, unemployment surpassing the levels of the Great Depression and, as Blair fears, social upheaval.

The United Nations’ International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. The collapse has already seen 3.6 million lost jobs in the United States. The International Monetary Fund’s prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent–the worst since World War II. There are 2.3 million properties in the United States that received a default notice or were repossessed last year. And this number is set to rise in 2009, especially as vacant commercial real estate begins to be foreclosed. About 20,000 major global banks collapsed, were sold or were nationalized in 2008. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to shut down this year. Unemployment, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers who cannot find full-time employment, is close to 14 percent.

And we have few tools left to dig our way out…

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Scott Horton has an excellent article regarding this video, which begins:

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison shared one definition of the term “tyrant”—a ruler who deprived a person of his freedom without operation of law and without accountability before a court. Which perhaps explains why American historians are consistently ranking George W. Bush at the very bottom of the list of all American presidents; the man, ultimately, is guilty of tyranny.

Take Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, accused by the Bush Administration of being an Al Qaeda sleeper agent. Al-Marri says that he came to the United States as a student and had no more sinister objective than to get a college degree. The Bush Adminstration brought charges against him, but as soon as its charges were set to be tested in a courtroom, it got cold feet. Jane Mayer reveals that this decision was against the advice of the career prosecutors handling the case—that the President, apparently lacking faith in the criminal justice system or his own Justice Department, directed al-Marri be seized by the military and held at a facility near Charleston, South Carolina. He’s the sole detainee at the facility, and he’s now been held for seven years. No charges, no due process, subjected to prolonged interrogation using what John Yoo calls the “Bush Program.”

Continue reading.

I just ordered one of these (and a spare) to replace a bulb that burned out above the sink. It’s a recessed light, limited to 75 watts. I put in this 40 watt CFL that sheds as much light as a 150 watt incandescent—2650 lumens, to be exact—except the light from the CFL is full-spectrum. The light is wonderful! I immediately replaced the bulb above the stove with the spare and have ordered a couple more. (You do have to be aware of the length of the bulb: it might not fit everywhere.) At $9 for 10,000 hours, it’s a bargain. You can also get this 30 watt CFL (equivalent to 120 watt incandescent, 2000 lumens) for $4.70. Shipping costs are quite reasonable, and the lights are well packed.

Good program. Transcript here.

As you probably know, many species of fish are hunted and caught until market extinction: the remaining stock is so depleted that the fish are not worth catching (cf. cod, orange roughy, Chilean sea bass, Atlantic swordfish) or the fish has indeed become extinct. Seafood Choices Alliance has some links to good resources for consumers:

Resources for Consumers

Sustainability

Which wild fish are sustainably harvested? Is it okay to eat tuna?  What kind of salmon should I buy? Are there farmed fish that are environmentally responsible choices?  Seafood Choices Alliance works with conservation organizations around the world that are working to answer these and other important questions regarding the sustainability of our seafood supply.  Click on the links below for further information.

• Seafood Recommendation Guides and Wallet Cards
• Conservation Organizations Working on Seafood & Other Ocean Issues
• Aquaculture and Fisheries Resources

Health

Fish are considered by many nutritionists to be part of a healthy diet; providing a low fat source of protein and essential omega 3 fatty acids.  However, concerns do exist about the presence of toxins (e.g. mercury and PCBs) in some seafood – marine pollutants can build up in the flesh of fish, which is then consumed by people.  This can be of particular concern for certain groups of people, including children and pregnant women. There are a number of non-profit organizations and government agencies with websites that provide advice on recommended consumption levels of fish that consider both the health benefits and toxicity risks.  Click here to see a list of links to many of these sites.

Molly is a friendly cat, affectionate toward strangers, unless they are big men in work clothes who erect a plastic tent in the living room so they can rip out the sliding glass door and then start banging around replacing the balcony. In that case, she’s terrified, and demands the company of The Wife and, ideally, a good hiding place: low to the ground, a snug fit, and completely enclosing her. And she finds the ideal hiding place behind a table top propped against the wall:

She feels perfectly hidden in this snug hidey hole. When The Wife walked by, Molly quickly drew back her front paws so they wouldn’t stick out and reveal where she was.

UPDATE: The Wife says that Molly was perfectly friendly with the workmen until they started ripping out the sliding glass doors. Indeed, the foreman put down his clipboard for a second, and when he went to pick it up, he found Molly curled comfortably upon it.

Several have pointed out that Molly is thinking, “This is so cool—I can see them, but they can’t see me.”

I got out the little brush stand for the Edwin Jagger brush so that you can see the reason for the orientation of the print on the handle. In fact, I use no brush stands, just placing the brush on its base to dry after I rinse it out.

The shaving soap in the Jagger mug is the Himalaya soap, of which I have become quite fond. Thanks to the commenter who pointed it out. The Jagger Chatsworth carries a Black Beauty blade his morning, and it delivered a very smooth shave indeed, though not with the ease of a new blade, so I replaced it after the shave.

And for the aftershave, today seemed a good day to return to Floïd Blue—which, despite the color, is a favorite of Big Red: Roll, Red, Roll!

Very interesting article by the economist Dean Baker. It begins:

The extraordinary financial collapse of recent months has been commonly described as a testament to the failure of deregulation. The events are indeed testament to a failure—a failure of public policy. Blaming deregulation is misleading.

In general, political debates over regulation have been wrongly cast as disputes over the extent of regulation, with conservatives assumed to prefer less regulation, while liberals prefer more. In fact conservatives do not necessarily desire less regulation, nor do liberals necessarily desire more. Conservatives support regulatory structures that cause income to flow upward, while liberals support regulatory structures that promote equality. “Less” regulation does not imply greater inequality, nor is the reverse true.

Framing regulation debates in terms of more and less is not only inaccurate; it hugely biases the argument toward conservative positions by characterizing an extremely intrusive structure of, for example, patent and copyright rules, as the free market. In the realm of insurance and finance over the last two decades, calls for deregulation have been cover for rules tilted starkly toward corporate interests. And the recent change in bankruptcy law, hailed by conservatives, requires much greater government involvement in the economy.

False ideological claims have circumscribed the public debate over regulation and blinded us to the wide range of choices we can make. Without these claims, what would guide regulatory policy? What kinds of choices would we have?

* * *

Patent and copyright protection are good examples of government policies obscured in the debate. They are forms of regulation, not elements of a “free market.”

It does not matter that we call patents and copyrights “property” or even that we have a clause in the Constitution that authorizes Congress to grant patents and copyrights. Suppose autoworkers were given a property right to a job in the automobile industry, a right they could even sell. Would anyone say that this right to a job is part of the free market? …

Continue reading.

Ezra Klein:

It’s hard to overstate how deep a hole California is in: The state is $41 billion in debt off of a $143 billion deficit. They’ve laid of tens of thousands of workers and, next week, will fire 20,000 more. It has halted payments to counties, replaced income tax refunds with IOUs, and stopped work on thousands of infrastructure projects. The state’s bond rating has been downgraded and it has lost access to most credit markets. It’s catastrophic.

And why? Well, voters keep approving costly ballot measures that mandate spending and the Republican minority refuses to accept any tax raises. You have a strong Democratic majority in the legislature, but it doesn’t control the state’s spending and it can’t raise the state’s revenues. It’s a state governed by whim and obstruction, and we’re learning that that’s no governance theory at all. Meanwhile, even as the state faces imminent economic collapse, minority Republicans refuse to deal on revenues. Why? It’s simple enough: It’s good for them if the state fails on the Democrats’ watch.

"Years of neglect, followed by economic disaster — and with all reasonable responses blocked by a fanatical, irrational minority," comments Paul Krugman. "This could be America next."

The comments at the link are also interesting.

The LA Times’s David Lazarus:

Even in the best of times, carrying a balance on your credit card is a risky — and costly — proposition. These days, it can be downright foolish, at least if there’s a chance you might miss a payment or two.

Millions of cardholders have recently received letters from the likes of Citibank, Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and American Express Co. notifying them that their interest rates are going up, in some cases to 30% [APR] if a single payment is missed. [Emphasis added – LG]

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the nation’s largest issuer of plastic, has begun charging hundreds of thousands of cardholders a $10 monthly fee for having carried large balances for more than a couple years.

Why? In part it’s because default rates are rising and banks are dealing with additional risk. But lawmakers and consumer advocates say the higher rates also reflect banks’ massive losses from betting wrong on the housing boom, and they’re basically sticking credit card customers with the tab.

At a Senate Banking Committee hearing last week, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), the committee chairman, said lenders are “gouging” customers to boost their bottom lines.

“The list of questionable actions credit card companies are engaged in is lengthy and disturbing,” he said.
At the same time, rising layoffs and tough economic conditions have caused many people to lean more heavily on their plastic — sometimes too heavily.

Continue reading.

Disturbing:

Ben Smith writes that “the campaign against [EFCA] is also taking its toll on moderate Democrats in the House and Senate, as this Arkansas News column vividly illustrates.” What the column illustrates is that Blue Dogs like Rep. Marion Berry who supported EFCA in the last congress are now telling business leaders that they did so only because they knew the bill couldn’t pass, and now they’re going to the House leadership and whining that they can’t support the bill.

It’s extremely naive to see this dynamic as anything “taking its toll” on moderate Democrats. What’s happening is that even though the Republican Party lost the last election, the wealthy business interests who’d been financing the Republican Party can’t be defeated at the ballot box. And they hate the Employee Free Choice Act. EFCA would make it easier to form unions. And the evidence indicates that unions flatten the compensation structure at unionized firms—more money for folks at the low end, less for folks at the top. If I were a corporate manager, I wouldn’t want that to happen to me. And if, as a manager, I was able to use the company’s resources to advance my interests by fighting EFCA, I would want to do that. And that’s what they’re doing. And they have a lot of money to spend on that cause. Which means that if you can be the guy who blocks this legislation, you’ll be a hero to a lot of rich people prepared to spend a lot of money rewarding their hero. It’s a great opportunity for a moderate House Democrat. In the last congress, Wal-Mart didn’t really need to care what Rep. Berry thought or did. The bill wasn’t going to pass anyway. Now it really might. Which means Berry might get to be a pivotal player in stopping it from happening. Which is great news for him.

Just finished cleaning kitchen for lunch. I was clever enough to peel and mince the garlic before starting the dishes so it has time to sit and stabilize the good nutrients. One garlic tip, which I learned from Chester Aaron’s entertaining memoir Garlic Is Life: In the spring (like right now out here), you can find other varieties in the garlic bin than the usual commercial crop. One good sign: if the central stem is woody instead of papery leaves. The varieties with the woody central stem seem much easier to peel and very tasty. Aaron’s book is highly recommended.

My plan: sauté a couple of strips of bacon, then remove the crisp bacon and pour off the bacon fat. A little olive oil, and sauté onions and garlic, then add chopped spinach, fennel bulb, a small can of Ro-Tel diced tomatoes with green chili, a handful of arame, and a slug of hot pepper sauce, Eden Organic shoyu sauce, mirin, and cherry wood aged organic white balsamic vinegar. Cover and cook over low heat. After that cooks down, plop the halibut fillet on top, cover again, and simmer for 12 minutes. Uncover and there’s my lunch and (with cheese topping) my dinner.

UPDATE: Photo added. I discovered about 1/3 c. chicken stock, so added that with the tomatoes. Then, just before I put the halibut on top, I added a good handful of whole-wheat orzo and stirred that it to the bottom. Halibut on top, 12 minutes, remove cover, sprinkle chopped bacon over all and paprika on the halibut. Now to eat.

There are many tricks to food photography. I know none of them.

From the Center for Media and Democracy:

Source: Columbia Journalism Review, February 18, 2008

The "majority of American journalists covering climate change, energy, and environment understand that human industry is primarily responsible for global warming," writes Curtis Brainard. Unfortunately, "a small minority of pundits — most of whom are talking heads and columnists, rather than hard news reporters" is "still trying to deny the well-established basics of climate science. The terrible irony is, that minority might reach more eyes and ears than all of the serious beat reporters combined." Brainard singles out Wolf Blitzer, Lou Dobbs, Chris Matthews, Charles Krauthammer and George Will, along with "Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and various anchors on Fox News," who apparently "don’t know the difference between weather and climate" and "continue to contradict the news and editorial departments’ otherwise solid understanding of climate science. … The far larger volume of quality climate-news reporting, which reflects an accurate understanding of the basic science, should far and away drown out the claptrap spewed by misinformed talking heads and columnists. But it doesn’t, and polls continue to show the majority of the pubic still does not understand the fundamental scientific evidence for global warming."

Very good post by Rory O’Connor:

The severe economic crisis now gripping the United States — and hence the entire world — has been labeled by the Paper of Record as the “ financial equivalent of 9/11.”

In its severity and overall impact, the comparison may hold true. But when it comes to media coverage, a far better analogy can be made to the invasion and occupation of Iraq undertaken in the wake of the terror attacks.

Just as our mainstream news reporters failed to do their job in alerting us an impending and fairly obvious disaster prior to the war in Iraq – and then ‘embedded’ themselves with the very people they were supposedly reporting on during the invasion and subsequent occupation — so too did our complaisant business press, which by and large missed the story of the disaster now threatening the very pillars of the global capitalist system itself.

Complicity, careerism, access, ratings, deregulation, glory, money, corporate and conglomerate media… the reasons behind our pusillanimous press coverage of the run up to the financial meltdown are much the same as those underlying the run up to war – and so are the results. Business reporters ‘embedded’ on Wall Street — as enamored of titans of commerce as their Pentagon press peers were with Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell – are now piling bad information on top of no information. Once again, we-the-people are paying the price in treasure and sadly, in some cases, blood.

Of course, I’m not alone in pointing fingers. As the AP’s David Bauder recently reported, …

Continue reading. This is a long post, but fascinating and informative and includes some cheesecake.

A superb post (with a stunning nature photo) by Christy Hardin Smith. Please click and read. The post begins:

We know the backstory: secrecy and legally incompetent boobery masking wholesale gutting of the rule of law.

But something in Jane Mayer’s most recent reporting on the al-Marri case made me pause: …