Leno Cracks an Abba Joke
Perfect joke to describe W:
"President Bush met with Palestinian president Abbas. There was one
embarrassing moment when he said to Abbas, `I love your hit, Dancing Queen.'"
--Jay Leno
From Carpetbagger - GOP right where they want us. Or something.
Taken from the
Carpetbagger Report:
I'm fully aware of the fact that the fight over Social Security privatization is far from over. Nevertheless, this struck me as terribly amusing.
Social Security was supposed to be the focal point of the Bush domestic agenda this year, but passage of a plan to secure its long-term financing and add private investment accounts has grown more complicated in recent weeks as Republicans appear increasingly willing to challenge the White House on issues including expanded stem cell research and the reimportation of prescription drugs.
White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Washington is exactly where Bush strategists thought it would be right now on Social Security, with a rising awareness of the system's problems and Congress entering a summertime legislative push. (emphasis added)
Riiiight. When Karl Rove and his lieutenants drew up the political game plan, I'm sure they expected, almost half-way through 2005, to have Bush's popularity plummeting, widespread skepticism about the privatization plan from the president's own party in Congress, and polls showing broad disapproval for Bush's scheme nationwide — with support dropping the more the public learns of the details. Just on the Hill, there is still no formal Bush plan, the GOP chairmen of all the relevant committees have made no progress, and Dem opposition to the White House approach is unwavering and practically unanimous.
And Trent Duffy would have us believe that everything is going exactly according to plan. If you believe that, I have some swampland in Florida I'd love to sell you.
From WSJ: JP Morgan Predecessor Took Slaves As Collateral
This is a rehash from a
wsj article from
May 10, 2005 (link from the Post-Gazette of Pittsburgh, PA - go figure). I just pulled the copy of the wsj front page that I stole from work out of by bag when I was looking for my checkbook today. And others have
blogged on the subject already. Anyway...
The article, written by
Robin Sidel (and Robin, forgive me if I paraphrase throughout - it's already late tonite), describes the story of one
James Lide,
historian, who as part of a Chicago city ordinance ordering due diligence regarding recovering the history of corporate America and slavery. In this case, in the town of Covington, LA, it was found:
" After 3,500 hours of research, he confirmed what his client didn't want to hear: between 1834 and 1861, Citizens [Bank] had secured loans with mortgages on land - and thousands of slaves"
The reason the city of Chicago gets involved in all this historical morass (and by that I mean the amount of effort to uncover this seedy part of American history) is that
Bank One, an entity which
JP Morgan Chase acquired in 2003, had financed a bond for the city, which forced it to follow a city ordinance called the
Business, Corporate and Slavery Era Insurance Ordinance (Mun. Code of Chi. § 292-585, passed in 2002). It requires that companies doing business with the city disclose
*any* ties to slavery. According to the article, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philly and the state of North Carolina have all enacted similar legislation.
The point of this post is not to highlight the fact that companies actively participated in slavery; by this point it should be readily apparent, especially to those that have read
A Peoples' Hostory Of The United States by
Howard Zinn. The point is that this should serve as a strong example of why cities and municipalities
SHOULD enact legislation that the feds and the states don't want to touch - it serves a great purpose, at the very least, to show defiance (like the cities and towns that are passing anti-Patriot Act legislation) and in this case be able to force big & long-in-the-tooth corporations to face their own realities (and our own), that they are part-and-parcel of the economy under the rules that exist at any given time. And in Antebellum America (which Dominion Christians strangely have a fond rememberance of), that meant that Citizens Bank of Louisiana used people as collateral for loans, some of which defaulted - meaning the bank owned people - thousands at any given time.
=================================
Update 6/2/2005: Wachovia Bank has fulfilled its obligations under this same ordinance (source: CNN):"On behalf of Wachovia Corporation, I apologize to all Americans, and especially to African-Americans and people of African descent," said Ken Thompson, Wachovia chairman and chief executive officer, in the statement released late Wednesday. "We are deeply saddened by these
findings."
Historians at the History Factory, a research firm specializing in corporate archival work, found that the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company and the Bank of Charleston -- institutions that ultimately became part of Wachovia through acquisitions -- owned slaves, Wachovia said in the statement.
Records revealed that the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company owned at least 162 slaves, Wachovia said, and that the Bank of Charleston accepted at least 529 slaves as collateral on mortgaged properties or loans. The Bank of Charleston also acquired an undetermined number of people when customers defaulted on their loans.So, things are moving in the right direction I think.====================================
EPA Rescinds Plans To Allow For Blending of Partially-Treated Sewage for Discharge
I get this regular collection of water treatment related articles across the country, and this one really cought my eye - the EPA was looking into allowing municipalities to blend partially treated wastewater with fully treated wastewater.
This article is from the Seattle Times and describes that municipalites across the country do this during certain times for whatever reason. Shellfish farmers in the Puget Sound area banded together to "send it back to the drawing board". That's all well and good, and should be applauded since it could cause increases in things like
Red Tide.
Certainly, I could forsee instances when you'd want to have the emergency need to push out overflow. You don't want to spend
000's of billions of dollars all across the nation (and, remember, this is a local spending thing and any demands from the USG to build capacity would be an unfunded mandate). But, it really depends on WHAT the 'partially treated' waste is! Basically, municipal wastewater treatment involves for following:
- Primary Clarification - settling out all the solids and essentially decanting off the remaining water. For those Bostonians reading this, Deer Island for years ONLY did this, which is why Boston Harbor was disgusting for so long - there's a reason the Standells wrote "Dirty Water" (here, too). Only with the (then) controvercial expansion of Deer Island to double its capacity did they also go beyond this.
- Secondary Treatment - this is usually a bioogical treatment to remove what's called BOD (biological oxygen demand) from the primary effluent by using biology to do it's thing - eat. There are several types of secdonary treatment scenarios.
- Tertiary Treatment - this is now being done by more and more cities and towns, especially in California, to use some sort of membrane treatment to filter out impurities to the micron and sub-micron level. This movement really took off when it was found that that things like giardia and cryptosporidium cold get through secondary treatment and then infect people. When you have floods and your city tells you to boil your water, these two buggers are the typical reason (but don't overboil!). Membrane treatment can affect a 9-log reduction in the count of these bugs. Especially in southern CA, they are injecting tertiary treated water into the ground near the coastline in order to push out seawater which increasingly infiltrates the local aquifers, rendering them unusable.
So, if you're telling me that you're going to mix secondary treated water with tert-treated water, I could see it being possible in an emergency situation. But if you're going to allow cities to regularly mix primary and secondary effluent, give me a break - that's rediculous. And just another thing that W is trying to do to pork us all (see all his other EPA regulation 'redefinitions' over the past 5 years).
Memorial Day: Remember *ALL* The Dead
We mourn the over 1,600 Americans (1656 as of this post) who have perished in Iraq since the beginning of the war in April, 2003. Who knew that 69 Americans have died in Iraq this month? We've heard NOTHING about this - for shame on our media.
Also, we remember those who have perished in Afghanistan - 184 now - as well as the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have given their lives so that we would not have to over the years.
But read this post - it really made me think hard about the silliness of war and how not to conduct world affairs. Also, this quote was horrific; I can only hope that this US soldier's attitude is atypical:
"In Ramadi, the capital of central Anbar province, where 17 suicide-bombs struck American forces during the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan in the autumn, the marines are jumpy. Sometimes, they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching with 30 metres, sometimes they fire at 20 metres: 'If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them,' says a bullish lieutenant. 'It's kind of a shame, because it means we've killed a lot of innocent people.'" Kind of a shame, killing the people you're trying to democratize, but after awhile, says the same lieutenant, "It gets to the point where you can't wait to see guys with guns, so you start shooting everybody..."
- The Economist, via James Wolcott: Kind of a Shame
Holy crap that's rediculous.
Nifty Tool For Viewing Page Details and Phishing Risk
Came across
this news item from Yahoo a cople of days ago - it's about an installable webtool for your ie or firefox web browsers from a company called
Netcraft which allows you to view multiple items about a page you're on - and potentially help with avoiding phishing issues. From their site:
"The toolbar runs on any operating system supported by Firefox and displays the hosting location, country, longevity, popularity, and an abstracted risk rating for each site visited."
Best part of the tool is that it devolves the host of the page you're on, and then you can click on some reports from this company to show it's risk rating, google, rank, and also a full site report regarding the shadiness of a website of webhost. They look like they want to sell this to institutions like banks and big companies. At best you get some nifty info about webpages and hosts that the average dude (like me) could not find right away.
Prices Keep Rising: Stagflation 21st Century Style?
Higher prices in April. Higher energy prices.
Higher proces in March. These folks that study these things keep talking about the
core rate of inflation and saying, basically, "It's okay. The core rate is steady."
I say it's all bunk. Higher energy rates affect everybody, especially those in the northeast corridor. Gasoline prices being over 100% higher than 5 years ago. Natural gas and home heating oil at extreme highs since the USG started measuring prices in the late 70's / early 80's.
The core rate does not mean anything to people that see cash just spirited out of their wallets to pay for the same tank of gasoline. This is inflation. Core rate theory just does not work when overall costs to consumers keep rising.
Stagflation, stagflation, stagflation. Prices rising, inflation rising, no net jobs in the private sector since Jan 2001, housing costs way up, wages falling relative to inflation (and to the core rate).
what a shitty economy - a "
neoconomy".
Sen. Reid's Quote of the Week
From
PoliticalWire.com, this quote from NV Sen. Harry Reid:
"The man's father is a wonderful human being. I think this guy is a loser. I think President Bush is doing a bad job."
Could not have said it any better.
From MyDD: Income / Wealth Gap Data Shows We Already Have 'Flat Tax' Era
Intersting conclusion
in this article, as the pverall tax burden of the top quintile was ~19%, where the overall tax burden for the lowest quintile (i.e., working poor) was ~18%.
If you look at numbers since the early 1960's (earlist available data from the USG) the top 1% have increased their wealth by a
FACTOR OF SEVEN over the poorest 20% of Americans. I'm sure that things have accellerated in the 80's, 90's and have been redonkulous in this decade.
Meanwhile, we continue to give away the farm to the richies and corporations while passing on the debt to China. 1/2 a trillion dollars and counting!
From Kos: Diary Showing All That Is Wrong With W Economic Policies
What
this post "How Bush Is Destroying The Middle Class" does not take into account is the Sept. 11 attacks and how that affected the economy immediately in terms of job loss. For example, the airline industry laid off over 100,000 people as I recall, and that had a ripple effect throughout the economy. Of course, this says nothing about the hand-to-mouth style that the old-school airlines had - every dollar that somebody paid to them in a fare was already spent. 5 days off and a 25-50% loss in customer base blew them out of the water.
However, I do think that the article makes the basic case.
