Uh-oh for Bush: There go the NASCAR dads...

Link

MIAMI -- More than 600 truckers gathered in their big rigs Wednesday to protest the rising gas prices in South Florida, NBC 6's Hank Tester reported.

The trucks, which included tractor-trailers, dump trucks and box trucks, gathered at the intersection of Okeechobee Road and the Florida Turnpike in Miami-Dade County.

Traffic in the area was at a standstill as the trucks started a caravan headed toward Miami City Hall.

The trucks traveled 20 miles to present a petition requesting a fuel surcharge break for independently owned trucks.

The truckers claim that the high cost of gas has made it impossible for them to earn a living.

"The airlines are charging passengers. The steam ship lines are charging the shippers. Everyone who's got clout is getting a surcharge," said Ron Carver of the Teamsters Union. "But the truck drivers who have to buy their own fuel are going into bankruptcy because they don't have the clout to demand this. So they're here today asking Congress to pass a mandatory fuel surcharge to keep them afloat."

I guess at that September 11 Country Western concert they'll have to confine the singers to songs about lost love and the savior, as well as mothers, prison, trains, farms, Christmas, and dead dogs.

Two Ways to Remember September 11...

Method Number 1:

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - The Pentagon will hold a massive march and country music concert to mark the fourth anniversary of Sept. 11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an announcement tucked into an Iraq war briefing Tuesday.

"This year the Department of Defense will initiate an America Supports Your Freedom Walk," Rumsfeld said, adding that the march would remind people of "the sacrifices of this generation and of each previous generation."

The march will start at the Pentagon, where nearly 200 people died on Sept. 11, and end at the National Mall with a show by country star Clint Black.

Word of the event startled some observers. "I've never heard of such a thing," said John Pike, who has been a defense analyst in Washington for 25 years and runs GlobalSecurity.org.

The news also reignited debate and anger over linking Sept. 11 with the war in Iraq.

"That piece of it is disturbing since we all know now there was no connection," said Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq veteran who heads Operation Truth, an anti-administration military booster.

Rieckhoff suggested the event was an ill-conceived publicity stunt. "I think it's clear that their public opinion polls are in the toilet," he said.

Method Number 2:

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Ongoing concerns over conflicts in the oil-rich Middle East lifted crude-oil futures to a new intraday record of $65 a barrel Wednesday, even though U.S. data reflected ample domestic supplies, with imports at their second-highest weekly average ever.

Refinery outages helped tighten U.S. gasoline inventories further last week -- sending futures prices for the fuel to uncharted territory, but the strong imports help raise crude supplies by as much as triple some market expectations.

September natural-gas futures mirrored the strength among its energy peers to end above $9 per million British thermal units, the first time since November of last year on a monthly average basis.

Crude for September delivery climbed as high as $65 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. That was the first time a benchmark contract has ever reached a level that high. The contract closed up $1.83, or 2.9%, at $64.90 a barrel -- the highest close ever for a benchmark.

"The market shows crude stocks have indeed increased, but the market fails to believe we are building a comfortable cushion in inventories," said John Person, president of National Futures Advisory Service.

Instead, "traders are pricing in the worst fears from the Middle East tensions [and] Iran's nuclear program is an issue," he said. Added to that, there's the question of governmental stability in Saudi Arabia, and the "ongoing Iraq military policing action that no one wants to call a war," he said.

Those are "the real culprits behind the energy market's high prices," he said.

I think that it's a given that we'll see prices rise - not steadily perhaps- until at least after Sept. 11.

After all, it's not like we're asking the Saudis to, you know, actually bring democracy and religious freedom to the place that spawned al Qaeda...

And of course lost in all of this is actually, you know, remembering the dead, and trying to execute a coherent policy for dealing with the root causes of Islamic fundamentalist religious terrorism connected with our greed for oil.

Just remember:

For every Cindy Sheehan, there's not only a Casey Sheehan, but also a Gennaro Pellegrini, and their experiences carry far more weight than the 101st Keyboarders.

I'm sure the right is scrounging right now to find some dead soldier's mother who - in the midst of her grief- can't bring herself out of her denial to admit that George W. Bush needlessly brought on her son's death.

News bits:

Yesterday, I was at a loss for particularly interesting things to blog, even though Jerry Garcia was 10 years dead, and Abe Hirschfeld died yesterday.

So, I'll just summarize here whatever might be of interest:

Kansas still doesn't like evolution.

TOPEKA, Kan., Aug. 9 (AP) - The State Board of Education has approved the latest draft of science standards that include greater criticism of evolution.

The board approved the draft on Tuesday by a vote to 6 to 4. It then voted to send it to be reviewed by outside academics. The board is expected to give its final approval in October.

The draft says the board is not advocating the teaching of "intelligent design," which contends that some features of the natural world are best explained by an intelligent creator, not evolution. But the language favored by the board does come from advocates of intelligent design.

Conduct unbecoming an officer:

DENVER (AP) -- An Air Force Reserve colonel could face criminal charges for allegedly vandalizing cars at Denver International Airport bearing pro-Bush bumper stickers.

Lt. Col. Alexis Fecteau, director of operations for reserve forces at the National Security Space Institute in Colorado Springs, is believed responsible for defacing at least 10 parked vehicles between December and June, police spokesman Sonny Jackson said Tuesday.

A bait car left by a police detective was also defaced and the detective tracked down Fecteau, who turned himself in Friday. He was released on bond.

China reveals what's in its basket but not how much:

SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- China disclosed for the first time Wednesday the composition of the basket of currencies used to set the yuan's value, saying it mainly includes the dollar, euro, yen and Korean won.

The currencies of Singapore, Britain, Malaysia, Russia, Australia, Canada and Thailand are also considered in setting the yuan's foreign exchange rate, Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank governor, said during a speech to launch a new operations center for the People's Bank of China in Shanghai.

Huawei wants Marconi:

After computers, cars and oil, will China's foreign acquisition target be telephones?

British news reports say Huawei Technologies Inc., China's biggest maker of telecommunications equipment, is in talks with Marconi Corp. PLC on a possible takeover of the struggling British firm, the Associated Press reported.

The news suggests that corporate China hasn't lost its appetite for foreign assets despite the acrimonious, highly publicized withdrawal last week of CNOOC Ltd.'s US$18.5 billion (euro15 billion) bid for U.S. oil and gas producer Unocal Corp.

A Huawei-Marconi deal, if completed, would be hugely symbolic: The purchase of a British industrial landmark -- one that traces its roots to the inventor of radio -- by a 17-year-old firm that represents China's new economic vigor and high-tech ambitions.

A Huawei spokesman declined Tuesday to comment. Marconi issued a statement in London saying it was exploring "all strategic options" with other firms. It didn't confirm whether that meant Huawei and warned that there was no assurance it could make a deal.

Huawei and Marconi make telecom switching equipment -- the guts of a phone system that the public doesn't see but that is critically important in the age of cell phones and the Internet.

Unlike CNOOC's bid, a tie-up between them would have more in common with successful acquisitions involving struggling foreign companies that actively courted Chinese buyers as corporate saviors.

The deal could be worth 560 million British pounds ($1 billion), according to London's Sunday Times.

The Yen is doing well in early trading...

he yen surged higher in European morning trade on Wednesday amid a potent cocktail of buoyant equity markets, a strengthening Japanese economy and signs that Junichiro Koizumi may be returned as prime minister after September’s snap election.

Opinion polls released on Wednesday showed an increase in Mr Koizumi’s approval rating, while a majority of respondents said they supported Mr Koizumi’s plans to privatise the postal service, the issue that brought his government down.

Moreover Japan’s domestic corporate goods price index, a measure of wholesale prices, rose 1.5 per cent year-on-year in July, outstripping forecasts and raising hopes that deflation may be on the way to being defeated.

Furthermore Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 stock market index rose 1.7 per cent on Wednesday, extending Tuesday’s 1 per cent gain and pushing the index to its highest close since April 2004. Foreign investors are likely to be playing a part in the rally - supporting the yen in the process. In July foreigners bought Y1,323bn of Japanese equities, the highest figure since March 2004.

As a result the yen rose Y1.1 to Y110.83 against the US dollar, Y1.1 to Y137.39 against the euro and Y1.1 to Y198.93 against sterling.

“The yen has clearly been the big mover in the foreign exchange market with a notable pick-up in demand reflecting rising optimism over the economic outlook and falling pessimism over the political outlook,” said Derek Halpenny, senior currency economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.

James Dobson invokes Godwin's law again, but without any real swastika-wavers, unlike folks who criticize the Minute Men.

Sometimes, you invoke Godwin's law because there really are Nazis

Or at least when some folks carry around Nazi flags, it does cause for some confusion, now wouldn't it?

It's the economy...

I'm amused by the fact that righties like to bash Kos; generally the economic outlook posed by their diarists has been spot on and has been the very good for making investment decisions. Included in the above is this diary:

1. Real inflation paid by real people is moderately high.
2. Since wages are nowhere near keeping pace, real wages are dropping.
3. Real unemployment - that is the kind you and I feel, rather than the kind Greenspan feels - is also reasonably high historically. (Check out the graph).
3. Historically speaking an inflation rate of 5.8% and an unemployment rate of 7.2% is a crisis that calls for drastic government action.
4. That's why Bush is unpopular...

But wait there's more. (Of course there's more, that's what more means) Housing inflation is heavily weighted to the two coasts. Again checking the same numbers as before - only for the coastal areas, one finds that housing inflation isn't adding about 2.6% to places like New York - but closer to 5.5% This means that if you live in the bicoastal areas, inflation doesn't feel bad, it feels blood awful...

What looking at real economic statistics says is that the US has been hovering above recession for over a year now. What is propping up the economy is a huge binge of spending - both war time spending such as the Iraq war and its associated costs, tax reductions that pump money into the economy, and huge pork bills like the transportation bill, the agriculture bill, the perscription drug benefit and the new energy bil.

In short, Bush is attempting to take America down the same road that Japan took in the wake of their 1987 crash: build a bubble in housing prices to keep the ruling party in power, and then use huge public spending injections, and geographic gerrymandering, to prevent the economy from completely meltingdown...

The problem is that no one else could do that much better. You see, the divergence between the real world and the government statistical world, creates a policy bind. The Fed can only do one thing at once. The fed is in a policy bind when it has to do opposite things. The last major policy bind was in 1998. Greenspan had to raise interest rates to cut off the stock bubble, and he had to lower them to deal with the world currency crisis. A better policy regime would have realized that two were the same problem - too much money flowing into the US - and done one thing to fix both. But the FM economy couldn't fix that problem...

I'll not in passing that the "FM economy" is reall a misnomer here; it's more of a "preserve the national banks" system...

The bottom line is that the old policy regime that has ruled since Reagan is faced with a crisis. That crisis is that while the economy is doing as well as it can do in its current form - as evidenced by "good" economic numbers - that economy is not generating enough activity to keep people happy. Governments are tottering in England, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Canada and Japan - that is to say 7 of the G-8 - while there are job riots in China and India.

The economic statistics that show why people are unhappy - the inflation number with housing thrown in, the employment slack number, the GDP deflator with housing costs correctly calculated - show an economy in stagflation, propped up by massive borrow and squander policies.

Also great: this post on the quality of life in the US. Must reading.

Yes, Bush let bin Laden get away....

This had been widely reported before the run-up to the Iraq war, it has been denied by Bush partisans, but this story just won't go away:

[I]n a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."

In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora "was not necessarily just the number of troops.

Krugman explains the housing bubble...

Forget what Atrios says (can't figure out for the life of me why he'd be critical of Krugman on this), this primer's as good as it gets:

Even some of the players are the same. The authors of the 1999 best seller "Dow 36,000" are now among the most vocal proponents of the view that there is no housing bubble.

Then there are the numbers. Many bubble deniers point to average prices for the country as a whole, which look worrisome but not totally crazy. When it comes to housing, however, the United States is really two countries, Flatland and the Zoned Zone.

In Flatland, which occupies the middle of the country, it's easy to build houses. When the demand for houses rises, Flatland metropolitan areas, which don't really have traditional downtowns, just sprawl some more. As a result, housing prices are basically determined by the cost of construction. In Flatland, a housing bubble can't even get started.

But in the Zoned Zone, which lies along the coasts, a combination of high population density and land-use restrictions - hence "zoned" - makes it hard to build new houses. So when people become willing to spend more on houses, say because of a fall in mortgage rates, some houses get built, but the prices of existing houses also go up. And if people think that prices will continue to rise, they become willing to spend even more, driving prices still higher, and so on. In other words, the Zoned Zone is prone to housing bubbles.

And Zoned Zone housing prices, which have risen much faster than the national average, clearly point to a bubble...

I hadn't heard that the Dow 36,000 folks had gotten into the act... but with the re-appearance of George Gilder in "Intelligent" "design" I'm not surprised.

Krauthammer "Intelligent" "Design" is OK, as long as he gets the Iraq debacle...

James Wolcott called my attention to it: "[P]eople of my ilk care a lot more about Iraq than about textbooks in Kansas.”



Yeah, neocons just don't care about veracity.

Already obsolete model on the yuan...

The NY Times business section I think specializes in conventional wisdom...it's article on the backfire effects of the rising yuan was something that was mentioned on this blog at least 4 months ago...

Most analysts have already figured out that the yuan's climb so far has been insignificant. But some of the most ardent advocates of yuan revaluation are still hoping for an appreciation of 6 to 7 percent a month in the currency, the maximum drift that the Chinese central bank will allow, according to its original announcement. Senators Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Lindsey O. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, are aiming for a total appreciation of around 27.5 percent. M. Brian O'Shaughnessy, chief executive of Revere Copper Products in Rome, N.Y., said he needed 40 percent immediately. "Otherwise, it won't have any impact," he said.

But even a yuan revaluation of 40 percent wouldn't significantly improve the overall balance of trade of the United States. For that to happen, the currencies of other developing countries would have to rise in tandem. If they didn't, the loss of competitiveness of Chinese manufacturers would move Americans to buy their products only from low-cost countries like Bangladesh, reallocating, but not reducing, America's external shortfall.

"The dollar has to fall not only against China but against the whole trade-weighted basket," said Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Still, assuming against all odds that all this happened, what would the results be for the American economy? Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert at the Institute for International Economics who has been calling for the yuan to rise, says some American manufacturing jobs could be saved.

He acknowledges that it wouldn't help all industries. Much of the less complex stuff that Americans buy from China is no longer made in the United States. Some of it moved to Japan a long time ago. Then Japan lost that manufacturing to South Korea, and South Korea lost it to China. It's unlikely that the United States will ever recover it, he said.

Yet for manufacturers of products like semiconductors or molded plastics - which aren't so low tech that they moved overseas long ago, but are not so high tech that labor costs are of no relevance - a currency shift of 20 or 25 percent could be important. It could make the difference between staying in the United States, where the going wage for a manufacturing worker averages about $16.50 an hour, or moving to China, where it is nearer to $1.25 an hour.

Two words sums up the obsolecence of this position: peak oil.

All this globalization is predicated on the assumption of cheap energy to move goods around the world, and to power lots of servers to outsource internet based services.

What happens when the energy becomes very expensive?

Which is bigger - labor costs or energy costs? Depends on the industry.

Deconstructing content and content creation

The NY Times magazine article on "Red vs. Blue" is good reading..

Whenever a friend discovered a particularly cool stunt inside Halo -- for example, obliterating an enemy with a new type of grenade toss -- Burns would record a video of the stunt for posterity. (His friend would perform the move after Burns had run a video cord from his TV to his computer, so he could save it onto his hard drive.) Then he'd post the video on a Web site to show other gamers how the trick was done. To make the videos funnier, sometimes Burns would pull out a microphone and record a comedic voice-over, using video-editing software to make it appear as if the helmeted soldier himself were doing the talking.

Then one day he realized that the videos he was making were essentially computer-animated movies, almost like miniature emulations of ''Finding Nemo'' or ''The Incredibles.'' He was using the game to function like a personal Pixar studio. He wondered: Could he use it to create an actual movie or TV series?

Burns's group decided to give it a shot. They gathered around the Xbox at Burns's apartment, manipulating their soldiers like tiny virtual actors, bobbing their heads to look as if they were deep in conversation. Burns wrote sharp, sardonic scripts for them to perform. He created a comedy series called ''Red vs. Blue,'' a sort of sci-fi version of ''M*A*S*H.'' In ''Red vs. Blue,'' the soldiers rarely do any fighting; they just stand around insulting one another and musing over the absurdities of war, sounding less like patriotic warriors than like bored, clever video-store clerks. The first 10-minute episode opened with a scene set in Halo's bleakest desert canyon...

...Video-game aficionados have been creating ''machinima'' -- an ungainly term mixing ''machine'' and ''cinema'' and pronounced ma-SHEEN-i-ma -- since the late 90's. ''Red vs. Blue'' is the first to break out of the underground, and now corporations like Volvo are hiring machinima artists to make short promotional films, while MTV, Spike TV and the Independent Film Channel are running comedy shorts and music videos produced inside games. By last spring, Burns and his friends were making so much money from ''Red vs. Blue'' that they left their jobs and founded Rooster Teeth Productions. Now they produce machinima full time...

...Perhaps the most unusual thing about machinima is that none of its creators are in jail. After all, they're gleefully plundering intellectual property at a time when the copyright wars have become particularly vicious. Yet video-game companies have been upbeat -- even exuberant -- about the legions of teenagers and artists pillaging their games. This is particularly bewildering in the case of ''Red vs. Blue,'' because Halo is made by Bungie, a subsidiary of Microsoft, a company no stranger to using a courtroom to defend its goods. What the heck is going on?

ure, Rooster Teeth ripped off Microsoft's intellectual property. But Microsoft got something in return: ''Red vs. Blue'' gave the game a whiff of countercultural coolness, the sort of grass-roots street cred that major corporations desperately crave but can never manufacture. After talking with Rooster Teeth, Microsoft agreed, remarkably, to let them use the game without paying any licensing fees at all. In fact, the company later hired Rooster Teeth to produce ''Red vs. Blue'' videos to play as advertisements in game stores. Microsoft has been so strangely solicitous that when it was developing the sequel to Halo last year, the designers actually inserted a special command -- a joystick button that makes a soldier lower his weapon -- designed solely to make it easier for Rooster Teeth to do dialogue.

''If you're playing the game, there's no reason to lower your weapon at all,'' Burns explained. ''They put that in literally just so we can shoot machinima.''

Other game companies have gone even further. Many now include editing software with their games, specifically to encourage fans to shoot movies. When Valve software released its hit game Half-Life 2 last year, it included ''Faceposer'' software so that machinima creators could tweak the facial expressions of characters. When the Sims 2 -- a sequel to the top-selling game of all time -- came out last year, its publisher, Electronic Arts, set up a Web site so that fans could upload their Sims 2 movies to show to the world. (About 8,000 people so far have done so.)

This is one more instance of the maxim that once a medium for communication and content delivery is created, the end consumer will deconstruct the relationships between content creation and distribution in ways unforseen by the creators, as anyone who's seen a 2 year old with a VCR knows.

Savvy producers of content and content creation/rendering devices will let consumers mess with it to create new content...a sort of Mystery Science Theater 3000 for everyone...


Red vs. Blue videos can be watched here. Some are laugh out loud funny.

The Rove- Novak relationship raises more questions...

Robert Novak got benched this week from CNN for saying "bullshit" more or less out of the blue, as anyone who's seen the now famous Novak meltdown will attest.

Well, the NY Times follows up today with a retrospective on Rove's relationship with Novak, ...

In 1992 in an incident well known in Texas, Mr. Rove was fired from the state campaign to re-elect the first President Bush on suspicions that Mr. Rove had leaked damaging information to Mr. Novak about Robert Mosbacher Jr., the campaign manager and the son of a former commerce secretary.

Since then, Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak have denied that Mr. Rove was the source, even as Mr. Mosbacher, who no longer talks on the record about the incident, has never changed his original assertion that Mr. Rove was the culprit.

"It's history," Mr. Mosbacher said last week in a brief telephone interview. "I commented on it at the time, and I have nothing to add."

But the episode, part of the bad-boy lore of Mr. Rove, is a telling chapter in the 20-year friendship between the presidential adviser and the columnist. The story of that relationship, a bond of mutual self-interest of a kind that is long familiar in Washington, does not answer the question of who might have leaked the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, to reporters, potentially a crime.

But it does give a clue to Mr. Rove's frequent and complimentary mentions over the years in Mr. Novak's column, and to the importance of Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak to each other's ambitions.

"They've known each for a long time, but they are not close friends," said a person who knows both men and who asked not to be named because of the investigation into a conversation by Mr. Novak and Mr. Rove in July 2003 about Ms. Wilson,...

I guess that source is Rove's lawyer Luskin, but it begs the larger question: if they're not friends what are they? Lovers? Prostitute and customer? Acquaintences? Scumbags thinking they're using each other?

About Novak I have this today: he should have been fired 20 years ago from every media outlet he was on; the most striking thing I've seen about him was his almost pathological ability to avoid the truth.

As is commonly said in the lefty blogosphere: the guy outs a CIA operative and keeps his job, but he says "bullshit" and gets fired?

Geez.

Cheap Labor Conservatives

The folks at Powerline wonder why the Bush regime's handling of the economy isn't praised more highly...(these folks would be right at home in Stalin's Russia or Kim's North Korea...)

The oddest thing about the strong economic growth that has taken place over the last several years is how stubbornly many people refuse to recognize it. Polls continue to suggest that most Americans are unaware of the economy's excellent performance. Can that really be true? No doubt inadequate news coverage is a factor, but I can't believe that a majority of Americans really have no idea how the economy is performing. I suspect that when asked about the economy in opinion surveys, many people focus on what they perceive to be negative at the time--budget deficits, the price of gasoline--either because that's what's in the news, or because they hope to influence the government by voicing dissatisfaction.

But of course that only points out a very obvious fact: the folks at Powerline are a bunch of elitists disconnected from the needs of average Americans.

The New York Times editorial page - yeah, the folks who brought us Judith Miller- are right on this point:

With July's number, the average monthly job creation so far this year comes to 191,000. (Since the spring of 2003, when job losses bottomed out, the monthly average has been 152,000.) That's enough to absorb the 150,000 or so new workers who enter the labor force each month, and then some. Still, it's not robust. If jobs were being created today at the same pace as in other economic recoveries since World War II, the monthly average would be about 250,000.

Employment rates - the share of the population that is employed, broken down by groups - tell a similar story. The rates ticked up slightly for most groups in July, including for African-American men and high school dropouts. That's encouraging because it's generally assumed that if the least-advantaged workers can find jobs, higher-skilled workers will do even better. Nevertheless, employment rates are still well below their most recent peak, in 2000.

Because the demand for workers has been subpar for some four years now, wages have suffered. Average hourly wages rose a surprising 0.4 percent in July, the strongest monthly surge in a year. But they're up only 2.7 percent over the past year, hardly keeping up with inflation. Asked about that yesterday, Secretary Chao replied that overall compensation - which includes employer-provided health care and other benefits - was rising faster than the cost of living. That's correct, but somewhat disingenuous. The fact that workers' raises are, in effect, being diverted to cover the exploding cost of benefits is hardly a positive development.

Can the folks at Powerline be so utterly clueless to not realize that the weakness in the job market, combined with exploding health care, reduced returns on retirement investments, and the increasing cost of energy's impoverishing America?

HT: Atrios, oddly enough, who cited Bush's radio address, and implying obliquely that stuff like lots of troops getting killed this week was "left out," but even on Bush's chosen topic the truth was left out.

Over a barrel

Link

Terrorists yesterday struck oil facilities in the US and Saudi Arabia, pushing oil prices to a record $120 a barrel and doubling to $5,214 the expected annual petrol bill for the average US household. Economists warned of the imminent collapse of the US's economic recovery and a loss of more than 2m jobs, the largest drop since 1945.

While none of this is true, the scenario is thoroughly plausible, according to high-ranking former government, military and intelligence officials who made up the US cabinet in a simulation exercise that is gaining increasing attention from members of Congress, the White House and oil executives.

"The risk of supply disruption in the oil markets now appears to be at one of the highest levels in history, primarily because of the thin cushion of spare capacity," John Dowd, analyst at Sanford Bernstein, which prepared the simulation's price reactions, ...

For the scenario, which included the evacuation of foreign workers from Saudi Arabia and unrest in Nigeria, analysts at Sanford Bernstein calculated that a 4 per cent reduction in world oil supply would increase prices by more than 170 per cent...

The mock cabinet concluded that the strategic petroleum reserve was of limited usefulness in such a crisis – it chose to tap it only when prices went to $120 a barrel. Using some of the emergency barrels too early could send prices higher, they said, because traders would worry that less emergency oil would be available if a more serious disruption ensued.

But the limited size of the stocks – the equivalent of two months of US imports – meant the reserve was useless for longer-term disruptions, such as an evacuation of all foreign personnel from Saudi Arabia, which was one of the scenarios presented in the role-play...

Oil closed at a record today.

Chip off the ol' block...

My son turns 4 on Monday, and already he's showing a precocious prediliction for le bad cinema.

He seems to love the latest video rental he insisted I get for him: "37 Ninja Kids."

See John Seal's review for "plot" and overall character of the film. Even my son gets that it's a cheesy flick.

Really, the "scientific" righties didn't expect this?

Paul Krugman draws the obvious line from supply side economics, to global warming to "intelligent" "design." (He left out the propaganda of the Iraq fiasco and the phony "ties" of Saddam Huessein to al Qaeda , but it's in the same box...)

Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking.

Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit."

"Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the accounting deficiencies of government."...

Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools.

But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?

Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed.

The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory.

Now the second sentence of the above is often why people don't like Krugman, but he has a point here: these people all didn't care to keep an open mind and see where the facts, observations, and experiments would lead them. So it's kind of amusing that the "scientific righties" (see here and here for examples) are shocked, shocked that George W. Bush, to pander to the theocratic wing of his party, would actually speak in favor of "intelligent" "design."

Look, they've been slinging delusional horse feces for years because political effectiveness was the priority.

Why do they think Bush would quit if he's goring hard sciences, when he's already gored economics, social sciences, and military science?

Spare us the outrage. As one of Balloon Juice's commenters says, "Hey, you invited these idiots to the party. Too bad we all gotta dance with them."

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's crackpots in the Democratic party, too. But they don't have a scintilla of juice in the current climate.

Update:

• PZ Meyers picks up the Krugman story.
  
  
• In response to my link, I suppose, Richard Bennett thinks a) some Buddhists are snake handlers (?) and b)Paul Krugman being partisan against Bush or Republicans is somehow unprincipled or dishonest. Note to Richard: using facts to make a negative statement about someone, as opposed to ad hominem attacks and just making stuff up is far more effective, and that's why Krugman's got cred and neocons don't.
  
  
  

Another post on Kos well worth reading...

One man - who performs abortions- speaks up against acts of terrorism aimed against him.


It's one thing to be against abortion - or to have any position on the subject. It's yet another to try to justify an incitement to violence against those who are doing legalized abortions. And denial of an incitement to violence does not negate the fact that it is an incitement to violence.

Another scandal of Plame size proportions?

For some reason, yesterday, I kept thinking Raw Story would break something significant, but I didn't see anything...but today...they're citing a soon-to-be-published Vanity Fair article claiming:

[FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds] reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast that they had a covert relationship with...Dennis Hastert, Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House since 1999. The targets reportedly discussed giving Hastert tens of thousands of dollars in surreptitious payments in exchange for political favors and information...

And in case anybody doesn't know about Edmonds...

On top of the usual prohibition against disclosing classified information, the Bush administration has smothered her case beneath the all-encompassing blanket of the “state-secrets privilege”—a Draconian and rarely used legal weapon that allows the government, merely by asserting a risk to national security, to prevent the lawsuits Edmonds has field contesting her treatment from being heard in court at all. According to the Department of Justice, to allow Edmonds her day in court, even at a closed hearing attended only by personnel with full security clearance, “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”

Edmonds’ attorney, who works for the ACLU, says: “It also begs a question: Just what in the world is the government trying to hide?”

If this is true- that officals in the Bush regime were actively trying to thwart an investigation into Hatert- to me this would be a crime comprising the very essence, the sine qua non, the genuine article, of a high crime against the United States of America.

And whoever did that ought to, you know, have their own special prosecutor on their heels..




HT: BarbinMD on Kos.

Real flesh and blood people are dying...

Regular commenter Matthew Goggins lost an acquaintance in Iraq.

Last night, Steven and his translator, Noor Al-Khal, were abducted off the street in Basra and subsequently shot and dumped outside. Noor Al-Khal is hospitalized in serious condition, but Steven was killed.

His murder was perhaps in retaliation for an op-ed of his that appeared in this past Sunday's New York Times. The op-ed is highly critical of "Islamic extremists and their Western-trained police enforcers" in Basra. His murder may also have been meant to keep him from writing his forthcoming book about Basra and southern Iraq.

From my added hyperlink:

... security sector reform is failing the very people it is intended to serve: average Iraqis who simply want to go about their lives. As has been widely reported of late, Basran politics (and everyday life) is increasingly coming under the control of Shiite religious groups, from the relatively mainstream Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to the bellicose followers of the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Recruited from the same population of undereducated, underemployed men who swell these organizations' ranks, many of Basra's rank-and-file police officers maintain dual loyalties to mosque and state.

In May, the city's police chief told a British newspaper that half of his 7,000-man force was affiliated with religious parties. This may have been an optimistic estimate: one young Iraqi officer told me that "75 percent of the policemen I know are with Moktada al-Sadr - he is a great man." And unfortunately, the British seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

The fact that the British are in effect strengthening the hand of Shiite organizations is not lost on Basra's residents.

"No one trusts the police," one Iraqi journalist told me. "If our new ayatollahs snap their fingers, thousands of police will jump." Mufeed al-Mushashaee, the leader of a liberal political organization called the Shabanea Rebellion, told me that he felt that "the entire force should be dissolved and replaced with people educated in human rights and democracy."

I often disagree with Matthew Goggins on many points, but on this we can agree: real people are caught up in this. This is not talk radio continued by other means, but it is people sacrificing their lives. Real lives.

Is the IMF about to go medieval on us?

Link

WASHINGTON, Aug 3 (Reuters) - The global economy's watchdog is growing nervous.

For years, the International Monetary Fund has warned that swelling budget deficits in the United States -- its biggest and most influential shareholder -- were feeding global economic imbalances that threaten world growth.

Now, worried that Washington is turning a deaf ear to its warnings, the IMF plans to lean harder on the world's rich nations to help fix the U.S. trade deficit as well as slow growth in Europe and Japan.

In April, the fund complained in its semi-annual World Economic Outlook that politicians around the globe were not keeping their promises to tackle these imbalances.

The IMF will seek to buttress its case in a September report on why the world's economic powers need bolder action...

U.S. officials also disagreed on the need for a more ambitious effort to cut the deficit, the report said, and argued this would not necessarily do much to help rebalance the global economy.

"More significant differences of view have emerged on the size and speed of fiscal consolidation and global current account imbalances," the report said in a highlighted box calling attention to points of contention.

"The (U.S.) authorities have disagreed that the large U.S. current account deficit -- which they see as largely reflecting weak demand growth in key partners -- poses a significant risk of 'disorderly adjustment,' or that it argues for more aggressive fiscal adjustment," it said...

The Bush administration, in a recent updated forecast that takes into account an unexpected surge in revenue, estimates the gap will shrink to $333 billion, or 2.7 percent of GDP, in the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30.

"We have a pretty good handle on what the strategy is to accomplish those goals," Treasury's Fratto said. "We don't see a reason to change that tack."

However, many economists -- as well as the IMF -- warn the deficit narrowing is likely to prove short-lived.

If foreign investors decided to pull their money out, the dollar could tumble and U.S. interest rates could surge, damaging both the U.S. and global economies, the IMF says.

Iraq costs money...empires cost money...