Liberman is so much toast...

Via Daily Kos, and the Connectiuct State Convention Blog, we learn that Ned Lamont has forced a primary without the signature process.

With more than 2X the number of delegates he needed (too bad he didn't win outright, but Liberman's not unpowerful.)

Ha ha! Now all he's got to do is win the primary.

Liberman, just resign!

A Brief Post on Enlightenment...

I've decided not to write a brief post on enlightenment because you might mistake it for being an accurate description of enlightenment.

Which it wouldn't be.

More propaganda: financial news reporting...

I don't get is why the financial media reports this garbage (speaking about yesterday's market tanking):

"We should have a bounce here," said Michael Metz, chief investment strategist at Oppenheimer & Co. "Certainly, any upside momentum that the market had has been lost, but the selloff yesterday was overdone."


"There are a lot of short-term-oriented traders right now and when the market is not performing well, they want out at all costs," Metz said. "There are a lot of hedge funds and a lot of program trading now and this makes the market very quick to overreact to any stimulus.

Now how does Michael Metz know this?

Now, yeah, yeah, I know, the financial media's a capitalist enterprise and they get ad revenue from folks like Oppenheimer and all that, and it's like US auto mags saying glowing things about US cars, but let's go a bit deeper here, OK?

Now first of all, let's note the apparent conflict of interest: Michael Metz works for a mutual fund company, and therefore has a vested interest in not saying, "Fire! Fire! Get out of the theatre!" metaphorically speaking, about how the nasty state of our markets is reflecting our nasty economy. If all Oppenheimer investors headed for the exists, they'd have a liquidity problem.

There are some statistical thingies about equities prices that are well known (although these should be held somewhat suspect too): for example, how P/E's are historically out of line. But that's an average behavior. There's no reason - outside of some interesting statistical behaviors that approximate the modelling of equities but dont' exactly model them - that a 214 point drop in the Dow can't or shouldn't happen. It can, and did.


It's not just rah-rah statements from guys with an axe to grind that make financial reporting among the most dismal aspects of the dismal science.

As another example, take continuing references to so-called "chartism," or "technical analysis" - it's bullshit- it's the "Intelligent Design" of stock markets - and yet a) it's reported on and b) I think some companies even hire these clowns to do this sort of thing still. Now "technical analysis" is not "quantitative analysis," - the latter generally requires an advanced degree in physics, mathematics or engineering, and deep knowledge of stochastic processes, game theory, optimization theory and so forth.

"Technical analysis" is the "reading the tea leaves" of financial reporting.

I don't think I've ever seen a quant on television.

Finally, there's the stuff left out of even good financial and business reporting. Take this week's PBS Frontline on retirement.

On that show they advocated a "buy and hold" strategy, which is not a bad strategy in a truly random market. (And again, there was a tad bit of conflict of interest on that show by putting on the show Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard funds, which made its bones marketing low-cost index funds which are essential to a "buy and hold" strategy.) But that's the catch: the market is not truly random. And Frontline not only didn't report that, but they also didn't report that it's difficult and expensive and riskier than it needs to be for people to take essentially short positions in an IRA, and can't do it in any 401(k)'s that I know about.

In the 90's the financial market reporters always said, "Buy! Buy! Buy!"

The bias is still there. Caveat emptor.

What the mind makes...

Just watch this video.

If you didn't catch Frontline last night

On the retirement mess, you ought to check it out.

It appears you just can't save enough.

This interview with the guy from Vanguard is particularly interesting and has generally good advice, but it leaves out a big point or two: today with ETFs, it is nothing short of criminal what open-end mutual funds charge clients for "sector" funds, and the fact that you can not go "short" in a 401(k) plan means these plans will always be weanies compared to hedge funds. (You can sort of do that in an IRA, now that there are mutual funds that take short positions, but you'll be paying quite high management and account fees.)

Fun with CIA Factbook Propaganda...

I was looking to see how well EYM - ishares Malaysia - correlated with actual industries in Malaysia. OK, I was kind of bored. So I Googled. Bear with me, there's a cool payoff for reading all of this...

And what did I get? Well, inter alia, the "CIA Factbook" entries on Malaysia...which helpfully listed their industries as:

Peninsular Malaysia - rubber and oil palm processing and manufacturing, light manufacturing industry, electronics, tin mining and smelting, logging, timber processing; Sabah - logging, petroleum production; Sarawak - agriculture processing, petroleum production and refining, logging

Then again, I also got this helpful link from the Malaysia Industrial Development Authority:

The electrical and electronics industry is Malaysia's leading industrial sector, contributing significantly to the country's manufacturing output, exports and employment. In 2004, gross output of the industry totalled RM183.1 billion (US$48.2 billion), while the industry's exports of electrical and electronics products amounted to RM241.5 billion (US$63.6 billion) or 64.1% of total manufactured exports. The industry created 369,488 jobs opportunities, accounting for 36.6% of total employment in the manufacturing sector.

That kind of made me go "Hmmmm...." Why does the CIA factbook list electical and electronics after rubber, oil, and tin mining?

Could it be possible that the CIA "Factbook" gets other countries wrong?

Let's try, oh, say the United States (using the link above to the CIA factbook):

leading industrial power in the world, highly diversified and technologically advanced; petroleum, steel, motor vehicles, aerospace, telecommunications, chemicals, electronics, food processing, consumer goods, lumber, mining

How odd: "aerospace" and "electronics"...but no specific category of defense.

Counting US companies alone, that's a $148 billion dollar industry. And that's quite an undercount: for example, BAE Systems, a "UK" company, does lots of business in the US, with US development. And "small businesses" and university grants are excluded from that list.

However, that's not the end of the story; the US propaganda continues here:

US business firms enjoy greater flexibility than their counterparts in Western Europe and Japan in decisions to expand capital plant, to lay off surplus workers, and to develop new products. At the same time, they face higher barriers to enter their rivals' home markets than foreign firms face entering US markets. US firms are at or near the forefront in technological advances, especially in computers and in medical, aerospace, and military equipment; their advantage has narrowed since the end of World War II. The onrush of technology largely explains the gradual development of a "two-tier labor market" in which those at the bottom lack the education and the professional/technical skills of those at the top and, more and more, fail to get comparable pay raises, health insurance coverage, and other benefits. Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households. The response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 showed the remarkable resilience of the economy. The war in March-April 2003 between a US-led coalition and Iraq, and the subsequent occupation of Iraq, required major shifts in national resources to the military. The rise in GDP in 2004 and 2005 was undergirded by substantial gains in labor productivity. The economy suffered from a sharp increase in energy prices in mid-2005, but by late in the year those prices dropped back to earlier levels. Hurricane Katrina caused extensive damage in the Gulf Coast region in August 2005, but had a small impact on overall GDP growth for the year. Long-term problems include inadequate investment in economic infrastructure, rapidly rising medical and pension costs of an aging population, sizable trade and budget deficits, and stagnation of family income in the lower economic groups.

What's missing/left out/shaded oddly?

• CEO salaries...and not "technology" is why incomes have been stagnating.
  
  
• Have your gas prices gone "back to earlier levels?" (Even late last year they were still high.
  
  
• "The response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 showed the remarkable resilience of the economy." - money was pumped into it by the Fed, creating a housing bubble.
  
  

You can add your own.

One more interesting tidbit: for the US, on "Disputes International," it says:

prolonged drought, population growth, and outmoded practices and infrastructure in the border region strains water-sharing arrangements with Mexico; the US has stepped up efforts to stem nationals from Mexico, Central America, and other parts of the world from crossing illegally into the US from Mexico; illegal immigrants from the Caribbean, notably Haiti and the Dominican Republic, attempt to enter the US through Florida by sea; 1990 Maritime Boundary Agreement in the Bering Sea still awaits Russian Duma ratification; managed maritime boundary disputes with Canada at Dixon Entrance, Beaufort Sea, Strait of Juan de Fuca, and around the disputed Machias Seal Island and North Rock; US and Canada seek greater cooperation in monitoring people and commodities crossing the border; The Bahamas and US have not been able to agree on a maritime boundary; US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay is leased from Cuba and only mutual agreement or US abandonment of the area can terminate the lease; Haiti claims US-administered Navassa Island; US has made no territorial claim in Antarctica (but has reserved the right to do so) and does not recognize the claims of any other state; Marshall Islands claims Wake Island

Gee, I get the feeling something's missing there too!

Rush LImbaugh and reality

Rush Limbaugh said:

If you've ever watched Law and Order, CSI, whatever, or any other program, you know that law enforcement can go get phone records from any phone company, track cell phone calls to find out who was where when. They produce alibis, they produce suspicion, they produce guilt, any number of things. The idea that this is some sort of secret stuff, have you run the
numbers on what all this would take? There are 300 million Americans, folks. How many of those Americans, how many of us do you think use the phone? Give me a conservative guess of the 300 million. (interruption) Two-hundred million? Okay, 200 million Americans use the phone. Okay. Sixty-five percent of Americans use the phone, use cell phones. They're using cell phones so much you can't walk around without seeing somebody on their phone. They're on their phone constantly. Some people are on the phone when they're not on the phone. They want you to think that they are talking when they are not. The cell phone is a new radio. You can't drive down the street without seeing someone on the phone in their car. They're everywhere.

The reason I mention that is, how much time per day do 200 million people spend talking on the phone? Let's be conservative and say that 200 million Americans talk 30 minutes a day on the phone. (interruption) I know Snerdley doesn't think that. We are just being conservative because you have to factor, I don't talk on the phone. Somebody is using my 30 minutes so we'll average it out. Now these numbers, by the way, come from a subscriber to my website, Gary Karsten. If you got 200 million people talking 30 minutes a day, what you have is six billion talk minutes or 100 million talk hours. Let's say businesses use the phone two hours a day. A hundred thousand businesses, another 12 million talk minutes or 200,000 talk hours, now we're at 100,200,000 talk hours per day. Per day. It would take 4,175,000 people at 24 hours a day to listen in on all of that, and that's probably a low number. Do we have that kind of workforce?

The point of this, even though these are ballpark numbers, ladies and gentlemen, the idea that people are being listened in on -- the president denied it yesterday -- the idea that people are being spied on, it is physically impossible. It simply isn't possible. The collection of these records, the purpose is probably nothing more than creating a database for when something needs to be learned when other indicators pop up about who may be talking to who, planning what. You know, what is amazing about this to me is that before 9/11, we didn't connect the dots. On 9/12, the nation started cat calling, "Why didn't we connect the dots? They knew this and they knew that, but they weren't talking. Why didn't they know that?" Now, this is why I say, do we need a bird flu pandemic or another terrorist attack to get us back in focus here? All we are trying to do is connect the dots, or be able to connect the dots if and when another attack is planned so we can stop it.

Everybody is going nuts. Actually, everybody is not going nuts because the Washington Post has a story today, "A majority of Americans initially support a controversial National Security Agency program to collect information on telephone calls made in the United States in an effort to identify and investigate potential terrorist threats, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, which included 24 percent who strongly objected to it. A slightly larger majority--66 percent--said they would not be bothered if NSA collected records of personal calls they had made."

But Jane Hamsher picked up the subtext. And now we know it was pretty much for political reasons this wiretapping was done.

How to read, "Conservative Christians Criticize Republicans"

I am completely cyncical about this by now:

WASHINGTON, May 13 — Some of President Bush's most influential conservative Christian allies are becoming openly critical of the White House and Republicans in Congress, warning that they will withhold their support in the midterm elections unless Congress does more to oppose same-sex marriage, obscenity and abortion.

"There is a growing feeling among conservatives that the only way to cure the problem is for Republicans to lose the Congressional elections this fall," said Richard Viguerie, a conservative direct-mail pioneer.

Mr. Viguerie also cited dissatisfaction with government spending, the war in Iraq and the immigration-policy debate, which Mr. Bush is scheduled to address in a televised speech on Monday night.

"I can't tell you how much anger there is at the Republican leadership," Mr. Viguerie said. "I have never seen anything like it."

In the last several weeks, Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and one of the most influential Christian conservatives, has publicly accused Republican leaders of betraying the social conservatives who helped elect them in 2004. He has also warned in private meetings with about a dozen of the top Republicans in Washington that he may turn critic this fall unless the party delivers on conservative goals.

First of all, let's be clear: there is no way these radical Christianists are going to leave the Republican party- they are one and the same by and large, especially where these groups hold political dominance.

Rather, this is a call to "rally the base," and to do it by a very odd kind of bribery/extortion: clowns like Dobson are basically telling their sheep to watch for politicians pandering to them, after which point inevitably a) Republicans will indeed pander to them, and b) the Dobsons will bless Republican voting - as they have for years now.

In fact this same scenario has gone on for years now. People should be used to it by now. Even the Times took note of it:

Christian conservative leaders have often threatened in the months before an election to withhold their support for Republicans in an effort to press for their legislative goals. In the 1990's, Dr. Dobson in particular became known for his jeremiads against the Republican party, most notably in the months before the 1998 midterm elections.

And even more on the Bush "boom!"

Link

IMF acts to avoid markets meltdown

Heather Stewart, economics correspondent
Sunday May 14, 2006
The Observer

The International Monetary Fund is in behind-the-scenes talks with the US, China and other major powers to arrange a series of top-level meetings about tackling imbalances in the global economy, as the dollar sell-off reverberates through financial markets.

Amid tumultuous trading, which sent the dollar to its lowest level in a year against the euro in late trading on Friday and gave the FTSE its worst day for three years, the IMF was working privately to exercise its new powers to bring decision-makers together.

At the IMF's Spring Meetings last month, its managing director, Rodrigo de Rato, was handed new responsibilities to carry out 'multilateral surveillance', assembling groups of relevant countries to discuss critical issues in the global economy. With the long-predicted dollar bear market sending ripples throughout the world, the IMF is keen to use its powers as soon as possible.

Analysts believe the weakening of the dollar is the beginning of a long-awaited readjustment in the global economy. After the Federal Reserve appeared to hint last week that it could pause in its series of interest rate rises, attention in the markets switched to the weaknesses of the US economy.

David Bloom, currency strategist at HSBC, described the switch of focus as a 'regime change'. 'I'm saying don't use the philosophical methodology you used last year: chuck it away. The market has wholesale changed the way it looks at the world,' he said, predicting that the euro could rise to $1.40 over the next 12 months, from its current level close to $1.29.

Few analysts expect IMF discussions to result in a concerted deal on stemming the dollar sell-off; but governments and central banks will want to avoid a crisis.

'We are in meltdown mode,' said David Brown, chief European economist at Bear Stearns. 'It's all being whipped up into a bit of a selling frenzy. The dollar has a massive portfolio of negatives against it: it's the long-term problems of the trade deficit, and the government's budget deficit.'

Bloom warned that 'phase two' of a sell-off would cause turmoil in the equity markets, as on Friday, when both the Dow Jones and FTSE saw sharp losses. 'I'm expecting an increase in volatility and uncertainty across the board,' he said.

Brown added that the dollar's woes were likely to be exacerbated by central banks shifting their reserves towards other currencies, including the euro. 'Asian central banks have been buying fistfuls of dollars as the flipside of their massive current account surpluses. They're long dollars.'

Yeah.... what a "boom!"

More BS from Adam Nagourney...

Why does the NY Times publish this nonsense?

Indeed, some Democrats worry that the worst-case scenario may be winning control of Congress by a slim margin, giving them responsibility without real authority. They might serve as a foil to Republicans and President Bush, who would be looking for someone to share the blame. Democrats need a net gain of 6 seats in the Senate, and 15 seats in the House. "The most politically advantageous thing for the Democrats is to pick up 11, 12 seats in the House and 3 or 4 seats in the Senate but let the Republicans continue to be responsible for government," said Tony Coelho, a former House Democratic whip. "We are heading into this period of tremendous deficit, plus all the scandals, plus all the programs that have been cut. This way, they get blamed for everything."

Mr. Coelho quickly added, "Obviously, from a party point of view we want to get in and do things, but I'm talking about the ideal political thing."

Of course, no Democrat is going so far as to say that he or she hopes the party fails, and party leaders are doing everything they can to avoid this outcome.

No Democrat hopes the party fails, but "some Democrats" - unnamed- "worry that the worst-case scenario may be winning control of Congress?"

Nonsense, and it's telling that Nagourney quotes the usual Beltway suspects here, without actually making his case.

Look, suppose the Dems take the House and not the Senate: it gives them the ability to demand a platform of equal height to the Repubs everywhere, since Mr. About-30% is a lame duck who will himself be under "increasing scrutiny."

What a waste of virtual newsprint.

"State secrets?" They're our "state secrets."

When you read stuff like this you simply know you're dealing not with people interested in protecting us from enemies, but rather you're dealing with common criminals who are trying to hide their crimes:

The federal government has moved to crush a class action lawsuit filed in San Francisco that accuses AT&T of illegally giving the government data on the communications of millions of Americans, claiming the suit would cause ``exceptionally grave harm'' to national security were it to be tried.

The lawsuit involves matters so secret they can't be discussed without revealing how the United States is tracking down terrorist enemies, according to a motion filed late Friday night by the U.S. Department of Justice in U.S. Northern District Court.

Filed in January by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the suit accuses the phone company of helping the National Security Agency scoop up and ``data-mine'' the records of millions of domestic and international telephone and Internet communications without search warrants. The lawsuit was filed after press accounts in December of a massive government telephone snooping operation.

It gained traction late last week with a report in USA Today that said AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth were helping the NSA monitor the phone calls of tens of millions of Americans. The report caused an uproar in Washington.

Though not a defendant in the lawsuit, the Justice Department seeks to intervene with a ``states secrets privilege'' over information that reasonably could be expected to surface during a trial. It is asking for a hearing June 21 on its motion...

While neither confirming nor denying the allegations in the lawsuit, the motion asserted that courts have affirmed a president's right to monitor for foreign intelligence purposes without a warrant.

``Everything that might actually give somebody an opportunity to respond to what they're saying is hidden in the secret parts,'' complained Lee Tien, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ``They don't come out and say what is a state secret in this case.''

My phone calls are my private business and intellectual property. They are not "state secrets." And even so, Létat c'est nous. We are the folks who are ultimately the power in this country, despite pretensions to the contrary by George W. Bush and his supporters.

If they're secrets, they're our secrets, and in this case, the immediacy of needs of defense are outweighed by our ability to exercise our power as a people: to bring those in government who are guilty of crimes to justice.

Rove is expected to be frogmarched shortly (hopefully as Joe Wilson wanted it). It's time that this NSA affair was brought out into the open.

One other thing: the Bush' regime's argument is nonsense on its face. Suppose there are indeed secret national technical means for eavesdropping on communications. (There are, of course.) How would disclosure of that - obvious to anyone "skilled in the art" allow people to get around it other than the way they do now- the way the Mafia has for decades? Measure and countermeasure are so well known by now, that it would be absurd to think this gambit is anything other than an attempt to obstruct justice.

More insight on the "Bush Boom"

John Hussman has some hypothetical strategies:

Avoiding deep losses requires investors to recognize that market risk sometimes isn't worth taking, particularly when stock valuations are rich and competing yields are rising. On average, about 40% of the gains in the typical “bull market” are wiped out by the subsequent “bear market,” though the individual figures vary widely. The retracement from rich valuations is often deeper. Unless one believes that market turns can be precisely identified and that short-term market forecasting is a fruitful effort (I don't – good managers know their skills but aren't unrealistic about them), it turns out that it is often necessary to forego some portion of bull market gains in order to avoid periods of substantial market loss.

Here's a historical fact that I don't recommend as a timing tool or investment strategy, but is true nonetheless. Had an investor sold the S&P 500 index anytime it reached a price/peak earnings ratio of 19 (i.e. 19 times the highest level of earnings achieved to-date), and then simply sat in Treasury bills, possibly for years, reinvesting in stocks only when the S&P eventually declined to 14 times earnings, that investor would have captured the entire historical return enjoyed by S&P 500, with substantially lower volatility and risk exposure.

Even easier, suppose that an investor sold the S&P 500 at 19 times record earnings, and just sat out of the market until the S&P 500 eventually dropped 30% from its prior highs (say, on a weekly-closing basis). Nothing more. Just sell at the first point of overvaluation and then sit around waiting for a plunge. That strategy would have placed an investor out of the stock market nearly 30% of the time, yet would have produced total returns of 13.03% annually since 1940 (versus 11.90% for a buy-and-hold approach), and 13.67% since 1970 (versus 12.96% for a buy-and-hold).

Read the rest of it, but also note: as of today, DIA is over 25X earnings, and SPY is almost 25X.


The market is slated either to go way up or way down next week:

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Stock market bulls hope economic reports in coming days will show inflation concerns that have dented equities recently are overdone.
But bears fear the data could confirm growing worries that high energy costs and a falling dollar will lead to more inflation and interest-rate hikes, crimping corporate profits and consumer spending.
A Tuesday report on April producer prices and a consumer price reading the following day will be closely watched, as will housing data and industrial production numbers, also on Tuesday.
"If these indicators counter the prevailing inflationary story, then the market can rally again," said Barry Hyman, equity market strategist at New York-based broker dealer Ehrenkrantz King Nussbaum. "If these data points corroborate inflationary concerns then the correction continues."
On Thursday, stocks logged their biggest one-day decline since January, drubbed by worries that rising commodity prices will translate into higher inflation and prompt the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates again in June. ...

While the market has managed to recover from similar, short corrections this year, Hyman isn't optimistic this time. On Wednesday, his firm began advising clients to sell stocks into strength and jettison holdings that have performed well recently.

I have for now sold IGE and IYF, and the basic materials ETF. The money was nice. Let's see whether the Bush bust continues next week.


Incidentally, Thinkprogress notes that "Fox News'" take on the tanking market was "the market was peeved over the spy scandal."

You could have been reading my blog and making more money, and I don't know much more than squat about the market. Anyone who's been really following this knows that the market dived because the Fed indicated it would keep raising rates (giving a "measured" decline in the dollar instead of a rout.)

Euro-Jesus and McBuddhism...

What's up with that ubiquitous Euro-Jesus anyway? Why is he on sale in China like that (the photo above, which accompanies this article in today's Times, depicts "Chinese Catholics," includes Euro-Jesus.)

I never understood why a historical Jesus was never pictured as, you know, middle-eastern looking. Sure, yeah, whatever, there's historically brown haired semites, and what-not, but really, what "biblical" evidence is there that Jesus looked like Jurgen Prochnow?

I have a theory about this, and it's not a pretty theory: Euro-Jesus is sold in places like Coca-Cola: it's an exotic Western thing.

Christians have used an African Jesus to close the sale too with believers; and I suppose there are Asian Jesii. But I find it odd that Catholics are using Euro-Jesus in China, and there likely is a reason.


On the grounds of the Daibosatsu Temple in upstate New York, there sits a statue of a very European-American, 20th century "Buddha." There really isn't a problem making buddhas and boddhisattvas of any ethnic group one would want, because being a buddha isn't limited to one individual or one ethnic group.

I would hope that Buddha isn't being sold in the US as an "exotic Eastern thing," and I certainly would abhor - can't even comprehend- what McBuddhism would look like.

But frankly, I don't care, my own reasons for practice have to do with experience and results and who I am rather than the exotic.

I would hope that Christians get the same thing out of their path, but given all the "pointing to outside," I'm not so sure.

Hugh Hewitt can't handle the truth...and has nothing but contempt for those who "agree" with him.

I dislike Andrew Sullivan's writings for many reasons, but his recent pronouncement of "Christianist" agitators (heh heh just try getting "Buddhistist" off your tongue) is spot on. And sure enough not only does Hugh Hewitt get into high dudgeon over it, but he repeats the same nonsense he's repeated whenever confronted with the theocratic threat:

Again, send me a list of 25 prominent "Christianists" with their demands for theocracy. How about 20? 10? 5?

Oddly enough Hewitt links to Sullivan's update on "Christianism." And guess what...?

Besides Hewitt, Sullivan names David Barton, Rick Santorum, Robert George, and references an article that mentions the American Life League, and of course "Focus on the Family." You'd think that'd be enough for Hewitt.

But Hewitt has such great contempt for his readers that he thinks none of them are going to read the Salon excerpt of Michelle Goldberg's book Kingdom Coming...

On November 13, 2003, Moore was removed from his position as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court after he defied a judge's order to remove the 2.6-ton Ten Commandments monument he'd installed in the Montgomery judicial building. On the coasts, he seemed a ridiculous figure, the latest in a line of grotesque Southern anachronisms. After all, Moore is a man who, in a 2002 court decision awarding custody of three children to their allegedly abusive father over their lesbian mother, called homosexuality "abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature's God upon which this Nation and our laws are predicated," and argued, "The State carries the power of the sword, that is, the power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle, to not encourage a criminal lifestyle." He's a man who writes rhyming poetry decrying the teaching of evolution and who fought against the Alabama ballot measure to remove segregationist language from the state constitution.

To the growing Christian nationalist movement, though, Roy Moore is a martyr, cut down by secular tyranny for daring to assert God's truth.

It's a role he seems to love. The battle that cost Moore his job wasn't his first Ten Commandments fight. In 1995, the ACLU sued Moore, then a county circuit judge, for hanging a Ten Commandments plaque in his courtroom and leading juries in prayer. As Matt Labash recalled in an adulatory Weekly Standard article, "The conflict's natural drama was compounded when the governor, Fob James, announced that he would deploy the National Guard, state troopers, and the Alabama and Auburn football teams to keep Moore's tablets on the wall."

That case reached an ambiguous conclusion in 1998, when the state supreme court threw out the lawsuit on technical grounds. By then, Moore had become a star of the right. Televangelist D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries raised more than $100,000 for his legal defense fund, and Moore spoke at a series of rallies that drew thousands. His right-wing fame helped catapult him to victory in the 2000 race for chief justice of the state supreme court.

Moore installed his massive Ten Commandments monument on August 1, 2001, and from the beginning, he and his allies used it to stir up the Christian nationalist faithful. He gave videographers from Coral Ridge Ministries exclusive access to the courthouse on the night the monument was mounted, and on October 14, D. James Kennedy started hawking a $19 video about Moore's brave, covert installation on his television show...

A few days before Bush's second inauguration, The New York Times carried a story headlined "Warning from a Student of Democracy's Collapse" about Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, professor emeritus of history at Columbia, and scholar of fascism. It quoted a speech he had given in Germany that drew parallels between Nazism and the American religious right. "Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics," he was quoted saying of prewar Germany, "but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured [Hitler's] success, notably in Protestant areas."

It's not surprising that Stern is alarmed. Reading his forty-five-year-old book "The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology," I shivered at its contemporary resonance. "The ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture and with the loss of authoritative faith," he wrote in the introduction. "They posed as the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their indifference to national greatness."

Fascism isn't imminent in America. But its language and aesthetics are distressingly common among Christian nationalists. History professor Roger Griffin described the "mobilizing vision" of fascist movements as "the national community rising Phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it" (his italics). The Ten Commandments has become a potent symbol of this dreamed-for resurrection on the American right.

True, our homegrown quasi-fascists often appear so absurd as to seem harmless...

Still, it's worth noting that thousands of Americans nationwide have flocked to rallies at which military men don uniforms and pledge to seize the reins of power in America on behalf of Christianity. In many places, local religious leaders and politicians lend their support to AVIDD's cause. And at least some of the people at these rallies speak with seething resentment about the tyranny of Jews over America's Christian majority...

Roy Moore and Rick Scarborough are Baptists, D. James Kennedy is a fundamentalist Presbyterian, and John Eidsmoe is a Lutheran. All of them, however, have been shaped by dominion theology, which asserts that, in preparation for the second coming of Christ, godly men have the responsibility to take over every aspect of society.

Dominion theology comes out of Christian Reconstructionism, a fundamentalist creed that was propagated by the late Rousas John (R. J.) Rushdoony and his son-in-law, Gary North. Born in New York City in 1916 to Armenian immigrants who had recently fled the genocide in Turkey, Rushdoony was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and spent over eight years as a Presbyterian missionary to Native Americans in Nevada. He was a prolific writer, churning out dense tomes advocating the abolition of public schools and social services and the replacement of civil law with biblical law. White-bearded and wizardly, Rushdoony had the look of an Old Testament patriarch and the harsh vision to match -- he called for the death penalty for gay people, blasphemers, and unchaste women, among other sinners. Democracy, he wrote, is a heresy and "the great love of the failures and cowards of life."

Reconstructionism is a postmillennial theology, meaning its followers believe Jesus won't return until after Christians establish a thousand year reign on earth. While other Christians wait for the messiah, Reconstructionists want to build the kingdom themselves.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: genocide fucks things up far worse than the reprehensible abomination of attempting to wipe out a whole bunch of people- it spawns crap like Rushdoony's ideas.

Even so, it is clear that this is as much, if not more a present danger to America than Communism ever was.

And Hewitt - I respect his intelligence- is completely complicit in all of this, which leads me to believe that he indeed is part of the problem.

Meanwhile on the oddball religious right fringe...

Donald Wildmon's "Agape Press" is touting an "online graduate degree program in science education" courtesy of the "Institute for Creation Research."

Here is a veritable treasure trove of sham and wingnuttiness...my particular favorite is the admissions area...

Take, if you will, the application form. Check out the Gothic font where it says "Graduate School." Looks really official, don't it?

And they want to know:

• If the applicant's been divorced
  
• How many kids the applicant's got
  
• If you are transferring from another school (!)
  
• The "college level" science, math, and science education courses the applicant has had (I can't even remember all the ones I took! I guess that doesn't qualify me, does it?)
  
• What the prospective student's high school transcript looks like!
  
• My GRE scores (unfortunately for them, I never took one.)
  
• Whether the prospective student or not is "in agreement with the tenets" of ICR (hard to find the link now, but basically you have to agree to be a creationist)
  
• Last (on this list), but not least, "Have you personally accepted Christ as Savior, and have you committed yourself to the discipline of His Lordship?" and "What church do you attend?"
  

Now you say, "How much could this cost?" Good question. For "33 semester hours," they want $6600.00 plus evidently $1100.00 in "special fees," and for applicatons, etc., another $800.00 or so bucks, for a grand total of about $8500.00.

Good business they've got considering they're accredited by the prestigious "Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools."

And no doubt some poor folks are plunking down money for this.

Reality and Delusion in Markets...

The very day the market did this:

Stock prices fell sharply and broadly yesterday as investors worried that rising oil prices would quicken the pace of inflation and force policy makers to raise interest rates further.

The abrupt drop, which was the largest since January, came after several days of modest but steady increases in the Dow Jones industrial average, which as recently as Wednesday was within 80 points of its record high. It also came a day after the Federal Reserve indicated that it was ambiguous about whether it would raise rates later this year.

The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fell 1.3 percent yesterday, to 1,305.92, with all but 59 of the stocks in the index losing ground. The Dow Jones industrial average declined 1.2 percent, to 11,500.73, and the Nasdaq composite index fell 2 percent, to 2,272.70.

Though consumer prices excluding energy and food have risen only modestly thus far, investors and policy makers are increasingly concerned that higher gasoline and commodity prices coupled with faster economic growth will drive up inflation in the coming months.

In March, one measure of inflation favored by the Fed — prices for personal spending excluding food and energy — rose at an annual rate of 2 percent, the upper end of a range the Fed considers healthy, from 1.8 percent in February.

The price of gold, which has soared this year and is considered a safe haven during periods of rising inflation, rose 2.2 percent yesterday, to $721.50 an ounce.

"Inflation is creeping into the mind-set here in a bigger and bigger way," said Jim Paulsen, the chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management.

The inflationary threat in higher energy prices was heightened as crude oil climbed for a third day. The June contract rose 1.6 percent, to $73.32 a barrel, on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Nationally, retail gasoline prices averaged $2.88 a gallon yesterday, up from $2.69 a month ago, according to AAA.

Mr. Paulsen said the signs of inflation coupled with a weaker dollar, which has fallen 8.3 percent against the euro so far this year, have introduced a new element of pessimism to the market.

...


Joe Carter at the Evangelical Outpost happily and helpfully posted this:

he undisputable fact is that we are in an economic boom, and have been for some time. Yet a Gallup survey shows that 64% believe the economy is getting worse. Only 33% described it as good, 40% as fair, and 23% as poor. And this was before gas prices leapt more than 30 cents a gallon!

The pessimistic attitudes, however, don’t match the evidence...

(From which follows a swath of cherry-picked and outdated stats, or stats which are contaminated by "averages" rather than more accurate quantiles.)

I suspect this is a meme you're going to hear from the right for a while: forget how bad you have it, the economy's doing just fine!

Sure enough Tony Snow is already pimping this meme:

NEW YORK In his first week in the job, new White House Press Secretary Tony Snow is already having issues with CBS News, and slamming The New York Times and USA Today.

Snow has fired off several emails to reporters. One rapped the Times for continuing to “ignore America’s economic progress,” while another hit USA Today for a “misleading Medicare story.”

But Marketwatch today has a better perspective:

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Americans' debt levels are rising, but not because we can't resist charging the latest plasma television to our credit card, according to a new report.
Instead, consumers' debt burden jumped higher in recent years because wages grew slowly even as costs increased on items that most of us don't consider frivolous, such as mortgages, health insurance and college tuition, according to a study by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank, in Washington, D.C.
Middle-income families felt squeezed more than most, devoting a median 20% of their income to debt payments in 2004 - even at a time of low interest rates -- up from 18% in 2001. U.S. households overall spent a median 18.3% of income on debt payments in 2004, up from 16.9% in 2001, according to the report, which is based largely on data from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances.
And more families entered the group of seriously indebted: 13.7% of households faced debt payments greater than 40% percent of their income in 2004, up from 12.8% in 2001.
Looking at households' overall debt load, Americans' debt rose to a median 108% of income in 2004, up from 78% of income in 2001, with middle-income people facing the steepest rise, to a median 114% of income from 80% in 2001, according to the report.
"The middle-class squeeze [is driven by] stagnant income growth in the face of very sharp price increases for big-ticket items such as homes and education," said Christian Weller, author of the report and a senior economist with the Center for American Progress.

So we're going to see "who are you going to believe, me or your lying checkbook" from these clowns for a while.

Lin-Chi

Here. And here.



From the 2nd link:

When students today fail to make progress, where's the fault? The fault lies in the fact that they don't have faith in themselves! If you don't have faith in yourself, then you'll be forever in a hurry trying to keep up with everything around you, you'll be twisted and turned by whatever environment you're in and you can never move freely. But if you can just stop this mind that goes rushing around moment by moment looking for something, then you'll be no different from the patriarchs and buddhas. Do you want to get to know the patriarchs and buddhas? They're none other than you, the people standing in front of me listening to this lecture on the Dharma!

From the first link:

It is most urgent that you seek real, true perception and understanding, so you can be free in the world and not confused by ordinary spiritualists. It is best to have no obsessions. Just do not be contrived. Simply be normal. You impulsively seek elsewhere, looking to others for your own hands and feet. This is already mistaken.

And:

Because you grasp labels and slogans, you are hindered by those labels and slogans, both those used in ordinary life and those considered sacred. Thus they obstruct your perception of objective truth, and you cannot understand clearly.

People might not like it when you renounce -isms. You may be suspect to them. But can there be another way, really?

Nothing to add, really.

Bush is a truly unabashed liar...

Bush says "US spying is not widespread," but it's hard to conclude that he's doing anything other than lying...

President Bush today denied that the government is "mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans," as Democrats expressed outrage over a news report describing a National Security Agency program that has collected vast amounts of telephone records.

The article, in USA Today, said that the agency did not listen to the calls, but secretly obtained information on numbers dialed by "tens of millions of Americans" and used it for "data mining" — computer analysis of large amounts of information for clues or patterns to terrorist activity.

Making a hastily scheduled appearance in the White House, Mr. Bush did not directly address the collection of phone records, except to say that "new claims" had been raised about surveillance. He said all intelligence work was conducted "within the law" and that domestic conversations were not listened to without a court warrant.

"The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," he said. "Our efforts are focused on Al Qaeda and their known associates."

Focused?

Yeah. Right.

"Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with Al Qaeda?" Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the committee's ranking minority member, asked angrily.

Who would have thought that USA Today would actually have, you know, news?

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews...

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said.

The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency's domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.

The NSA's domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA's efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. "In other words," Bush explained, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States."

So we know that he's been caught in at least one lie: this isn't just international-domestic calls. Wanna guess that there's more?

The nice economy we've got...

A couple of articles on Marketwatch really give a good sense of the zeitgeist...

First, about all that nationalization of Bolivia stuff...

The price citizens of Venezuela and Bolivia are paying for having elected Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales will only steepen, "as it appears likely that both leftist leaders will expand state interference in the energy sector into the mining industry," said Brien Lundin, editor of Gold Newsletter. "Production, as well as economic growth, will decline as a result."
Peru may even enter the picture with the 2006 presidential candidate Ollanta Humala already saying he would force foreign-mining companies to renegotiate contracts and candidate Alan Garcia saying mining companies could face higher taxes and royalty payments, according to CNN.
The prospect of nationalization could further feed a rally in metals that's already lifted gold futures to more than 26-year highs above $700 an ounce. Silver prices have climbed above $14 an ounce to their highest levels since 1983, and copper's reached record levels above $3.60 per pound...

In Bolivia, the biggest concerns are for silver, tin and zinc production; in Peru -- it's copper and gold; and in Venezuela it's gold, aluminum, copper, nickel and zinc...

"The greater concern is potential spillover to Peru," which is a major producer of gold and copper, said Hill, pegging 2005 gold output at 207.8 metric tons, or 8.2% of global production, and last year's copper output at 510,000 metric tons, or 3% of global production.
Miners with exposure in Peru include Newmont Mining, Barrick Gold, Phelps Dodge and "potentially Inco
should its acquisition of Falconbridge proceed," he said.

Looks to me like it's the shareholders of those companies that would pay the price, if the nations tried to keep the mines open.

One other quote from the article bears repeating:

John Stafford, editor of Stafford's Investment Strategy Letter, said that "political incompetence ... always restricts production [and] these Socialists represent the debtor class -- so they will hyper-inflate away the small remaining value of their worthless paper currencies to pay off debts in cheaper paper currency units."

Sounds like George Bush's folks, not "soicalists." Brazil's done very well with a "socialist"in power.

Meanwhile, with the global economy balanced on a knife edge, the Treasury department wasn't going to shake things up by branding China a currency manipulator.

Of course, reading the Treaury's report, there's kind of a subtext that the Chinese don't like the situation they're in, and would love to detach themselves from the dollar, particularly if the US economy is going to decline anyway. They don't want to run away from it all at once though.

Republicans raise your taxes!

Yeah, yeah it's hyperbole, but it's the sort of hyperbolie that Repubs use agsint those of us who favor fiscal responsiblity. Only in this case, it's actually pretty irresponsible.

WASHINGTON, May 10 — The House of Representatives approved a $69 billion bill to extend President Bush's tax cuts for two more years this afternoon, sending the measure to the Senate, where passage is expected by Thursday.

The House vote was 244 to 185, with nearly all Republicans voting in favor. Although most Democrats voted no, more than a dozen voted in favor. The measure also temporarily blocks a big jump in the alternative minimum tax.

The stage for this afternoon's vote was set on Tuesday, when Republicans from the House and Senate reached agreement on a tax package. Assuming the package clears the Senate, which seems virtually certain, it will lock in one of Mr. Bush's signature tax cuts through 2010 and give Republicans a victory at a time when most of their other efforts have stalled.

But the bill falls far short of Mr. Bush's original goal, which was to make permanent all of his major tax cuts from 2001 and 2003. Nor did Republican leaders work out their differences on a separate measure that would extend scores of other tax cuts that expired at the end of last year.

Of course they're bankrupting the country.