‘Ghost Net’
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Hack into the matrix:
The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities.
It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room.
The investigators say they do not know if this facet has been employed.
The New York Times has a story this morning on a huge, Orwellian computer spy network, working out of China and “that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.”
Read the whole Times story here.
Straight-Shooter Business
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Bow-tied and all business, long-time TV news journalist, Irving R. Levine, died Thursday at the age of 86.
Levine was an original, who like Murrow, Cronkite, Howard K. Smith, to name a few, were themselves a trademark for excellence in news gathering — trench journalists.
Despite looking urbane and all-sophisticated up with a bow tie, Levine knew his shit.
(Illustration found here).
As if living a journalism story, Levine came up through the ranks, starting as an ‘obit’ writer with a Rhode Island newspaper in 1940, and although he’s far-more well known nowadays for business-related issues, he was a global correspondent for NBC News in the 1950s — the network made him its chief economic reporter in 1971 — producing all kinds of stories from Korea, the old USSR, Vietnam.
Levine was a straight-shooter business guy.
Paul Kangas with Nightly Business Report on PBS this evening:
Irving R. Levine didn’t just cover financial news, he pioneered it.
The bow-tie clad reporter had his own incisive style and dry delivery.
He shared it with viewers as an economics correspondent for NBC News for 45 years, reporting from more than two dozen countries.
He brought that insight to NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT for more than a decade.
Looking back, much of what he told our viewers was right on the money.
He might have been dry, but he had a certain style.
I’d always snicker when Levine came on, but I’d watch and pay attention to his reports, though so-enjoying his sign-off, “This is Irving R. Levine,” heavy with dry-like authority with a certain tempo — serious with a side of hilarious:
During one economic slowdown, Johnny Carson quipped on NBC’s “The Tonight Show” that things were so bad that “I saw Irving R. Levine standing by the side of the freeway with a sign reading, ‘Will work for bow ties.’ ”
On another occasion, Carson noted that “NBC is cutting back so much, Irving R. Levine has to buy his bow ties at the Pee Wee Herman garage sale.”
When Levine starting covering the economics beat near four decades ago, business news was way down on the scale of importance — currently it’s ALL the news and ALL tied in one hell of a gnarly bow.
Despair Economics
Filed Under Finance, Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
This so-called “financial meltdown” is indeed a down, but a descent from the base-bottom up — Close to 70 percent of the current unemployed in the US are blue-collar workers despite all the Wall Street blubbering and Rick-Santelli rants about the financial industry.
“This is a blue-collar recession, just like we saw in ’81,” said Andrew Sum, professor of labor economics at Northeastern University. “In fact, we’ve seen no net loss among college graduates. At least not yet.”
And this ain’t heavy.
(Illustration found here).
Jobs are important in more than just the obvious, financial sense, but in the physical-social movement as well — an example, the growing tent city explosion across the country of unemployed, homeless folks, maybe a big chunk from the construction industry, at 17 percent unemployed, one of the hardest-hit trades in this economic nightmare.
Here in California, the unemployment rate hit 10.5 percent in February, which lead the nation in mass layoffs — 116,000 jobs gone, the “biggest portion, about a third, were in manufacturing, followed by retail trade and transportation and warehousing” — all blue-collar peoples, and mostly male peoples.
Maybe the big news is former banking executives now delivering pizza or some such bullshit, but the real feelers of the “news” are those in actual contact with the physical end-result reality of all those fancy default swaps.
National employment stats released this morning from the Labor Department continues the look of an old Shell-station public toilet — brown-shit nasty:
And for the week ended March 21, first-time (unemployment) claims for benefits rose 8,000 to 652,000, a level that’s fully 78% higher than the same period in the prior year.
The four-week average of these initial claims fell 1,000 to 649,000.
The claims report shows that businesses are laying off workers at a rapid pace and that finding replacement employment for those people out of work is ever harder.
Initial claims represent job destruction, while the level of continuing claims indicates how hard or easy it is for displaced workers to find new jobs.
Claims rose 123,750 to stand at 5.33 million — in itself an all-time record-keeping high.
Also from MarketWatch:
The U.S. economy experienced its most violent contraction in a generation during the fourth quarter, with real gross domestic product plunging at a 6.3% annualized seasonally adjusted rate, the Commerce Department reported Thursday in its third estimate of quarterly growth.
GDP hadn’t fallen so much since the first quarter of 1982.
It was the third largest decline in GDP in 50 years.
Economists believe the current quarter, which ends March 31, was nearly as bad.
Current projections look for GDP to fall at a 5.1% annual pace.
Since 1947, GDP has never fallen by more than 4% for two quarters in a row.
But the real horror:
The recession that began in December 2007 intensified in the fourth quarter following the government’s rescue of several large financial institutions and the collapse of Lehman Bros.
The ensuing credit squeeze has driven consumer and business confidence to generational lows, and cost 3 million Americans their jobs.
Just since last September — WTF!
Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, ah, we remember.
The now-famous $700 billion TARP program we couldn’t survive without in September, but never really used and redefined by Paulson a month later, which actually meant the man didn’t know what the shit he was doing.
Geithner was head of the New York Fed at the time and had a hand in putting the original nonsense together.
This entire financial system bailout/save-the-bankers scheme is akin to having the fox guard the hen-house.
Blue-collar vs white-collar nowadays, even within its own self, like reports CitiGroup engaging in “Recessionary Discrimination” in laying off people, or even with new jobs lagging, medical people are in high demand — a circle of employment spiraling down.
According to the above-mentioned Andrew Sum, professor of labor economics at Northeastern University, education is still the key: “It is well-documented that the more education you have the easier it is to find a new job…This is why we’ve seen virtually no net losses among white-collar workers,” he said.
Although there’s been some net job gains for black women, not so for black men, and in the Hispanic community, men have absorbed about 80 percent of the layoffs, while with whites it’s 75 percent.
Where are we going with this?
In the meantime, economists high and low are still searching for the bottom of the blue-collar, mostly male recession barrel, only to come up with bigger and bigger unemployment numbers.
“The magnitude of this is alarming,” Mr. Sum said. “People say, ‘Why does it seem so much worse?’ and the answer is because it is.”
Horse walks into a bar, bartender asks, ‘Why the long face?’
When Smart-Ass Reporters Ask Dumb-Ass Questions
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News people working the White House are way-too-cool for school — Last night, they acted the arrogant clowns displaying delusional as opposed to actual smarts during President Obama’s press conference.
(Illustration found here).
Obama is a slick guy and the slick comes from within — Josh Marshall at TPM hit the eye-tooth right on the head, noting US peoples are right now “looking for competence and command, a sense that someone is sailing the ship, at helm with a clear sense of where they’re going.”
No one knows right now what’s going to happen with this horrific-mangled financial system, despite all the bluster — No one knows for sure, but a real leader also has to comfort.
Hence, Obama’s mug, voice and body has been all over the place his first 64 days in office, even hitting late-night TV, utilizing his administration’s biggest asset — himself.
In public appearances, from a joint session of Congress to town-hall meetings to shooting hoops last summer in Kuwait, Obama has always displayed an acute public sense, a kind of fore-knowledge if you will, of what people want to hear.
He also seems to understand the vital point of it all: The ability to communicate that ‘what people want to hear’ with seemingly sincere confidence.
And ostensibly with good grace — Even if the news is not so good.
Last night, he returned to the early campaign trail with a classroom-like exposition:
Instead, in his second prime-time news conference from the White House, it was Barack Obama the lecturer, a familiar character from early in the campaign.
Placid and unsmiling, he was the professor in chief, offering familiar arguments in long paragraphs — often introduced with the phrase, “as I said before” — sounding like the teacher speaking in the stillness of a classroom where students are restlessly waiting for the ring of the bell.
…
At a time of anger and anxiety in the country, Mr. Obama showed little emotion.
He rarely cracked a joke or raised his voice. Even when he declared himself upset over the $165 million in bonuses paid this month by the American International Group despite its taxpayer bailout, his voice sounded calm and unbothered.
“I’m as angry as anybody about those bonuses,” he said, adding that executives needed to learn that “enriching themselves on the taxpayers’ dime is inexcusable.”
To a certain extent, Mr. Obama’s demeanor could have been calculated — an effort, aides said, to lower the temperature after a supercharged week and nudge the country toward what Mr. Obama considers the more pressing issues of fixing the banking system and reviving the economy.
Even after excoriating the A.I.G. executives, he cautioned that “the rest of us can’t afford to demonize every investor or entrepreneur who seeks to make a profit.”
Recent polls, however, suggest US peoples are still confident in his performance, even with the AIG bonus fiasco.
Despite talking through the pratfalls of a tanking economy, Obama last night also had to put up with the dumb-ass White House press corp, who apparently couldn’t muster up any decent, pertinent questions, a shameful performance made worse by some non-professional, high-salaried, always-obnoxious asshole reporter people — Representatives of the MSM.
First nearly out of the chute was Chuck Todd of NBC, a most-pure example of the Peter Principle and a shallow political commentator to boot (Seen making a question pitch in the above photo at Obama’s press conference last month), with a bone-headed question about the obvious.
Some have compared this financial crisis to a war. And in times of war, past presidents have called for some form of sacrifice.
Some of your programs, whether for Main Street or Wall Street, have actually cushioned the blow for those that were irresponsible during this economic period of prosperity or supposed prosperity that you were talking about.
Why, given this new era of responsible that you’re asking for, sacrificing to participate in this economic recovery?
On TV anyway, Obama looked liked he winced, not from the question, but from the absurdity of it, and then laid it all out once again:
Well, as — as I said, the American people are making a host of sacrifices in their individual lives.
We are going through an extraordinary crisis, but we believe that, taken — if you take the steps that we’ve already taken, with respect to housing, with respect to small businesses, if you look at what we’re doing in terms of increasing liquidity in the financial system, that the steps that we’re taking can actually stabilize the economy and get it moving again.
After a couple of weak, but decent questions on middle-class tax cuts and cap-and-trade measures in Obama’s proposed budget, up steps Chip Reid of CBS with a real-smart-ass beef on the looming $1 trillion deficit (Reid, one remembers, got his panties in a bind earlier this month when during a questioning of Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, made a catty aside about the “ugly heads” of Democrats), but neglected to mention in his question Obama’s heady inheritance.
First of all, I suspect that some of those Republican critics have a short memory, because, as I recall, I’m inheriting a $1.3 trillion deficit, annual deficit, from them.
That would be point number one.
Point number two.
Both under our estimates and under the CBO estimates, both — the most conservative estimates out there, we drive down the deficit over the first five years of our budget.
The deficit is cut in half.
And folks aren’t disputing that.
Reid is an idiot.
Maybe the top dumb-ass question last night, however, came from chub-cheeks nit-wit Ed Henry of CNN, who tried to pop a “gotcha” question, but instead ended looking mean-spirited and sore:
You spoke again at the top about your anger about AIG.
You’ve been saying that for days now.
But why is it that it seems Andrew Cuomo seems to be in New York getting more actual action on it?
Pricking at the AIG bonus flap last week amid the talk vs action routine, Henry continued, saying that although Obama has “been very critical of President Bush doubling the national debt,” then predicted failure for the current budget when spending skyrockets: “You keep saying that you’ve inherited a big fiscal mess. Do you worry, though, that your daughters, not to mention the next president, will be inheriting an even bigger fiscal mess if the spending goes out of control?”
Obama is slick indeed and with a knife-like, serious edge, replied as if talking to an ignorant smarty-pants:
Of course I do, Ed, which is why we’re doing everything we can to reduce that deficit.
Look, if this were easy, then, you know, we would have already had it done, and the budget would have been voted on, and everybody could go home.
This is hard.
He went to explain about “a structural deficit that’s going to take a long time” to put behind us and how health-care will benefit in the long run, but Henry wouldn’t leave it alone, following up: “But on AIG, why did you wait — why did you wait days to come out and express that outrage?”
The president smiled and retorted:
It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.
The answer created laughter in the press room.
Another good look at Henry’s time at bat can be found here.
And then there’s the incompetent Ann Compton of ABC.
She let loose a question that was so dated, it was near embarrassing: “Could I ask you about race?”
(An inquiry most likely way-way-down on the list of questions for the new president).
And after listening quietly, looking like he was a bit uneasy, too, Obama answered:
I think that the last 64 days has been dominated by me trying to figure out how we’re going to fix the economy, and that affects black, brown and white.
And, you know, obviously, at the inauguration, I think that there was justifiable pride on the part of the country that we had taken a step to move us beyond some of the searing legacies of racial discrimination in this country, but that lasted about a day.
And — and, you know, right now, the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged.
And that is: Are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to re-open, keep America safe?
And that’s what I’ve been spending my time thinking about.
A transcript of the press conference can be found via RealClearPolitics.
Odd, but not a question about Tim Geithner’s famous bank plan unrolled just on Monday — one would think there would be a shitload of questions about crook-faced Geithner’s three-forked scheme to massage $420 billion in toxic loans and assets off US bank balance sheets.
No, the press is too hard-pressed to catch Obama off guard.
And for a look at the media looking not at itself, but Obama, see here.
Sugar-Coat the Stress
Filed Under Finance, Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
A side effect of continuous bad news on the doorstep.
This morning in the New York Times:
The recession seems to have a sweet tooth. As unemployment has risen and 401(k)’s have shrunk, Americans, particularly adults, have been consuming growing volumes of candy, from Mary Janes and Tootsie Rolls to Gummy Bears and cheap chocolates, say candy makers, store owners and industry experts.
Theories vary on exactly why. For many, sugar lifts spirits dragged low by the languishing economy. For others, candy also provides a nostalgic reminder of better times. And not insignificantly, it is relatively cheap.
(Illustration found here).
When every other damn thing is in the tank, candy is riding high.
Many big candy makers are reporting rising sales and surprising profits even as manufacturers of other products are struggling to stay afloat.
Cadbury reported a 30 percent rise in profits for 2008 while Nestle’s profits grew by 10.9 percent, according to public filings.
Hershey, which struggled for much of 2008, saw profits jump by 8.5 percent in the fourth quarter.
Lindt & Sprüngli, which specializes in more expensive products like Lindt and Ghirardelli chocolate, announced that even though it expects to close some of its luxury retail stores this year, it also expects chocolate sales to remain strong through mainstream retailers like Wal-Mart and Target.
“All is well in candy land,” said Jamie Hallman, owner of the Sweetdish candy store in the Marina district of San Francisco.
And this is sweet, too:
Congressional Republicans are telling Dick Cheney to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input.
…
The veep, who showed a penchant for secrecy during eight years in the White House,has popped up in media interviews to defend the Bush-Cheney record while suggesting that the country is not as safe under President Obama.
Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said, “He became so unpopular while he was in the White House that it would probably be better for us politically if he wouldn’t be so public…But he has the right to speak out since he’s a private citizen.”
And this, too, with a near-illegal twist:
WBAL in Baltimore reported today that Jenna Bush’s Secret Service detail vehicle was towed due to six unpaid parking tickets. A second Secret Service vehicle was also ticketed.
Bush and her hubby, Henry Hager, moved to Baltimore after their wedding, where she is a school teacher, and he is employed by Constellation Energy.
Big deal, right?
Well, according to the Secret Service’s web site, Jenna Bush is not entitled to Secret Service detail as she is over age 16.
So…why are our tax dollars paying for at least two Secret Service vehicles to be dispatched to Jenna?
Yeah, and hand over those damn Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!
An Audacity of Impertinence: Obama’s Toxic Shame
Filed Under Media, Orwellian, Politics | Leave a Comment
If not for the way-pissed-off feeling I have, coupled with a sense of nothing-you-can-do despair, maybe this would be sad, or least wouldn’t appear so freakin’ obviously stupid:
Mr. Haas walked on, his pink shirt a burst of color on a slate-gray afternoon.
The words came haltingly.
“You have to understand,” he said, “there are kids involved, there have been death threats. …”
His voice trailed off.
It looked as if he was fighting back tears.
“I didn’t have anything to do with those credit problems,” said Mr. Haas, 47. “I told Mr. Liddy” — Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G., the insurance giant — “I would rescind my retention contract.”
He ended the conversation with a request: “Leave my neighbors alone.”
(Illustration found here).
Maybe the above-mentioned AIG executive Mr. “Jackpot Jimmy” Haas should himself stay far, far away from his neighbors — a lady down the block from his house told the New York Times, the current financial tank/bailout/bonus mess “makes me absolutely sick,” she said. “It’s despicable. It’s disgusting what these people have done. They should be forced to give every cent back.”
The AIG bonus episode has indeed stirred up a national hornets’ nest of outrage, and although most of the venting has been against the frightened multi-millionaire default-swappers like the clownish clod Mr. Haas, the real cusp of the situation is still the failing, swirling-downward economy, which hasn’t been helped at all by all this blubbering madness.
Beyond the US taxpayer, the big loser in all this could be President Obama.
Frank Rich writes this morning Obama’s handling of the AIG bonus bullshit might be the Katrina moment for the young president (Hurricane Katrina allowed the US peoples to finally see George Jr. Bush as the arrogant, incompetent asshole he really, really is and eventually led to his ouster) and Obama may not recover.
Does the event foreshadow the end of a national era?
The National Post noted on Friday the world is watching and apparently gasping as “the circus-like U. S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos.”
Paul Krugman summed up this whole affair: “What an awful mess.”
And all this political backlash could make matters worse, much worse.
The real pulse might be from Joe Nocera, the New York Times business writer, who always seems to have a grasp on this puzzling, financial suck hole, and it ain’t pretty:
By week’s end, I was more depressed about the financial crisis than I’ve been since last September. Back then, the issue was the disintegration of the financial system, as the Lehman bankruptcy set off a terrible chain reaction.
Now I’m worried that the political response is making the crisis worse.
The Obama administration appears to have lost its grip on Congress, while the Treasury Department always seems caught off guard by bad news.
And Congress, with its howls of rage, its chaotic, episodic reaction to the crisis, and its shameless playing to the crowds, is out of control. This week, the body politic ran off the rails.
There are times when anger is cathartic.
There are other times when anger makes a bad situation worse.
“We need to stop committing economic arson,” Bert Ely, a banking consultant, said to me this week. That is what Congress committed: economic arson.
Nocera lists the problems with the bonus flap overriding all the other real economy’s failed situation.
Read his entire post here.
This coming week will tell the tale — shame or blame?
IEDed at the ‘Gates of Hell’
Filed Under Just Plain War | Leave a Comment
Ironic in an age of such brain-busting technology, such a simple device can cause such horror.
Four US soldiers were killed last Sunday in a roadside IED blast in eastern Afghanistan, three of those from the Illinois National Guard — 11 from its ranks have now died since the unit arrived in country last September.
“It’s a very, very sad day for our state,” said Gov. Pat Quinn. “Our Illinois National Guard, we’ve sent 3,000 brave men and women to the gates of hell in Afghanistan, and I think it’s important for all of us in Illinois and America to say a prayer for their families.”
An Air Force staff sergeant from Tucson, Ariz., was the fourth fatality in the incident.
The Afghan war is about to get worse.
(Illustration found here).
Makeshift bombs like the one in the situation mentioned above — IEDs or improvised explosive devices — are indeed making life a tortured hell for coalition troops in Afghanistan, and have killed three times the soldiers in the first two months of 2009 than during the same period last year — 32 already this year, only 10 in 2008 with 96 troops wounded in January and February of 2009, a 146 percent increase from the 39 early last year.
IEDs can be made from all kinds of shit, jerry-rigged from household chemicals and appliances, some use standard cooking oil — components just need be of four parts: A power source, switches, an explosive initiator and, of course, some kind of explosive.
Or more gut grabbing: Hand grenade with pin pulled, placed in a small glass with glass filled mortar or plastic of paris; 120-mm HE mortar with hole drilled in shipping cap with an electric blasting cap inserted (placed in a sandbag); suicide vest — leather-look sleeveless waistcoat with explosives and ball bearing sewn into the interior; and maybe a thrown block of TNT with a grenade fuze inside.
Whatever works.
IEDs as terror weapon has a short history.
Not too long ago in a place not too far away — 1886 Chicago and the Haymarket Riot, where some asshole thrown a shrapnel-filled dynamite bomb into a crowd of cops.
Off and running was the concept of terror to influence a shitload of people.
The Haymarket incident cripplied the struggling US labor movement and the bombing resonated for years.
The World Trade Center attacks in 2001 killed 2,752 people, but the event scared the living shit out of 300 million and eventually caused even far, far-worse problems.
T.E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ was a proponent of IEDs, using railway and roadside bombs to disrupt Turkish supply routes during WWI and create, as he put it, “an uncertain terror for the enemy.”
Flash-forward to Iraq: IEDs really came into its own, killing 70 percent of US troops in combat; Iraq and Afghanistan now carry the scar of IEDs being the signature weapon of those conflicts.
Although all the whack-heads who started both the Iraqi and Afghan misadventures knew the US military was not equipped to handle an IED proliferation, but did nothing, causing another term to arise, “hillbilly armor“, or an ‘improvised defensive device‘ — bits of scrap metal and ballistic glass — used by soldiers to “up-armor” their vehicles.
And from one pissed-off Iraqi war vet:
Well, as it turns out, Bush, Rumsfeld and all those folks who were supposed to be running this bitch knew that when we invaded and toppled Saddam, that an insurgency would develop and those insurgents would develop IEDs that would be used to kill Americans.
In spite of this, they sent us with insufficiently armored vehicles.
In spite of this, they cut off development and deployment of MRAPs.
In spite of this, they failed to provide for returning troops and fully fund the VA.
This has lead to increased homelessness, addiction and suicide amongst returning OIF/OEF veterans.
Now, I usually try to be a good person and forgive and forget. However, it was one of these IEDs that took 6 of my Marines.
I hope these people have a long time to burn in hell.
Meanwhile, Back at the Wars
Filed Under Just Plain War, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Today six years ago, one of the most dumb-ass and dangerous operations in all of history started up and despite all kinds of processes to the contrary, is still going full banana with no end in sight.
Just as the eyeballs of the whole US was focused Wednesday morning on DC — AIG CEO Edward Liddy testified before Congress about the now-infamous $165 million in bonuses paid to high-financial talent and attempted to leave the building without being choked, hanged, guillotined, or forced to commit sepuku by enraged mobs — while overseas national flesh and treasure is still being squandered.
(Illustration found here).
And all those silly-assed masters of the universe have nothing over the Iraqi adventure, which sucks up $12 billion a month ($608.3 billion at five years) to keep operating and the original “war” in Afghanistan has cost $162.6 billion over seven years — and even now, there’s no sign of having gained anything at all from the waste.
Up to this past weekend, 4,259 US GIs have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion with official DOD number of wounded at 31,089 (estimates at 100,000 or more — and near 350,000 have suffered brain injuries) while in Afghanistan 667 US troops have died there since 2001.
The invasion of Iraq just might be the worst military, social and cultural blunder in history.
On top of the US losses: An estimated 1.3 million Iraqis have been killed.
A new ABC/BBC/NHK Poll reveals the Iraqi people still don’t like the US and a majority think the invasion was a mistake:
But here’s a key finding and the rejoinder to the constant call for war critics (and Obama) to admit that it was, despite everything, correct to topple Saddam: 56% now say the U.S. was wrong to invade, actually up (despite the cooling of violence) since last year’s 50%.
And on top of all the squawk about an Iraqi bloodbath after the US troop withdrawal, 57 percent aren’t too concerned about what might happen after the U.S. exits — despite some consternation:
“The situation in Iraq will improve only if the Americans and the Iraqi politicians withdraw from Iraq,” said Abbas al Dulaimy, 31, as he walked through Baghdad.
“The situation will soon be worse because the politicians will look out only for their interests like those who demand to divide Iraq . . . it will be chaos.”
And the horror of the situation is that if US troops are gone by Dec. 31, 2011, or even tomorrow, the result would be the same — the bottom line then should be to leave as soon as possible.
Why complicate the matter.
Simple, really: Chicago Mayor Richard Daley told LBJ in 1967 the way to get the 500,000 U.S. troops out of Vietnam was to just, “Put them on a [expletive deleted] plane and bring them home.”
One asshole to another — How many lives would have been saved if Johnson had done what Daley had so vividly suggested?
Iraqi women want the US out yesterday!
Here in the U.S., we’ve rarely heard the story of the Iraq War told from the perspective of women.
So what are Iraqi women saying on the sixth anniversary of the US invasion?
The same thing they’ve been saying since 2003: end the occupation. Polls consistently show that a majority of Iraqis want US troops out.
We’ve been told that if the U.S. withdraws, violence would again soar in Iraq.
That’s a compelling argument for those of us who care about the suffering that the U.S. has already visited on Iraqi women and their families.
But Iraqis themselves, who have the best grasp of their security situation, say that U.S. troops are causing, not confronting, violence.
In multiple polls, most Iraqis say they would feel much safer without U.S. troops.
Who can blame them?
Since the invasion, over a million Iraqis have died violently and four million have been driven from their homes.
The resources that women need to care for their families — electricity, water, food, fuel, and medical care — have become dangerously scarce, sometimes totally unavailable.
Six years along, 36 percent of Baghdad’s water is still undrinkable — In a bad month, it’s 90 percent. Cholera broke out last summer, and officials fear another outbreak this year.
Yesterday was relatively peaceful — only 12 Iraqis were killed, another 12 wounded and a couple of skulls were discovered at a suspected mass grave near Basra.
Among the those dozen dead:
A bomb blast killed a married couple working in an orchard in Saidiya.
Authorities believe the bomb was leftover from when armed groups controlled the area.
A place where picking fruit can get you killed.
And from as the crow flies across the fat middle of that other axis of evil, Iran, into Afghanistan and to another whole nasty, dangerous can of worms.
Even as President Obama tries to put together some kind of strategy for the now-nearing-8-year-old-war, there’s reports of a different kind of surge.
According to Reuters:
Other threads that run through them all are building up Afghan military and civilian capabilities and finding the resources to support whatever strategy is adopted.
Officials said two other elements under discussion were making a significant “civilian surge” of U.S. experts to address Afghanistan’s development needs as well as a strategic communications campaign to try to persuade the U.S., Afghan, Pakistani and European publics to support the war effort.
If that occurs, and when the “war effort” fails, and then when an urgent “Eagle Pull” operation is required, there will be just another shitload of civilians to snatch out of harms way — And don’t just believe me, the “war effort” will fail (See here and here and here).
Although Obama unleashed the order a couple of weeks ago for 17,000 additional troops, a group of 15 US congressmen have dispatched a letter to the president, urging his to “reconsider” the action as it “may well be counterproductive.”
While attempting to cobble together some kind overall Afghan strategy, DOD Chief Bob Gates has been blubbering about “…goals, at least in the near to mid-term, that are achievable,” but has yet to offer anything useful.
There’s also been reports of a plan for Afghan government efforts to reconcile with some elements of the Taliban and other militant organizations.
Another piece of big-idea shit.
Noted independent diplomatic historian and journalist, Gareth Porter, examines this so-called “peel off” from the “hard core” Taliban notion that would lead to a “political route to victory” in Afghanistan.
Not so fast:
But experts warn that the strategy is unlikely to work.
And by appearing to provide a political route to victory, the strategy is luring the administration into a renewed commitment to war in Afghanistan and diverting it away from a deal with the Taliban leadership aimed at keeping al-Qaeda from having a presence there.
News reports this past week have raised the possibility of negotiations by Afghan, Saudi, and Pakistani officials with the Taliban leadership that could result in an agreement not to allow an al-Qaeda presence on Afghan territory in return for U.S. and NATO withdrawal and assurances that they will not intervene in the country as long as al-Qaeda is kept out.
The latter sounds cool, but…
But that extraordinarily optimistic assumption (of the ‘peel off’ idea) is not shared by most experts on the insurgency in Afghanistan.
A report by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times last Wednesday quotes “several Western diplomats and officials in Afghanistan, including those already in contact with the Taliban” as saying that attempts to split off individual commanders or groups from the Taliban leadership “would not work.”The reason, according to those officials, is that the plan would require those commanders to surrender and accept an Afghan government and a foreign military presence in which they have no trust.
Which takes us back to square one.
A lot of cash has flowed out of the US the past few years — billions of dollars since just last September — and even with the ironic horror of paying big-buck bonuses to the very people who caused this worldwide financial conflagration, a nifty way to cut back and save some dough is to bring the US military home.
Or just buy up some old AIG stock.
Yes! Yes! Hate and Anger!
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
Gail Collins, who writes for the New York Times editorial pages, has penned a right-on, nail-’em-to-the-wall piece this morning on the AIG/banking/finance clusterf**k of a freakin’ mess.
Collins is way-pissed:
Angry. So very, very angry. Unable to speak due to mega-anger washing over every pore and fiber of my being. Anger is in. (Hope’s so … January.)
I am extremely angry at Tim Geithner for being such a baby that he couldn’t scare a bunch of American International Group quants into forgoing their bonuses.
We need a Treasury secretary so terrifying that if you were stuck in an elevator alone with him, you would just automatically hand over your wallet and credit cards.
…
I hate everybody in the world of finance. Also accountants, since it’s tax time.
And I’m totally angry at everybody in Congress for trying to pretend that they’re angrier than I am. Like Senator Chuck Grassley saying the A.I.G. execs should follow the Japanese model and “resign or go commit suicide.”
Took him about three seconds to backtrack. “Inteligent journalist can’t recgnize rhetoric,” Grassley twittered.
…
Let’s complain about Barack Obama. Why doesn’t he sound angrier? Doesn’t he understand that his job right now is to be the Great Venter?
Sure he keeps saying he’s mad. But you can tell that he secretly thinks it’s crazy to obsess about $165 million in bonuses in a company that’s still got $1.6 trillion in toxic assets to unravel.
“I don’t want to quell that anger. I want to channel our anger in a constructive way,” he said on Wednesday.
Everybody knows constructively channeled anger doesn’t really count. It’s like diet pizza.
Read Collins entire venting post here.
Obama tried to keep it moving, taking the ‘buck-stops-here’ routine yesterday in California, however, in “fixing these messes, even if I didn’t make them,” and “Now, I know a lot of you are outraged about this — rightfully so. I’m outraged too.”
Then kick some ass! Mr. President.
Journalism: ‘It’s Not A F**king Game!’
Filed Under Media, Orwellian | 1 Comment
In the past few years, a lot of people and organizations who should have been the standard bearers for news gathering and reporting have dropped the ball big time — Journalism sucks nowadays.
Despite all kinds of media available, the exciting journalistic genre of “investigative reporting” has nearly disappeared off the mainstream radar.
Except sadly at Comedy Central.
(Illustration found here).
Jon Stewart and the The Daily Show has been all over the media this past week as a tell-tale segment of who/why/how the financial meltdown has been covered by the press, especially at CNBC, and especially that nutcase, weirdo Jim Cramer ‘Mad Money’ guy.
Read a good background note to the entire process here.
So Thursday night, Cramer visited Stewart’s show and was beat to a pulp.
The video was all over the media yesterday morning.
See clips here and here and here.
The Daily Show site has the segment posted.
Stewart said he and Cramer are both snake-oil salesman, only “The Daily Show” is labeled as such.
He claimed CNBC shirked its journalistic duty by believing corporate lies, rather than being an investigative “powerful tool of illumination.”
And he alleged CNBC was ultimately in bed with the businesses it covered — that regular people’s stocks and 401Ks were “capitalizing your adventure.”
And Cramer is indeed a financial turd.
Two years ago:
On the truth: “What’s important when you are in that hedge fund mode is to not be doing anything that is remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view — it is important to create a new truth to develop a fiction,” Cramer advises. “You can’t take any chances.”
The real, core problem is the media, which has morphed the last three decades into a kind of trade-animal with a nose ring, tethered to corporate giants and is really no longer interested in the public good.
This attitude has maybe been reflected by a major arm of media itself becoming news — newspapers are dying if not already dead.
The demise of the old-fashioned newsprint journalist, however, is really a self-inflicted fatal wound.
Ad revenues reflect what’s been happening with the rapid rise of the Internet and have been slipping away for years:
“Newspapers historically have not been on the leading edge of anything.
They tend to react to things that happen to them rather than to look ahead and figure out where they are vulnerable and try to figure out something that will prevent it,” said John Morton, president of Morton Research Inc., a media research company.
To staunch the loss of readers and advertisers, newspapers have put much of their content on the Web. But the transition hasn’t been seamless or quick. Some papers, notably The New York Times, tried to charge fees to access their sites only to pull the plug when the experiment failed. Others dithered while online news aggregators such as Google and CraigsList, the free classified ad site, became part of the landscape.
“Papers are doing a lot of good things on their Web sites now. The only problem is they started 10 years too late,” Morton said.
And journalists are after the big story, the quick, dramatic sound byte and are leaving real reporting behind.
The three biggest news stories of the last two decades — the summer prior to Sept. 11, 2001; the run-up to the Iraqi invasion; and the Wall Street meltdown — were a sham to the mainstream media, a shame to any kind of journalism even in its most basic tenets.
Helen Thomas, who has covered the White House since Kennedy, told a recent panel discussion hosted by Media Matters for America that the press corp surrendered it’s most vital weapon, “skepticism,” as the Bush White House thundered against Iraq: “Questions? There were no questions. Complicit…the press played ball, after 9/11, the press rolled over and played dead…”
When I graduated from the University of Florida’s J-school in 1974, the US press was at it’s zenith.
Watergate, Bernstein and Woodward — It was a heady time, and it also made for a kind of esprit de corps, a pride in a cigarette smoke-filled, IBM-typewriter punching newsroom where all of us felt we were in a profession that could make a difference.
The newsroom was home, the wacked, crazy people who populated it, from the copy desk to the beat reporters, my kind of folks.
I was out of the trade for nearly 20 years, but when I returned to a newsroom in the late ’90s, what a shock — no longer the pride of profession, but a deep, craven desire for a stronger bottom line, newspapers were now owned by giant media conglomerates who cut and nipped until local news and investigative reporting were all gone — just fluff pieces to keep advertisers happy.
Mainstream journalism, especially TV news, is not worth a shit.
If a person in the US is getting his/her news from TV — forget it.
One major example: the New York Times Pentagon pundit expose, a long, detailed piece how the DOD used retired military officers to push the Iraqi war effort — a major news event last year which NEVER made it to broadcast, or cable TV — except a small segment on PBS.
A very large portion of the US public has no idea how they were manipulated into giving the Iraqi war its full support.
Pure shame.
And the shame continues.
NBC — which claims to handle MSNBC and CNBC — has apparently clipped the clips on Friday of Cramer getting nailed on Stewart’s show.
MSNBC and CNBC are sister networks, and earlier in the day, Mediabistro had reported, “A TVNewser tipster tells us MSNBC producers were asked not to incorporate the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart interview into their shows today.”
…
According to Mediabistro, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had initially alerted fans of his show that Cramer would be putting in an exclusive appearance on Friday’s Morning Joe — but he was a no-show. NBC’s Today Show’s had also promised coverage of the encounter, which similarly failed to materialize.
And even Cramer acted the closed-mouth, teasing asshole.
On his show Friday, he wink-winked at the audience:
Cramer started promisingly enough.
“Before we get started, I want to say something about what happened yesterday,” he began soberly. “A lot of people are talking about what happened. … Although I was clearly outside of my safety zone, I have the utmost respect for this person, for the work that they do, no matter how uncomfortable it was to be on. So I want you to take a look at this clip from yesterday of Cramer vs. Stewart!”
At that point, it was revealed that the come-on had been nothing but a tease, as the clip turned out to show Cramer helping Martha Stewart — on whose program he had appeared earlier on Thursday — prepare what appeared to be a banana cream pie.
“You’re doing a very good job,” Martha said encouragingly.
As the clip ended, Cramer sneered, “Now back to business as usual.”
He never did mention Jon Stewart at all.
Yes, you prick bastard.
Journalism is back to business as usual — a fucking game.
Jon Stewart’s Daily Show is informative, and hilarious.
Mainstream news is neither.
A problem criminally shameful.
‘Hooker’ Guitar: GOP Music
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
The new normal for Republicans exemplified by such goings on:
- Inverness Police say former Cook County Republican Chairman Gary Skoien admitted having two prostitutes in his children’s playroom when his wife walked in on him early Sunday morning.
The allegation is in a domestic battery report from Skoien, 55, against his 36-year-old, 5-foot-4-inch, 110-pound wife.
He said she beat him with her fists and an electric guitar.
Skoien denies there were hookers with him in the playroom, just he and a couple of female friends sitting in the playroom talking at 5 AM when his wife came in and began beating him with “a hard heavy electric guitar.”
(Illustration of Gary Skoien found here).
However, the police blotter in Inverness, a Chicago suburb, say otherwise:
- The police report said Skoien had cuts and blood on his hands and there was blood on the walls and stairs near the playroom.
The police report said Skoien “told [the responding officer] he did in fact have prostitutes with him in the playroom when his wife caught him.”
The playroom looked like “a struggle of some kind took place there…There were items turned and tossed around the room,” the report said.
“That’s how it was reported to us,” Barrington/Inverness Police Deputy Chief Jerry Libit said.
The wife, Eni Skoien, spent two nights in a lock-up before being released on a $10,000 personal recognizance bond after being charged with misdemeanor domestic battery.
The couple have been married 13 years and apparently the marriage had already gone south before the hookers incident — He went to police a week earlier after she had supposedly struck him “while he was brushing his teeth.”
There’s two sides to every “normal” coin and Skoien told his version of the story Wednesday to Chicago’s WBBM Newsradio that his wife was drunk when she came home the night before the playroom brawl, “I’m not sure why the police report characterizes the people that were at the house later on the way they do. It was an allegation my wife made, but it was an allegation made in anger.”
Pissed might be better word usage.
Since there’s three children involved in this messy shit — ages 5, 7 and 8 — the whole affair is sad, sad.
What is it about Republicans and illicit sex? Especially in the pay-for-play/porn couplet.
Maybe being a member of the GOP creates a wigged-out view of morals: In a recent study, most online porn is consumed by US states considered to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption.
A situation usually dubbed as hypocrisy.
And on top of Michael Steele’s dim-witted, nit-witted float about the GOP ether, and the dumb-assed “infighting” of the Republican wingnuts, there’s still the hooker man making news: Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, late of the late DC Madam scandal.
Mr. Vitter claimed a “very serious sin in my past” associating himself with Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s up-flight bordello, but was a streetwalker man from way back, reportedly visiting a Canal Street cat-house well before all the DC business erupted.
The DC Madam affair ended hard: Palfrey killed herself by hanging, and one of her employees, a former University of Maryland professor, also committed suicide after being charged with prostitution.
Vitter still creates ass-cracks for the GOP in the Senate, but seems destined to get slaughtered in any kind of re-election bid next year, even facing possible opposition from porn star Stormy Daniels, who says, “Politics can’t be any dirtier of a job than the one I am already in.”
(Illustration of David Vitter found here).
Up pops Vitter again this week, pitching a bitch fit at Dulles Airport:
- …arrived Thursday evening at his United Airlines gate 20 minutes before the plane was scheduled to depart, only to find the gate had already been closed.
Undeterred, Vitter opened the door, setting off a security alarm and prompting an airline worker to warn him that entering the gate was forbidden.
Vitter, our spy said, gave the airline worker an earful, employing the timeworn “do-you-know-who-I-am” tirade that apparently grew quite heated.
And adds the Washington Post:
- Vitter, for his part, issued a statement chalking up the incident as a misunderstanding and dismissing the report as something that appeared in what he called a “silly gossip column.”
Unfortunately for Vitter, however, the story lives on.
Not only were there scads of stories in today’s papers about the incident but the Transportation Security Administration is also looking into the fact that Vitter allegedly opened a security door and set off an alarm in the process.
Read a personal aspect of the Vitter airport meltdown here, which calls the incident “not surprising.”
Prostitution and good government, a gloved pair from way back in history:
- Greek literature refers to three classes of prostitutes: pornai, or slave prostitutes; freeborn street prostitutes; and hetaera, educated prostitute-entertainers who enjoyed a level of social influence that was denied to nearly all non-prostitute women.
GOPers are really themselves the worst kind of prostitute-entertainers, creating a kind of anti-pleasure — singing without a song and way short a tune.
Rampage: ‘Never, Never’ Dreams
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
Last graph in Al-Jazeera‘s report on Tuesday’s shooting in south Alabama: “The right to own guns has been fiercely defended in the US since the country’s civil war in the 19th century, and they are widely available for purchase for reasons of self-defence and hunting.”
(Residents of Samson, Ala. Illustration found here).
Samson, Ala., Mayor Clay King on the aftermath: “…never, never dreamed of this happening…”
‘This’ being “this:”
- A gunman shot and killed at least 10 people, including several members of his family, on Tuesday afternoon in what officials said was the worst shooting in Alabama.
…
Witnesses of the shootings and their aftermath described a man with multiple weapons who engaged in heavy gunfire, leaving behind blood-soaked porches and bodies.
“It is truly one of the most horrific things that anyone in law enforcement can remember in Alabama,” said Col. J. Christopher Murphy, the director of the state’s Public Safety Department. “We’re still getting victims coming in.”
Robert Preachers, the coroner:
- Mr. Preachers said the man burned down the house of his mother, Lisa McLendon, in Kinston.
Officials found the woman’s body inside the house, The AP said.
“He started in his mother’s house,” Mr. Preachers said. “Then he went to Samson and he killed his granny and granddaddy and aunt and uncle. He cleaned his family out.”
The gunman, Michael McLendon, was reportedly armed with at least two assault rifles, one an AK-47, and a 38-caliber pistol.
He also shot and killed four dogs at his mother’s house.
And then continued onward, apparently killing random folks along the way — one at a Samson hardware store, another at a nearby gas station, two people on their porches — creating a real-life shooting/police-car chase across a small patch of south Alabama, finally ending up at a metal fabricator warehouse about 15 miles away, where after popping off about 30 rounds at police, shot and killed himself.
And Mayor King this morning on CNN: “Well, the whole community is still in shock. Like I said, we know, I personally know everyone that is involved, both the shooter and the victims. And that makes it more difficult to have to deal with.”
A most tragic and bizarre episode.
And a personal one, in an ancestral way.
I was born in Brundidge, Ala., about 35-40 miles northeast of Samson, and most of my still-living relatives still reside in what’s called the “wire-grass” section of southeast Alabama, tiny towns with names like Elba, New Brockton, Ozark, and the big city in the area, Dothan (from the Bible).
And although I actually grew up on the Florida panhandle — a small town on Choctawhatchee Bay named Shalimar — during so, so many visits to my relatives back in Alabama, the journey carried our family car right down West Main Street of Samson to a left turn on State Road 87 and north towards Ariton.
I haven’t been back to Alabama in more than 20 years, and certainly haven’t been down West Main Street in Samson in probably 40 — the town seemed caught in the 1940s, as I recollect, even when I passed through it in the 1960s, with old cars, old people and a lot of old, big southern homes with all the big porches and screens.
In fact, on a lot of those trips we stopped in Samson, to get soft drinks or whatnot, and a few times for me to get a haircut — after all these years I can’t recall why a freakin’ haircut was needed so badly, the clipping was done there.
Everyone is from somewhere.
Alabama for me is just where I’m from — I tell people, please, don’t hold that against me.
Now the people of Samson, where in reality everybody-knows-everybody, have to deal with an incident seemingly right out of Stephen King.
And add to the strange, this morning in Germany:
- German police say a 17-year-old gunman has been killed following a shooting spree that began at a school near Stuttgart and left 15 other people dead.
Police say nine students and three teachers at the Albertville technical high school in the town of Winnenden are among the dead.
A resident near the school and two others also were killed.
In this case, too, the gunman carried on a shooting/police-car chase, ending up near a car dealership (where two bystanders were killed), and shot by police.
Also this morning in Las Vegas:
- The unidentified man entered the hospital at 3100 St. Rose Parkway just before 1 a.m. threatening to commit suicide, Henderson police spokesman Keith Paul said.
Officers arrived within minutes of a nurse’s phone call, and patients and hospital staff were evacuated while police attempted to speak with the man, Paul said.
The man raised the handgun at officers, who then shot him.
The man was taken to another part of the hospital for treatment, but died a short time later, Paul said.
…
It is unclear how many people were inside the emergency room at the time of the incident and Paul was unsure how many officers were involved.
And another hospital shooting this morning, this one in Spain:
- A female doctor died and an ambulanceman was injured after a retired taxi driver who was unhappy about his treatment started shooting wildly in a Spanish clinic.
The 34-year-old doctor died after she was hit in the head and chest. She has not yet been named.
An ambulance driver was also shot but was in a stable condition.
…
Random shootings in public areas such as schools and hospitals, which are more common in countries such as the US, are almost unknown in Spain.
The Spanish healthcare service enjoys a generally good reputation.
And last weekend in of all places, the southern Caribbean:
- A shooting spree by a St Ann’s Hospital outpatient on Friday night in the Covigne Road, Diego Martin, area was thought to have claimed the life of one man identified as Toby Charles.
Not so. This man is now believed to have killed two people.
The alleged killer — during his spree — injured four other people who, up to press time last night, were listed as stable at the Port of Spain General Hospital.
While Googling “shootings,” I came up with another weird rampage from last month, this one near another long-time-ago childhood stomping ground in Florida, the resort town of Miramar Beach, just east of Destin — about 60-70 miles east of Pensacola on the Gulf coast.
- It began a little before 2:00 Thursday morning at these units of the Summer Lake Townhomes.
Walton County sheriff’s deputies arrived to find two people shot to death, 3 others critically injured.
Investigators say the suspect, 60-year-old Dannie Baker, left his townhouse, armed with a rifle, walked across the complex to the victims’ unit, and opened fire.
…
Neighbor Crystal Lynn says “he did come up to me one time and asked me if I was ready for the revolution to begin and if I had any immigrant in my house to get them out.”
The victims were foreign nationals who appear to have been working in the U.S. legally.
As John Lennon pointed out: “Happiness Is A Warm Gun.”
Indeed.