More accurately, it’s something very similar to diesel fuel produced by genetically altered microbes.
Month: June 2008
AQ Khan Network May Have Sold Miniaturized Warhead Designs
These appear to be the crown jewels of Pakistani nukes, with warheads small enough to fit on missiles.
Profoundly disturbing, and according to the story above, it’s freaking out the Pakistanis too.
Bear Stearns Hedge Fund Managers Face Imminent Arrest
I am so totally not surprised by this development. This sort of lying and deception is endemic in Wall Street.
No FOIA on White House Email Coverup
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has ruled that the White House email system is not subject to the Freedom Of Information Act, and so ruled against CREW.
There is still another suit alleging that the WH is not taking reasonable steps to preserve electronic records.
Iraqis Choosing Go Slow on Status of Forces Agreement
Yet another sign that everyone is treating Bush as a lame duck.
Truth be told, it’s also because Bush and His Evil Minions™ want an agreement that can only be described as a colonial relationship, where Iraq has little or none of the authority that would ordinarily be ascribed to a nation state.
11 Going on 16
My daughter just turned 11 today….Not dating yet….thank God.
Her birth was fairly easy….for me….For Sharon*, it was 14 hours of back labor followed by forceps delivery…
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Gore Formally Endorses Obama
Not a surprise, but I’m betting against his being the VP choice.
He’s done that, and he’s got a bloody Nobel prize now.
Loser of the Day: Gheorghe Dobrescu
He lost the election for mayor of a small village in Romania, to Neculai Ivascu, who just died, so he lost to a dead man.
Of course, Neculai Ivascu, being dead, couldn’t really be called a winner either.
Nunn of the Above
Open left has the following VP short list of Obama, and I thought that I would put my 2 cents in:
- Evan Bayh (Sen-IN)
- DLC Squish.
- Joe Biden (Sen-DE)
- Only if McCain chooses Joe Biden.
- Wes Clark (Gen-AR)
- Hillary Clinton (Sen-NY)
- Tom Daschle (Sen-SD)
- Sorry, but he screams out milquetoast.
- Chris Dodd (Sen-CT)
- Recent revalations about his house loans rule him out.
- James Jones (Gen-MO)
- Tim Kaine (Gov-VA)
- John Kerry (Sen-MA)
- No. He’s already lost once.
- Patty Murray (Sen-WA)
- Bill Nelson (Sen-FL)
- Sam Nunn (Sen-GA)
- If he gets the nod, we will all know that a bunch of progressives in the party got completely taken in by him. In addition to being homophobic, he’s sat on so many corporate boards lately that he looks like a McCain lobbyist.
- Jack Reed (Sen-RI)
- Kathleen Sebelius (Gov-KS)
- Mark Warner (Gov-VA)
- Jim Webb (Sen-VA)
We’ll see, but if it’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” Nunn, it’s not a good move.
6 Years Late: Bush Goes After Osama bin Forgotten
Gee, Bush said that bin Laden was irrelevant years ago.
So now he pulls out all the stops….go figure.
Shoot Me, I Agree With Canuck Flying Monkey Right Winger David Frum
David Frum, writing in The New Republic, in yet another example of how that magazine has fallen, actually writes something that I wholeheartedly support, though for very different reasons:
I have my own personal nomination for vice president for McCain. It’s Rudy Giuliani, precisely because he shares the vision of a practical, reforming, war-winning Republican Party that inspires John McCain, plus the stronger-than-usual grounds for hoping that he might be the rare candidate who can make a difference in an essential state–in this case, New Jersey.
Simply put, it’s been way too long since I’ve had the opportunity to use the phrase, “Clown Show”, but making a your vice-presidential running mate the man who:
- Chose a police commissioner who was mobbed up.
- Who recommended said mobbed up police commissioner to be head of homeland security.
- Who broke up with his wife at a press conference on mothers day
- Whose first wife was his cousin
- Bailed on the Iraq study group so he could get fat speaker fees.
- Lobbyied for unsavory clients, including Saudi Arabia, Tobacco, and Coal.
Would give me plenty of opportunity.
Of course, I can’t hope to own him the way that Joe Biden did when he said that when Rudy talks, “there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.”
That one is one of the classics of the ages, up there with George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill.
Agreed
The folks at The Talent Show note that the right wing slime machine is gearing up to go after Michelle Obama.
They suggest that that be our response:
I wholeheartedly agree.
Full story on stealing dope for her fix is here.
US Gulags in Afghanistan Worse Than Gitmo
I want my country back.
Not Enough Bullets
CEO pay higher, even though profits are down, or in some cases, losses.
No accountability. Gotta love Bush style crony capitalism™.
Economics Update
The Empire State Manufacturing Index droppeed 5 points, to -8.7 (0 is neutral), indicating further weakness.
Oil is down for the day by a quarter, but it hit a new record of $139.89/bbl before settling, and retail gasoline hit another record, now having hit a record on something like 25 days of going back a month.
It’s not surprising that the dollar was down today, though I’m not sure if this drove oil, or oil drove this.
In banking, we have Barclays looking at selling shares to raise capital to cover losses in the US mortage market, and Lehman had some sort of hush-hush weekend meeting, which might indicate some problems, though it’s reassuring that they reduced their mortgage holdings by 20%, which indicates a bit of common sense.
Mugabe Makes it Official in Zimbabwe: He Will Not Abide by Election Results
He’s saying that he won’t give up power for a mere “x” on a ballot.
Nice to know that he’s frank.
Another Impact of the Housing Crash
At Calculated Risk, they note that the housing bust will reduce geographic mobility, because people owe more than they can sell their homes for.
The costs of this to the economy are only just beginning to be calculated.
Guantánamo Defense Attorneys to Challenge Tribunals in Federal Court
As a result of the Supreme Court decision.
At the very least, this should move the trials past the election season. Bush and His Evil Minions™ clearly timed the arraignments to give the maximum electoral effect for the trials.
It’s now likely that we won’t see any verdicts until the Avignon President is out of office now.
This is a good thing
Econ 101: Free Trade Does Not Necessarily Bring Lower Prices
Dani Rodrik has a good analysis:
Advocates of globalization love to argue that free trade lowers prices, and the argument seems sensible enough. Think of all the cheap goods from China that we can buy at Wal-Mart. But anyone who understands comparative advantage knows that free trade affects relative prices, not the price level (the latter being the province of macro and monetary factors). When a country opens up to trade (or liberalizes its trade), it is the relative price of imports that comes down; by necessity, the relative prices of its exports must go up! Consumers are better off to the extent that their consumption basket is weighted towards importables, but we cannot always rely on this to be the case.
Consider your typical Argentinian for example, who consumes a lot of wheat and beef. Since these are export products for Argentina, free trade implies a rise in the relative price of the Argentine consumption basket. (The gains from trade are still there, of course, but they derive from the usual allocative efficiency improvements, not from lower prices across the board.) And in the U.S., the Wal-Mart effect has to be qualified to take into account the fact that the relative price of the goods that the U.S. exports (including for example agricultural commodities) is higher than it would have been absent trade. Similarly, when the U.S. gets better market access abroad for its agricultural exports (a key demand under the Doha round), you can be sure that this will raise domestic prices for these goods, not lower them.
Highly recommended.
Not Getting it in the EU
Looking at this report on the responses to the failure of the Irish referendum on the new EU treaty, it’s clear that the many of the movers and shakers simply don’t get what their problem is.
I am generally not a big fan of the referendum as a process, but it is a valid process, and the degree that the Eurocrats are claiming that it is somehow illegitimate, they are reinforcing every negative stereotype about them.
The problem is quite simple, and has 3 parts:
- The new constitution is too damn complex. At 250 pages, no one understands all of its sections, and so this breeds distrust.
- The response to the failure of the last constitution, where France and the Netherlands had referenda that failed was to eliminate referenda, which further breeds distrust in the process.
- Among the Eurocrats, there seems to be the idea that the decision making structures of the EU must be insulated from politics, which means that they are insulated from democracy, which further breeds distrust.
Simply put, in order to update the EU governance structures such that they will win the support of the public, or at least the Irish public, since any change in Ireland mandates a referenda, these structures must be seen as less opaque and more democratic.