Seeing as how Missouri is a potential battleground state, why the hell is McCain outspending Obama $224,696 to $115,054?
Obama has more than twice as much cash on hand, so it makes one wonder what the strategy here is.
Year: 2008
US-EU private data sharing agreement at hand: report – Yahoo! News
Just lovely:
The United States and European Union are close to an agreement to share private data of their citizens, including credit card information, travel history and internet browsing information, The New York Times said Saturday.
6 Months to go, and Bush is still doing his level best to leave as much of a mess behind as possible.
Polish MP Says Missile Defense Deal Basically Done
Yep, with 6½ months to go in the Bush regime, it appears that Poland may have completed an agreement to place a US ABM system in their country.
As I’ve said before, it’s diplomatically disastrous and it’s poorly located to deal with the stated threat, Iran.
Bush and His Evil Minions™ want the missile site there because they want a hostile and threating Russia, because they feel that it benefits them politically.
The Onion, September 27, 2000
Deleveraging: Defined as Getting Out of Debt Before Creditors Realize that You Are Broke
The major banks are deleveraging, reducing their debt to asset ratio.
They are worried that in the event or a run, they could go into Bear Stearns style meltdown, and that if Congress of the SEC start increasing margin requirements, that they will be caught flat-footed.
Additionally, the leverage that they retain is being moved to longer term loans, which insulates them from a panic, at the cost of higher interest rates.
We still have a way to go down as this all unwinds, but one consequence will be higher interest rates, as the availability of money decreases, and supply and demand drives the price higher.
Peshawar, Pakistan Under Islamist Militant Threat
So, as a result of the backlash starting from Jimmy Carter buying a civil war in Afghanistan in the 1970s, we now have a city of more than 3 million in Pakistan that is at real risk of a military takeover.
In Pakistan, we have a nuclear armed failing state. Delightful.
You Know That Dobson Is Losing It When His Fellow Winger Evangelicals Call Him Out
Peter Wehner, a man who has been at the forefront of putting religion in the public sphere, just called out James Dobson as an ignorant twit regarding his recent rants regarding Barack Obama.
It appears that Dobson’s main beef is the phrase used by Barack Obama in a speech, “And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s?”
His motivation for his rant is largely because he is offended by being compared to Sharpton.
Still, I get the sense that, now that they see the Republican party heading into some very bad years, the Republican party Washington, DC establishment wants to start slapping down the most ignorant and arrogant members of the Christo-fascist community, particularly Mr. Dobson.
Birth of a Super Villain
Click picture for original
Your Late Nite Zimbabwe Update
Well, Officials: Mugabe has won his phony election, and has been sworn in.
It also that Tsvangirai has hardened his stance a bit, saying that there will be no unity government with the MDC as a junior partner.
Bush is calling for more sanctions, but they are not enough. If Bush were to threaten sanctions against banks with subsidiaries doing business in Zimbabwe, the cash that the ZANU-PF uses to reward loyalists, and Mugabe would be out in a week.
Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu has declared that the “international community has the right now to override the sovereignty argument of the country.”
As a first step, he would shut down commerical air transport from Zimbabwe, which would mean that, “Mugabe and his sidekicks would not be able to — as they are now — escape the rigors of their own policies.”
Old Pinko’s Says
Or more accurately, to what Old Pinko links to on Tim Russert.
I know nothing of the man as a person, but as a journalist, some of the reviews are out from some people in the know, and they are not pretty.
I’m sure that Olbermann will take the opportunity to make them “Worst Persons in the World”.
In a related nowt, it also appears that Olbermann will have a special comment tomorrow, where he promises to address (that means alibi) his disgraceful behavior excusing Obama’s sellout on Telco Immunity.
I’ll have a review of it tomorrow night.
Charlie Went to a Cub Scout Meeting Today
He’s interested.
I’m conflicted. I last donned a uniform related to the Boy Scouts of America in 1975, and I won’t do so again as a scout master or an assistant, given their anti-Gay bigotry.
As to his participation, I keeping my own council for right now.
A400M Rollout Video
Not too much information, just some aircraft pr0n.
Dick Cheney Tried to Sabotage DPRK Nuke Deal
The usual suspects amongst the Neocons, Pearle, et al, are in a rage over this.
God is Beyond Our Comprehension, So Many Use Him to Justify Hate
So at best, we only see bits and pieces of the totality that is called in Kabbalistic thought the Ein Sof, and what see reflects far more on us than it does on the nature of the divine.
For conservative Anglicans, it appears that when they look for God, all they find is hate, because that is all that they look for:
Conservative evangelicals representing half of the world’s Anglicans launched a new global church yesterday, challenging the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury and vowing to rescue people from the forces of “militant secularism and pluralism” created by a “spiritual decline” in developing economies.
The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, Foca, will sever ties with the main churches in the US and Canada, whose leaders they accuse of betraying biblical teaching. Foca architects will tomorrow go to the conservative evangelical church of All Souls, in central London, to discuss global Anglicanism and English orthodoxy.
Hundreds of disgruntled clergy, representing many Church of England parishes, will be in the audience and the speakers will include the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, and the Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Luke Orombi.
So much training in theology, and all they can think to do is to search scriptures for reasons to hate.
Retired Anglican Bishop John Shelby Spong asks more generally, “Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?”
The answer is, “yes”, and for these people, this is all that religion is for them.
Manhattan Office Rents Fall
If commercial real estate is falling in Manhattan, it’s falling everywhere.
In this case, it appears that subleases are a large part of the drop.
John McCain, Tax Deadbeat
Cindy McCain owns a condo in San Diego County in which an elderly aunt of hers lived, and she has neglected to pay property taxes on the property for the past 4 years.
When they were finally contacted by Newsweek on the matter, they claimed to have made the payments in the past few days.
One wonders how screwed up Mrs. McCain’s financial empire is, if they cannot manage to pay property taxes for 4 years.
Sy Hersh: Bush and His Evil Minions&trade Escalating Covert Ops In Iran. Goal: Create Casus Belli
Seeing as some in the administration *cough* Dick Cheney *cough* they see this as a win, win, I find the idea that they are funding military and terrorist actions in Iran to be credible.
My guess would be is that if an American special ops soldier were captured by Iran, they would consider it to be a lucky break for them, because it would allow them to strike.
It reinforces their view that American military might is the only way to conduct foreign policy, and they believe that it would benefit Republicans in November.
Keith Olberman Gets Owned by Glenn Greenwald and John Dean
Glenn Greenwald savaged Keith Olbermann because he is endorsing Obama’s sellout as clever politics, when earlier he had one of his vaunted “special comments” denounced telco immunity as textbook Fascism.
Olbermann promptly went on Kos, and called Glenn Greenwald names, and asserted that John Dean said that a President Obama could prosecute the telcos criminally.
There are two problems with this assertion:
- Nothing prevents a Bush pardon on this, and given the language Bush is using on the civil immunity, such a pardon is almost certain.
- John Dean did not say that a President Obama could president the telcos criminally. I saw the interview. What he said was that the had not yet seen anything that would prevent this in the bill.
I said that when I read the bill, and talked to the folks at the ACLU who had been following it, that it was not clear. I raised it when appearing on Countdown with the hope that someone might figure it out. But that is the nature of this badly drafted bill that it is not clear what it does and does not do, and the drafters are not saying.
But even if the bill is unclear there is no question the Bush Administration is not going to do anything to the telecoms, so the question is whether a future DOJ could — and here there is case law protecting the telecoms. But there may be language buried in the bill that protects them as well but it can only be found by reading the bill with a half dozen other laws which I have not yet done.
I made no declarative statements rather I only raised questions that jumped at me when reading the 114 page monster.
(emphasis mine)
For Keith Olbermann to laud Obama’s decision to sell out, and to suggest that Dean supports this action, when on his own show, Dean called telco immunity a, “grave assault on the Constitution”.
It’s not OK when Bush does it, and it’s not OK when Obama goes along with, Mr. Olbermann.
USAF May Have Improperly Lobbied Congress on BRAC
It appears that they lobbied Senators Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Daniel Inouye (D-HI) to insert language allowing the services to veto joint bases decisions made by the commission.
Once again, it looks like the USAF’s real core competency is gaming the federal budget process.
According to the article, it looks like the USAF then used this language to blackmail the other services at joint bases more control and more of the budget.
Where Can I Get Some for My Car?
A company called Inframat was showing a series of coatings the Eurosatory show that are supposed to greatly reduce the IR signature of objects. So it could be used to hide a tank:
More accurately, it could be used to hide a second tank:
The company also makes IR suppressive fibers that can be used in uniforms and cammo netting, and claims to have an anti radar coating in development that gets you -15 dB to – 25 dB signature reduction at 8.8 – 10.5 GHz. It’s not full stealth, but it would make ECM much more effective.