From Pine View Farm

Hercule Poirot would talk about the little grey cells. It’s all psychological. Isn’t it?

The other day, I met my brother for lunch down in Dover.

I got there early, so I checked out this bookstore. It was really neat. Huge, cheap, and no coffee shop.

And I came away with this book:

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before here, but I’m a mystery fan. That’s mystery, not suspense. My favorite kind of story is one that opens with the body on the parlor floor and ends with the Great Detective explaining his or her solution before the assembled suspects in said parlor.

I have read the Canon at least six times, bits of it more.

My favorite mystery writers are Rex Stout, the early Martha Grimes, David Frome, Edmund Crispin, the early Margery Allingham, Robert van Gulik, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Ellery Queen, and S. S. van Dine. There are others I enjoy, but they are the Best. (I outgrew Erle Stanley Gardner and Agatha Christie a long time ago).

I started A Dog about Town last night. It is written in the first person from the point of view of the dog.

So far, it’s fun.

In a few days, I know whether it’s a good mystery.

In the meantime, I’m keeping a close eye on the three dogs in this house.

I never did trust a one of them . . . .

The wingnuts think that the President is Tsar and the Executive Branch is his apparachik, beholden to carry out the wishes of the Tsar.

Somewhere, they have forgotten that Federal Officials swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, not an oath to obey the Tsar.

This oath binds them to uphold the Constitution even against the actions of the Tsar.

But, when one registers as a Bushie, one apparently signs an oath to betray that duty, to betray that oath to the Constitution of the United States of America.

Glenn Greenwald:

Brad Blakeman is a former Deputy Assistant to President Bush and is currently the CEO of Freedom’s Watch, the group formed last year at the American Enterprise Institute by some of the nation’s largest GOP donors (and Ari Fleisher), devoted to advocating the neoconservative agenda. On Wednesday night, Blakeman was on the Dan Abrams Show discussing the White House’s refusal to turn over to Congress FBI interviews with Bush and Cheney in the Plame investigation, based on a brand new form of executive privilege invented by Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Here’s how Blakeman justified Mukasey’s obstructionist actions:

Look, what you have is a very smart attorney general who’s trying to protect his client and that’s the president of the United States, an executive privilege.

That is about as warped a view of how our Government is supposed to work as one can imagine. The core attribute of the Justice Department is independence, not allegiance to the President as “client.” The President has his own lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office. The Attorney General is not and never was one of those lawyers. To the contrary, the Attorney General represents the people of the United States — if he has any “client,” that’s who it is — and is often required to take positions and actions adverse to the President. Few things could subvert — and have subverted — the American justice system more than thinking of the President as being the “client” of the Attorney General.

First, there is the failure to regulate the wrongdoers. Next the Current Federal Administration circles the wagons around the rich them. Gretchen Morgenstern in the New York Times:

Borrowers who are in trouble on their mortgages have seen their government move slowly — or not all — to help them. But banks and the executives who ran them are quickly deemed worthy of taxpayer bailouts.

On the ground, this translates into millions of troubled borrowers, left to work through their problems with understaffed, sometimes adversarial loan servicing companies. If they get nowhere, they lose their homes.

Taxpayers, meanwhile, are asked to stand by with money to inject into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants, should they need propping up if loan losses balloon.

The message in this disconnect couldn’t be clearer. Borrowers should shoulder the consequences of signing loan documents they didn’t understand, but with punishing terms that quickly made the loans unaffordable. But for executives and directors of the big companies who financed these loans, who grew wealthy while the getting was good, the taxpayer is coming to the rescue.

(snip)

So asking Main Street to bail out Wall Street leads to this inevitable question: Weren’t the financial folks the ones who helped create the mess we’re in?

Robert Reich suggests that, yeah, bailouts may be necessary, but that there ways in which the government can protect its interests and the interests of the polity:

(1) for the duration of the bailout, their top executives cannot receive total annual compensation higher than that received by the President of the United States, and

(2) the government gets five percent of their current valuation as shares of stock (roughly representing the benefit to their shareholders of the federal insurance) — so that if and when the entities become profitable again, taxpayers are compensated for the risk they’ve taken on.

unless one is willing to learn from ones experiences. Commonly, when persons have described someone as “experienced,” they mean that the person of whom they speak not only has experiences, but has learned from those experiences. Accepting that implication, it is safe to say that

• Candidate McCain has longevity.
• Senator Obama has experience.

Watch as TPM shows how Candidate McCain is learning from Senator Obama’s experience.

I have mentioned Richard Hofstadter before. Now comes the Guardian citing his work in a column:

There’s long been a strain of American politics that puts ignorance on a pedestal. The mid-20th-century political scientist Richard Hofstadter viewed it as a combination of anti-intellectualism and a deep-seated sense of paranoia. Sometimes that strain is subdued. Other times it roars to life. In contemporary America, the GOP has done a pretty good job of reinvigorating it.

A few days ago, Barack Obama suggested that it would be a good idea if more American students learned foreign languages. . . . In essence, all he said was it would be a good thing if more Americans could do what my Portuguese hosts did – answer questions in words not of their native tongue.

The response launched by anti-immigration groups and senior figures within the Republican party was nothing short of culturally catastrophic. Groups such as Americans for Legal Immigration declared he was saying native-born Americans should be forced to learn Spanish. On television, Rudy Giuliani seemed to suggest Obama’s words were simply designed to appeal to European anti-Americanism, a conspiratorial attempt to boost the Democrat’s already sky-high poll numbers on the global stage.

This is politics at its most stupid. And it reconfirms my sense that America is at a crossroads. Will the country embrace a politics of ignorance come November? Or will voters realise that if America is to regain its sense of purpose and prosperity it has to embrace smarter ideas, educate its people properly and engage with – instead of be afraid of – the world, peoples and cultures beyond its borders?

. . . and you still never reach the horizon.

I saw one of these yesterday going down the DuPont Highway in Kent County.

It looks sort of like one of those motorcycle tricycle thingees going backwards.

Wonder to whom I’ll be mailing my mortgage check next month:

Citigroup posted another loss and laid off 6,000 employees in the second quarter as it struggled with surging loan defaults, but the $2.5 billion shortfall was smaller than Wall Street anticipated.

The biggest U.S. banking company by assets said Friday that it lost the equivalent of 54 cents per share in the April-June period. In the same timeframe last year, the bank earned $6.23 billion, or $1.24 per share.

This is where I buy my groceries.

It’s a nice store in a nice neighborhood.

And I also patronize this store.

Also a nice store in a nice neighborhood.

Maybe it flew to the urn:

A 12-foot bronze race horse, one of a pair that adorned the now-demolished Garden State Park, disappeared from an overgrown lot sometime in the last week.

Officials don’t know how it happened.

The statue, which weighs more than a ton, was sliced from its base in an undeveloped part of the former racetrack off Route 70.

The bronze horse was valued at $500,000 — but authorities suspect it may have been stolen for its scrap value.

Just saw a Chevy Silverado ad where they act that 20 mpg highway (which is the government rating, so the reality is probably closer to 16) is some kind of big deal.

There is an initiative in San Francisco to honor the Current Federal Administration in a most fitting way.

It’s a AP story, so here’s the link.

H/T Karen for the heads up.

Addendum, Later That Same Evening:

ASZ has more.

Via Huffington Post.

There has been much furor in Left Blogistan over the recent New Yorker cover satirizing the wingnut lies about Senator Obama.

There has been less about the article about the Senator that was inside the magazine.

Now, I’m not planning to read the article, unless I find an old copy of the mag in the doctor’s waiting room three or four months from now. I don’t like the New Yorker, except for the cartoons.

I don’t like the typeface, I don’t like the layout, and I don’t appreciate the New York City egocentrism. Consequently, I will spend neither either my money at a newsstand nor my gasoline to go seek out a library.

Of course, the New Yorker is a city magazine–a city magazine that has earned a national readership because of the quality of its writing over the years and, to some extent, simply because it’s New York’s city magazine–but still a city magazine, and it can’t be criticized for being egocentric about its title city. Nevertheless, I don’t have to like that quality.

I’ll just wait for the next anthology of cartoons to come out.

So I very much enjoyed and appreciated listening to this interview with the author of the article about the Senator’s formative years in Chicago politics on Fresh Air; I recommend the interview to anyone who would like to learn more about the Senator:

Barack Obama has been portrayed as an outsider candidate — an idealist not mired in the political game. But Ryan Lizza says that a look at Obama’s political history in Chicago might offer a different view of the candidate. Lizza is the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, and has been tracking the Obama campaign.

(Aside: Oh, yeah, about the cover. I don’t like it. I think it misfired, but I do not think its publication constitutes a crisis for Senator Obama, for the campaign, or for Western Civilization, and I think the two day’s wonder of the uproar over the cover exemplifies the ability of persons to get really, really, really worked up (and if they have blogs or other public platforms, to get worked up in public) over not much of anything.)

Addendum, Later That Same Evening:

As I was mucking about with the grill, because it’s much too hot to turn on the stove inside the house, I remembered that I neglected to mention that the quotation that titled this post came from a short passage in the New Yorker article that was read towards the end of the interview.

Which leads me (Danger! Will Robinson!) to a few stray thoughts.

In contemporary American politics, to call someone a “politician” is to insult that person. We like to pretend that public political figures we favor are, somehow, not “politicians.”

This is, quite frankly, crap.

There are good people who are politicians. There are bad people who are politicians. There are even stupid and evil people who are politicians.

There are good people who are bad politicians and bad people who are good politicians and vicey versy all over the place.

When a policy we favor wins the day, we tend to refer to the process that led to the victory as “a process of negotiation and compromise”; when a position we do not favor wins the day, we refer the process as “backroom politics.”

Here’s the earth-shattering revelation. It’s the same damned process. Sometimes victory is carried by the forces of truth, justice, and the American Way; sometimes it’s carried by Republicans.

And sometimes politicians make short-term compromises for long-term gains. That’s why I said a while ago that Candidate McCain had probably been as consistent as a politician could be over a thirty year career (at least until he started blowing in the wind over the past three months, making a weather vane in a tornado look consistent) (I searched for the post and couldn’t find it).

We remember that James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, and Warren Harding were politicians. We forget that Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt were also politicians, and damned skillful ones.

Those of you who follow politics know that there has been pain and g-nashing of teeth amongst some of the correct persuasion (which is the left persuasion, not the right persuasion) about what some have interpreted as Senator Obama’s shifts in positions.

Anyone who has actually listened to what Senator Obama has said will realize that he hasn’t done any significant shifting, except for the F. I. S. A. thing (which I deplore, but, looking at the alternatives, I will still be supporting Senator Obama–because my vote will be reality-based, and the reality is that the Republican Party must be expunged if the Republic is to survive).

I do think that some of us over here in LeftLand have some legitimate differences with Senator Obama. That’s okay. I’ve never yet voted for a candidate with whom I agreed completely–there has been no such candidate.

I also think that some persons have projected their own positions Senator Obama and, when they have discovered that he is not they, have found themselves disappointed.

That is their problem. Not the Senator’s and certainly not mine.

Forget the bleating about Senator Obama’s “lack of experience.” That’s just a code word for “young.”

He’s got a lot of experience; he’s a smart, wily, skillful politician, who happens to be on the correct (that is, on the left, not the right) side.

He’s not perfect, but he’s smart, wily, skillful politician, and those who underestimate his political skills haven’t been paying attention.

I think that Karen pretty much summed it up here.

Lots of persons have addressed this issue, but Dana says it best:

Dictators can lock up people, provide them no trial and detain them indefinitely and now so can George Bush.

Bush once said it the job of the presidency would be a lot easier if he were a dictator. Locking up people and throwing away the key has now become very easy indeed.

Unprecedented attack on national health issue:

U.S. schools are being overwhelmed by growing food costs, and some are cutting back on meals for kids and “downgrading” menus, lawmakers are told Wednesday.

It will cost an additional $1.5 billion to prepare lunches this school year, according to an estimate from Katie Wilson, president-elect of the School Nutrition Association, who is testifying before the House Education and Labor Committee.
Wilson’s estimate is based on preliminary findings from a recent survey of school-nutrition directors that show the cost of school-meal preparation will rise 30 cents per meal per child per day — 5 billion lunches were served last year — to a national average of $2.88.

“As food costs continue to rise, we are challenged to do more with much less,” she said.

Via Brendan.

Whose programs change with the polls.

From Josh Marshall:

From today’s local rag:

At the E.F. Sullivan & Son scrap shop in Port Richmond, manager Rick Walton recently turned away a customer who wanted to sell a particular brass object:

A funeral urn.

The man said there were more where that came from.

“I said, ‘Yeah, but you have to dump the ashes,’ ” Walton said in an interview. “They’re stealing everything they can get their hands on.”

These days, it seems even the dead - or at least their containers - aren’t safe. Soaring metal prices have made it hard on the living, too.

On the post-industrial streets of Port Richmond, it can seem as if nothing made of metal stays put. Car batteries, cables, extension cords, gutters, manhole covers and even flagpoles have been stolen as thieves try to cash in. Building contractors say they’ve had aluminum windows and door frames taken right off their trucks.

And, in other news . . . .

If politicians put as much thought into governing as dogs do into deciding where to pee, the country wouldn’t have half these problems.

I get mail from Senator Carper:

Thank you for sharing your concerns with me regarding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. As you probably know, the measure passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 293-129 on June 20 and the Senate by a vote of 69-28 on July 9. The bill was then signed into law by the President on July 10.

While I regret that we did not see eye to eye on some provisions of this bipartisan compromise to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), I respect and value the views of the scores of people like you who urged me to oppose it, and I appreciate your willingness to share your heartfelt concerns with me. If you would allow me, I would like to take a few minutes to explain to you why I joined the majority of my colleagues in both the House and Senate in supporting this compromise whose principle architects were House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md), Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo).

As you may recall, FISA was created in 1978 to establish a process for obtaining a court order to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance in the United States. Over time, dramatic changes in telecommunications technology reduced the effectiveness of the law, causing our intelligence community to miss a significant amount of foreign intelligence that we should have been collecting in order to protect our country. Rather than asking the Congress to modify the law to restore its effectiveness and better balance the need to protect our country and the safety of our citizens with the need to preserve our civil liberties, the Bush administration essentially chose to ignore the law in the days following the attacks of 9-11.

Almost immediately after those attacks occurred, the Administration reached out to a number of America’s major telephone companies and asked them to help intercept communications between sources in our country and terrorist suspects located overseas without approval of the FISA court. When those companies questioned the legality of doing so, they received written directives from our government’s senior national security and law enforcement officials that their cooperation was vital, as well as lawful and constitutionally sound. As a result, most of the telephone companies who had been contacted agreed to help.

In December 2005, the New York Times reported on the existence of the National Security Agency’s “terrorist surveillance program.” Partly as a result of the public disclosure of the program, in January 2007, the program was placed under the supervision of the FISA court. After the
warrantless surveillance program was publicly disclosed at the end of 2005, many of the telephone companies that may have participated in the program were sued by civil liberties groups and other individuals who argue that the phone companies violated the privacy rights of millions of Americans by turning over private information to the federal government. It is estimated that close to 40 such lawsuits have been filed.

Because national security laws prohibit individuals and companies from revealing details related to secret national security programs, these telephone firms are not legally permitted to produce documentation showing that their participation in this surveillance program was authorized. Effectively, these companies are unable to fully defend themselves in court. In addition, the defendant phone companies are concerned that they will face costly financial liabilities if these lawsuits are successful. Finally, significant concerns have been raised about the chilling effect on lawful voluntary cooperation in the future on the part of U.S. companies in the fight against terrorism if these suits prove successful. I believe that those concerns are legitimate.

For the better part of the last year, we have debated in Congress and with the Administration about whether to allow these lawsuits to go forward. In the end, a majority of us in the Congress concluded that it was not fair to allow the companies, who agreed to cooperate after being reassured by senior law enforcement officials that their cooperation was both lawful and constitutionally sound, to be sued IF the following conditions are met. Under the terms of the final compromise FISA bill that has been adopted, a federal district court hearing a case against a phone company will decide whether the Attorney General’s certification attesting that the liability protection standard has been met and is supported by “substantial evidence.” In making that determination, the court will have the opportunity to examine the highly classified letters to the providers that indicated the President had authorized the activity and that it had been determined to be lawful. The plaintiffs and defendants will have the opportunity to file public briefs on legal issues and the court should include in any public order a description of the legal standards that govern the order. My legal counsel has advised me that most phone companies that participated in the warrantless wiretapping program after 9-11 will likely be able to obtain retroactive immunity under this compromise. Time will tell.

With that said, however, I believe that the issue of immunity has taken on a significance that goes beyond its actual importance. This is not to suggest that immunity is unimportant, but that a number of more critical aspects of this FISA bill seem to have been overlooked. In my view, those portions of the bill matter much more. This point was made
very clear in an editorial by the Washington Post on July 9, 2008, which I have included for your reference.

Rather than looking backward, at immunity, I feel that our real focus now should be on what this FISA legislation accomplishes going forward. I believe that this legislation comes very close to striking the right balance in providing our intelligence networks with the tools they need to protect our country without diminishing our civil liberties. The Administration has overreached on this front before. That is why the FISA legislation recently enacted is a significant improvement over
current law and will help ensure that neither this Administration - nor the next one - will overreach again.

Specifically, the new FISA law contains a number of improvements that strengthen civil liberties and will help prevent any future abuse of executive authority. First, the new law makes it crystal clear that FISA is the “exclusive” means to conduct surveillance, ensuring that neither this President nor our next President can go around the law. The inclusion of this provision is a major improvement over the old FISA law, since it will prevent any recurrence of the warrantless wiretapping program that has been the main concern of those who oppose retroactive immunity for phone companies.

Second, under the new FISA law, the special FISA court must approve all surveillance and targeting procedures involving domestic surveillance before any surveillance can actually begin, to ensure that they are consistent both with the Fourth Amendment and with the law. The new law requires an individualized, FISA court-approved warrant to conduct surveillance targeted at communications between Americans and those overseas. The new law expands existing FISA protections to also protect Americans abroad. These provisions mark a significant improvement over earlier versions of this legislation, which limited the FISA Court to
after-the-fact review of surveillance that was already ordered by the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence.

Third, the new law expressly prohibits “reverse targeting.” Reverse targeting occurs when the NSA uses the authority granted under FISA to intercept foreign communications without an individual warrant if the true purpose is to spy on a particular person in the United States. I supported Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and others’ efforts to make sure that a prohibition on reverse targeting was included in the final
version of the compromise FISA legislation.

Fourth, the new FISA legislation enhances oversight by Congress. The inspectors general of the Justice Department, the Department of Defense, and our intelligence agencies are required, under the new law, to conduct comprehensive reviews and issue reports that will provide the relevant congressional committees with the information that they will need to conduct needed oversight going forward.

Fifth, the new law permits emergency surveillance only if the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence make a determination that exigent circumstances exist because “without immediate implementation of an authorization, intelligence important to the national security of the United States may be lost or not timely acquired.”

Sixth and finally, the new FISA law establishes a shorter sunset of four and a half years-instead of six years, as was originally proposed. This will give Congress and the American people the opportunity to review how the new FISA law is working, and it will give us the opportunity to make any necessary changes within a few years.

For all of these reasons, which - to me at least - deserve greater focus than the retroactive immunity issue, I chose to support this legislation, although I realize that it is not perfect. Instead, in my view, it is the best bill that we can agree to at this time, and I believe that it reflects a reasonable middle ground between the genuine needs of our intelligence agencies and the legitimate privacy interests of every American citizen. This legislation is much more desirable than the alternative: a return to the obsolete provisions of the original, 1978 version of FISA that provided the Bush Administration the opportunity to conduct warrantless wiretapping in the first place. I believe that this compromise represents the best chance we have today to protect both our national security and our civil liberties.

Let me end with a pledge. I will work with my colleagues in the next Congress and with the next administration to make additional improvements to this legislation that our country and our citizens may need and deserve. As you know, many of the issues that come before us in Congress are relatively easy to address. This one has not been. In fact, it is among the most difficult ones with which we have had to grapple in my seven years in the Senate. While you and I may still not
fully agree on this course that a majority of us in the Congress have chosen, I want you to know that I have given this issue a great deal of time and study, and I have sought the opinions of people on all sides of this issue.

Thank you again for taking your own time to lend your voice to this important debate and for sharing your views with me as my colleagues and I have sought to determine what is the right thing to do and to come as close as we can to doing it.

With best personal regards, I am

Sincerely,

Tom Carper
United States Senator

I send mail to Senator Carper:

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:25:49 -0400, You wrote:

Because national security laws prohibit individuals and companies from revealing details related to secret national security programs, these telephone firms are not legally permitted to produce documentation showing that their participation in this surveillance program was authorized. Effectively, these companies are unable to fully defend
themselves in court. In addition, the defendant phone companies are concerned that they will face costly financial liabilities if these lawsuits are successful. Finally, significant concerns have been raised about the chilling effect on lawful voluntary cooperation in the future on the part of U.S. companies in the fight against terrorism if these suits prove successful. I believe that those concerns are legitimate.

One word.

Qwest.

They got it right.

Why couldn’t any one else?

This is not the kind of reasoning for which the Founders fought the Revolutionary War.

I cannot say you have lost my vote, because any Democrat is better than every Republican.

But you have betrayed the American Revolution.

God have mercy on your soul.

It’s 2008, not 1978. There is no Czechoslovakia.

Then, again, Candidate McHack, it’s clear you are still stuck in 1968, fighting yesterday’s war today.

All joking aside, there could have been no “victory” in Viet Nam, because we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I’m not going to do your homework for you–read the histories.

There can be no “victory” in Iraq, because we shouldn’t have gone there in the first place.

And, listen carefully, never does McHack in his paeans to more death for a lost cause define “victory,” except, perhaps–and this is reaching–as absence of defeat.

But, quite frankly, anyone who has ever played a game knows that not losing is not the same as winning.

And this is not a game.

People are dying every day because of Republican fantasies that not obviously losing is the same as winning.

People are dying every day because of Republican fantasies.

People are dying.

Real people.

Real dead.

I have sat in a room with a real man–a real man, unlike, oh, never mind–who had died, died of natural causes after a long full run, but still, well, was dead.

He died rich and full of days.

His life was not cut short,

not cut short for lies.

How long are you going to tolerate the lies, the lies that lead to the death of innocents?

Another great day for the Dow:

-92.65 -0.84%

Note: The link is a dynamic link. It will change tomorrow.

Even if it’s up tomorrow, go short. It’s going to be trending down for a long time.

But some things are going up. But that’s okay. As Bonddad points out, it’s not “core inflation.” Core inflation just ignores food and energy and other stuff you have to pay for every day. So it matters more that what the Bushies have done to your paycheck.

Doesn’t it?

Making the poor poorer and the middle class poor. It’s a Bushie thing.

Bushies are such nice people:

From the Guardian, in a review of this book:

. . . what Mayer’s book makes clear is that waterboarding was only a small part of the CIA’s torture programme. In fact, even detainees that were subjected to waterboarding did not think it was the worst technique they had to endure. That was reserved for stress positions. These were often employed differently but included being shackled to the ceiling of their cells, forcing all the weight of their body onto their shoulders as they were suspended upright for eight hours. One detainee was locked in a box half his size for hours at a time. Most of them were deprived of sleep and bombarded with loud music and noises for 24 hours.

(snip)

But that was senator McCain. Now he is running for president and things are a little different. In the wake of the reported success of the field manual in Iraq and Hayden’s admission, several US senators attempted to force the CIA to follow the same standard as the military and only use techniques in the field manual. Several senators, that is, except John McCain. Even while reiterating his objections to waterboarding, he voted against the bill that narrowly passed but did not survive the president’s veto.

If you had been living on another planet for the last six years you might be able to make a convincing case that the CIA needs to have more flexibility than the military during interrogations. But Jane Mayer has just told us again what that flexibility actually means: torture. Of course McCain knows this too. Unfortunately he has more important things to do, like running for president.

Torture is their pornography.

Just up the road a piece, the United States of America at its best:

Intently, they toiled to eradicate ugly words left in Magic Marker on the van used by Willie James Bailey to execute his house-cleaning and hauling business.

It was vandalized, along with their mother’s vehicle, outside of their home on the 200 block of Marshall Avenue in Collingdale early Saturday morning.

“I told them, ‘Don’t be afraid’ and to forgive them,” Irene Bailey said Monday night. “My oldest daughter was afraid and said, ‘We gotta’ move.” I said, ‘No, you don’t allow people to chase you out of your home.’”

All the same, Bailey is mystified by the hateful attack on her family, which is African-American.

In addition to scribbling vulgarities on both sides of her husband’s white van, they slashed all four tires. Then, they apparently used a key to scratch both sides of her sea-green van, etching a racial slur on her driver’s side door.

From John Cole.

No, I’m not mixing laptops with vodka. It doesn’t taste good and it ruins the vodka. Plus, all those sparks and shorts are distracting.

I upgraded the laptop to Slackware 12.1.

I copied all my home files (sort of the Linux equivalent of the Windows “C:\Documents and Settings\Username” directory) and crucial configuration files (rc.local, rc.firewall, and samba.conf) over the network to my file server, blew everything on the laptop away and started from scratch.

(Yeah, I know, the file names can sound complicated. But remember that Windows was complicated to you until you learned how to use it. In Linux, there is no registry–all the configuration is done through text files. It’s a different vocabulary, for sure, but it’s a damned sight harder to break and a lot easier to fix. There is nothing in the Linux world that’s anywhere as complicated a mishmash of misbegotten junk as the Windows registry.)

Everything was going great until about 2 p. m., when I rebooted and LILO turned into just a series of 99’s. The computer wouldn’t boot. I think what happened is that, when I installed Gnome Slackbuild over the web, it trashed my LILO.

Since I don’t use the Gnome desktop, don’t like the Gnome desktop, and wanted Gnome only for some of it’s libraries, when I started over at 2:01 p. m., I decided to leave Gnome off. Whatever program I try that needs Gnome libraries, I will either get the libraries separately or find another program that does the same thing using KDE libraries.

Pat did his usual fine job with Slack 12.1. What anyone would use Ubuntu anything else when he or she could use the Distro of Iron puzzles me.

As a result or playing computer all day, I didn’t have much net surfing time.

So I’ll just catch up on everything tomorrow at Drinking Liberally, Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia, 6 p. m.

Remember, Tangier came in fourth in the Philadelphia Inquirer hamburger survey a couple of years ago. That’s fourth out of a whole lot of restaurants.

But, frankly, I never order the hamburgers. They’re too big for me.

Hedge Funds on the move, manipulating the markets for personal gain:

Three years ago, Deep Capture reporter and Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne gave a famous conference call that he titled, “The Miscreant’s Ball.” His thesis was simple: Some short-selling hedge funds collude to destroy public companies by spreading misinformation, orchestrating government witch hunts, filing bogus class-action lawsuits, and, most egregiously, selling billions of dollars worth of phantom stock.

(snip)

But Jim Cramer is talking. No doubt to distance himself from the growing scandal, he went on CNBC today and said precisely what Patrick Byrne said three years ago. Noting that short-sellers are colluding to take down Lehman, he said the problem is “the need to be able to get a borrow and see if you can find stock….. no one is even calling to see if they can get a borrow. [In other words, hedge funds are selling stock they don’t have — phantom stock]. It’s kind of like, well listen, let’s just knock it down. It’s very similar to what Joe Kennedy would have done in 1929 [leading to Black Monday and the Great Depression] which is get a couple of cronies together and let’s take it down…”

Whaddya bet these folks vote Republican? Huh? Because Republicans worship wealth above wight or wrong.

Originally found in the comments to this Market Watch story.

Oh, yeah, and then there’s this comment to this Market Watch story. It’s so much on target that I’m quoting it in its entirety. It’s on page six of the comments to the original story:

We need to place the blame squarely where it lies - Republicans.

Ever since Ronald Reagan, the Republicans have repeated the mantra of laissez-faire capitalism and “greed is good”. There is a big difference between creating a stable business environment, and providing the type of corporate welfare that the Republicans have forced on our society.

What we need is for the Republican party and all its members to ADMIT THEY ARE WRONG, and give up their lies.

America needs to get back to work again. Fire the investment bankers, and let’s create a two-tiered tax system that forces all US corporations to bring their factories back to the US immediately, to create solid jobs and products HERE in the US.

I’ve said for months now that America has gangrene in a limb, and we need to cut off that limb (the housing market), to save the rest of the body (the dollar and our financial system). Bernanke will go down as the biggest fool if he tries to save the housing market, because you cant force people to buy houses at over-inflated prices!

I live in LA and can tell you that the housing market here has only begun to deteriorate. Houses in unsafe neighborhoods are still being put on the market for $500K, the houses in nice areas are still one million plus - the only buyers left are the complete fools.

We need to let housing plummet quickly, with no government intervention, let people who made bad decisions lose their houses, and then when the prices are back down to reasonable amounts, there will be buyers to step in, and a new financial community, based on sound principles of banking, will emerge.

In the meantime, the only thing an investor can do is to short stocks, buy gold, and put your money in foreign currencies, primarily the Euro.

The biggest question is whether the US can emerge from the ashes. I doubt it since our country is still so fractured between race and socio-economic factors. Americans dont really rally around the flag anymore, they prefer to fight for the last remaining scraps at the table, rather than work together to make a new meal.

Also posted, in slightly edited form, at Kos.