‘A Return to These Truths’

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.

– President Barack Obama

Source: Yahoo

 

The bill for the Bush administration

President Bush inherited a peaceful, prosperous America. As he exits, Salon consults experts in seven fields to try to assess the devastation.

How much poorer are we going to get before we start getting richer again? Here are some (scary, morbid, gruesome) clues.

Expected shortfall of gross domestic product below normal growth path in 2009: $900 billion

Decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average from its decade high to its value at the close of business, Jan. 7, 2009: 5,394.83, or 38.1 percent

Number of manufacturing jobs lost since 2000: 3.78 million

Increase in number of unemployed workers from 2001 to 2008: 4 million, a jump of 2.7 percent in the unemployment rate

Real median household income according to the 2000 census, adjusted for inflation: $51,804

Real median household income as of August 2007: $50,233

Of course, the government didn’t sit idly by while our financial future was disappearing down the drain. Instead, the feds have pumped in hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, hoping to juice lending and public spending.

Cost of finance industry bailout: $350 billion, with another $350 pending congressional approval

Cost of auto industry bailout: $17.4 billion, so far

And even though there’s widespread agreement among economists that the government needs to be spending a large sum of money on an economic stimulus package, it still won’t look pretty on the public balance sheet.

National debt: $10.6 trillion

Amount of that debt owned by China: At least $800 billion

Source: salon.com

 

I have confidence that Prop 8 will be repealed

I have confidence that, in no short order, Prop 8 will be repealed, and the gay marriage debate will look as absurd as the miscegenation debates of the 20th century do now. I have confidence this will happen not because it is merely right, or because the electorate will suddenly love gayness, but because opposition to gay marriage has no logical foundation in a civil society that is premised on equality.

John Hodgman

 

Man who set up alternate email for White House dies in plane crash

From at-Largely (Larisa Alexandrovna):

“Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all “known” Karl Rove accounts.

In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened.”

Graham writes: “Unfortunately, he won’t get to talk. He died in a plane crash yesterday.”

UPDATE: A curious press release: “Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash: Non-Profit Demands Full Federal Investigation” (Thanks, Adam!)

(Via Why, That’s Delightful)

Source: Boing Boing

 

Any questions?

 

Charles Platt on life in prison

Forced by the feds to spare a life, the Texas criminal justice system did the next-best thing: It sentenced Son to forty years before he can be eligible for parole. He now spends his days providing unpaid labor, sewing underwear for a garment manufacturer that has contracted with the prison system. Forget about third-world sweatshops; some of the most lucrative ones are staffed by felons here in America.

Source: Boing Boing

 

Send your old shoes to Dubya’s Liberry

Got an old pair of shoes lying around, waiting to be used in a ritual gesture of disrespect? Send ‘em to the GW Bush liberry so they can put them on the My Pet Goat shelf.

George W. Bush Presidential Library
c/o SMU
6425 Boaz Lane
Dallas TX 75205

Old Shoes

(via Making Light

Source: Boing Boing

 

You wouldn’t buy our shitty cars…

Source: Here

 

The Worst Is Yet To Come: Anonymous Banker Weighs In On The Coming Credit Card Debacle - Executive Suite Blog - NYTimes.com

A few weeks ago, I published an e-mail message sent to me from an executive who works in the banking industry — and had become disgusted by what he sees all around him. This weekend, that same banker sent me another e-mail message, which he has also agree to let me publish. It’s another wake-up call. Too bad nobody is listening.

Source: New York Times

 

Bailout costs more than Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA’s lifetime budget — *combined*!

Barry Ritholtz sez,

In doing the research for the “Bailout Nation” book, I needed a way to put the dollar amounts into proper historical perspective.

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars.

People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Crunching the inflation adjusted numbers, we find the bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

Source: Boing Boing

 

Poor George

 

UK local governments use anti-terror spying powers to catch litterbugs and people who put out trash early

Half of the local councils in Britain are using anti-terror laws to plant secret cameras and enlist snitches in order to catch people who put out their trash-cans too early.
Back when Britain was ushering in its dramatic new Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, those of us who questioned whether it was a good idea to take all reins off the power to spy on people was a good idea were called paranoid kooks. Now we come to find that RIPA is the first tool that local governments turn to when they need to catch someone whose dog has crapped on the pavement, or to catch paperboys who dump their advertising circulars rather than deliver them, or to catch litterers. These are the grave crimes that justify warrantless spying and turning neighbour against neighbour.

Mark Wallace, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘It is crazy that so many councils are using anti-terror legislation to spy on their residents. It must cost a huge amount for all these concealed cameras, just to give a few people relatively low-level fines.’

Other local authorities which gave details of how they used RIPA included Lewes District Council in East Sussex.

It admitted that the Act was used to gain evidence on residents who persistently left rubbish out at the wrong time.

South Bedfordshire council also admitted going through phone bills inside rubbish bags to identify who had left them outside.

Officers also electronically tagged certain types of rubbish to find out if they had been dumped illegally.

Wycombe District council in Buckinghamshire put an electronic tag on rubbish left outside a shop to see if it was taken.

Source: Boing Boing

 

The White House

 

If McCain Had It to Do Over Again

 

Election: Is This the Beginning of America’s “Fourth Republic”?

Snip from a Salon opinion piece by Michael Lind, which argues that Obama’s victory marks “the beginning of a new era in American history,” and that such eras are sparked by technological change.

[W]hat causes these cycles of reform and backlash in American politics? I believe they are linked indirectly to stages of technological and economic development. Lincoln’s Second American Republic marked a transition from an agrarian economy to one based on the technologies of the first industrial revolution — coal-fired steam engines and railroads. Roosevelt’s Third American Republic was built with the tools of the second industrial revolution — electricity and internal combustion engines. It remains to be seen what energy sources — nuclear? Solar? Clean coal? — and what technologies — nanotechnology? Photonics? Biotech– will be the basis of the next American economy. (Note: I’m talking about the material, real-world manufacturing and utility economy, not the illusory “information economy” beloved of globalization enthusiasts in the 1990s, who pretended that deindustrialization by outsourcing was a higher state of industrialism.)

Naturally, the Americans alive during the founding of new American republics have other issues on their minds. The Civil War was fought over slavery, not steam engines, and the New Deal, for all of FDR’s commitment to nationwide electrical power fed by hydroelectric dam projects, was animated by a vision of social justice. The broad outlines of technological and economic change merely provide the frame for the picture; the details depend on the groups that emerge victorious in political battles.

That is why it is too early to predict the outline of the Fourth American Republic. Its shape depends on the outcomes of the debates and struggles of the next generation. But it is possible to speculate about its life span. If the pattern of history holds, the Fourth Republic of the United States will last for roughly 72 years, from 2004 (or, if you like, 2008) to 2076. And if the pattern of the past holds, we will see a period of Hamiltonian centralization and reform between now and 2040, followed by an approximately 36-year long Jeffersonian backlash motivated by ideals of libertarianism and decentralization.

Source: Boing Boing

 

Collection: Election night homepages

I ran a script on a half-hour interval that screengrabbed the homepages of several major news websites, starting at 3pm Pacific, running until 10pm Pacific. These are the results, grouped by time and by source. This was all completely automated, please blame any errors on our robot overlords.

Source: Election night homepages

 

Election maps based on population

Mark Newman’s, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan election maps based on population via Waxy. I suspect in 4 years we’ll see these on all the networks doing “live morphs” from geographic view to population view on a big touchscreen with a hologram operating it…

Most of us are, by now, familiar with the maps the TV channels and web sites use to show the results of the presidential election:

The states are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate, John McCain, or the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, respectively. Looking at this map it gives the impression that the Republicans won the election handily, since there is rather more red on the map than there is blue. In fact, however, the reverse is true – the Democrats won by a substantial margin. The explanation for this apparent paradox, as pointed out by many people, is that the map fails to take account of the population distribution. It fails to allow for the fact that the population of the red states is on average significantly lower than that of the blue ones. The blue may be small in area, but they represent a large number of voters, which is what matters in an election.

We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground. On such a map, for example, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.

Here are the 2008 presidential election results on a population cartogram of this type…

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Source: MAKE: Blog

 

Sarah Palin, proud socialist

The best part of Hendrik Hertzberg’s excellent New Yorker commentary about McCain and Palin’s failed attempt to convince people that Obama is a socialist is the final paragraph containing this boast from Gov. Sarah Palin:

The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

Like, Socialism

Source: Boing Boing

 

Palin pipeline terms curbed bids

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Gov. Sarah Palin’s signature accomplishment — a contract to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48 — emerged from a flawed bidding process that narrowed the field to a company with ties to her administration, an Associated Press investigation shows.

In interviews and a review of records, the AP found:

• Instead of creating a process that would attract many potential builders, Palin slanted the terms away from an important group — the global energy giants that own the rights to the gas.

• Despite promises and legal guidance not to talk directly with potential bidders, Palin had meetings or phone calls with nearly every major candidate, including TransCanada.

• The leader of Palin’s pipeline team had been a partner at a lobbying firm where she worked on behalf of a TransCanada subsidiary. Also, that woman’s former business partner at the lobbying firm was TransCanada’s lead private lobbyist on the pipeline deal, interacting with legislators in the weeks before the vote to grant TransCanada the contract. Plus, a former TransCanada executive served as an outside consultant to Palin’s pipeline team.

• Under a different set of rules four years earlier, TransCanada had offered to build the pipeline without a state subsidy; under Palin, the company could receive a maximum $500 million.

Source: Yahoo News

 

Ron Howard’s Call to Action