Pakistan’s President Wants To Hug Sarah Palin
This is both amusing and disturbing.
Pakistan’s recently-elected president, Asif Ali Zardari, entered the room seconds later. Palin rose to shake his hand, saying she was “honored” to meet him.
Zardari then called her “gorgeous” and said: “Now I know why the whole of America is crazy about you.”
“You are so nice,” Palin said, smiling. “Thank you.”
A handler from Zardari’s entourage then told the two politicians to keep shaking hands for the cameras.
“If he’s insisting, I might hug,” Zardari said. Palin smiled politely.
The Alaska governor did not answer questions from reporters at her first two appearances on Wednesday, when she joined McCain in meetings with Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili and Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko, and then traveled downtown to meet with Iraqi president Jalal Talabani.
But she did offer brief remarks to a reporter at the Zardari meeting who asked about her day.
“It’s going great,” Palin said. “These meetings are very informative and helpful, and a lot of good people sharing appreciation for America.”
Source: CNN
I do not agree with the statement that the “whole of America” is crazy about her. Also, does anyone really expect such blatantly sexist statements, and that too in front of the press, from a national head? The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from this exchange is that Mr. Zardari is suffering from some sort of mental problem. Oh wait.
Barack Obama And The Cell Phone Voters
During the last few days a lot of people were wondering why, after the economic collapse and John McCain saying that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong,” Barack Obama was still up in the polls by only a few points. A few people argued that it was because the polling research wasn’t taking into account the people who use only cell phones, who happen to be predominantly young and Barack Obama supporters, in lieu of land lines. The Pew Research Center conducted a research study on this issue and came up with a few interesting numbers:
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has conducted three major election surveys with both cell phone and landline samples since the conclusion of the primaries. In each of the surveys, there were only small, and not statistically significant, differences between presidential horserace estimates based on the combined interviews and estimates based on the landline surveys only. Yet a virtually identical pattern is seen across all three surveys: In each case, including cell phone interviews resulted in slightly more support for Obama and slightly less for McCain, a consistent difference of two-to-three points in the margin.
If you narrow the window down to only those under 30 the results become more skewed towards Obama and the Democrats, which is definitely reassuring.
Among landline respondents under age 30, there is an 18-point gap in party identification – 54% identify or lean Democratic while 36% are Republican. Among the cell-only respondents under age 30, there is a 34-point gap – 62% are Democrats, 28% Republican. The difference among registered voters on the horserace is similar: 39% of registered voters under 30 reached by landline favor McCain, compared with just 27% of cell-only respondents. Obama is backed by 52% of landline respondents under 30, compared with 62% of the cell-only.
The question, however, is: How many of these young people will actually turn out to vote? Usually it’s the older voters who go to the polls. The young people, whatever they say about voting before the election, usually stay back home on voting day. Remember how the 2004 election was supposed to be all about the young voters, who were supposedly going to vote in droves to deny Bush a second term? Well guess what, they didn’t show up on the most important day and we were stuck with the moron for another four years.
The agency also found that turnout rates were closely correlated to a voter’s age. A little more than 73 percent of those between 65 and 74 said they voted, the highest rate for any age group. Those between the ages of 18 and 24 had the lowest, with 47 percent reported going to the polls.
Hopefully it won’t be the same again this time, or else we are in big trouble.
Source: Pew Research Center, The Washington Post
Zakumi: 2010 FIFA World Cup Mascot
I have watched every World Cup since 1994 (Romario vs. Roberto Baggio) and continue to look forward to each tournament which occurs every four years. The last one in Germany was exhilarating, although the team I was supporting, Germany, got knocked off in the semi-finals. Anyway, FIFA just revealed the first images of the mascot for the 2010 World Cup which will be held in South Africa, a strange choice in my opinion. The mascot is named Zakumi.
The Official Mascot, a leopard, has been designed and produced exclusively in the host country. The name is a composition of “ZA”, standing for South Africa, and “kumi” translating into “10″ in various languages across Africa. Inspired by his football idols, Zakumi has dyed his hair green as he felt it would be the perfect camouflage against the green of the football pitch.
“Zakumi represents the people, geography and spirit of South Africa, personifying in essence the 2010 FIFA World Cup. We are certain we will have a lot of fun with him in the lead-up to and during the FIFA Confederations Cup and the FIFA World Cup,” said FIFA Secretary General Jérôme Valcke.
Source: FIFA
It’s a freakin’ leopard.
My reaction: meh.
Neil Cavuto And The Minorities
I stopped watching Fox News a long time ago but I still remember Neil Cavuto, the host of Your World with Neil Cavuto, the business “expert” of the channel. I remember the smugness oozing out of the screen as he went about spouting dead conservative economic theories while doing the bidding of his master Roger Ailes in defending the Bush administration’s policies. With the economic meltdown in the news the blame game has already started, the majority blaming the Republican party’s policy of deregulating the banking industry over the past years. Some also blamed the SEC, the Bush administration, the Federal Reserve and even Henry Paulson. Who does Mr. Cavuto blame for the mess?
CAVUTO: — did you warn or express concern about any of the things that happened? I’m not saying that one or the other is beyond blame –
BECERRA: Oh, absolutely, we did. Absolutely.
CAVUTO: — I’m just saying, I don’t remember a clarion call that said, “Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster.”
Source: Media Matters
Really? Loaning to “minorities” caused the economic meltdown? I think I just found out who the next recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics is.
What Europeans Think About The Financial Meltdown
Here’s a collection of quotes by our “friends” across the Atlantic, from the left and the right, on the American financial collapse. Some are sympathetic and some not so much, but what can you do? They are, after all, Europeans.
The finance minister of Italy’s conservative and pro-U.S. government warned of nothing less than a systemic breakdown. Giulio Tremonti excoriated the “voracious selfishness” of speculators and “stupid sluggishness” of regulators. And he singled out Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, with startling scorn.
“Greenspan was considered a master,” Tremonti declared. “Now we must ask ourselves whether he is not, after [Osama] bin Laden, the man who hurt America the most. . . . It is clear that what is happening is a disease. It is not the failure of a bank, but the failure of a system. Until a few days ago, very few were willing to realize the intensity and the dramatic nature of the crisis.”
Joaquin Almunia, an ideologically moderate Spanish Socialist who is the European Union’s economic commissioner, offered a simple analysis.
“It has been a problem of greed,” he told El Pais newspaper. “In Europe it can’t be said that we did nothing, European banks bought toxic products. . . . Nobody knows when this will end.”
“This time next year we’ll be seeing things back to normal,” said Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute, a think tank here. “The last thing we need is to slap more rules on the system. . . . From time to time, businesses fail and the worst thing a government can do is to bail them out because that just passes the cost on to the taxpayer and creates a moral hazard.”
Hanna Evers of Berlin, a cellphone retailer interviewed in the shopping district of Wilmersdorfer Street, said she was angry about the amount of money that had been “burned” in recent days.
“And I’m furious when I see the pictures of Americans who thought they were on the sunny side of life and now have lost their homes and have to live in their cars,” Evers said. “I definitely do not feel sorry for the bankers who lost their jobs in the last couple of days. I can’t believe that a country like the U.S.A. could have been so careless on a money issue!”
“I was taught that the U.S.A. is the motherland of moneymaking,” she added. “And now all I can see is a herd of headless chickens running around on Wall Street.”
Source: The Los Angeles Times
Roger Ebert On Creationism
Roger Ebert has posted an entertaining Q&A on Creationism which I suspect is a joke (at least I hope so). A sample:
Q. Was there a Noah, and did he have an Ark?
A. Certainly. There are many unverified reports of a massive wooden vessel on Mount Ararat. The Arc contained eight people, from whom we are all descended. It also contained two of each kind of animal. Since living species were obviously not created through an evolutionary process, every surviving land-based mammal species (about 5,400) had both ancestors on the Arc.
Q: What about dinosaurs?
A. They walked the earth at the same time as man, but were wiped out by the Flood, whose turbulence buried their bones in non-sequential sediments.
Source: RogerEbert.com
Say Hello to Authoritarianism
It’s strange to me that the country is all set to trust the Bush administration on the so called bailout. Did we forget that this is the same administration that brought us the Iraq War, the mass erosion of privacy and civil rights, and the Katrina fiasco? So how can we expect it to handle the financial collapse? Bush has all but disappeared, which is typical of him, at a time when the country needs a leader the most. And frankly, can we trust this administration, filled with the same people who always had a connection with the corporations responsible for this mess? After a constant stream of “the economy is fine” from the Bush administration (and John McCain who said that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong” just last week) suddenly we are pouring $700 billion of public money to buy back bad debt, transferring the cost to the American taxpayer. I don’t want to reiterate the cliche but this is basically privatizing profits and socializing loss.
And where is the transparency? How many people actually know what’s going on in the country? How many people know the cause of the collapse and just how the $700 billion we are asked to fork over will help solve the crisis? Call me a nutjob, but it seems to me that the Washington bigwigs and the corporate heads are basically sitting in some shadowy chamber in the capital and making decisions among themselves which will impact the rest of our future without consulting us or making us aware of the repercussions.
It seems that the central thesis of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine might not be so far-fetched after all. It simply states that the government takes advantage of a disaster, terrorist attacks or natural disasters, to implement reforms which ultimately line the pockets of vested interests and turn democratic governments to full blown authoritarian states.
These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy.
Source: The Shock Doctrine
The Huffington Post posted an interesting article today which points to a section of the draft proposal of the bailout plan. The section is innocuously labeled “Section 8″ and reads:
Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
Source: The New York Times
We have seen the pattern repeat in history. The government, often supported by a dominant ideology, imposes measures and laws in light of a disaster in the name of “national security” or something similar to further the interests of certain groups and to concentrate power under an ideological wing. Label me a conspiracy theorist, but instances like these are scattered throughout history, and we would be stupid not to at least ponder the possibility of such a thing happening in this country. After all anything is possible right? If you asked me a year ago if investment banks would be wiped from the face of America’s financial map, I would have called you crazy and continued to laugh in your face. These are terrible times we live in.
Much criticism has been piled on Henry Paulson, the current Secretary of the Treasury who is overseeing the crisis, about the bailout plan and its lack of transparency. The American Prospect, a liberal-leaning magazine, had an article on this subject. They pointed out the lack of oversight in the bill:
The deal proposed by Paulson is nothing short of outrageous. It includes no oversight of his own closed-door operations. It merely gives congressional blessing and funding to what he has already been doing, ad hoc. He plans to retain Wall Street firms as advisers to decide just how to cut deals to value and mop up Wall Street’s dubious paper. There are to be no limits on executive compensation for the firms that get relief, and no equity share for the government in exchange for this massive infusion of capital. Both Obama and McCain have opposed the provision denying any judicial review of decisions made by Paulson — a provision that evokes the Bush administration’s suspension of normal constitutional safeguards in its conduct of foreign policy and national security.
Source: The American Prospect
The article goes on:
Though the administration’s line is that these securities are not trading because of a crisis of confidence, so many are ultimately backed by loans that will not be paid back that they will eventually be sold for a fraction of their face value. Firms that have marked these securities down or have otherwise gotten them off their books have valued them at around 30 cents on the dollar or less. If Paulson had proposed such a deal in his old job as CEO of Goldman Sachs — putting $700 billion of the firm’s capital at risk in exchange for junk bonds of unknown value — he would have been fired in short order. But this is merely taxpayer money.
Source: The American Prospect
The Bush administration in the past has been caught lying through their teeth on several matters. What guarantee do we have that it’s not doing the same now? Can you blame anyone for not trusting them, after the stunts they have pulled over and over again? I am angry as hell about the whole situation. For years and years the conservatives and Republicans have been spouting off the ideals of the “free market” (and they now backtrack, saying that the market was never “free” and a free market was never implemented, just like a true Communist state never existed) and deregulation and suddenly when the walls have collapsed, their only solution is more regulation. Isn’t this pure hypocrisy on their part?
The week that just ended revealed the myth of market fundamentalism: the notion associated with mainstream, Milton Freidman’esque economics, and amplified by anti-government conservatives that unfettered markets will provide society with the best outcomes. Such simplicity, such elegance…such nonsense.
Source: The Huffington Post
The Bush administration, and John McCain, have been constantly pushing to privatize social security. Their plan was to play with the last safeguard the American people have by putting it in the stock market where, supposedly, the “free market” would have taken care of it – which was an underhanded way of saying “give us the money which would have helped you in your retirement so that we can line the pockets of our investor friends in Wall Street.” Imagine if that deal went through. It would have been a nightmare for the coming generations.
Goodbye, Wall Street
These are historic times we live in. I simply can’t believe the turbulence this country has been through in the past couple of days. We came very, very close to financial collapse and utter ruin. First it was Bear Stearns, then Lehman Brothers, and then AIG, and it’s not over yet. One after another, these once giant financial institutions collapsed, and left their massive debts on the shoulders of American taxpayers. And now, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the “last two independent investment banks,” have been converted to bank holding companies.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two independent investment banks, will become bank holding companies, the Federal Reserve said Sunday night, fundamentally altering the landscape of Wall Street.
The move fundamentally changes one of the mainstay models of modern Wall Street, the independent investment bank, soon after the federal government unveiled the biggest market intervention since the New Deal. It heralds new regulations and supervision of previously lightly regulated investment banks, as well as an end to the outsized paychecks that underpinned the traditional image of the chest-thumping Wall Street banker.
Source: The New York Times
Is this the end of Wall Street? This guy thinks so:
“The decision marks the end of Wall Street as we have known it,” said William Isaac, a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. “It’s really too bad, as our country has benefited greatly from the entrepreneurial risk takers on Wall Street.”
Source: Bloomberg
The Bush administration has been disastrous for this country. They came in and started a war, eroded our civil rights and are now leaving the country in utter financial collapse. Who or what is to blame? Greed? Hubris? The blame game has already begun. The right is blaming the poor who were too “stupid” to accept loans they couldn’t pay back, and the left is blaming the money-hungry corporations. What makes me angry is the lack of transparency on the part of our government. It seems to me that we, the people, don’t really know what’s going on in the upper echelons.
How would you define the political system of America today? Is it a democracy, an oligarchy or a plutocracy?
The next administration has a big mess on its hands. It must end the war, manage the financial crisis and steer the country in the right direction. I don’t think that person is Bush II: Electric Boogaloo, John McCain. But I am not really convinced that it’s Barack Obama either. Even though Obama might have better ideas to solve the crises we are in, he still has to work with the Senate and the Congress. I doubt that the Republicans there will allow him to pass the radical legislations and reforms this country needs to get out of this mess. At one time everyone was saying that the Iraq War was the beginning of the end of the mighty American Empire, but it seems to me that this financial collapse might just be it. God help us all.
What Republicans Like About Sarah Palin
I came across this interesting graphic about what Republicans think of Sarah Palin on The New York Times website which gives you a “disturbing” look into the psyche of the people who support her. Click on the image for the full version.
Notice that more than 30% of respondents answered “Nothing” to the question: What Republicans like least about Sarah Palin. Today on Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill Maher noted that most of the American populace is, in fact, stupid. Seeing polls like this doesn’t really do anything for me to argue with that statement. Now I am not saying that only Republicans can be this dense. You can find these trends on the other side too. The problem is the whole concept of “party line”. Just like you can never persuade a Democrat to concede any weakness on the part of Barack Obama, you cannot expect a Republican to do the same thing when it comes to Sarah Palin. People will ignore facts after facts but will still stick to their “gut instinct.” This fact becomes more egregious when it comes to Sarah Palin, however, since there is simply no evidence that she is indeed not that incompetent or, for lack of a better word, stupid. The fact that people will actually characterize her as “honest” is mind-boggling, especially in light of about everything that has come out about her in the recent weeks. Also, notice that not many Republicans really care that she has zero foreign policy experience, except for the fact that she can see Russia from her house.
This is scary. The Republicans like to tout themselves as the party of security. They like to say that they know how to fight terrorism. Now imagine if John McCain “expires” and Sarah Palin becomes President, which isn’t entirely inconceivable. Saying that we would be in trouble then would be an understatement.
Source: The New York Times
