A surprise guest at Netroots Nation this morning:

Labels: Netroots Nation

Perhaps John McCain should’ve kept his drooling piehole shut when he chided his rival Senator Barack Obama for not going overseas, especially to combat zones. Because in response, the junior senator from Illinois and the man whom many believe will be the 44th president now gets to play statesman while Congress is in recess. World leaders such as Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai will get an advance preview of what to expect from an Obama administration. Typically, the GOP is now criticizing for going to the Middle East a man whom they’d criticized just last month for not going to the Middle East, desperately trying to reduce the Obama trip as a mere "campaign stunt."

In fact, in advance of Senator Obama’s stop in Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has already told Der Spiegel that he likes the Democratic candidate’s withdrawal plan. Of course, the Iraqi government that we’d cobbled together over the last few years has been screaming for us to get the hell out for weeks now and have been virtually ignored by both the Bush administration and State Department.

There are many, many good reasons for Sen. Obama’s lightning-fast trip through Europe, the Persian Gulf, as well as Afghanistan in central Asia. While the Obama campaign is strenuously trying to avoid the appearance of campaigning abroad, that is exactly what it’s doing. The most damning true allegation leveled against Mr. Obama is that he lacks experience, gravitas and pragmatism, especially in the arena of foreign relations. Forging relationships with a very strong possibility of being the next leader of the free world alone is a very good reason for this whirlwind tour. The Middle East, to put it mildly, is a gigantic geopolitical minefield and if Sen. Obama can adroitly skip through this area of the world with tripping any mines, it would be a huge boost to his campaign and standing as a statesman-in-waiting.

It also allows world leaders to see the stark contrast between the young, dynamic senator who’s been associated with the word “change” as George W. Bush has been chained to the word “failure.” After the last G8 and Bush’s previous trip to Europe and the Middle East, governments and their leaders will gain an invaluable insight into how much different the world could be under an Obama administration.

It also allows these world leaders to compare not only their notes but two sets of notes- It’s inevitable but useless to compare a likely incoming president with an outgoing one. However, the contrast between Obama and McCain, especially on foreign policy, is just as marked. While Bush is now speaking vaguely about “time horizons” and McCain sputtering about a century-long occupation in some Utopian Iraqi paradise, Obama is talking about specific numbers (16 months and we’re out of Iraq, he’s been saying. However, it ought to be noted during the 2004 presidential debates, Sen. John Kerry was talking about getting us out by December 2005 and less than three years ago Rep. John Murtha had a more stringent timetable in mind, which was six months.).

While Bush and McCain are hoarsely screaming about non-existent nukes in Iran, Obama is promising to round up all fugitive nuclear weapons that do exist and ridding the world all nuclear weapons. While Bush’s foreign policy consists of ignoring capriciously-designated rogue nations until they accede to all his unreasonable demands, Obama is already advocating opening up negotiations with them, including the government of Iran.

You will not see Sen. Obama cautiously bumbling through a pre-swept Iraqi market swaddled in body armor and surrounded by 100 soldiers and five attack helicopters circling overhead while pretending he’s in a flea market in Muncie. There will be closed-door meetings where Obama will seriously discuss ground conditions with national and local-level politicians as well as our ground commanders.

Bush’s own recent whirlwind trips through Europe and the Middle East and now Obama’s will offer foreign heads of state and the people who live in them an invaluable opportunity to observe and analyze a crucial crossroads in not only American history but also world history. The three men will allow these people and national leaders to see what the United States used to be like in all its hideous, unilateral glory under Bush, how it would continue unabated if not actually accelerated under McCain and a tantalizing if still somewhat vague alternative under a President Obama.

Well, I think the crash came and went yesterday. I certainly hope so, anyway, because if it did, it wasn't so bad as crashes go. Some massive fatigue, a short weep session, but not the curled-up-in-a-fetal-position-in-the corner crash I'd feared.

The job search has ramped up pretty quickly, thanks to the intartoobz. I can remember when a Really Serious Job Hunt took the form of laying in a supply of fine stationery, a box of carbon paper, and a notebook. The Sunday want ads were about the only source of open job listings if you didn't have a large personal network. The other option was mass-mailings to companies; the appropriate staff found through poring through Standard& Poor's Register at the public library. As recently as last year I was tossing out old job search letters done on a typewriter with the newspaper clipping stapled to my carbon copy.

So job searching has become easier, despite the prevalence of online job application software, much of which is quirky at best and nonfunctional at worst. But at least today you don't need to practically hire a secretary just to organize the paper from a job search.

It hasn't quite hit me yet, and indeed, I don't think it's really hit anyone yet. It feels strange to have all these e-mails about job opportunities flying around among not just the casualties, but also the survivors, as the combination of impending loss of friends and survivors' guilt sets in among those who will remain. In my more optimistic moments, I think that perhaps this is a case of ultimately the living (those keeping their jobs) may very well envy the dead (those of us being jettisoned).

I am, however, compiling a picture of what kinds of behaviors are constructive when dealing with friends, relatives and co-workers who are losing their jobs, and what aren't.

DON'T look at the person with what I call the Basset Hound Face. I mean no disrespect to Tbogg's dogs, but what is cute on a basset hound is really annoying when presented to the one who has been sacked. Your friend/relative/co-worker is being laid off, s/he has not been diagnosed with terminal cancer and s/he is not dead. So don't look at him/her like this:



We know you feel badly about it. What that face does is make us feel that we somehow have to comfort you, and frankly, we are having enough trouble keeping ourselves together. And besides, while that face is utterly adorable on a basset hound, on a person? Not so much.

If you don't know what to say, DO say "I don't know what to say." It's a no-win situation for you, so don't try. If we're envisioning our futures as having to scavenge the remains of McGriddles out of trash cans and keep warm on a subway grate, "You'll find something soon" just sounds hollow. Commiserating, as in saying, "Yeah, the job market really sucks these days," isn't what we want to hear either. The best thing to say, if you are in a position to actually follow up, is "I am going to help you find a job." If you genuinely don't have the resources to do that, "I don't know what to say" is fine.


We found out in the middle of the afternoon. I had figured that this was coming, so I had come up with plans for who I was going to e-mail first, and who in my workplace I had to see that might know of available positions either in-house or outside. So I didn't even talk to my fellow programmer/project manager, who is surviving this layoff. The next day I came in and there were five e-mails from her. One was the "I don't know what to say but I am going to help you find a job" e-mail, and the others were links to job listings she'd already found and notification that she'd already contacted people who were jettisoned in our LAST layoff. In this case, the person is a bit of a control freak and helping people find jobs is her way of trying to make some kind of order out of this chaos, but her approach was really constructive and helpful.

DON'T ask if the person needs money, and DON'T ask the person to "not hesitate to call" if s/he needs anything. Of course the person needs money. If the person didn't need money, the prospect of six months of unemployment followed by retirement or other slack time would have us dancing for joy. But trust me, we are not going to ask you for money even if we do need it, because we have pride. What we want is a job, not a handout. If you're in regular contact with the person, you'll know if/when the financial position becomes dire, and when/if that happens (and hopefully it won't), if you're in a position to share your network of contacts who might be in a position to hire, or if you can offer compensated work, or a reference letter, then just do it.

DON'T ask the person to call if s/he needs to talk. Check in every now and then to see how the person is doing. If the person needs to talk, s/he will. Trust me. But don't use the tonal equivalent of the basset hound face. If you do, we'll take it as "I really don't want to know how you're doing because it's really depressing...but if I sound REALLY, REALLY CONCERNED, maybe that will suffice." And for God's sake, don't ask how the job hunt is going. It makes us feel stressed and pressured to find something soon, if only to take the burden off of YOUR worrying. Believe me, when we find something, we'll tell you.

DO tell the friend about friends of yours who were in a similar predicament and who came out on top. Especially if the unemployed person is over 50, DO tell him/her about middle-aged friends of yours who may have taken the better part of a year to find a job, but who found one before the year was out and are now blissfully happy and making money hand over fist. Your middle-aged friend who lost his job and then hung himself in the bathroom after the unemployment ran out? DON'T tell us about him. We don't want to know.

DON'T belittle the loss. It may be "just a job", but for most of us, the job is 1/3 of our day. We spend more time with our co-workers than we do with our spouses and families. In addition to the financial issues, there's the interpersonal impact of job loss. We tend to rank relative degrees of trauma associated with loss, but when it's you, "It's just a job" is as meaningless as telling a couple whose baby was stillborn, "You can always have another one." It may very well be true, but it's not constructive at that moment in time.

I'm actually lucky in that our layoff is in a small, self-contained group, and those of us who have been cut know that this was not at all related to job performance, and it wasn't even necessarily related to our value to the department. Everyone being cut is a senior-level person where cutting is gives the most cost-cutting bang for the buck. I'm not sitting here thinking that if I'd only done this or that I wouldn't have been cut, because in no way is that true, and I've been told as much. That helps prevent the Runaway Train of Self-Doubt from pulling in temporarily at this particular station.

Today I take the day off, and tomorrow it's back to job board land.

Labels: employment

The news just broke during Countdown that all of a sudden, the McCain campaign has decided that Phil Gramm's branding of people like me as "whiners" and his role in not just the Enron scandal but also in creating the mortgage mess, was just too much, and he's now underneath the Straight Talk Express instead of on it:

John McCain's campaign just released the following statement from Gramm:

"It is clear to me that Democrats want to attack me rather than debate Senator McCain on important economic issues facing the country. That kind of distraction hurts not only Senator McCain's ability to present concrete programs to deal with the country's problems, it hurts the country. To end this distraction and get on with the real debate, I hereby step down as Co-Chair of the McCain Campaign and join the growing number of rank-and-file McCain supporters."

Who's whining now, Mr. Gramm?

But with McCain following up his curious statement in Philadelphia last month that he'll be the underdog until a few hours before the polls close in Pennsylvania with a prediction of "spectacular" attacks in Iraq around the time of the U.S. elections (perhaps Bush has told him something), the news that in the last two years, McCain has attended ZERO of his own committee's hearings on Afghanistan, the fact that John McCain pockets his own Social Security check even though he is a) still working; and b) calls the program "a disgrace", and the fact that the freaks he surrounds with in his campaign deciding that joking about how women love to be raped just shows how "authentic" McCain is -- well, it hasn't exactly been a banner week for Captain Codpiece II: Electric Boogaloo.

So cue Skeletor himself -- Michael Chertoff -- to remind Americans that OMG YOU'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!

European terrorists are trying to enter the United States with European Union passports, and there is no guarantee officials will catch them every time, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday.

[snip]

In his last scheduled appearance before the House Homeland Security Committee, Chertoff said that the more time and space al-Qaida and its allies have to recruit, train, experiment and plan, the more problems the U.S. and Europe will face down the road.

"The terrorists are deliberately focusing on people who have legitimate Western European passports, who don't appear to have records as terrorists," Chertoff told lawmakers. "I have a good degree of confidence we can catch people coming in. But I have to tell you ... there's no guarantee. And they are working very hard to slip by us."

Chertoff and other intelligence officials have delivered similar warnings before, and he offered no new information about specific threats or an imminent attack.

So let me see if I have this straight. If I go to an airport, I have to take off my shoes, take my laptop out of its case, and carry no more than 3 ounces of any liquid on the plane with me. In some airports I may be scanned by machines that actually DO what those X-ray glasses that used to be advertised in comic books claimed to do. We have the Bush Administration scooping up every phone call we make, every web site we visit, every e-mail we send or receive.

And Chertoff not only KNOWS that European terrorists are coming in, but says nothing can be done to stop it.

If this is the case, then why the hell do AMERICANS need to put up with all this surveillance? And why does anyone still defend this level of complete and utter incompetence and stupidity?

Labels: Bush Administration, Department of Homeland Security, icepick meet forehead, incompetence, You can't make this shit up

For over two decades, we've heard that privatization is the way to go; that the private sector does everything better than the government ever can. This belief has persisted despite the success of federal programs like Head Start, and yes, even Social Security and Medicare.

Even after WorldCom, Enron, Countrywide, and now the IndyMac bank failure, the myth of corporate competence always being superior to that of government persists. And even though Republicans have given lip service to being supportive of, even worshipful of, the military, they've done what they can to outsource that too.

But how is it possible to defend the profit motive when it bumps up against endangering the very troops that they've been using as political props for the last seven years?

Shoddy electrical work by private contractors on United States military bases in Iraq is widespread and dangerous, causing more deaths and injuries from fires and shocks than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to internal Army documents.

During just one six-month period — August 2006 through January 2007 — at least 283 electrical fires destroyed or damaged American military facilities in Iraq, including the military’s largest dining hall in the country, documents obtained by The New York Times show. Two soldiers died in an electrical fire at their base near Tikrit in 2006, the records note, while another was injured while jumping from a burning guard tower in May 2007.

And while the Pentagon has previously reported that 13 Americans have been electrocuted in Iraq, many more have been injured, some seriously, by shocks, according to the documents. A log compiled earlier this year at one building complex in Baghdad disclosed that soldiers complained of receiving electrical shocks in their living quarters on an almost daily basis.

Electrical problems were the most urgent noncombat safety hazard for soldiers in Iraq, according to an Army survey issued in February 2007. It noted “a safety threat theaterwide created by the poor-quality electrical fixtures procured and installed, sometimes incorrectly, thus resulting in a significant number of fires.”

The Army report said KBR, the Houston-based company that is responsible for providing basic services for American troops in Iraq, including housing, did its own study and found a “systemic problem” with electrical work.

But the Pentagon did little to address the issue until a Green Beret, Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth, was electrocuted in January while showering. His death, caused by poor electrical grounding, drew the attention of lawmakers and Pentagon leaders after his family pushed for answers. Congress and the Pentagon’s inspector general have begun investigations, and this month senior Army officials ordered electrical inspections of all buildings in Iraq maintained by KBR.

“We consider this to be a very serious issue,” Chris Isleib, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday in an e-mail message, while declining to comment on the findings in the Army documents.

Heather Browne, a KBR spokeswoman, would not comment about a company safety study or the reports of electrical fires or shocks, but she said KBR had found no evidence of a link between its work and the electrocutions. She added, “KBR’s commitment to the safety of all employees and those the company serves remains unwavering.”

Note that she doesn't say what level that commitment is.

I wonder what Congressional Republicans and the gasbags of right-wing talk radio would be saying if a company intimately linked with, say, Al Gore had been responsible for shoddy electrical work that had killed American soldiers. And yet, when the company is associated with a Republican Vice President, there's nary a peep of outrage.

Because after all, Jesse Jackson used the "n" word, and isn't that more important than the fact that an American corporation is killing American troops rather than doing its job correctly?

Labels: just another outrage

I remember the days before abortion was legal. I remember the girls who disappeared to "visit grandma for a few months" and then re-appeared in school under code of silence, sworn to Never Mention It Again.

When I went to college, there was a clinic in town with a sliding fee scale where you could obtain contraceptives. Even though by that time abortion was legal, even in provincial, conservative Bethlehen, Pennsylvania -- college students had access at low cost to a physician who would prescribe birth control pills, insert an IUD, or offer up a diaphragm and jelly or condoms with spermicidal foam for those students who wanted to be responsible about their active sexuality.

Today, the right to terminate an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy is hanging by a thread, but the hand-wringing about at what point a woman ceases to be a human being and simply becomes a vessel for a parasitic developing being that has more rights than she does isn't stopping at the angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin question. Emboldened by the relentless march towards a legal definition of abortion as murder, those who don't believe women should be permitted to prevent unwanted pregnancy (that is, have sex without the "punishment" of the mark of her sin), have been able to take steps towards "conscience exceptions" in medical fields. Pharmacists are now permitted to refuse to fill prescriptions for contraceptives they believe (erroneously) to be "abortifacients". Doctors are permitted to refuse to prescribe them.

If your child has a raging fever and runaway systemic infection, should a Christian Scientist doctor be allowed to refuse to prescribe antibiotics? Then how is this any different?

If for no other reason than the kind of medieval thinking about women's right to control their own bodies BEFORE having to deal with unwanted pregnancy, John McCain must NOT be elected this November. Because if he is, he WILL perpetuate this:

The Bush administration wants to require all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control.

Under the draft of a proposed rule, hospitals, clinics, researchers and medical schools would have to sign “written certifications” as a prerequisite to getting money under any program run by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Such certification would also be required of state and local governments, forbidden to discriminate, in areas like grant-making, against hospitals and other institutions that have policies against providing abortion.

The proposal, which circulated in the department on Monday, says the new requirement is needed to ensure that federal money does not “support morally coercive or discriminatory practices or policies in violation of federal law.” The administration said Congress had passed a number of laws to ensure that doctors, hospitals and health plans would not be forced to perform abortions.

In the proposal, obtained by The New York Times, the administration says it could cut off federal aid to individuals or entities that discriminate against people who object to abortion on the basis of “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

The proposal defines abortion as follows: “any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”

Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents providers, said, “The proposed definition of abortion is so broad that it would cover many types of birth control, including oral contraceptives and emergency contraception.”

“We worry that under the proposal, contraceptive services would become less available to low-income and uninsured women,” Ms. Gallagher said.

In other words, a family planning clinic receiving federal funds would not be allowed to require that a nurse or other employee distribute family planning supplies.

The article's headline specifies "abortion", but the proposal also includes "conscience clauses" for contraception as well.

Given that so-called conservatives want to gut programs that help low-income families, you'd think that they'd want to provide assistance for low-income women to be able to avoid having children they can't afford. Or are they saying that just as housing, health care, and all the other things the middle class has taken for granted for the last two generations are now the exclusive province of the wealthy, now family planning is too?

Labels: abortion, contraception, idocy

Here's what I really want to know, though: Why is it, that when you click over to this video's YouTube page, under "related videos" the second video in the list is titled "HOT LESBIAN MAKEOUT SESSION" (that ought to get me some Google hits), and the one after that is "Sexy Lesbians getting it on in public"? Especially when the tags are "John McCain George Bush Stupid Dumb Grades Student Fifth Naval Academy Class Rank"?

Is there some kind of window into the secret souls of McCain and Bush here?

Labels: George W. Bush, idiocy, John McCain

Labels: Jon Stewart, media, The Daily Show

Tbogg: "Your Mumia sweatshirt won’t get you into heaven anymore".

Labels: awesomeness, bloggers

Click the preposterously cute photo above to read the kind of amazing animal story that'll make you glad to be alive. Even if, like me, you spent too much of the day attempting to apply for a job via an online application system that refused to accept ANY number format at all for current salary.

There's something inherently cute about ducks. Part of the 2.2-mile loop that constitutes my morning constitutional goes down a path into a small wooded area surrounding a brook, and a bridge across said brook. People have been known to fish off this bridge, and there's often an elderly person or small child feeding the ducks. As a result, the ducks have learned that people = food. Yesterday as I headed down the path, a veritable Netroots Nation of ducks -- about fifty of them -- came waddling towards me, mack-mack-macking with excited anticipation. I greeted them using the diminutive species name, as is my wont to do with small cute animals, saying "Hello, duckies!" This only served to encourage them as I wound my way through the sea of mallards anticipating the kind of feast usually only seen at family reunions and G-8 meetings about world hunger. You'd think that once I'd passed through the horde without any little bullets of Wonder bread being tossed in their direction, they'd realize that the Anas Platyrhynchos equivalent of the hotdog cart just wasn't happening this morning. But no...these are persistent little buggers -- the whole crew of them followed me, mack-mack-macking, this time in reproach, all the way out to the street.

Next time I head out that way, I'm taking my camera to see if I can capture it for posterity.

Labels: animals

And damn proud of it, too.

You see, I was supposed to be an a plane this morning, on my way to the Annual Conclave of Le Grand Orange. But fate stood in the way, in the form of an e-mail last Thursday from the head of my department, announcing a full staff meeting for Tuesday the 15th, attendance is mandatory.

Now, I've been pretty much waiting for the other shoe to drop for the last three years, ever since the LAST bloodbath in my department. So I knew immediately that the Titanic had hit the iceberg and that there were nowhere near enough lifeboats for everyone. Through some rather oblique e-mail exchanges with the Powers that Be, trying to ascertain whether anything was going to be said at this meeting that might, say, cause one to think twice about spending $768 plus meals on a blogger conference, I received little enough of an answer that I knew the writing was on the wall. And so, when the meeting actually took place yesterday, I was well-prepared.

Many years ago, when I was still doing secretarial/administrative work, a headhunter told me that you should always update your resume three months into a new job, and every six months thereafter -- just so you're ready, and also because it's easy to forget what you've accomplished over a long period of time.

And 7-1/2 years is a long period of time.

So my resume has been more-or-less ready for the last three years, and my Spidey-sense served me in good stead yesterday, enabling me to deal with the news without falling completely apart.

I'm actually kind of surprised at how relatively calm I am. I think it must be the yoga.

There really isn't anyone at whom to lash out, either. When you work on research grants, and the grants aren't there, there's that much less money to pay people. If I'm angry at anything, it's the relentless cost-of-living increases that we've received almost every year -- two of them this year alone. Each time they announced one, I've been more scared, because every raise makes me more expensive to keep on in a time of limited funds. In a six-person system development group, three of us got the axe, one of whom has been with the place about a decade longer than I have. But aside from that person, the cuts in my group were clearly made on seniority -- and despite the fact that 7-1/2 years is a long time in IT, it's a mere blip in my department.

And so, as of August 30, I will be a middle-aged unemployed person in George W. Bush's America.

And that's where YOU come in, fair readers.

Because I need work.

What kind of work? Well, there's the dilemma. Because I'm not strictly a web programmer, not strictly a designer, not strictly a copywriter, not strictly a technical writer, not strictly a desktop support rep, not strictly a trainer -- and yet I've done all of these and more. What I need to find is a company that needs a nimble IT generalist who can handle just about anything thrown at me. You use a programming language in which I don't have experience? Let me run over to Barnes and Noble and pick up a book -- I'll at least have a passing familiarity between the time I give notice and the time I start with you. I have never had experience in the languages used at any of the IT jobs I've had, including my first one, into which I moved from being the department's administrative assistant.

I'd rather not post my resume for public consumption, but if you are in the New York metropolitan area (or if you have a position in which I could telecommute), and you are looking for a -- dare I say it? -- Jill of all trades; or if you know of such a position, and you want to discuss it further, my e-mail address is shown in the right-hand sidebar.

I'm not one of those people who believes that things happen for a reason. I don't believe in some giant Boris Spassky in the sky, moving chess pieces because he has nothing better to do than to just mess with people's lives. But while I had hoped to stay put where I am till I retire, it's not going to happen. So I have to adapt or be crushed.

And I refuse to do the latter.

Labels: economic death watch, employment

The New York Times' Amber Von Tussle is upset because Barack Obama isn't giving her enough snark material:

At first blush, it would seem to be a positive for Obama that he is hard to mock. But on second thought, is it another sign that he’s trying so hard to be perfect that it’s stultifying? Or that eight years of W. and Cheney have robbed Democratic voters of their sense of humor?

Certainly, as the potential first black president, and as a contender with tender experience, Obama must feel under strain to be serious.

But he does not want the “take” on him to become that he’s so tightly wrapped, overcalculated and circumspect that he can’t even allow anyone to make jokes about him, and that his supporters are so evangelical and eager for a champion to rescue America that their response to any razzing is a sanctimonious: Don’t mess with our messiah!

If Obama keeps being stingy with his quips and smiles, and if the dominant perception of him is that you can’t make jokes about him, it might infect his campaign with an airless quality. His humorlessness could spark humor.

On Tuesday, Andy Borowitz satirized on that subject. He said that Obama, sympathetic to comics’ attempts to find jokes to make about him, had put out a list of official ones, including this:

“A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, ‘I was expecting the farmer’s daughter.’ Barack Obama replies, ‘She’s not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American dream.’ ”

John McCain’s Don Rickles routines — “Thanks for the question, you little jerk” — can fall flat. But he seems like a guy who can be teased harmlessly. If Obama offers only eat-your-arugula chiding and chilly earnestness, he becomes an otherworldly type, not the regular guy he needs to be.

Because we all know just how important it is to be a "regular guy", right? After all, look around us at the country the regular guy that people wanted to have a beer with is leaving us. But if that's still the standard of qualification for the presidency, than I say we just cut to the chase and elect this guy:

Labels: hack journalism, idiocy, Maureen Dowd

Mr. Brilliant and I live in a Cape Cod-style house, or in the local parlance, "POS Cape." I wanted a cape so that we could have a guest room on a separate floor from our bedroom, and so that we could live just on the first floor at such time as we become too old and infirm to handle the steps. It has occurred to me more than once that the two-rooms-and-a-bath upstairs, along with kitchen privileges, might make a good housing arrangement for a student someday, if we find ourselves short of cash.

I'm not the only one who thinks this way; an increasing number of homeowners are renting out space to help avoid foreclosure:

With residential mortgage foreclosures still on the rise, more homeowners nationwide are considering Miss Terry’s choice: whether to take in a boarder to keep their homes. Modest but growing numbers are turning to agencies nationwide like the St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center Homesharing Program in Baltimore, which screen boarders to find appropriate matches and relieve some of the fear of strangers.

“We’re seeing greater numbers of marginal people,” said Kirby Dunn, executive director of HomeShare Vermont, one of several hundred programs around the country that have been formed since the 1980’s to help elderly or disabled homeowners exchange spare rooms for income or, more often, help around the house, but now being pressed to meet different needs.

“Historically,” Ms. Dunn said, “the people who come to us have been looking for someone to provide services in the home. But now, money is the bigger issue for folks. There’s definitely an increase in people looking for a revenue stream.”

Ms. Dunn said volume at the agency was up this year, with three or four times as many people seeking rooms as seeking boarders.

On a recent Saturday morning, while Miss Terry attended a training session at her church, Katherine Ongiri, 47, celebrated her first week of living in Miss Terry’s two-story house, where she pays $500 a month, in weekly installments. The women work different schedules, but have shared an occasional meal. Miss Terry helped Ms. Ongiri, who does not drive, get her check cashed, and treated her to lunch at Burger King.

“She’s good company,” Miss Terry said. “And I don’t mind helping because I know how hard it is when you’ve got to take the bus, because I’ve been there.”

Ms. Ongiri said of Miss Terry and her daughter, “I don’t mind helping her keep a roof over that girl’s head, because I know what it’s like.”

The two women’s routes to St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center, which culminated in Ms. Ongiri’s moving into Miss Terry’s attic, describe the multiple hazards of the current economic downturn: stagnant wages, rising energy and food prices, exotic mortgages, job insecurity, neighborhood instability and the challenges for single working women to find safe environments for themselves and their children.

“A lot of prayer comes in,” Miss Terry said. “You don’t want someone to try to take over, or cause problems once they get a foot in the door.”

Miss Terry bought her home six years ago, in a hilly neighborhood in northeast Baltimore, for $92,000, with a government-backed mortgage and monthly payments of about $800. She had never owned a home before, and was excited to move out of subsidized housing.

After two refinance loans, like many homeowners she does not understand her current mortgage, which is an interest-only loan. What she knows is that her payments are now more than $1,000 per month, and that she cannot afford them.

“Everything was going up except my paycheck,” Miss Terry said. “During the refinance, people tell you you can get money to upgrade your home, and your mortgage will go up a little bit. O.K., but my paycheck is not rising.”

The problem, at least here in this part of New Jersey, is that strong local governments are already cracking down on housing of nonrelated people in the same domicile, in an effort to prevent the creation of boarding houses for undocumented immigrant day laborers. One nearby town has a new ordinance requiring any home, new or remodeled, with four or more bedrooms to have a two-car garage. The logic behind this escapes me, unless it's based on an assumption that a larger family is going to by definition have more vehicles. A co-worker who decided to reconfigure the new addition to his house for his mother-in-law so that one of the two rooms upstairs would be better classified as a walk-in closet told me that he had to do this or add on to his detached garage on a 50' x 100' lot with no room for an expanded garage.

As incomes continue to shrink, this kind of roadblock placed in the way of homeowners simply trying to make ends meet is going to be increasingly anachronistic. I suspect there will be little outcry, though -- at least not until there are more people in need of the reduced costs of house sharing than there are people trying increasingly in vain to protect a lifestyle whose time is rapidly passing.

Labels: America After Oil, mortgage crisis

You, with your lost job and your house in foreclosure and that letter from the fuel oil company that tells you that your price cap is going to be 61% higher than last year's. You with your cancer that your insurance company will no longer pay for. Quit your whining already. Things aren't so bad. I mean, look at Cindy McCain. She's going to pull in upwards of a cool $2 million without so much as lifting an impeccably-manicured fingernail -- simply by virtue of owning a bunch of Anheuser-Busch stock as part of her family's beer distributorship:

Cindy McCain, together with dependent children, earned $50,001-$100,000 in dividend income for 2007 from Anheuser-Busch shares, according to a Financial Disclosure Report filing on the Center for Responsive Politics' Web site.

Anheuser-Busch paid $1.25 dividend in 2007 per share, according to company filings.

That indicates that Cindy McCain, together with dependents, owned between 40,000 and 80,000 shares -- figures which were calculated by Reuters.

At the offer price of $70 a share, those shares would be worth $2.8 million to $5.6 million.

I mean, hell -- that could be three or four whole months of shopping on the credit cards right there.

Labels: economic death watch, income inequality

This is what we're doing. Without even knowing what the cover story of the July 21st edition of the New Yorker will say.

And this is what we're reduced to, because mere words aren't enough because we're too distracted by reality TV and our Blackberries and iPods to actually parse words. Because we can't properly visualize and parse something such as the lies, distortions, fabrications and innuendos regarding Senator and Mrs. Obama unless it's rubbed in our faces in the form of cartoons and caricatures. Sort of like the cartoons presented by Colin Powell at the UN Security Council in February, 2003 purporting to show mobile weapons labs. Only then did we all go "oooh" and "aaah."

We're likewise too distracted by the serious issues (even though we're distressed by the tanking economy and the recession into which we're slipping and the inflation that makes our dollars practically worthless) to concentrate on what the candidates ought to and ought not expend their mental energy. This is why we jump into the fray when Rev. Wright or Gen. Clark open their mouths or when John McCain says something stupid like killing Iranians with lung cancer or shipping bottles of hot water to dehydrated babies.

The New Yorker Magazine cover depicting many of the lies about Senator and Mrs. Obama that have gotten the most traction is a piece of humorless satire, satire to which they've been reduced because we haven't done enough as a supposedly educated populace to wave away with laughter and derision these very same lies.

But, just to play Devil's advocate for a minute, whatever we've had to endure from the right wing's Mighty Wurlitzer in the form of said lies, distortions, fabrications and innuendos regarding Senator and Mrs. Obama, we've done the same thing to a lesser degree regarding John McCain. The only reason it looks as if only the right wing is engaging in deadcatting is because their own pack of lies is actually gaining traction and picked up by an MSM that have come one degree shy of turning Barack Obama into supermarket tabloid fodder. They, in turn, couldn't care less what senile idiocy dribbles out of McCain's mouth.

We're not blameless. Don't think I haven't been listening. I've heard all the memes about John McCain.

He's too old. He's too susceptible to cancer.

He set fire to the USS Forrestal.

He made a deal with the Vietcong to get released early from the Hanoi Hilton.

He called his wife a cunt.

Ronald Reagan turned 78 years of age mere weeks after leaving office in 1989. Even though he had perhaps the softest schedule of any modern president, Reagan was still able to assume the crushing burden of the presidency up until the age of 77. McCain is 71, will be 72 on August 29th and his history with cancer is paralleled by Reagan's own history with the disease. And people age at different rates. What proof do we have a 100 year-old man can't run the country? McCain's age and medical history are certainly of legitimate concern to the US voter but do they in and of themselves disqualify him to run our nation? Please.

While we know that McCain was on the deck of the USS Forrestal when all Hell broke loose, a naval investigation of the disaster could never conclusively prove that McCain's "wet-firing" his jet caused the accident.

The Vietcong gave McCain an out when they realized that his father was a high-ranking admiral. Deliver the propaganda we want to you to put out and you can go home. McCain told them to fuck themselves and he stayed with his men. If McCain was itching to make a deal with Charley, that was his one shot.

I am not going to vote for a man based on whether or not he called his wife a cunt, even if she is. Even if she's a beer heiress worth $100,000,000. It's no sin in itself to be rich.

However, Obama and McCain both possess grave weaknesses on which we ought to be focusing. When Barack Obama clinched the nomination, it's notable that he quickly began sucking up to "the center" (meaning the right wing establishment, if we adjust for Overton's window). I have a big enough attitude problem about him sucking up to AIPAC, claiming that Iran needs to be harshly dealt with, endorsing telecom immunity in the FISA bill and claiming Social Security is in a state of crisis. I have an even bigger attitude problem with him insulting our intelligence by saying that he's not, indeed, sucking up to the right wing and moving toward the center.

Consequently, I am genuinely frightened when I see that the only man in America, it seems, who can keep the Straight Talk Express from veering off the road is, of all people, Traitor Joe Lieberman. The sight of watching Joe Lieberman whisper in McCain's ear correcting him about something that a 5th grader should know much less a major presidential contender and senior United States senator is enough to give me cold sweats.

Both these men have serious, and I mean serious defects in their fitness to lead this country. Both men flip flop, both men lack moral courage (or has it been lost on you all in your Obamamania how ready, willing and able Obama is to throw under the wheels of his own version of the Straight Talk Express anyone who says something that gets the right wing establishment in a lather?) and neither, in my estimation, is fit to lead because they both, to one degree or another, pander to the Cujo faction of the right wing establishment.

But the lies and distortions that have been told about Obama have gone so ignored on a national level that we can't appreciate how evil and petty they are until we're drawn funny little pictures depicting them. And even when that gets our attention, we still misconstrue it.

The blunt satire of the New Yorker isn't just an indictment on the right wing spin machine: It's an indictment of 99% of the nation.

Labels: comedy

It's tempting to regard the recent trend of newspaper ombudspeople smacking around their own papers' editors regarding stories that make said newspaper not even fit for wrapping fish as a laudable development, were it not for the damage that said stories have already done by the time the smackdown is delivered.

New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt usually does a good job of this, but again -- by the time he weighs in, the story is already out in the ozone, such as when he chastised Edward Luttwak for passing off speculation that overseas Muslims would be appalled at Barack Obama abandoning "the Islam of his father" as expertise. But even he ultimately dances with the one that brung him (and that signs the paychecks), as when he defended the paper against charges of sexism in its coverage of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Just before the July 4 weekend, the Washington Post ran a hit piece on a home loan that Barack Obama had taken out. (I wrote about this piece here.) That there's no there there is immaterial -- WaPo is a paper of note, and once they published this piece, the story was out there:



The coverage above debunks the "sweetheart deal" idea, but note how it includes mention of a staffer who resigned from his campaign, Sen. Chris Dodd's sweetheart mortgage, the notion that getting a house for below asking price is somehow sleazy, and even throws in the name of Tony Rezco, who had nothing to do with it. So the point is made. Sort of like invoking "terrorist fist jabs" and linking Obama with Jesse Jackson.

So please forgive me if I don't stand up and applaud Deborah Solomon's praising by faint damns the paper's hit piece:

Readers also objected to the story's prominent mention of controversial mortgage loans given two other senators and a prominent Obama supporter by the troubled Countrywide Financial Corp. James Duemer of Potsdam, N.Y., said that "the inclusion of information in the story about Countrywide is irrelevant: the Obamas got their loan from Northern Trust. The rhetorical purpose of the details about Countrywide is to create an appearance that the Obamas got a special deal because Mr. Obama is a senator."

Of the seven financial and mortgage experts I talked to, three were former reporters. The reporters thought the rate was low enough to merit a story. Financial experts who weren't journalists thought the rate was normal and something that any other wealthy, smart borrower might have gotten.

Keith Gumbinger, vice president of HSH Associates, was quoted in Stephens's story as saying that Obama "did better than average. It's a good deal." Gumbinger also told me that the rate "was not out of the boundaries" of what other borrowers were offered. "Frankly, any reasonably savvy borrower should have been able to do better than average. That context was missing" from the story, he said.

The story quoted an Obama spokesman as saying that the rate was lower because of a competing offer. It is common for borrowers to shop for the best rate. The story noted that the Obamas had enjoyed a surge in income. This came through higher-paying jobs for both and a $2.27 million book deal for him.

Northern Trust Vice President John O'Connell said in an interview, "This was not a unique situation -- it is common and consistent business policy which shows no favoritism toward politicians, celebrities or any public figures. His rate was based on the fact this is a client who could potentially bring us more personal business." The Obamas since have invested about $3 million with Northern Trust, the Obama spokesman said.

O'Connell said that Northern Trust's rate on this type of mortgage at the time was 5.81 percent and that a discount of 0.125 percent was available to clients or prospective clients based on the potential for more personal business; 0.060 percent was subtracted from the rate because it was a competitive bid.

Bob Bauer, the Obama campaign's general counsel, is familiar with the mortgage and reviewed the loan with bank officials. He said that the story "tilted over, to any reader, into a story of preferential treatment, not justified by the facts. The fact that Obama is a U.S. senator is immaterial." After reviewing the loan file from an ethics point of view, he said, "it was a walkaway, a piece of cake." To Bauer, the rate Obama got wasn't as relevant as whether another borrower in the same circumstances would have received the same treatment and gotten a loan at the same rate.

Then why hadn't the Obama campaign complained about the story? Bauer, an expert on ethics and campaign finance, said a Columbia Journalism Review critique of the story was so good that "we didn't have a whole lot to add." CJR's Campaign Desk blog said that there "there doesn't seem to be much of a story here" and that the story raised more questions than it answered.

Christopher Cruise of Silver Spring, a national trainer of mortgage brokers and loan officers, thought the story was "fair, broad and deep." A former reporter, Cruise suggested that Obama should not have bargained for a lower rate if for no other reason than to avoid the appearance of preferential treatment.

Holden Lewis, a reporter who covers mortgages for Bankrate.com, said, "I realize that the story annoyed some people, but this was a case of an enterprising reporter asking a question that had to be asked and who got it answered thoroughly. I wish I had written the story."

Would he have done anything differently with the story? "I would have stressed that the mortgage rate was normal for someone who has $3 million invested with the brokerage lending the money. The money they invested was more than the mortgage, so they are incredibly good credit risks.''

Guy Cecala, owner of Inside Mortgage Finance newsletters in Bethesda, said the rate was not typical for most lenders to offer good customers. "It certainly raises eyebrows and suggests that Obama got the deal because he was a U.S. senator," he said. "I don't think you will find that Northern Trust handed out any other 5.625 percent, 30-year fixed-rate loans that day or week." Cecala said he had negotiated hard with banks himself for several loans and the most he had ever gotten was an eighth of a percentage point discount.

O'Connell said information about the other loans given that week is not easily available. He said Cecala's statement does not reflect an understanding of Northern Trust's business. "Our core business is wealth management, and mortgages are one of many services we provide to our clients," he said.

Jill Hoogendyk, president and owner of HomePoint Mortgage Co. in Phoenix, said, "It's nothing for one borrower to get a quarter percentage point lower than another borrower on any given day. The industry is set up in such a way that owners have that kind of flexibility. If you have a high-net-worth customer, it makes perfect sense to develop a business relationship that would bring in more business to the bank" by giving a break on a rate. "There's nothing unethical or scary or anything else about it. It's good business. If you take away the fact that he's a U.S. senator, no one would have a problem with that."

I asked the advice of my longtime financial adviser and CPA, Stephen B. Smith of Williams-Keepers in Columbia, Mo., only because Smith is about the most Republican Republican I know when it comes to financial matters. And he's no Obama fan. After reading the article, he said: "No story. It's a very normal mortgage gotten by normal people, not even a sweetheart deal. The story quotes average rates. Averages have a range in this context. The rate charged is probably within the range of others in the sample who had no reason to get a favor. That is not a rate to shock the conscience."

Well. Reporters thought the rate merited a story. This is hardly surprising, after all, the nature of journalism today is about "gotcha", whether there's anything to get or not. I'm told that Barack Obama has two black daughters, too.

What's appalling is that the Washington Post is bending over backwards to try to make this look like something sleazy or illegal, which then allows CNN to pad the story by invoking Tony Rezco -- while the way John McCain is gaming the campaign finance system and the way he's a tax deadbeat in San Diego has received only a fraction of the coverage. If the mainstream press were perhaps a bit more even handed in their elevation of the trivial into the monstrous, perhaps they might have more credibility.

Labels: hack journalism

Even though my friends and I were a little old for them, there was a period in the 1980's when we took in all that era's high school movies. Is there anything that screams "1980's" more than the John Hughes movies, plus Say Anything, and of course Fast Times at Ridgemont High?

When you don't have children, you don't really have a barometer for the passage of time, so if most of your friends are childfree and your only sibling is also, it's easy to kid yourself for a long time that you aren't getting older.

My most recent smack in the face occurred when I read recently about Molly Ringwald playing the MOTHER of a pregnant teenager in an upcoming TV movie. I can deal with James Spader having morphed from a creepily pretty young man into the prissy, pursed-lips Church Lady clone that is his Alan Shore character on Boston Legal. I can deal with John Cusack being a passionate activist whose eye-crinkles are now crow's feet. I can even deal with the trip into bizarro world that is Two And a Half Men reruns that precede Family Guy every night on the CW.

But Molly Ringwald as the mother of a teenager? That, my perpetually adolescent friends, is a true hot kiss at the end of the west fist of reality.

Last night I was flipping channels and came across the last ten minutes of one of the worst of that particular genre, Pretty in Pink. I should have loved this movie when it came out; after all, it had a geeky heroine like I was, who instead of hiding under a poncho like I did in high school, managed to create her own style. It may have been a ghastly style, but it was a style. And we were supposed to believe that both of the pretty rich boys in town wanted her but caved to social pressure -- from each other, no less. The two boys were the aforementioned James Spader at his absolute creepiest and the rabbity Andrew McCarthy, while the Molly Ringwald character's TRUE soulmate; the one that there's no way she'd be able to appreciate until she's 40, is the quirky Duckie, played by Jon Cryer.

We all knew guys like this in high school -- ferociously smart, funny, talented guys so full of their own zany energy and able to cover up their self-loathing with a quirky wit. And they never, ever get the girl; not until they grow into their faces and the girls stop longing for the chiseled jock with the hot car. I was thirty-one when I saw Pretty in Pink, and I really, really wanted Andie to realize at the end just how freaking cool Duckie was:



Of course, at the age of 31, it was the Annie Potts character that I wanted to BE.

Labels: movies

And here I was so looking forward to going to Stubbs' and to searching for a cheap plastic ashtray in the shape of an armadillo for Mr. Brilliant (or alternatively, a cheap plastic armadillo that poops chocolate-flavored jellybeans). But alas, due to the seemingly ubiquitous these days Work Crap™, I've had to cancel my plans to attend the 2008 Conclave of Le Grand Orange. For completely unrelated reasons, so has Melina, so between the two of us we have two registrations available at the early bird rate of $175 each (a hell of a lot less than what it'll set you back now) and two rooms on the executive floor of the Austin Hilton up for grabs.

The thing with the hotel rooms is that you'll have to take the leap of faith of providing a credit card number, because I'm not in a position to leave the room on my card, especially since I've already sunk $600 into something I can't attend. And as for the registrations, well, make an offer. No reasonable offer refused. And you don't even have to do the ashtray search.

I will know more if there's a Personal Bummer of the Week #2 after Tuesday.

Labels: Netroots Nation, stuff

But it's hard to respond in any other way to this.

Sounds like a good time to not accept any job offers in tall buildings in American cities this summer. Déjà vu anyone?

Labels: hack journalism, icepick meet forehead

You'd think, after John F. Kennedy became president and the Pope didn't end up ruling America, that we'd be over this notion that a president's religion meant he was a theocrat. Of course, we're living in a country where a bunch of U.S. Senators held a session that named the Rev. Sun Myung Moon as the Messiah, but it's funny....no one in the mainstream media ever uttered a peep about that. We're also living in a country in which John McCain, adulterer and bigamist, can suck up to the Christofascist Zombie Brigade by announcing his opposition to gay Americans being allowed by adopt children thusly: “I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption,” -- and the mainstream media utters nary a peep about where a guy like this gets off being so holier-than-thou about "both parents" after leaving his wife for a younger, prettier one with a hundred million smackers to boot.

Funny how no one's digging into what John McCain thinks about God; it's as off-limits as any question about whether being shot down makes him a hero, or just unfortunate. But it's becoming increasingly clear that it doesn't matter how often Barack Obama goes to church, or what he believes about Jehovah, the Great White Alpha Male in the Sky who micromanages people's lives and who, well....ah, the heck with it -- let's just let Uncle George point out how ridiculous it is that the issue of Barack Obama and religion just doesn't seem to go away, not even after the week John McCain had.



Of course, this is the country where it seems to be perfectly okay to present Barack Obama and his wife on a magazine cover like this:



...so it's no wonder that we keep seeing story after story after story questioning what Obama believes. It's sort of like the way "terrorist fist jab" stayed in the public consciousness, the better to link the word "terrorist" with the name "Obama". It's sort of like the way the media have kept harping on Jesse Jackson's fantasies of emasculating Barack Obama -- the better to link Obama to the ferociously unpopular Jackson. It doesn't matter that Jackson simply looks like a bitter (heh) old jealous man, the point is to link the two men together in the public consciousness and feed the Fear of a Black Planet if Barack Obama is elected.

And it's working. The latest polls have Obama and McCain in a statistical dead heat, which ought to boggle the mind. A major mortgage lender went belly-up on Friday in the second biggest bank failure in U.S. history, and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae may require a %5 TRILLION bailout. And oh, yeah -- Condi says that Israel trumps everything, and we'll attack Iran if they attack Israel...preferably before the election, because like everything else, global thermonuclear war helps John McCain.

And yet, the most important story, in the eyes of the mainstream media, is STILL whether Barack Obama loves the baby Jeebus enough to satisfy Chris Matthews.

Labels: Christofascist Zombie Brigade, hack journalism, icepick meet forehead, racism