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September, 2008 Monthly archive

The truth comes out:

According to CNN, McCain’s camp is now proposing that the debate be postponed by moving it to into the time and venue of the vice presidential debate, scheduled for Oct. 2nd in St. Louis. The Biden-Palin debate would then be itself rescheduled to happen later on.

So, that’d be delaying two debates, not just one. And what are the odds that the vice presidential debate would manage to somehow never get rescheduled, given the McCain camp’s intensive efforts to keep her away from reporters and questioners?

I guess those cram sessions with Joe Lieberman aren’t going so well…

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This is kind of old, and I acutally saw it on another blog, but I thought it deserved a watch.

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I stumbled across this link today, and to be honest I haven’t fully looked into it. It seems like a good idea though.
 

 

http://us.onionmap.com/web/us/

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Here we go

In Adhamiya, a neighborhood that only a year ago was among the most dangerous in Baghdad, the violence last week seemed almost negligible. A shootout near a checkpoint left two people dead on Sunday. Another man was killed on Monday by a small bomb placed under a car.

Some residents hardly noticed.

But the deaths quickly drew the attention of the American officers stationed in the neighborhood. Both outbursts involved members of the Awakening Councils, the citizen patrols paid by the United States to fight the insurgency.

And both were seen as a worrisome sign of the tension and infighting that have rippled through the Sunni-dominated Awakening groups in recent weeks, just as the American military plans to transfer control of about half the councils to the Shiite-led government.

BTW, just so y’all know that I’m not making up how huge of deal this transition of Awakening forces is, here you go:

American military commanders have said the success of the transition is a critical gauge of whether reconciliation is possible at a time when withdrawals of American troops are beginning.

“It’s a very big deal to us to make sure that this goes off well,” said Brig. Gen. Robin P. Swan, a deputy commander for the American forces in Baghdad.

The military has spent months working out the mechanics of the transition, hoping to head off problems. But some American officers have expressed concerns that should the transfer go badly, the lure of the insurgency might prove too great for some Awakening members, in particular top leaders, who stand to lose lucrative management fees and higher salaries. The result could threaten the fragile stability attained in much of Iraq in recent months.

We’ll see, I guess.  We’ll see.

[Via Sullivan]

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[Via Sullivan]

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You know, you have to hand it to conservatives.  They have an uncanny ability to tie everything back to black people (and their liberal friends):

Much more problematic than Gramm-Leach-Bliley is the Community Reinvestment Act, a bit of legislative arm-twisting much beloved by Sen. Obama and his fellow Democrats. One of the reasons so many bad mortgage loans were made in the first place is that Barack Obama’s celebrated community organizers make their careers out of forcing banks to do so. ACORN, for which Obama worked, is one of many left-wing organizations that spent decades pressuring banks and bank regulators to do more to make mortgages available to people without much in the way of income, assets, or credit. These campaigns often were couched in racially inflammatory terms. The result was the Community Reinvestment Act. The CRA empowers the FDIC and other banking regulators to punish those banks which do not lend to the poor and minorities at the level that Obama’s fellow community organizers would like. Among other things, mergers and acquisitions can be blocked if CRA inquisitors are not satisfied that their demands — which are political demands — have been met. There is a name for loans made to people who do not have the credit, assets, income, or down payment to qualify for a normal mortgage: subprime.

Yglesias leads the takedown:

The technical term for this argument is “bullshit.”

For one thing, the timeline is ludicrous. The Community Reinvestment Act was passed in 1977. Are we supposed to believe that CRA was working smoothly throughout the Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton years and then only under Bush II did overzealous anti-”redlining” enforcement come into play, perhaps a result of Dubya’s legendarily close relationship with ACORN? Or maybe overzealous enforcement back in the late 1970s is somehow responsible for a real estate blowout that only materialized 30 years later? It doesn’t even come close to making sense.

Beyond that, the mere existence of “subprime” loans — i.e., mortgages given to less-creditworthy individuals at higher interest rates — isn’t the problem here. The problems have to do with what was done with the loans after they were packaged, sold and used to make leveraged plays.

You know, I’m beginning to think their wouldn’t be a conservative movement if their wasn’t some sort of minority to blame everything on…

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My friend Adam at work passed along this blog post for the Juice The Blog crowd. Regarding the anti-Palin demonstration in Alaska:

…I felt a bit apprehensive.  I’d been disappointed before by the turnout at other rallies.  Basically, in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it’s a success.  So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there that aren’t sent by Eddie Burke, we’ll be doing good.  A real statement will have been made.  I confess, I still had a mental image of 15 demonstrators surrounded by hundreds of menacing “socialist baby-killing maggot” haters.

It’s a good thing I wasn’t tailgating when I saw the crowd in front of the library or I would have ended up in somebody’s trunk.  When I got there, about 20 minutes early, the line of sign wavers stretched the full length of the library grounds, along the edge of the road, 6 or 7 people deep!  I could hardly find a place to park.  I nabbed one of the last spots in the library lot, and as I got out of the car and started walking, people seemed to join in from every direction, carrying signs.

Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage.  The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators).  This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state.  I was absolutely stunned.

Pics and vids and all the rest: http://mudflats.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/alaska-women-reject-palin-rally-is-huge/

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PBS is doing a poll which asks if Palin is qualified to be VP.  The right wing has organized a yes campaign–and the “yes” is at the moment winning.  Take literally  1/2  minute, go to:

http://www.pbs.org/now/polls/poll-435.html  and vote!

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Our friend Chris showed me this, I found it hilarious.

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So I am dying to write a little about Army Ants but I want to make sure I do it right, so until then I will write a quick blurb about a dream I had last night.

I don’t remember quite what was going on, but I remember the outcome. I think I was chatting with someone … but what we were chatting about is irrelevant. At some part of our conversation, my dream returned an out of bounds enumeration which my brain didn’t have a condition for. This, for one reason or another, lead the subsequent dream function to enter an infinite for loop. My dream hung up for a few seconds before the debugger caught it and I woke up with a very sudden jolt. As metaphorical as that may seem, that’s actually how it played out in my head and what I remembered when I woke up.

I have been working on Army Ants literally all day every day, from wake up to bed. I get to school between 8 am and 10 am and leave around 10 pm or later and typically during that time I will be neglecting all of my classes except for Army Ants. Saturday and Sunday cannot escape the wrath of Army Ants.

I need a vacation.

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Dealines are coming.  Get everyone you know registered here.

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The one thing that pushes my “InstaPissed” button faster than anything is when an undecided voter pulls the “haven’t heard any specifics” line.  I just have no patience for these people, because they are clearly just attempting make an intellectual excuse for their own laziness and lack of interest.  They don’t want to tip their hand that they haven’t read a damn thing about either candidate all year, and are basing their entire opinion of each candidate on the 30 minutes per week they watch of the babble coming from Wolf Blitzer’s mouth.  So, quit giving me the cop out of “lack of specifics.”  Not sure if these people know, but there’s this thing called the internet, and if you can spare the 30 minutes or so that you would have spent watching re-runs of the Dog Whisperer, you might just find out a few those “specifics.”

The one issue that frustrates me the most with this kind of discussion is the current financial crisis.  People still seem to think that neither candidate has given any specifics on how to deal with these issues.  In fact, John McCain is counting on the fact that people haven’t been paying attention.  He’s counting on the fact that you didn’t hear him calling for more deregulation back in March.  He’s counting on you not knowing that his “former” economics advisor championed most of the deregulation that got us into this mess.  He’s counting on the fact that you might think that John McCain is actually interested in doing something productive to prevent a mess like this from happening again.

So for the last time, if anyone ever says that they “haven’t heard any specifics” on the current financial meltdown then they might be right, as long as they’re talking about John McCain.

On the other hand, hit the jump to find out what Barack Obama said in March.

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Devilstower explains the banking meltdown and the perils of deregulation way better than I did.  His closing:

It may come as a surprise to the champions of deregulation, but nobody likes regulation. The restrictions that were placed on banks, S&Ls, and other institutions in the 1930s weren’t put there because someone thought it would be fun. They were put in place because they addressed problems that had just been clearly and painfully revealed. They were put in place because they were necessary.

It’s bad enough if John McCain didn’t know that. It’s far worse if he did.

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[Via DailyKos]

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