Fierce clashes involving rockets and heavy machine guns erupted in Lebanon on Sunday between pro-government forces and opposition gunmen in mountains east of Beirut. At the same time Arab foreign ministers held an emergency meeting in an effort to find a solution to the worsening crisis.
According to a Republican-produced magazine, blacks should vote Republican instead of Democratic because of what happened years ago. Or rather, because of the Republicans’ version of what happened years ago. The Black Republican describes the Ku Klux Klan as the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party”, claiming that every person in an old photo of a KKK rally was a Democrat and citing the Dixiecrat opposition to Civil Rights.
The article does not acknowledge that many of those Dixiecrats joined the Republican Party in protest over President Johnson’s active and successful support of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
I wonder what the magazine has to say about what the Republican Party has done to earn the loyalty of minority voters. Protected voter rights? Um, no. The Republican Party is all about making it harder for people to vote. Protected the rights of immigrants? No. Protected low-income people from predatory lending practices? Nope. Encouraged the prosecution of discrimination cases? Nope, quite the opposite. Made health care more affordable and more available? Nope.
That’s why the Republicans resort to smear tactics based on unsupported claims about long-ago events. They can’t attract minority voters, they can only try to turn them against the Democrats.
…Russia has 20% of the world’s natural gas reserves, and at least 7% of proven oil reserves, some 75 billion barrels. However, Russia’s huge reserves are in remote regions and will require vast investment to further exploit.
Even so, as energy prices soar, Russia grows wealthier and more powerful by the day, a sort of Saudi Arabia with snow. Interestingly, Russia today commands far more influence over Western Europe than it did when 100 Red Army divisions threatened the continent to the point where France began re-arming the Maginot forts.
Russia’s Gazprom now accounts for nearly 40% of Germany’s and Ukraine’s gas consumption, 33% of Italy’s, 26% of France’s heating needs, 70% of Austria’s, and almost all of Eastern Europe’s gas. Moscow does not need tanks to threaten Europe.
If Vladi and Dimi turn off the gas export tap, as they recently did to late-paying Ukraine, Europeans will shiver in the winter cold.
Washington is deeply alarmed by Russia’s growing energy clout. Until recently, the U.S. controlled much of world energy through its domination of the Middle East. Now, Russia is challenging America’s oil Raj and Washington is struggling to develop new pipeline routes to circumvent Russia’s fast expanding pipeline network.
…
The Kremlin now must deal with Washington’s violation of secret agreements with former General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev not to advance NATO any further east in exchange for Moscow freeing Eastern Europe.
The Russians tend to overplay their hands, creating dangerous instability… um, not unlike other countries one could name. Let’s hope that Germany, France, the Scandinavian countries and the UK get their act together fast and start cranking out the biodiesel and recovered methane they need to tell the Russians to blow.
A highly sensitive internal report into the state of the British Army has revealed that many soldiers are living in poverty. Some are so poor that they are unable to eat and are forced to rely on emergency food voucher schemes set up by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). …
Pressure from an undermanned army is “having a serious impact on retention in infantry battalions”, with nearly half of all soldiers unable to take all their annual leave as they try to cover the gaps.
The Tories will doubtless use this as an issue against Labour, just as our “conservatives” used their systematic underfunding of enlisted salaries/benefits against Clinton– and then did nothing except make the misery of the troops worse. Sure the right supports the troops… right after cutting taxes and maintaining the culture wars and paying off big business and pretending to be pious while sleeping with anything that moves, and….
Salon’s Broadsheet and the blog Time in Moments remind us about The Weather Channel’s history of not only tolerating sexual harrassment, but of punishing those female employees who refuse to submit to it — acts which are finally coming back to haunt them as they try to sell themselves for top dollar to a new owner:
Ms. Andrews isn’t stupid. Before her contract was up she filed a demand for arbitration according to her contract with The Weather Channel. Her complaint? The company TWC allowed Bob Stokes to sexually harass her.
She won. On January 31st, 2008, the arbitrator issued an award of an undisclosed amount to Ms. Andrews.
For some reason the Weather Channel doesn’t want this little story out in the media while a bidding war is going on. They want that 17 pages of arbitration hidden until they get a new owner.
Awww. Rick Santorum’s favorite cable channel is in trouble. Gee, you mean that TWC’s coddling a lawsuit and bad-publicity magnet among their employees might just hurt their marketability? What a shame. Not.
By the way: If you want to go look up US weather online, the NOAA’s own website, http://www.weather.gov, is a much better bet — and it’s free.
The Bad Idea Blog points out that even as Scott Bloch’s Office of Special Counsel blew off sex-discrimination complaints from women and any complaints directed against the political allies of Bush and Company, they were pursuing bogus complaints on behalf of their buddies, such as those in the creationist/ID movement:
One of the latter cases involved none other than Richard Sternberg, Expelled’s cause célèbre. In that case, the OSC, despite having no jurisdiction (since Sternberg was not a federal employee in the first place), issued a letter claiming that they could substantiate Sternberg’s claims of persecution. Ed Darrell (who alerted me to this story) notes how that one played out:
The mackarel by moonlight in that story (both shining and stinking at the same time) was a letter from the Office of Special Counsel which, while claiming to have found unspecified evidence of wrongdoing [in the Sternberg case], said that OSC was the wrong agency to prosecute wrong-doers (OSC had an obligation to turn over any evidence of wrongdoing to the right agency, but Stein doesn’t mention that; there never was any evidence turned over to anyone). (emphasis added)
Bloch is currently in hot water because he was part of the apparent Bush administration “coincidence” involving the illegally deletion of millions of e-mails and other computer records, which critics suspect might have contained embarrassing or incriminating evidence. The FBI has focused on Bloch in particular for basically doing to his own employees what his own agency supposedly exists to prevent.
There are a lot of foxes in the Federal henhouse because of BushCo. I’m looking forward to seeing them evicted — if not convicted.
Taibbi’s Law: If nothing happens, then you can’t have “news,” because nothing has changed since the day before.
We already know that some within any traditionally Democratic demographic, some people support Clinton and some support Barack Obama. We also know that the disagreements between the two groups of supporters are often contentious.
But the Associated Press thinks it’s news that some feminists are supporting Barack Obama, and that some of the feminists who support Hillary Clinton are peeved about that. And vice versa.
I suspect this “news” is an excuse to describe a traditional Democratic demographic as “sharply divided”. Again. The snooze media can’t talk about Democrats at all without describing us as “sharply divided”, the way every time a hero died in The Iliad, his armor clashed around him.
When you see a story like this, remember that the Republicans are “sharply divided”, too: even though John McCain is the last candidate left standing, 20% or more of Republican voters are going to the polls just to vote against him, which is a lot more significant than Democrats variously supporting one or the other of two strong candidates.
And remember that the so-called news media are not our friends.
Lucky for me I stopped off at our friend Bruno Giussani’s Lunch over IP, or I might have missed Pangea Day, which is Saturday, May 10th, 11 AM Pacific (if I am reading the times correctly). You can watch the stream here, but it takes a new computer and a fairly fast connection. Read Bruno for the details, but here’s my favorite:
The movements of the Euro over the last weeks have been puzzling. It hit 1.60 to the dollar, then plunged to 1.53 before having a bit of a bounceback. This is high volatility in a major currency and small changes in currencies have very large consequences in the real world.
MacroMan asked: Now, what’s peculiar is that the euro was essentially frog-marched up to 1.60 by central bank demand….but since then has been sold off aggressively, with some of the same names that had previously been buying cited as the sellers. This has led Macro Man and others to speculate: has Voldemort [i.e., the People's Bank of China](and others) fallen out of love with the euro?
So, all the more surprising to find this story by Keith Bradsher in the NYT:
Facing the double-barreled threat of a falling dollar and weakening American demand, some Chinese exporters are starting to ask European customers to pay in euros….Drastic times call for drastic measures. The dollar’s fall against China’s currency has been accelerating — it is down 4 percent so far this year, after dropping 7 percent last year. That has left businesses across China nursing losses and trying to figure out how to raise prices for overseas buyers, Chinese executives and sales representatives said
My guess is that the Chinese government realized that the strength of the Euro, caused by their purchases, were starting to gripe the Europeans enough to threaten retaliation, so they switched to accumulating reserves in dollars, taking the losses of a weakening dollar. Interestingly, the yen also started strengthening a little bit about this time. So, perhaps they are diversifying into yen, a move that would also help them compete against Japanese exporters.
This is the Republican Party’s idea of good governance. If the Democrats had dared to do this during their twelve years in the minority, you know full well that the press led by FOX would have been playing it up big-time:
On Wednesday afternoon, the House had just voted, 412 to 0, to pass H. Res. 1113, “Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of Mother’s Day,” when Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), rose in protest.
“Mr. Speaker, I move to reconsider the vote,” he announced.
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who has two young daughters, moved to table Tiahrt’s request, setting up a revote. This time, 178 Republicans cast their votes against mothers.
It has long been the custom to compare a popular piece of legislation to motherhood and apple pie. Evidently, that is no longer the standard. Worse, Republicans are now confronted with a John Kerry-esque predicament: They actually voted for motherhood before they voted against it.
Republicans, unhappy with the Democratic majority, have been using such procedural tactics as this all week to bring the House to a standstill, but the assault on mothers may have gone too far. House Minority Leader John Boehner, asked yesterday to explain why he and 177 of his colleagues switched their votes, answered: “Oh, we just wanted to make sure that everyone was on record in support of Mother’s Day.”
By voting against it?
It’s not as if Republicans can claim that they acted on principle here, taking a stand against fluffy legislation — not when they tout even fluffier legislation designed to aid and abet FOX commentator Bill O’Reilly’s imaginary war on the imaginary enemies of Christmas.
