Room to breathe

Asha’ar Rehman, writing in Dawn, captured it:

IT is a perfect verdict for everyone except for those who had become a liability for people above and below them. The cake was cut in a manner to please generally. The eating part will come later.

First take the president of the country. He has been absolved of charges of rigging the vote in favour of his Pakistan Muslim League-Q. He had sent shivers down the spine of all those who considered a free election vital for Pakistan’s stability when he said that he expected his allies to obtain a majority on Feb 18. It may have cost Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain his seat in the National Assembly, but at least he can boast now that aspersions cast on President Pervez Musharraf’s role during the polls have turned out to be false.

Socialization of risk, socialism for the rich

Gillian Tett, FT:

US banks have been quietly borrowing massive amounts of money from the Federal Reserve in recent weeks by using a new measure the Fed introduced two months ago to help ease the credit crunch.

Hemi-Demi-Semi-Super Tuesday

Here are some polls I found knocking around the Net (well, mostly Daily Kos) today:

— Per MissLaura, both SUSA and Opinion Research‘s latest polls show Obama closing with Clinton in Texas. Weirdly, Friday’s Rasmussen poll still had Clinton up well into the double digits in the Lone Star State. You figure it out.

— Why Obama might be closing with Hillary in Texas:  He’s now doing better than Hillary with Hispanics nationwide.

— Latest Rasmussen national polling says pretty much what Rasmussen’s polling’s been saying for months now: McCain beats Clinton, Obama beats McCain (h/t Jon Wiener).

— Wow! Latest Rasmussen has Al Franken pulling ahead of Norm Coleman for the very first time (h/t christomento).

— More polling goodness from MissLaura.

“Border Wall” Preserves Rich Texans’ Property, Protects Crony Corporations’ Profits

We already knew that the 18-foot-high wall DHS wants to build along the Texas-Mexico border is useless for security. The Texas Observer reports that it will have gaps in it: gaps corresponding, by some strange coincidence, with the locations of rich people’s property.

As the U.S. Department of Homeland Security marches down the Texas border serving condemnation lawsuits to frightened landowners, Brownsville resident Eloisa Tamez, 72, has one simple question. She would like to know why her land is being targeted for destruction by a border wall, while a nearby golf course and resort remain untouched.
 […]
 

Just 69 miles north, Daniel Garza, 76, faces a similar situation with a neighbor who has political connections that reach the White House. In the small town of Granjeno, population 313, Garza points to a field across the street where a segment of the proposed 18-foot high border wall would abruptly end after passing through his brick home and a small, yellow house he gave his son. “All that land over there is owned by the Hunts,” he says, waving a hand toward the horizon. “The wall doesn’t go there.” In this area everyone knows the Hunts. Dallas billionaire Ray L. Hunt and his relatives are one of the wealthiest oil and gas dynasties in the world. Hunt, a close friend of President George W. Bush, recently donated $35 million to Southern Methodist University to help build Bush’s presidential library.

The Observer also reports that the “wall” project is completely privatized. There is no oversight whatever for the project:

In a February 2007 hearing, Congressman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat and the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, had more scathing remarks for Giddens and the SBInet project. “As of December, the Department of Homeland Security had hired a staff of 98 to oversee the new SBInet contract. This may seem like progress until you ask who these overseers are. More than half are private contractors. Some of these private contractors even work for companies that are business partners of Boeing, the company they are supposed to be overseeing. And from what we are now learning from the department, this may be just the tip of the iceberg.”

There is also no spending limit. Oh, what a surprise.

This is worse than Security Theater. It’s another Bushevik scam to drive unrich people from their homes and pour taxpayers’ money into corporate coffers.

Holy Flying Wind Turbines, Batman!

This sounds pretty nifty. As does this.

So does this.

An eight-turbine module of these won’t even come close to taking a typical American home off the grid. But a twenty-turbine module will indeed come close will come closer (see comments section below). Besides, either of these will pay for itself in reduced electric bills in about a year’s time, at most — after which you can sock away the savings for other things, like, perhaps, a set of solar panels.

Mexico, February 19th 2008

A bomb directed against a security official exploded in Mexico City, killing the bomber and wounding a female acquaintance. The goal of the bombing remains speculative, but at least some opinion is that it is to allow further crackdowns to grease the way for PEMEX privatization.

SenderodelPeje has a truly remarkable 5 minute ad from the national oil company PEMEX urging the exploitation of deepwater petroleum.   Interestingly, they claim that Cuba is on the verge of becoming a net exporter. A billion dollars is to be invested in an ethylene plant.

Well, Duh!

The Politico figures out what Minnesotans have known for, oh, the past three years or so:

Even through the McCain campaign’s darkest days in 2007, Minnesota
Gov. Tim Pawlenty remained a steadfast ally to the Arizona senator in
his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

As a result, with John McCain as the clear GOP front-runner and
insider talk turning to speculation about his possible running mate,
party insiders are now buzzing about the 47-year-old, second-term
governor’s vice presidential prospects.

Vin Weber, a Minnesota congressman-turned-Washington-lobbyist who is
one of Pawlenty’s biggest boosters, ticks off the list of appealing
traits.

“First of all, his age is attractive,” Weber says, hinting at the
nearly quarter-century difference between his fellow Minnesotan and
the 71-year-old McCain. “Second, he’s from outside Washington. Third,
he represents a battleground part of the country. And he has a nice
balance of, on one hand being totally acceptable to the conservative
wing of the party, especially to social conservatives, but at the
same time sharing a couple of key maverick strains of thought with
McCain.”

Weber isn’t Pawlenty’s only Washington admirer. Sara Taylor, former
White House political director and a veteran of both Bush-Cheney
campaigns, contacted this reporter to offer unsolicited observations
on the governor.

Declining to say how she got wind of the story, Taylor lavished
praise on Pawlenty. “By far, he’s the strongest candidate” to serve
as McCain’s running mate, she said. “He’s a conservative,
rock-n-roll Republican and is counterintuitive to the party stereotype that
we’re old and rich,” says Taylor, who recalled visiting St. Paul and finding
the governor jamming in his office to recording artist Bruce Springsteen.
“He’s young and blue-collar.”

And, Taylor said, in a potential race against the 46-year-old Barack
Obama, Pawlenty would be “as good as our party has for that [matchup].”

Smilin’ Tim’s shown his eagerness to get near the White House by adopting the standard Grover Norquist starve-the-beast-and-drown-it-in-the-bathtub strategy for dealing with government programs that his buddies can’t use to turn a profit for themselves. He screwed his own state by ramming through a tax cuts package while he was in the state legislature, then pretending to be oh-so-surprised as governor when the state developed a huge deficit as a result. Rather than undo his tax cuts, which would jeopardize his standing with the kingmakers in the national GOP, Pawlenty instead slashed public services and worked to make the state’s tax system even more regressive, using fees (which hit lower- and middle-income folks harder than the rich) and shoving the tax burden onto local municipalities and their property-tax systems — and one of the results of that slashing is still being fished out of the Mississippi River six and a half months after it collapsed.

The big irony? This robbing the poor to give to the rich was done in the name of boosting the state’s economic growth. But under Pawlenty’s cut-taxes-on-the-rich régime, state growth has consistently lagged behind the rest of the nation’s for the first time in recent memory, in addition to being a mere shadow of what it was under high-tax Democratic governors.

Meanwhile, Pawlenty will likely be having to fend off Joe Lieberman in his quest to remain McCain’s presumptive running mate. Short Ride Joe claims he doesn’t want the job, but we know better..

Guess Texas And Ohio Democrats Can Cancel Their Primaries Now

From The Politico via Atrios:

‘Second-class delegates’

A co-chairman of Hillary’s Michigan campaign and has a line that’s sure to drive a whole bunch of red state governors up the wall:

“Superdelegates are not second-class delegates,” says Joel Ferguson, who will be a superdelegate if Michigan is seated. “The real second-class delegates are the delegates that are picked in red-state caucuses that are never going to vote Democratic.”

So I guess Hillary and Obama should stop campaigning in Texas and Ohio, then?