Archive for September, 2008
r.i.p. paul newman
springsteen covers suicide
too bad bruce is hipper than most of his fans.
gruel for thought
Paulson’s dreadful scheme will become law, because Americans love their bankers. The bankers enable their collective gambling habit. Think of America as a town with one casino, in which the only economic activity is gambling. Most people lose, but the casino keeps lending them more money to play. Eventually, of course, the casino must go bankrupt. At this point, the townspeople people vote to tax themselves in order to bail out the casino. Collectively, the gamblers cannot help but lose; individually they nonetheless hope to win their way out of the hole.
Americans are so deep in the hole that they might as well keep putting borrowed quarters into the one-armed bandit. They have hardly saved anything for the past 10 years. Instead, they counted on capital gains to replace the retirement savings they never put aside, first in tech stocks, then in houses. That hasn’t worked out.[...]
Altogether, they’d rather gamble, and if that requires a bailout of the house, they gladly will chip in to pay for it. After all, today’s baby boomers won’t pay for the bailout. The next generation of taxpayers will pay for Paulson’s $700-$800 billion. If that enables the present generation to keep borrowing rather than saving, it is no skin off their back. If home prices continue to collapse, the baby boomers will die in debt anyway, working at low-paying jobs until the day before their funerals.
Pakistani authorities have compared Saturday evening’s devastating truck suicide attack on the Marriott Hotel in the capital Islamabad to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
In terms of its psychological effect, the blast, which killed more than 80 people, injured hundreds and burnt out the hotel, has traumatized the nation, and, like 9/11, marks the beginning of a new battle: this time not the “war on terror”, but the war by terrorists.
Pakistan is now the declared battleground in this struggle by Islamic militants to strike first against American interests before the United States’ war machine completes its preparations to
storm the sanctuaries of al-Qaeda in Pakistan.
[link]
The Wasilla mayor’s seat is nonpartisan, and Mayor Stein, a former city planner who had held the post for nine years, ran a businesslike campaign that stressed his experience and competency. But Palin ignited the traditionally low-key race with scorching social issues, injecting “God, guns and abortion into the race — things that had nothing to do with being mayor of a small town,” according to Tigner.
Palin’s mayoral campaign rode the wave of conservative, evangelical fervor that was sweeping Alaska in the ’90s. Suddenly candidates’ social values, not their ability to manage the roads and sewer systems, were dominating the debate. “Sarah and I were both Republicans, but this was an entirely new slant to local politics — much more aggressive than anything I’d ever seen,” said Stein, looking back at the election that put Palin on the political map.
[...]
Even though Palin knew that Stein is a Protestant Christian, from a Pennsylvania Dutch background, her campaign began circulating the word that she would be “Wasilla’s first Christian mayor.” Some of Stein’s supporters interpreted this as an attempt to portray Stein as Jewish in the heavily evangelical community. Stein himself, an eminently reasonable and reflective man, thinks “they were redefining Christianity to mean born-agains.”
really looking forward to this, hopefully published in april (!)
The Bush regime’s proposed cure for the fiscal crisis involves the granting of greater new and irrevocable power to one official than at any point in American history. On matters financial, Henry Paulson, presently treasury secretary but former major participant, as head of Goldman Sachs, in the dangerous greed-driven practices that led to the crisis, will have the status of a dictator.
This is not being reported by the media; it is not being discussed by the candidates; and it is not being seriously debated by the general public. This is one of the most dangerous moments in American history. From Section 8 of the proposed legislation : “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”
colbear & maria bartiromo
can’t get this to embed so here’s the link
it’s worth the time.
stephanie zacharek on ghost town
“Ghost Town” is similarly well-crafted. Call me old-fashioned, but I like a movie that looks like it cost more than 29 cents to make (even — especially — if its actual budget was 28 cents), a picture that suggests someone put time and care into its planning and execution, instead of just turning a hand-held camera on the actors after supplying them with a hastily typed-up script peppered with pop-culture references. That’s not to say there aren’t filmmakers out there capable of doing interesting things within tiny budgets (and Lord knows those filmmakers exist in other countries, too, making movies that most of us never get to see). But mainstream movies have gotten so big, glossy and empty in recent years that we often assume indie pictures are better just because they’re somehow less shiny, and that’s a fallacy. You can’t blame intelligent audiences for turning away from mainstream romantic comedies in recent years. But self-conscious, rambling exercises like Alex Holdridge’s recent indier-than-thou romantic comedy “In Search of a Midnight Kiss” aren’t an antidote to true Hollywood stinkers like “Over Her Dead Body.” They only offer further proof that it takes focus and discipline to make a romantic comedy work. And while it’s true that Judd Apatow has given the genre a shot in the arm in recent years, even vivid, vital pictures like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up” are not exactly elegant.
“Ghost Town,” on the other hand, finally brings some class to the joint. Shot in New York, the picture has a feel for what it’s like to live in the city: Instead of making Central Park look like a tourist destination, cinematographer Fred Murphy shows us a sturdy landscape of paths and trees that people use and enjoy every day. The movie’s greatest pleasures unfold in the form of little details, like the way the Beatles’ “I’m Looking Through You” pops up on the soundtrack when Frank discovers that he’s no longer flesh and blood but ectoplasm. The joke is quite literal, but it’s also a gentle metaphor for the way we can’t always fully know even the people we love best.
let’s see: this year i’ve seen easy living (over 70 years old) & wristcutters (on the fringes of the genre, i think we can agree).
judd apatow, you’re kidding, right?.
news of the day
william greider on AIG’s criminal capitalism and some senators have serious doubts about the FBI’s neat little anthrax package
note the comment at the bottom of the AIG piece, about their history of laundering CIA drug money.
