ch.annel2-i.s-n.ow-a.ngry

First, a truism that NO ONE gets: The only easy money being had is the money going to the guy selling you the plan to make easy money.

Second, a Newsweek quote via the Mishblog:

The federal agency charged with backstopping pension benefits for 44 million Americans has understated the risks of its new investment policy, a congressional watchdog said Monday.

The PBGC said earlier this year that it would take a more aggressive investment approach by investing more in stocks and adding new alternative investments, such as real estate and private equity funds.

The agency, which has assets of $68 billion, hopes the strategy will help it close a $14 billion gap between those assets and its liabilities. Otherwise, taxpayers could be called upon to pony up extra funding, the director of the PBGC has warned.

As a well-educated taxpayer, I would like to call bullshit on this: taxpayers will not be ponying up the extra funding, foreign sovereign wealth funds will be loaning America money to pony up the extra funding. Taxpayers will be ponying up extra debt without any recourse or way to say no.

I say no taxation without at least a kiss on the back of the neck when we are being royally screwed in the asshole.

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.

This, coming from a bunch of people whose only qualifications were raising enough money to win a popularity contest and look good at the same time?

The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

Only, that’s illegal, because WE HAVE NO JURISDICTION IN OTHER COUNTRIES. Contrary to what the Bush administration, and now Congress, apparently, believes, we do not have the right to go fucking about in other countries’ business. We do not have the right to kidnap their citizens, nor slap them with antitrust laws. Also, and repeat after me here, Countries Are Not Companies. They have armies. This distinction, however, is fast becoming blurred, and when governments go for-profit we are all fucked until we tear it down.

The legislation also creates a Justice Department task force to aggressively investigate gasoline price gouging and energy market manipulation.

“This bill guarantees that oil prices will reflect supply and demand economic rules, instead of wildly speculative and perhaps illegal activities,” said Democratic Rep. Steve Kagen of Wisconsin, who sponsored the legislation.

Well, actually, Mr. Kagen, if you have been fucking paying attention, you would know that, currently, oil demand outstrips supply by about 10% worldwide. Also, the BRICs of the world are seeing amazing amounts of oil thirst. Guess what? We, as world leaders, have taught the rest of the world what to emulate when you want to dominate economically and politically. Will they follow in our footsteps? Well, they’d be fucking dumb not to, from a certain standpoint. Why should they have let us shit all over them for much of our history and then turn around and be like, “Oh, well, your gas prices (which are still just a fraction of what people pay for gas elsewhere in the world barring a few subsidied countries like Venezuela) are too high, so we’ll stop driving so your Imperial Americaness can continue despoiling the world’s skies with your monster SUVs at what you think ought to be a reasonable price.”

The lawmaker said Americans “are at the mercy” of OPEC for how much they pay for gasoline, which this week hit a record average of $3.79 a gallon.

Solution: EVs. Even a shit-hot Tesla Roadster clocks at 2 cent per mile. The equivalent of 60 cents a gallon if you have a nice car like my ‘97 Honda that gets 30/35 mpg city/hw.

The Bush administration has announced proposed new guidelines that call for a fleet average of 31.6 miles per gallon by 2015.

Honda had that. 11 years ago. Technically 12 because a ‘97 was sold in ‘96. I tell you what, filling up an 11.9 gallon tank and paying over $40 hurts like shit, but my prior car got maybe 17 mpg, and had a tank that cost about $25 bucks to fill up 8 years ago (when gas was $1.40 a gallon, just before Herr Bush was sworn in). Now it would take an uncomfortable percentage of my paycheck, like scarily close to 80 bucks (I tried to figure out how big the tank on a 83 cutlass supreme brougham was but google apparently doesn’t know, some other models say 17 gallons so I ran with that).

Maybe, instead of trying to sue the shit out of OPEC and cutting off our noses to spite our faces (because, really, what are they gonna do, say “OK, we were just fuckin with ya but we’ll be nice now” or “Well, we weren’t fucking with you, but now we’re going to charge double to ship to America”), maybe Congress should investigate why gas and oil prices skyrocketed coincidently with the arrival of Prez Bush on the scene, after years of relative stability.

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

How can you spot the liberal bias? 1) Contradicts what the Bush administration says, which is never a lie. 2) Is reporting something that showed up on Democracy Now! last week. 3) Involves the word ‘public.’ 4) Has a Nobel Prize-winner.

…just to find out how many Americans had been injured in Iraq.

5) Claims that Americans get injured in Iraq. Everyone knows they just die.

And taxes have never been cut during a major American war.

6) They claim that other American wars have been major in comparison to this. Don’t they understand that if we lose in Iraq, we’ll have 47 terrorists waiting for us in heaven when we die?

[update: whoops, forgot to link the source article.]

Senator Kennedy via Democracy Now!: Make no mistake about it: waterboarding is already illegal under United States law. It’s illegal under the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit outrages upon personal dignity, including cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment. It’s illegal under the Torture Act, which prohibits acts specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. It’s illegal under the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. And it violates the Constitution. The nation’s top military lawyers and legal experts across the political spectrum have condemned waterboarding as torture. And after World War II, the United States prosecuted — prosecuted — Japanese officers for engaging in waterboarding. What more does this nominee need to enforce existing laws?

I just wish my Senators felt the same. I sent a fax calling shame on Senator Feinstein for voting to approve Mukasey’s nomination. I told her I will vote against her until the end of time for supporting torture and rolling over (again) for Mr. Bush’s anti-American agenda (though not quite in those words.)

This is actually what I said:

Shame on you, Ms. Feinstein, for voting to approve Mr. Mukasey’s nomination. I oppose torture. Waterboarding is torture. If you do not believe so, I invite you to have this practice tried on yourself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding

I will vote against you from now until the end of time for your betrayals of American ideals and justice. I cannot put into words exactly how saddened and shamed I am.

More Americans have died now than for a war YOU have authorized than in all terrorist attacks against America.

Shame on you. Enjoy your power and privelege of ignoring your constituents while it lasts, as the President you roll over for destroys our country. You make me want to emigrate.

Probably a bit harsh, but I am upset and have no other way of expressing my frustration in a Congress that swept the election due to dissatisfaction with the way our government was being ran and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing to change things for the will of the American people.

For those of you interested, my words to Mr. Kennedy:

 Mr. Kennedy,

I am not one of your constituents, but I wanted to thank you for your vote against Mr. Mukasey and your insightful comments afterwards. It appears you have a strong sense of history and justice, which sadly many Americans, especially the media, lack.

We need more men and women like you in Congress, and in America in general. It seems that you still believe that government in America is “Of the people, by the people, for the people,” and not “Of me, by me, for me,” as Mr. Bush and many other elected and appointed goverment officials seem to believe.

Though you are not my senator, I look forward to helping you create a better America for all our children, including the children of those who will never see them grow up because they have been lost in this misguided war in Iraq.

Go to www.senate.gov and make your voice heard! Demand to know why “We the people” has changed to “We the goverment, and you all had better shut up and follow along.”

Mukasey so far has refused to say explicitly what his position is on the lawfulness of the interrogation technique, which simulates drowning.

Wikipedia does say: “Waterboarding is a form of torture^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]} ” That’s right. Nine citations.  Forms of waterboarding were used as far back as the Spanish Inquisition. Even our good media has a myopic view of the world. Media doesn’t even remember it’s own previous role in exposing the uses of such torture: In 1968, during the Vietnam War, the Washington Post published a controversial photograph of American soldiers waterboarding a North Vietnamese POW near Da Nang.

Wiki also says: All countries that are signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture have agreed they are subjected to the explicit prohibition on torture under any condition, and as such there exists no legal exception under this treaty. (The treaty states, No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.) Additionally, signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also agreed to its Article 5, which states, No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

And we are most certainly a signatory to that Convention.

A smear campaign during the primary in February 2000 here had many in South Carolina falsely believing that Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict and that the couple’s adopted daughter, Bridget, was the product of an illicit union. Mr. McCain’s patriotism, mental well-being and sexuality were also viciously called into question.

…

The bruising episode left him rancorous toward Mr. Bush, yet schooled in what it takes to win. Mr. McCain fell into a “very dark place,” in the words of one acquaintance, re-emerging as a more pragmatic, traditional Republican who now regularly reaches out to many of Mr. Bush’s allies, speaks comfortably to religious conservatives and has all but abandoned the maverick story line of 2000.

“He regrouped, and he dug real deep to figure out how to make the best of that situation,” said the acquaintance, Ed McMullen, who heads a South Carolina public policy group.

I guess I can believe Republicans could do that to their own guy. Makes me kinda sad, though. More sad still that McCain would allow himself to be leashed like that. He sought to not play ball, and he got eviscerated by lies. And he took that as a lesson that he needed to play ball the way they wanted to. They showed him they would take their ball and go home if need be. Sad, that in this day and age lies like that are the norm and unquestioned at the time. All that counts is the now, the rhetoric. The actions of people and the truth of history is forgotten almost instantly, with all the bread and circuses we find in this modern life.

Is it just me, or does RealityTV (including celebrity ‘reality’ tv and paparazzal cinema verité footage) remind anyone of the coliseum of ancient Rome and the battles within, albeit with less death and more humiliation? Condemnation in the court of public opinion, acclaim for the winners but looking for any weakness to tear that winner down next season.

He just talked shit on US soldiers.

“He is a talk show host,” Mr. Kingston said. “He has a right to speak out and say what he thinks.”

No one in Congress said that about Don Imus. Fuckers.