The Sign in "the Middle"!

I love the guy in the striped-shirt!!

"Torture is a failure of leadership."

Major Alexander is a credible witness - he was a U.S. military interrogator for 14 years and received a Bronze Star for leading the team that got the information that led to the capture of Zarqawi without using torture.

It doesn't get much better than this!

Fran & Marlo Cowan (married 62 years) playing impromptu recital together in the atrium of the Mayo Clinic. He'll be 90 in February.

10+ minutes w/ Bill Black: "They knew it. They knew that they were frauds."

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html

Moyers: “Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?”

Black: “Absolutely, because they are scared to death. All right? They... Read More’re scared to death of a collapse. They’re afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we’ll run screaming to the exits. And we won’t rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it’s foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, ‘We just can’t let the big banks fail.’ That’s wrong.”

and this little gem:

BILL MOYERS: But I can point you to statements by Larry Summers, who was then Bill Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury, or the other Clinton Secretary of the Treasury, Rubin. I can point you to suspects in both parties, right?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: There were two really big things, under the Clinton administration. One, they got rid of the law that came out of the real-world disasters of the Great Depression. We learned a lot of things in the Great Depression. And one is we had to separate what's called commercial banking from investment banking. That's the Glass-Steagall law. But we thought we were much smarter, supposedly. So we got rid of that law, and that was bipartisan. And the other thing is we passed a law, because there was a very good regulator, Brooksley Born, that everybody should know about and probably doesn't. She tried to do the right thing to regulate one of these exotic derivatives that you're talking about. We call them C.D.F.S. And Summers, Rubin, and Phil Gramm came together to say not only will we block this particular regulation. We will pass a law that says you can't regulate. And it's this type of derivative that is most involved in the AIG scandal. AIG all by itself, cost the same as the entire Savings and Loan debacle.

South Park explains it all.

ring, ring...Hello? This is a collect call from China. Will you accept this call?

China Urges New Money Reserve to Replace Dollar

By DAVID BARBOZA

Published: March 23, 2009

SHANGHAI — In another indication that China is growing increasingly concerned about holding huge dollar reserves, the head of its central bank has called for the eventual creation of a new international currency reserve to replace the dollar.

In a paper released Monday, Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, said a new currency reserve system controlled by the International Monetary Fund could prove more stable and economically viable.

A new system is necessary, he said, because the global economic crisis has revealed the “inherent vulnerabilities and systemic risks in the existing international monetary system.”

While few analysts believe that the dollar will be replaced as the world’s dominant foreign exchange reserve anytime soon, the proposal suggests that China is preparing to assume a more influential role in the world. Russia recently made a similar proposal.

China’s bold idea, released more than a week before world leaders are to gather in London for an economic summit meeting, also indicates that Beijing is worried that its huge dollar-denominated foreign reserves could lose significant value in coming years.

China has the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, valued at nearly $2 trillion, with more than half of those holdings estimated to be made up of United States Treasuries and other dollar-denominated bonds.

On March 13, China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said he was concerned about the safety of those assets, particularly because huge economic stimulus plans could lead to soaring deficits in the United States, which could sink the dollar’s value.

Should China lose its appetite for Treasuries, the United States’ borrowing costs could rise, making it more costly for Washington to carry out economic stimulus packages and for Americans to pay off their mortgages.

Nicholas Lardy, an economist and China specialist at the Peterson Institute in Washington, said that through its proposal, China was indicating that the dollar’s long dominance was unfair, allowing the United States to run huge deficits by borrowing from abroad, and that the risks to holders of Treasuries were growing.

“Chinese are quite concerned that the large U.S. government deficits will eventually lead to inflation, which will erode the purchasing power of the dollar-denominated financial assets which they hold,” Mr. Lardy said. “It is a legitimate concern.”

The timing of the Chinese announcement, analysts said, could also be aimed at giving Beijing more leverage to negotiate with the United States and other nations in London on trade and on proposals about how to stabilize the global economy.

But China is cautious when it discusses buying or selling Treasuries, for fear of sending a signal that could significantly affect currency markets. So in a separate announcement on Monday, China said it would continue to buy Treasuries, something the United States has encouraged.

In Mr. Zhou’s essay, published in English and Chinese on the central bank’s Web site, he said the international community should consider expanding the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights.

Such a proposal has been suggested before by developing countries. But the United States has always been wary that this could be inflationary and affect the central role of the dollar.

Special Drawing Rights are based on the value of the dollar, euro, pound and yen, but have been little used except as an accounting entry by international organizations.

Mr. Zhou said the goal of reforming the international monetary system was to “create an international reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run.”

Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Beijing.

Get Ready, "Oxycontin-Rush" Limbaugh is Gearing Up to Run for Office Next Year

I guess "Rush" has figured out that if Sarah Palin can do it, so can he.

"Everything's Amazing and Nobody is Happy" - Louis CK

After this week..."I'm dreaming of a Green Christmas!; Just like the ones I used to know!"

Holy Relic

The Shoe Thrown at Bush

Clarification of Republican Talking Points on the Bush "Legacy"

TTT's Cat to a tee

a Thanksgiving Prayer from William Burroughs

Did Talk Radio Kill Conservatism?

Nate Silver [NS]: Do you stand by all the statements in the survey as being unambiguously true?

John Ziegler [JZ]: I stand one hundred percent by the notion that there is absolutely zero ambiguity as to what the right answer is to any of the questions.

And then a bit later...

JZ: [Laughs]. In your world, the question that I would ask you is what question [in the survey] is there any ambiguity as to what the answer is?

NS: Well, that Obama 'launched his career' at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground --

JZ: That happens to be one of the questions that Obama supporters did the best on! They did better on that question than on any other Obama-related answers! And here you’re telling me that it’s not true?

NS: What do you mean by "launched his career"?

JZ: The first campaign as told by the person whose position he took in the State Senate, as told by her admission, his first campaign event was in the home of Bill Ayers and his wife. [Laughs] Unless you live in the Obama kool-aid world! That is astonishing to me that you would not accept that! And by the way, when you're given four responses to that question, what else was the response going to be? Sarah Palin?

Emphasis mine.

This might be the key passage of my interview with John Ziegler on Tuesday, for it is, in a nutshell, why conservatives don't win elections anymore. It is not that conservatism generally permits less nuance than liberalism (in terms of political messaging, that is probably one of conservatism's strengths). Rather, the key lies in the second passage that I highlighted. There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.

John Ziegler is a shining example of such a conservative. During my interview with him, Ziegler made absolutely no effort to persuade me about the veracity of any of his viewpoints. He simply asserted them -- and then became frustrated, paranoid, or vulgar when I rebutted them.

I didn't quite get how someone like Ziegler, who is usually fairly poised, who solicited me to interview him, who has years of experience in the media, could so completely lose his cool. This was until last night, when I read David Foster Wallace's profile of him, conducted in 2005 when Ziegler was hosting a fairly successful talk radio program in Los Angeles.

To understand Ziegler, you have to understand that he's a radio guy. And you have to understand that radio is a very strange medium. As Wallace writes:

Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don't have names.

To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want—with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you're saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you're speaking.) Plus, ideally, what you're saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself—your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you're discussing. And it gets even trickier: You're trying to communicate in real time with someone you cannot see or hear responses from; and though you're communicating in speech, your remarks cannot have any of the fragmentary, repetitive, garbled qualities of real interhuman speech, or speech's ticcy unconscious "umm"s or "you know"s, or false starts or stutters or long pauses while you try to think of how to phrase what you want to say next. You're also, of course, denied the physical inflections that are so much a part of spoken English—the facial expressions, changes in posture, and symphony of little gestures that accompany and buttress real talking. Everything unspoken about you, your topic, and how you feel about it has to be conveyed through pitch, volume, tone, and pacing. The pacing is especially important: it can't be too slow, since that's low-energy and dull, but it can't be too rushed or it will sound like babbling.

Not to reduce Wallace's fine prose to a catch phrase, but the distinguishing feature of radio is that it exists in a sort of perpetual amnesiac state. In a book, you can go back and read the previous page; on the internet, you can press the 'back' button on the browser. In radio, there is no rewind: everything exists in that moment and that moment only. This is, theoretically, a problem with teleivsion too, but in teleivison you at least have context clues -- graphics and what not, and what falls under the heading of "non-verbal communication". In radio you do not. Just a sine wave in the ether.

Moreover, almost uniquely to radio, most of the audience is not even paying attention to you, because most people listen to radio when they're in the process of doing something else. (If they weren't doing something else, they'd be watching TV). They are driving, mowing the lawn, washing the dishes -- and you have to work really hard to sustain their attention. Hence what Wallace refers to as the importance of "stimulating" the listener, an art that Ziegler has mastered. Invariably, the times when Ziegler became really, really angry with me during the interview was when I was not permitting him to be stimulating, but instead asking him specific, banal questions that required specific, banal answers. Those questions would have made for terrible radio! And Ziegler had no idea how to answer them.

Stimulation, however, is somewhat the opposite of persuasion. You're not going to persuade someone of something when you're (literally, in Ziegler's case) yelling in their ear.

The McCain campaign was all about stimulation. The Britney Spears ads weren't persuasive, but they sure were stimulating! "Drill, baby, drill" wasn't persuasive, but it sure was stimulating! Sarah Palin wasn't persuasive, but she sure was (literally, in Rich Lowry's case) stimulating! By the way, let's look at another little passage from Lowry's paragraph on Palin:

A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is projecting through the screen. It's one of the keys to the success of, say, a Bill O'Reilly, who comes through the screen and grabs you by the throat.

I'll bet you that TV executive began his career in radio. Television too has to be stimulating (although perhaps not quite so immediately, since the television viewer is usually giving you a larger proportion of his mindshare). But it can stimulate you in a variety of different ways -- through visual cues as well as verbal ones.

FOX News is unusual television, really, in that almost all the stimulation is verbal, and almost all of it occurs at the same staccato pacing as radio. You could take tonight's broadcast of Hannity & Colmes or the Factor and put it directly on radio and you'd lose almost nothing (not coincidentally, Hannity and O'Reilly also have highly-rated radio programs). That wouldn't really work for Countdown, which has higher production values, and where the pacing is more irregular. It certainly wouldn't work for the Situation Room -- or moving in a different direction, the Daily Show.

Conservatives listen to significantly more talk radio than other market segments; 28 percent of conservative Republicans listen to talk radio regularly, as opposed to 17 percent of the public as a whole. (Unsurprisingly, conservative hosts also dominate the the Arbitron ratings). It may have gone to their heads a little bit; they may have forgotten about radio's idiosyncrasies as a means of communication. The failures of the Bush administration have woken the country up; conservatives now need to find a way to communicate with people who are actually paying attention.

-- Nate Silver at 9:40 AM
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/did-talk-radio-kill-conservatism.html

Letter from Dr. Blackhirst (Australia)

Religious literacy is vital to a tolerant world

LA Trobe University’s decision to downgrade its successful religious studies program at Bendigo is the latest episode in the decline of such studies in universities throughout Australia. There are now very few places left where students can study religion in a secular context. This makes no sense in a multicultural and multi-faith society.

Surely the events of September 11, 2001, underlined for us how dangerous it is to leave religion to the religious.

After those events it was hoped that our education system would acknowledge the importance of religious literacy to a sane and tolerant world.

It was hoped that religious education might be one of the cures for fanaticism.

This has not happened.

Surveys reveal stunning levels of religious ignorance among the general population and even more among the supposedly educated classes.

It must be admitted that often letters to The Advertiser illustrate the alarming degree of religious ignorance, among believers and non-believers alike, in our society.

The thing that should worry all of us is that ignorance, hatred and violence all go hand in hand.

In this sense our universities are failing in their duty to a free, informed and tolerant society.

As university curriculums become narrower and universities become overly focused on training, the level of basic ignorance in our society increases.

Surely anyone who claims to have a liberal education needs to know something about the Bible, the Koran and the religious ideologies that - for good or for bad - continue to shape our world?

Sadly, our universities are no longer producing graduates with a knowledge of such basics.

Yet, quite plainly, it is only through teaching such things and raising levels of religious literacy that we can address the root causes of religious strife in the world.

In Britain and other countries the teaching of religious studies is increasingly regarded as a vital element in building tolerance and social cohesion.

Alas, not in Australia.

Dr RODNEY BLACKHIRST,

Olbermann on CA Prop 8

Cornel West on Obama's Win

The Indescribable

music: Gustav Mahler, the last 6 minutes of Symphony #8

photo: Joe Corrao 11.04.08

One Week!

Here's a silly question:

Why the hell are we still in Iraq???