I”d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous-which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from.
I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people”s money, would be expelled from finance.
And the folks at Morgan Stanley? They’re planning to pay themselves $10.7 billion this year, much of it in bonuses – almost exactly the amount they are receiving in the first phase of the bailout. “You can imagine the devilish grins on the faces of Morgan Stanley employees,” writes Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil. “Not only did we, the taxpayers, save their company…we funded their 2008 bonus pool.”
No blogging, responding to emails, cell phones or encumbering myself in anything else
electronic until 1706 tomorrow as I continue my going out from Egypt.
I think it would be a very big mistake to simply turn this list over to the DNC, for the above reasons, and others. Political hacks like nothing more than someone handing them a list they themselves put zero work into. Thus, they abuse the list, as the DNC most certainly will. The DNC will have no ownership interest in the list, it”s like free money. And that”s what the DNC will use it for, almost exclusively – money.
This list should be used to govern.
It should be at Barack Obama”s disposal, whenever he needs it to push change. Barack should use the list to pressure Congress when he needs to. Barack should engage the list in the debate about policy. Barack should target the list to key congressional races – key races only. And the list should become a place safe from petty partisanship which would kill it.
For example, during the campaign, Barack said he”d like to put the health care reform discussions on CSPAN. Use the list to get people to give their input on those discussions, create a dialog, and from that, a consensus on policy that the American people can support, beginning with Barack”s list. That way, whatever bullshit lobbying effort is created to kill it will fail because the American people, beginning with the list, were engaged, consulted, and support Barack.
This cannnot work if the list is owned by the DNC. It is Barack”s list, and should stay that way, not for Barack, but for the country.
Here’s what frosts my shorts. A year or so ago I got into a conversation with a fellow educator who lamented the results of the having President George Bush in office for eight years. My friend agreed that Bush’s leadership was a mess, but said that no one could have known in 2000, that we would be where we are in 2007.
I replied that of course we could have known. That I knew of multiple experts who told us again and again that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; that Saddam Hussein had no connection to either Osama bin Laden or the attacks on 11 September 01; that abandoning the war in Afghanistan was a bad idea.
My friend’s reply was that nobody could have known and that hindsight was always 20/20.
We should all play this video over and over again whenever such people tell us that the our leaders in both Congress and the White House couldn’t have known that the economy would tank in 2008.
The priest at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in downtown Greenville has told parishioners that those who voted for Barack Obama placed themselves under divine judgment because of his stance on abortion and shouldn’t receive Holy Communion until they’ve done penance.
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The Rev. Jay Scott Newman told The Greenville News on Wednesday that church teaching doesn’t allow him to refuse Holy Communion to anyone based on political choices, but that he’ll continue to deliver the church’s strong teaching on the “intrinsic and grave evil of abortion” as a hidden form of murder.
Both Obama and Joe Biden, the vice president-elect, support legal abortions. Obama has called it a “divisive issue” with a “moral dimension,” and has pledged to make women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a “priority” as president. He opposes a constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court decision.
This is an example of why I voted to make now president-elect Barack Hussein Obama the political leader of the United States of America for the next four years. He gets it.
I honestly believe that President-elect Obama and Rev. Newman could have a conversation. And that is an example of what Jill andI mean when we dismiss the politics of exclusion by association. If we all don’t engage in conversation we all lose.
In the us-or-them world of President George Bush and Karl Rove purity is everything. We’re allowed to dismiss all of a person because we disagree with a part of a person. President-elect Obama rejects that paradigm.
The economic crisis Obama is inheriting is like the first President Bush”s gift of Somalia to the Clinton administration. After the 1992 election, President Bush sent substantial forces to Somalia, which became an enormous headache for Clinton. It was a parting gift. Now multiply the headache by 100 times. It”s not an entirely apt analogy, but the Bush Administration”s response to the financial crisis is a huge albatross for Obama.
It took JFK three months to stumble over the no-win Cuban invasion he inherited in 1961, but Barack Obama is in a deeper mess as he makes his first visit to the Oval Office more than two months before taking over.
The Bush Administration is fumbling the financial bailout in ways that make CIA planning for the Bay of Pigs look brilliant, and this time the new president won’t have the option of pulling back and starting all over.
And:
Even before he takes office, President Obama may find himself asking the question that plagued Casey Stengel when he took over the hapless New York Mets, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
Now, in light of the election, many are asking: What is the future of the Republican Party?
But that is the wrong question. The proper question should be: Where is our country heading? There’s no doubt that a large majority of Americans believe we’re on the wrong track. That’s why the candidate demanding “change” won the election. It mattered not that the change offered was no change at all, only a change in the engineer of a runaway train.
OK Tim, can President-elect Barack Hussein Obama keep the A-Train on the tracks?
At the moment, the only legal framework is a 1997 agreement under the United Nations relating to “non-navigable freshwater resources”. The document was initially drafted to regulate the use of surface water, and attempts are underway to extend it to underground resources as well.
The political intricacies of such a legal framework are considerable. For starters, aquifers fall into two gross categories: those that are recharged by rainfall permeating from the surface and “fossil” aquifers, such as the famous Nubian sandstone aquifer beneath Egypt, Sudan, Chad and Libya. These contain water that can be tens of thousands of years old, relics of a much wetter climate. Crucially, they are not recharged by rainwater, making them finite resources.
Exploiting fossil aquifers is “a race to the bottom,” says [Mark] Zeitoun, [a water policy expert at the London School of Economics]. “Typically they are seen in much the same way as diamond mines.” Nations that share a fossil aquifer must agree on how to run that race – but they don’t always agree, and that can cause conflict.
Rechargeable aquifers present an entirely different political – and scientific – challenge. The best use of the water from an environmental perspective is to use the water at the same rate as it is naturally recharged, or more slowly.
This implies knowing how the aquifer is recharged and agreeing on the fairest way of sharing the water that can be sustainably extracted each year. “You have to really understand the water flow, so you can put sustainable limits on its exploitation,” says Zeitoun.
Mark Begich made a dramatic comeback Wednesday to overtake Ted Stevens for the lead in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race.
Begich, who was losing after election night, now leads Stevens by 814 votes — 132,196 to 131,382 — with the state still to count roughly 35,000 more ballots over the next week.
The state Division of Elections tallied some 60,000 absentee, early and questioned ballots on Wednesday. The ballots broke heavily in the Democrat’s favor, erasing the 3,000-vote lead Stevens held after election night Nov. 4.
Stevens, a 40-year incumbent, is trying to become the first person ever elected to the U.S. Senate after a being found guilty of felony crimes.
The state still needs to count at least 15,000 questioned ballots and an estimated 20,000 absentee ballots that made it to the Division of Elections after election day last Tuesday.
I have to wonder if in a pre-Florida 2000/Ohio 2004 electoral world if Stevens would have been declared the winner and all those pesky other ballots might have just gone away.
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. —Marge Piercy, For the young who want to in The Moon Is Always Female
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At day’s first light, have in readiness, against disinclination to leave your bed, the thought that “I am rising for the work of man.” Must I grumble at setting out to do what I was born for and for the sake of which I have been brought into the world? Is this the purpose of my creation, to lie here under my blankets and keep myself warm? “Ah, but it is a great deal more pleasant!” Was it for pleasure, then, that you were born and not for work? —Marcus Aurelius
Let me respectfully remind you, life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken-- Awaken! This night your days will be diminished by one. Take heed. Do not squander your life. —Zen Evening Gatha
Take an ax to the prison wall. Escape. Walk out like someone suddenly born into color. Do it now. —Rumi, Quietness
