Sour economy pushes down Northeast lobster prices (David Liscio, 10/09/08, The Daily Item)
A devastated national economy has sent Maine lobster prices spiraling downward as cash-strapped consumers cut back on seafood delicacies and fishermen wrestle with rising costs for bait and fuel.With off-the-boat prices as low as $2.60 a pound this week, some lobstermen say they’re ready to pursue different careers.
Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places (Deborah A. O'Malley, 10/8/2008, American Spectator)
Some Supreme Court justices have taken to using international law as a reference point to interpret provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh applauds the practice, hailing these justices for ushering in the dawn of a "transnationalist jurisprudence."Not everyone is as pleased. Many -- lawyers and laymen alike -- think it shows a blatant disregard for national sovereignty. They lament that future lawyers attending one of the nation's most elite law schools are being inculcated with this misguided theory. Even more worrisome: Dean Koh is heavily rumored to be at the top of Barack Obama's Supreme Court short list -- bad news for those who wish to stop this theory's pernicious growth within the judiciary.
The high court is increasingly injecting international law into cases addressing purely domestic issues. In the court's outrageous 2005 decision overturning the death penalty for a brutal, 17-year old murderer, it was one of three major factors cited to justify the ruling. Invoking the "evolving standards of decency" doctrine that has, alas, become part and parcel of the Court's Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, the Court opined that there is an international consensus that these "evolving standards" forbid the execution of anyone under 18 years of age, no matter how heinous the crime. This international consensus was indicated in part by a treaty to which the United States is expressly not a signatory.
Rather than base their ruling on the original meaning of the Eighth Amendment, the five justices of the majority instead imposed foreign standards on American citizens in the name of our Constitution. In doing so, the Court audaciously elevated international mores above the considered democratic judgment of the states and called it "law."
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U.S. needs new 'special' friends (Kim Holmes, October 9, 2008, Washington Times)
Europe is not the only place where we should be cultivating new friends. Now that the U.S.-India civilian nuclear deal is approved, we have an opportunity to develop a special relationship with India that brings the collective strength of the world's two largest democracies to bear on shared concerns.We could do this, not only by increasing cooperation on counterterrorism, but also by reviving and elevating the Quadrilateral Initiative, a "strategic partnership" inaugurated by the U.S., Japan, Australia and India in 2007.
Just last year, it held great promise. There were even military exercises in the Indian Ocean. The current Australian government may need some convincing, but the idea of more closely coordinating our security interests with India is still very appealing.
India already has made major contributions to the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Afghanistan. The NATO-led coalition should welcome India's involvement and facilitate more of it.
India knows better than anyone else how to achieve democratic stability in a multiethnic, economically developing society. We would need to be careful how we go about doing this, however, so as not to increase Pakistani paranoia.
We could also do a better job strengthening our relationship with Japan, a key strategic ally. Reactivating the Quadrilateral Initiative will help, but we also can deepen cooperation on missile defense and show greater sympathy for its particular concerns regarding North Korean abductions
We could take similar special actions with respect to other friends and allies, like South Korea and Israel. And we could look at expanding our relationships with partners like Singapore.
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It was Bill Parcells who once said of confidence: "Confidence is born of only one thing - demonstrated ability." Well, now that Patriots quarterback Matt Cassel has demonstrated the ability to make plays and get the ball downfield to Randy Moss, as he did last Sunday in a 30-21 victory over the San Francisco 49ers, his confidence should be boosted. "I felt good about how I played," Cassel said yesterday, prior to the Patriots' first practice at San Jose State. "There are still things that I want to work on, but hopefully I'll build on that and continue to grow and continue to get better."...was his coach.
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Finally, a key component of renewing relations is ending illicit emigration. At issue is the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, amended in 1995. It encourages disaffected Cubans to risk their lives for the reward of an expedited path to US citizenship upon reaching American soil. They also receive immediate access to a work permit and the ability to acquire residency in one year. A 2002 article from The Miami Herald reported that 1 in 20 Cubans being smuggled to the shores of the United States dies in the attempt. Meanwhile, smugglers collect up to $10,000 a person. Retiring the "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy and normalizing immigration laws could stop the Cuban brain drain, end charges of a US immigration double standard, and save hundreds of millions of dollars for the US taxpayers who must fund four different agencies to implement this policy.We owe the Cuban people a double standard after betraying them to Castro. There should be no numerical restrictions on their coming here.
The hotel heiress has offered a spot of fashion advice to the Republican vice-presidential nominee. "My advice to Sarah Palin is, you've got a hot bod - don't keep it to yourself. Why wear a pantsuit when you can wear a swimsuit?" she said.PALIN INVITED TO JOIN THE PUSSYCAT DOLLS (Contact Music, 10/08/08)
PUSSYCAT DOLL NICOLE SCHERZINGER has invited U.S. vice presidential candidate SARAH PALIN to join the sexy girl group, if her election campaign fails next month (Nov08). The singer is convinced former beauty queen Palin has got what it takes to join the all-singing all-dancing five-piece. The Buttons hitmaker says, "She seems like a headstrong woman, a tough chick. And she's hot."Unfortunately, Maverick is a tad too old to join Menudo, but Senators Obama and Biden could form Nihili Vanilli.
There is a fashion these days for apologies: not apologies for the things that one has actually done oneself (that kind of apology is as difficult to make and as unfashionable as ever), but for public apologies by politicians for the crimes and misdemeanours of their ancestors, or at least of their predecessors. I think it is reasonable to call this pattern of political breast-beating the False Apology Syndrome. Mr. Blair, the then British prime minister, apologized to the Irish for the famine; one of the first public acts of Mr. Rudd, the Australian prime minister, was to apologize to the Aborigines for the dispossession of their continent; Pope John Paul II apologized to the Muslims for the Crusades. There are many other examples, and there are also demands for apologies by aggrieved, or supposedly aggrieved, groups. [...] [O]fficial apologies for distant events, however important or pregnant with consequences those events may have been, are another matter entirely. They have bad effects on both those who give them and those who receive them. The effect on the givers is the creation of a state of spiritual pride. Insofar as the person offering the apology is doing what no one has done before him, he is likely to consider himself the moral superior of his predecessors. He alone has had the moral insight and courage to apologize. On the other hand, he knows full well that he has absolutely no personal moral responsibility for whatever it is that he is apologizing for. In other words, his apology brings him all kudos and no pain. This inevitably leads to the false supposition that the moral life can be lived without the pain of self-examination. The locus of moral concern becomes what others do or have done, not what one does oneself. And a good deed in the form of an apology in public for some heinous wrong in the distant past gives the person who makes it a kind of moral capital, at least in his own estimation, against which he can offset his expenditure of vice. The habit of public apology for things for which one bears no personal responsibility changes the whole concept of a virtuous person, from one who exercises the discipline of virtue to one who expresses correct sentiment. The most virtuous person of all is he who expresses it loudest and to most people. This is a debasement of morality, not a refinement of it. The end result is likely to be self-satisfaction and ruthlessness accompanied by unctuous moralizing, rather than a determination to behave well.
[I]t is safe to say that, until the money markets behave more normally, the financial crisis will not be over. And until the financial crisis is over, the global economy may not recover. Liquid dynamite First, the problem. It is widely assumed that central banks set the level of interest rates in their domestic markets. But the rate they announce is the one at which they will lend to the banking system. When banks borrow from anyone else (including other banks), they pay more. Every day, this rate is calculated through a poll of participating banks and published as Libor (London interbank offered rate) or Euribor (Euro interbank offered rate). Normally, these are only a fraction of a percentage point above the official interest rates. But that has changed dramatically in recent weeks (see chart 1). Take the cost of borrowing dollars. On October 1st banks had to pay 4.15% for three-month money, more than two percentage points above the fed funds target rate. In theory, three-month rates could be that high because markets are expecting a sharp rise in official rates. But that is hardly likely, given the depth of the crisis. Instead, the width of the margin reflects investors’ worries about the banks, not least because so many have faltered so quickly. Three months is now a long time to trust in the health of a bank. In addition, banks are anxious to conserve their own cash, in case depositors make large withdrawals or their money gets tied up in the collapse of another bank, as with Lehman. One way this risk aversion shows up is in the “Ted spread” (see chart 2), the gap between three-month dollar Libor and the Treasury-bill rate. After being as low as 20 basis points (a fifth of a percentage point) in early 2007, the spread is now 3.3 percentage points. In other words, the relative cost of raising money for banks has risen 16-fold in the past 18 months. Indeed, some banks argue that Libor and Euribor understate the full extent of the increase in banks’ borrowing costs. According to John Grout of the (British) Association of Corporate Treasurers (ACT), banks have started to talk to companies about invoking the “market disruption” clause in loan contracts. This would allow them to replace the two benchmarks with the “real” cost of their funds, which they say would be higher. (Companies usually pay Libor or Euribor plus a margin that depends on the riskiness of their finances.) One company, Hon Hai of Taiwan, an electronics manufacturer, says its banks have already invoked the clause. This affects only debt facilities that have already been set up. Mr Grout says that when companies are negotiating new loans with banks, they are being asked to accept rates based on Libor plus a quarter of a percentage point. Unsurprisingly, the ACT is unimpressed with this tactic, since Libor is calculated from data supplied by the banks themselves. Companies do not have to borrow from banks; they can raise money from the markets by selling commercial paper, a type of short-term debt. For much of this year, that was an attractive option. The preference of investors for debt issued by non-financial companies made commercial paper a source of cheap finance. But in recent weeks even this has become more difficult. The volume of commercial paper outstanding fell by $61 billion to $1.7 trillion in the week ending September 24th. And investors are unwilling to lend for long: AT&T, a big American telecoms company, said on September 30th that the previous week it had been unable to sell any commercial paper with a maturity longer than overnight. The volume of asset-backed commercial paper maturing in four days or less ballooned from $32 billion a day to $104 billion during September (see chart 3), while the amount maturing in 21 to 40 days fell by 63%. Where there is doubt about a company’s finances, it inevitably has to pay a higher rate. Worries about GE, one of America’s most prestigious companies, pushed up the premium on its credit-default swaps and made raising short-term debt dearer. According to the Wall Street Journal, the rate on its commercial paper had gone up by two-fifths of a percentage point. That might not sound much, but GE has $90 billion of paper outstanding, so it faced an extra interest bill of $360m a year. On October 1st the company announced a $12 billion public share offering and a $3 billion injection from Warren Buffett, a leading investor. Why has commercial paper lost its shine? The explanation seems to lie back in the authorities’ willingness to allow Lehman to collapse. That move, designed to warn the markets that the authorities took moral hazard seriously, has had some unintended consequences.
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Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote. "I don't even know the entire scope of it because registrations are coming in so heavy," Davis said. "We have identified about 100 duplicates, and probably 280 addresses that don't exist, people who have driver's license numbers that won't verify or Social Security numbers that won't verify. Some have no address at all."Conspiracy theories have a hilarious tendency to butt up against the real incompetence of the supposed masterminds.
Le Clézio—known to his admirers as JMG—is not a fully paid member of the Washington-hating Paris intelligentsia. But his subjects are commonly the peoples erased by dominant cultures—in America, Africa and the Pacific. His first book, Le Proces Verbal (1963), is still his best known outside France. Its story of a lost boy in Nice, who grapples with both philosophy and a lost girl on a billiard table, has echoes of Albert Camus, an earlier French Nobel winner. The experimental text included crossed out words and newspaper cuttings of the hero's admissions to psychiatric hospital. In 1976 he translated fragments of Mayan Chronicles, Les Propheties du Chilam Balam. In 1980 he added Trois Villes Saintes which the Times Literary Supplement called “a barely readable exercise in shamanistic geography.” One of his favorite authors is another writer who preferred exile and exiles, James Joyce....than the French Joyce?
Cells taken from men's testicles seem as versatile as the stem cells derived from embryos, researchers reported Wednesday in what may be yet another new approach in a burgeoning scientific field. The new type of stem cells could be useful for growing personalized replacement tissues, according to a study in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. But because of their source, their highest promise would apply to only half the world's population: men.
U.S.-led coalition troops killed 21 militants in two separate clashes in southern Afghanistan, while insurgents killed 10 civilians in the same area, the U.S. military said Thursday. Coalition troops on a security patrol Wednesday in the Shaheed Hasas district of Uruzgan province repelled an ambush by insurgents, killing 12 militants, the U.S. military said in a statement. There were no coalition casualties....collateral damage is the necessary precondition of a successful surge. MORE: The End of the War on Terror: Noah Feldman, legal scholar and one of Esquire's 75 most influential people of the twenty-first century, on the end of Al Qaeda. And what happens next. (Noah Feldman, Esquire)
The terrorist attacks of the last seven years all need to be understood against this backdrop of Osama's unbelievable luck. The big attacks--London and Madrid in particular--were carried out by local Muslims, immigrants or the children of immigrants, who were motivated by the fact that these countries had troops in Iraq. Just a few years earlier, these bombings would have seemed inexplicable to Europeans, and probably horrifying to most Muslims in the world. Now they were not only justified by the jihadists, but many of their targets in Europe acknowledged the justification. In Spain, the government even withdrew from active involvement in Iraq. Meanwhile, in Iraq and Afghanistan terrorist attacks against civilians became daily events, carried out sometimes by locals but more often by foreigners. The terms of terror had changed. No foreign fighters had streamed to Saudi Arabia when bin Laden was claiming that the Arabian Peninsula was under occupation. In Iraq, though, actual occupation had brought an actual jihad. For a while, this defensive-jihad rationale seemed plausible to many Muslims. Al Qaeda came to be seen as an ally of the Sunni resistance in Iraq, which was fighting both against the U. S. as the occupier and against Iraq's Shiite majority. The perception that the mission was legitimate made the tactics seem legitimate, too. Gradually, though, something began to change in the way the jihadist terrorists chose their targets. The Americans in Iraq got better at defending themselves, making it harder to attack them directly. Then the jihadists, flush with success and popularity, began to believe they could get away with anything. Instead of targeting non-Muslim occupiers directly, the terrorists began to go after other Muslims. What opened the floodgates were two spectacular and horrifying mosque bombings, the first in 2003, of the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, and then, more fatefully, in 2006, of the golden dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra. It was in principle unlawful to target Muslims in a jihad. But, said the jihadists, Shiites weren't real Muslims. And anyway, driving the Shiites into retaliation and triggering a civil war was a good way to get the Americans to leave. Then, inexorably, Sunnis began killing fellow Sunnis. At first this was thought to be permissible only if they were collaborating with the enemy, such as Sunnis lining up for jobs at a police station. But suicide bombings are hardly a surgical method, and bystanders were killed who were not necessarily collaborators. And the expansion of suicide bombing did not even stop there. The next phase, especially in 2007, was Sunnis killing other Sunnis for no other reason than to cause instability in Iraq. Those Muslim scholars who took the trouble to justify these killings claimed there was no other way to fight this war, and so the ends justified the means. From Iraq, the strategy spread to Afghanistan and then to Pakistan. Now it was Sunnis killing Sunnis for political advantage in a country where there was no foreign occupation of any kind. More than two dozen suicide-bombing attacks have taken place in Pakistan in the last year alone. The most famous killed former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, along with more than a dozen bystanders. The logic of suicide bombing had now reached its inevitable extreme: One could kill innocent Sunni civilians on purpose if it served the interests of the jihadists, regardless of whether the conditions of defensive jihad actually applied. When radical jihadism dies out, the Bhutto assassination may well look like the turning point. Al Qaeda is now identified not so much with defensive jihad against foreigners as with injecting suicide bombing into ordinary political struggles, which flatly contradicts fourteen hundred years of Islamic law. The jihadists have weakened Pakistan's already faltering government and so expanded their power in Pakistan's tribal areas and North-West Frontier. But they have alienated the public. In the elections that followed Bhutto's death, Islamist political parties did worse than they had in years. This sense of Muslim disillusionment has begun to reverberate from Pakistan to Iraq and beyond. Critics hold Al Qaeda responsible not just for deaths caused by their terrorist attacks but also for deaths brought about subsequently by American retaliation. "Brother Osama, how much blood has been spilled?" Sheik Salman al-Oadah, a radical Saudi cleric formerly sympathetic to bin Laden, exhorted in an open letter last year. "How many innocent children, women, and old people have been killed, maimed, and expelled from their homes in the name of Al Qaeda? . . . What is to be gained from the destruction of entire nations--which is what we are witnessing in Afghanistan and Iraq?" Two months later, an important jihadist ideologue known by the nom de guerre Dr. Fadl released a ten-part treatise that condemned the killing of innocents as a violation of Islamic law and argued that it was forbidden for Muslims living in Europe to attack civilian targets. Dr. Fadl's work was written from an Egyptian prison, and so his statements have to be treated skeptically. But Al Qaeda took them seriously enough that Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, replied to them directly. There is a similar tactical shift happening on the ground. Starting in the second half of 2006, Sunni tribal sheiks in the Anbar province of Iraq decided to turn against Al Qaeda and side with the U. S. and the Iraqi government. This was not because they suddenly decided they liked the Shiites or the Kurds or the Americans. It was because the path of jihad had been a failure of policy, bringing with it only instability and death. The sheiks didn't want war as an end in itself; they wanted security for their people and patronage for themselves. The U. S. and the Iraqi government were prepared to offer these things, so the sheiks decided to switch sides. The significance of the sheiks' defection is that they turn bin Laden's one true ideological victory--causing the U. S. to become an actual occupying force--into a defeat for Al Qaeda. The sheiks of Anbar, and others, not only blame bin Laden for bringing us into Iraq; they have come to realize that what is standing between them and American withdrawal is not our imperial ambition but the jihadists whose presence is keeping us there. The logical response is therefore not to join the jihad but to take practical steps to make both the jihadists and the occupiers go away. It is still too soon to say when, exactly, bin Laden will be seen as a pariah. But that day is coming. Radical jihadists have always had a central goal, which is to win over the Muslim public to their side. If they lose their audience, the attacks against the West will decline--and eventually disappear. This does not mean the end of all Islamic terrorism. There will always be small groups acting within Al Qaeda and on their own, and jihad will continue against Israel and others who can be described as foreign invaders. But it will mark the end of the age of terror as we've come to know it. When that happens, our footprint will lighten abroad, and back at home we'll have to reevaluate what post-9/11 America should look like. We'll never be able to go back to our complacency.Huh? In what sense do we not already have it back? Have you heard any of the candidates so much as mention specific details of how they'd defend against future attacks?
Barack Obama has his William Ayers connection. Now John McCain may have an Iran-Contra connection. In the 1980s, McCain served on the advisory board to the U.S. chapter of an international group linked to ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America. ADVERTISEMENT The U.S. Council for World Freedom aided rebels trying to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua....of which sides John McCain and Joe Biden were on respectively in the Cold War. Maverick was with the freedom fighters. Mr. Biden tried protecting the Marxist dictatorships.
For This I Microwaved Popcorn? (Mark Katz, 10/08/08, The Daily Beast)
Now I understand why Americans are in the habit of electing governors. Put two senators on the national stage and what you get is humdrum political theater. Here are the kinds of sentences you hear when these two legislators go at it:"I introduced a bill..."
"I wrote a letter..."
"I put out a statement..."
"I've taken on the special interests."
"I've reached across the aisle."
"I voted against an energy bill loaded with goodies."
And lots of stuff about earmarks.