October 2010 archive

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

October 5 is the 278th day of the year (279th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 87 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1877, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Indians surrenders to U.S. General Nelson A. Miles in the Bear Paw mountains of Montana, declaring,

“Hear me, my chiefs: My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

Chief Joseph (March 3, 1840 – September 21, 1904) was the chief of the Wal-lam-wat-kain (Wallowa) band of Nez Perce during General Oliver O. Howard‘s attempt to forcibly remove his band and the other “non-treaty” Nez Perce to a reservation in Idaho. For his principled resistance to the removal, he became renowned as a humanitarian and peacemaker.

Joseph the Younger succeeded his father as chief in 1871. Before his death, the latter counseled his son:

“My son, my body is returning to my mother earth, and my spirit is going very soon to see the Great Spirit Chief. When I am gone, think of your country. You are the chief of these people. They look to you to guide them. Always remember that your father never sold his country. You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. A few years more and white men will be all around you. They have their eyes on this land. My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and your mother.”

Chief Joseph commented “I clasped my father’s hand and promised to do as he asked. A man who would not defend his father’s grave is worse than a wild animal.”

The non-treaty Nez Perce suffered many injustices at the hands of settlers and prospectors, but out of fear of reprisal from the militarily superior Americans, Joseph never allowed any violence against them, instead making many concessions to them in hopes of securing peace.

In 1873, Chief Joseph negotiated with the federal government to ensure his people could stay on their land in the Wallowa Valley. But in 1877, the government reversed its policy, and Army General Oliver Howard threatened to attack if the Wallowa band did not relocate to the Idaho Reservation with the other Nez Perce. Chief Joseph reluctantly agreed.

Before the outbreak of hostilities, General Howard held a council to try to convince Joseph and his people to relocate. Joseph finished his address to the General, which focused on human equality, by expressing his “[disbelief that] the Great Spirit Chief gave one kind of men the right to tell another kind of men what they must do.”

Howard reacted angrily, interpreting the statement as a challenge to his authority. When Chief Too-hul-hul-sote protested, he was jailed for five days.

The day following the council, Joseph, White Bird, and Chief Looking Glass all accompanied General Howard to look at different areas. Howard offered them a plot of land that was inhabited by Whites and Indians, promising to clear them out. Joseph and his chieftains refused, adhering to their tribal tradition of not taking what did not belong to them.

Unable to find any suitable uninhabited land on the reservation, Howard informed Joseph that his people had thirty days to collect their livestock and move to the reservation. Joseph pleaded for more time, but Howard told him that he would consider their presence in the Wallowa Valley beyond the thirty-day mark an act of war.

Returning home, Joseph called a council among his people. At the council, he spoke on behalf of peace, preferring to abandon his father’s grave over war. Too-hul-hul-sote, insulted by his incarceration, advocated war.

The Wallowa band began making preparations for the long journey, meeting first with other bands at Rocky Canyon. At this council too, many leaders urged war, while Joseph argued in favor of peace.

While the council was underway, a young man whose father had been killed rode up and announced that he and several other young men had already killed four white men, an act sure to initiate war.

Still hoping to avoid further bloodshed, Joseph and other Nez Perce chiefs began leading his people north toward Canada.

With 2,000 U.S. soldiers in pursuit, Joseph and other Nez Perce chiefs led 800 Nez Perce toward their friends the Crows, but when the Crows betrayed them and joined the United States army for money, the Nez Perce went towards freedom at the Canadian border. For over three months, the Nez Perce outmaneuvered and battled their pursuers traveling 1,600 miles (2,570 km) across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. General Howard, leading the opposing cavalry, was impressed with the skill with which the Nez Perce fought, using advance and rear guards, skirmish lines, and field fortifications. Finally, after a devastating five-day battle during freezing weather conditions with no food or blankets, Chief Joseph formally surrendered to General Nelson Appleton Miles on October 5, 1877 in the Bear Paw Mountains of the Montana Territory, less than 40 miles (60 km) south of Canada in a place close to the present-day Chinook in Blaine County. The battle is remembered in popular history by the words attributed to Chief Joseph at the formal surrender:

“Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Too-hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are-perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

(E)ither Biden got played, or he lied.  Either they didn’t have the votes in the first place, or they couldn’t hold them.  In either case, there is nothing preventing the President, as the Commander in Chief, from suspending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell discharges pending the Pentagon review if he’s sincere and that’s what he really wants.  He could do it today.

Obama says liberals are hurting Democrats and depressing turnout when they criticize him.  Well, he’s not up for reelection in November, and we’re doing plenty to support Democrats.  We’ve raised nearly $40,000 for Russ Feingold in the past week alone.

But right before an election is the time that the public is supposed to express their concerns and hold their representatives accountable.  That’s why we have elections in the first place.  It’s the last chance people will have to push their elected officials on how they plan to vote on the Catfood Commission’s recommendations in December, which members of the commission say will include cuts in Social Security benefits.  A bill that Obama plans to sign.

Anyone who tells people to be silent now is telling you to give up your last chance to fight to keep Congress from voting to reduce the deficit on the backs of senior citizens.

But Obama’s not talking about the fact that people are unhappy about his Catfood Commission plans.  He says that people expect too much too soon, but that’s a straw man.  That’s not what’s happening at all.

People understand when they’re being played.  And they don’t like it.

Round and round it goes, where this stops nobody knows.

Three killed in attack on Nato tankers which the Taliban claimed responsibility for because U.S. drone strikes increase on Pakistan border which happened because an increased risk of terrorist attacks in Europe, with Washington saying al Qaeda might target transport infrastructure. Terror strikes provoke drones attacks which provoke more terror attacks which provoke….Dizzy yet?

Glenn Greenwald sums it up nicely:

What a surprise: bombing Muslims more and more causes more and more Muslims to want to bomb the countries responsible.  That, of course, has long been the perverse “logic” driving the War on Terror.  The very idea that we’re going to reduce Terrorism by more intensively bombing more Muslim countries is one of the most patently absurd, self-contradicting premises that exists.  It’s exactly like announcing that the cure for lung cancer is to quadruple the number of cigarettes one smokes each day.  But that’s been the core premise (at least the stated one) of our foreign policy for the last decade:  we’re going to stop Terrorism by doing more and more of exactly the things that cause it (and see this very good Economist article  on the ease with which drones allow a nation’s leaders to pretend to its citizenry that they are not really at war — as we’re doing with Pakistan).

So where does this end Mr. President? Are you now going to send ground troops into Pakistan?

Up Date: From Glenn Greenwald:

…..a 2004 Task Force convened by Donald Rumsfeld said about the actual causes of Terrorism and, specifically, the effects on Terrorism from our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The whole Report is worth reviewing, but among the highlights:  (a) the “underlying sources of threats to America’s national security” are grounded in “negative attitudes” towards the U.S. in the Muslim world and “the conditions that create them”; (b) what most exacerbates anti-American sentiment, and therefore the threat of Terrorism, is “American direct intervention in the Muslim world” — through our “one sided support in favor of Israel”; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, “the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan”; and (c) “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies.”

All premiers on broadcast, none worth watching unless you’re into the train wreck that is Bristol Palin.

• ABC Family– O Brother, Where Art Thou?
• AMC– Overboard (totally misogynist)
• Disney– Halloweentown
• ESPN– Pats @ Aquatic Mammals
• Food– Unwrapped, The Best Thing I Ever Ate, Triple D (premiers)
• History– American Pickers (premier)
• Lifetime– Flirting With Forty x 2
• Spike- The Hills Have Eyes
• TBS– Family Guy night
• Turner Classic– Penthouse, Skyscraper Souls
• Toon– Regular Show, Total Drama World Tour (premiers)

Later-

• AMC– Rubicon, Mad Men (this week’s repeats), You’ve Got Mail (a Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan movie that doesn’t suck)
• FX– Halloween H2O: 20 Years Later
• Sci Fi– The Resistance (premier), Stargate Universe (repeat of Season Premier)
• Turner Classic– Touch of Evil (really good)

Dave hosts Bruce Willis (a waste of time) will.i.am, and Nicki Minaj.  Jon has Sam Harris, Stephen Eugene Robinson.  Alton does Salt.

Boondocks– The Garden Party (Series Premier repeat)

Nigga, if you ruin this party for me, I’ll put my…

Ruin the party? They love me. These people aren’t worried about us. They’re not worried about anything. They’re rich. No matter what happens, these people just keep applauding.

…

Attention please. Attention please. My name is Uncle Ruckus, no relation. I want to sing y’all a brand new song I just wrote called “Don’t Trust Them New Niggers Over There”. Sing along if you know the words.

Don’t trust them new niggers over there

Leaving they nigger essence in the air

Them happy, nappy head niggers

With they finger on the trigger

Don’t trust them new niggers over there

Don’t trust them big nostrils over yonder

They suck up so much air it’ll make you wonder

Don’t them new niggers

With they spidey little nigger figures

Don’t trust them new niggers over there.

I think the N-word is OK as long as they say it.

…

Excuse me. Everyone, I have a brief announcement to make. Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lying about 9/11. Thank you for your time and good night.

How many times have I told you you bet’ not even dream of tellin’ white folk the truth? You understand me? Shoot… makin’ white people riot. You better learn how to lie like me. I’m gonna find me a white man and lie to him right now.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Europe triumph in thrilling Ryder Cup finale

by Rob Woollard, AFP

1 hr 21 mins ago

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Matt Taibbi: Tea & Crackers

How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster

The world is changing all around the Tea Party. The country is becoming more black and more Hispanic by the day. The economy is becoming more and more complex, access to capital for ordinary individuals more and more remote, the ability to live simply and own a business without worrying about Chinese labor or the depreciating dollar vanished more or less for good. They want to pick up their ball and go home, but they can’t; thus, the difficulties and the rancor with those of us who are resigned to life on this planet.

Of course, the fact that we’re even sitting here two years after Bush talking about a GOP comeback is a profound testament to two things: One, the American voter’s unmatched ability to forget what happened to him 10 seconds ago, and two, the Republican Party’s incredible recuperative skill and bureaucratic ingenuity. This is a party that in 2008 was not just beaten but obliterated, with nearly every one of its recognizable leaders reduced to historical-footnote status and pinned with blame for some ghastly political catastrophe. There were literally no healthy bodies left on the bench, but the Republicans managed to get back in the game anyway by plucking an assortment of nativist freaks, village idiots and Internet Hitlers out of thin air and training them into a giant ball of incoherent resentment just in time for the 2010 midterms. They returned to prominence by outdoing Barack Obama at his own game: turning out masses of energized and disciplined supporters on the streets and overwhelming the ballot box with sheer enthusiasm.

The bad news is that the Tea Party’s political outrage is being appropriated, with thanks, by the Goldmans and the BPs of the world. The good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that those interests mostly have us by the balls anyway, no matter who wins on Election Day. That’s the reality; the rest of this is just noise. It’s just that it’s a lot of noise, and there’s no telling when it’s ever going to end.

New York Times Editorial: First Monday

The Supreme Court enjoys all but free rein in selecting which cases to review. From the end of one term in the summer until the start of the next, on the first Monday in October, the work of the court is to sift through thousands of petitions from parties that lost in one of the federal appeals courts or highest state courts and are eager for the justices to reverse their fate.

The kinds of petitioners favored say a lot about the court’s interests and biases. The Warren court, eager to champion individual rights, chose a large number of petitions from downtrodden people. The Rehnquist court, looking for opportunities to vindicate states’ rights, favored petitions from the states.

BP and the Feds have fooled America and the entire world into thinking the BP Gulf Oil Spill is over, that the beaches are clean and that the seafood is safe, and everything is OK.

Titled “The Gulf Oil Spill isn’t over!” here’s a little bit of mournful Louisiana blues to tell the real story.

Let’s make this one viral…

Hat tip to Alexander Higgins who for months on his blog has been collecting every bit of news you can imagine about the BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe.

Monday Business Edition

Economics isn’t much of a science.

Sure they try and dress it up with the maths and produce the pretty graph, but in the end the letters are all just acronyms designed to make words look like numbers and somehow impart the dignity of 2 + 2 = 4 to arguments considerably more specious (a hard currency pun).

Take for instance Keynesian.  Today it’s being thrown as a slur and adopted to include almost anything that’s not related to Monetary policy and a Friedmanite/Greenspan fantasy land where government employment doesn’t produce anything of value (otherwise Capitalists would be doing it, by definition) and the concept of ‘public good’ is unknown.

The 2 leading schools of economic thought in the United States are the Freshwater School centered on the University of Chicago where Friedman taught and the Saltwater School which would be every one else.  Krugman has an essential summary.

But they’re both Monetarist Schools and Monetary Policy prescriptions don’t work when you have zero interest rates and incredible liquidity but your problems are under capacity utilization, over supply, and lack of aggregate demand.  You can’t push a string.

Then you need Fiscal Policy and deficits don’t matter.  We’ve grown or devalued our way out of every deficit we’ve ever had, our Currency is Sovereign (when I pay off my T-Bills I give you nice shiny greenbacks and tell you they taste great in a vinagrette), and who gives a rat’s ass about devaluation anyway, the only people it hurts are bankers and billionaires and they both deserve a spanking (some prefer the haircut metaphor).

My point about labels is this-  my views about macro economics, political economy, are what is properly called Neo-Classical Synthesis believe it or not because they’re grounded in Samuelson’s seminal 1948 Economics.  Krugman, DeLong, Stiglitz, Reich, etc. get called Neo Keyesians but that’s not what they’re really about, they’re all Samuelson Neo-Classicists.  Part of the problem with academic debate is that there has to be some otherwise you might lose your phony baloney job or, even worse, go out and teach some smelly undergraduates instead of sitting in your office writing papers.

Neo Liberal is an entirely different philosophy, but because lazy and stupid media people think anything new is Neo even though they live in the matrix and Liberal is Goldwater and Nixon, that one gets thrown around a lot too.

Krugman–

The point is that we have perfectly good models  for thinking about the state we’re in – models in which we can describe what all the agents are doing and why, models that have done a very good job in terms of predicting how events have proceeded. Moving back and forth between simple new Keynesian models and their IS-LM translations, it was straightforward to show that a huge expansion in the monetary base could and would go along with continuing disinflation, that massive government borrowing would not cause an interest rate spike, and so on.

So what’s wrong with my “one model to rule them all”? Well, it doesn’t easily translate into anything that looks like monetarism – for a good reason: when short-term interest rates are near zero, the distinction between the monetary base, which the central bank controls, and the much broader class of safe short term assets, which it doesn’t, more or less vanishes. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature; it says that when you’re in a liquidity trap, thinking in terms of the supply and demand for money is just not a helpful way to approach the issues.

More Krugman–

But maybe this is an opportunity to reiterate a point I try to make now and then: economics is not a morality play. It’s not a happy story in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished. The market economy is a system for organizing activity – a pretty good system most of the time, though not always – with no special moral significance. The rich don’t necessarily deserve their wealth, and the poor certainly don’t deserve their poverty; nonetheless, we accept a system with considerable inequality because systems without any inequality don’t work. And before the trolls jump in to say aha, Krugman concedes the truth of supply-side economics, that’s not an argument against progressive taxation and the welfare state; it’s just an argument that says that there are limits. Cuba doesn’t work; Sweden works pretty well.

And when we’re experiencing depression economics, by which I mean a situation in which it’s hard to create sufficient demand to achieve full employment – mainly because short-term interest rates are up against the zero lower bound – the essentially amoral nature of economics becomes even more acute. As I’ve said repeatedly, this is a situation in which virtue becomes vice and prudence is folly; what we need above all is for someone to spend more, even if the spending isn’t particularly wise.

The trouble in practice is that conventional modes of thought tend to prevail even when they shouldn’t; in particular, public spending on the scale needed never seems to happen. That’s why Keynes facetiously proposed burying bottles full of cash in coal mines, so people could dig them up again: since any proposal to spend money on things we need got shot down on grounds of prudence and efficiency, he proposed completely pointless spending instead.

Still More Krugman–

What I’d say about America now is that we have big problems, very much including too much talent going into financial fiddling, too few people who actually make stuff – actually, I worry as much or more about machinists as I do about scientists and engineers. But that observation has virtually no bearing on high unemployment right now. So I’d hope we can walk and chew gum at the same time, appreciating the structural problems but not letting that understanding get in the way of fighting the immediate jobs crisis.

Robert Reich–

My argument is just to opposite. For three decades American consumers managed to maintain demand despite flat real wages. They did this by sending women into paid work, working longer hours, and then borrowing to the hilt. But all these coping mechanisms have come to an end. So it’s only now that we have to face the reality that most Americans have not shared in America’s prosperity.

Now with 26 Stories from Yahoo Business News.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

October 4 is the 277th day of the year (278th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 88 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1883, the Orient Express commences its first run.

The Orient Express is the name of a long-distance passenger train, the route for which has changed considerably in modern times. The first run of The Orient Express was on 4 October 1883. The train travelled from Paris to Giurgiu in Romania, via Munich and Vienna. At Giurgiu, passengers were ferried across the Danube to Ruse in Bulgaria to pick up another train to Varna. From here they completed their journey to Istanbul by ferry.

The Orient Express was the name of a long-distance passenger train originally operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. Its route has changed many times, and several routes have in the past concurrently used the name, or slight variants thereof. Although the original Orient Express was simply a normal international railway service, the name has become synonymous with intrigue and luxury travel. The two city names most intimately associated with the Orient Express are Paris and Istanbul, the original endpoints of the service.

The original route, which first ran on October 4, 1883, was from Paris, Gare de l’Est, to Giurgiu in Romania via Munich and Vienna. At Giurgiu, passengers were ferried across the Danube to Rousse in Bulgaria to pick up another train to Varna, from where they completed their journey to Istanbul (then called Constantinople) by ferry. In 1885, another route began operations, this time reaching Istanbul via rail from Vienna to Belgrade and Nis, carriage to Plovdiv and rail again to Istanbul.

In 1889, the train’s eastern terminus became Varna in Bulgaria, where passengers could take a ship to Istanbul. On June 1, 1889, the first non-stop train to Istanbul left Paris (Gare de l’Est). Istanbul remained its easternmost stop until May 19, 1977. The eastern terminus was the Sirkeci Terminal by the Golden Horn. Ferry service from piers next to the terminal would take passengers across the Bosporus Strait to Haydarpasa Terminal, the terminus of the Asian lines of the Ottoman railways.

The onset of World War I in 1914 saw Orient Express services suspended. They resumed at the end of hostilities in 1918, and in 1919 the opening of the Simplon Tunnel allowed the introduction of a more southerly route via Milan, Venice and Trieste. The service on this route was known as the Simplon Orient Express, and it ran in addition to continuing services on the old route. The Treaty of Saint-Germain contained a clause requiring Austria to accept this train: formerly, Austria allowed international services to pass through Austrian territory (which included Trieste at the time) only if they ran via Vienna. The Simplon Orient Express soon became the most important rail route between Paris and Istanbul.

The 1930s saw the zenith of Orient Express services, with three parallel services running: the Orient Express, the Simplon Orient Express, and also the Arlberg Orient Express, which ran via Zürich and Innsbruck to Budapest, with sleeper cars running onwards from there to Bucharest and Athens. During this time, the Orient Express acquired its reputation for comfort and luxury, carrying sleeping-cars with permanent service and restaurant cars known for the quality of their cuisine. Royalty, nobles, diplomats, business people and the bourgeoisie in general patronized it. Each of the Orient Express services also incorporated sleeping cars which had run from Calais to Paris, thus extending the service right from one edge of continental Europe to the other.

The start of the Second World War in 1939 again interrupted the service, which did not resume until 1945. During the war, the German Mitropa company had run some services on the route through the Balkans, but partisans frequently sabotaged the track, forcing a stop to this service.

Following the end of the war, normal services resumed except on the Athens leg, where the closure of the border between Yugoslavia and Greece prevented services from running. That border re-opened in 1951, but the closure of the Bulgaria-Turkey border from 1951 to 1952 prevented services running to Istanbul during that time. As the Iron Curtain fell across Europe, the service continued to run, but the Communist nations increasingly replaced the Wagon-Lits cars with carriages run by their own railway services.

By 1962, the Orient Express and Arlberg Orient Express had stopped running, leaving only the Simplon Orient Express. This was replaced in 1962 by a slower service called the Direct Orient Express, which ran daily cars from Paris to Belgrade, and twice weekly services from Paris to Istanbul and Athens.

In 1971, the Wagon-Lits company stopped running carriages itself and making revenues from a ticket supplement. Instead, it sold or leased all its carriages to the various national railway companies, but continued to provide staff for the carriages. 1976 saw the withdrawal of the Paris-Athens direct service, and in 1977, the Direct Orient Express was withdrawn completely, with the last Paris-Istanbul service running on May 19 of that year.

The withdrawal of the Direct Orient Express was thought by many to signal the end of Orient Express as a whole, but in fact a service under this name continued to run from Paris to Budapest and Bucharest as before (via Strasbourg, Munich, and Budapest). This continued until 2001, when the service was cut back to just Paris-Vienna, the coaches for which were attached to the Paris-Strasbourg express. This service continued daily, listed in the timetables under the name Orient Express, until June 8, 2007. However, with the opening of the Paris-Strasbourg high speed rail line on June 10, 2007, the Orient Express service was further cut back to Strasbourg-Vienna, departing nightly at 22:20 from Strasbourg, and still bearing the name.