Tag: News

Evening Edition

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 NATO chopper crash makes 2010 deadliest year of Afghan war

by Lynne O’Donnell, AFP

51 mins ago

KABUL (AFP) – Nine US troops were killed in a helicopter crash in the insurgent heartland of southern Afghanistan on Tuesday, making 2010 the deadliest year for international forces since the war began.

The Taliban, who have been waging an increasingly deadly insurgency against Afghan government and foreign troops since the 2001 US-led invasion ousted them from power, immediately claimed responsibility.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said the cause of the crash was “under investigation”, adding: “There are no reports of enemy fire in the area.”

On This Day in History: September 21

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

September 21 is the 264th day of the year (265th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 101 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1780, during the American Revolution, American General Benedict Arnold meets with British Major John Andre to discuss handing over West Point to the British, in return for the promise of a large sum of money and a high position in the British army. The plot was foiled and Arnold, a former American hero, became synonymous with the word “traitor.”

Born in Connecticut, he was a merchant operating ships on the Atlantic Ocean when the war broke out in 1775. After joining the growing army outside Boston, he distinguished himself through acts of cunning and bravery. His actions included the Capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, successful defensive and delaying tactics despite losing the Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain in 1776, the Battle of Ridgefield, Connecticut (after which he was promoted to major general), operations in relief of the Siege of Fort Stanwix, and key actions during the pivotal Battles of Saratoga in 1777, in which he suffered leg injuries that ended his combat career for several years.

In spite of his successes, Arnold was passed over for promotion by the Continental Congress while other officers claimed credit for some of his accomplishments. Adversaries in military and political circles brought charges of corruption or other malfeasance, but he was acquitted in most formal inquiries. Congress investigated his accounts, and found that he owed it money after he had spent much of his own money on the war effort. Frustrated and bitter, Arnold decided to change sides in 1779, and opened secret negotiations with the British. In July 1780, he sought and obtained command of West Point in order to surrender it to the British. Arnold’s scheme was exposed when American forces captured British Major John André carrying papers that revealed the plot. Upon learning of André’s capture, Arnold fled down the Hudson River to the British sloop-of-war Vulture, narrowly avoiding capture by the forces of George Washington, who had been alerted to the plot.

Arnold received a commission as a brigadier general in the British Army, an annual pension of £360, and a lump sum of over £6,000. He led British forces on raids in Virginia, and against New London and Groton, Connecticut, before the war effectively ended with the American victory at Yorktown. In the winter of 1782, Arnold moved to London with his second wife, Margaret “Peggy” Shippen Arnold. He was well received by King George III and the Tories but frowned upon by the Whigs. In 1787, he entered into mercantile business with his sons Richard and Henry in Saint John, New Brunswick, but returned to London to settle permanently in 1791, where he died ten years later.

Evening Edition

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Intimidation and fraud claims cast shadow over Afghan poll

by Sardar Ahmad, AFP

24 mins ago

KABUL (AFP) – Concerns grew about intimidation and fraud in Afghanistan’s parliamentary election as the Tuesday deadline for complaints about the conduct of Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections approached.

Millions of Afghans voted Saturday in their second parliamentary poll since the 2001 US-led invasion overthrew the Taliban regime, against a backdrop of insurgent threats and attacks.

With counting under way and the first preliminary results expected on Wednesday, the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) was gathering reports of irregularities so that final results can be certified by October 31.

On This Day in History: September 20

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

September 20 is the 263rd day of the year (264th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 102 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1973, in a highly publicized “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, top women’s player Billie Jean King, 29, beats Bobby Riggs, 55, a former No. 1 ranked men’s player. Riggs (1918-1995), a self-proclaimed male chauvinist, had boasted that women were inferior, that they couldn’t handle the pressure of the game and that even at his age he could beat any female player. The match was a huge media event, witnessed in person by over 30,000 spectators at the Houston Astrodome and by another 50 million TV viewers worldwide. King made a Cleopatra-style entrance on a gold litter carried by men dressed as ancient slaves, while Riggs arrived in a rickshaw pulled by female models. Legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell called the match, in which King beat Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. King’s achievement not only helped legitimize women’s professional tennis and female athletes, but it was seen as a victory for women’s rights in general.

Billie Jean King (née Moffitt; born November 22, 1943 in Long Beach, California) is a former professional tennis player from the United States. She won 12 Grand Slam  singles titles, 16 Grand Slam women’s doubles titles, and 11 Grand Slam mixed doubles titles. King has been an advocate against sexism in sports and society. She is known for “The Battle of the Sexes” in 1973, in which she defeated Bobby Riggs, a former Wimbledon men’s singles champion.

King is the founder of the Women’s Tennis Association, the Women’s Sports Foundation, and World Team Tennis, which she founded with her former husband, Lawrence King.

Despite King’s achievements at the world’s biggest tennis tournaments, the U.S. public best remembers her for her win over Bobby Riggs in 1973.

Riggs had been a top men’s player in the 1930s and 1940s in both the amateur and professional ranks. He won the Wimbledon men’s singles title in 1939, and was considered the World No. 1 male tennis player for 1941, 1946, and 1947. He then became a self-described tennis “hustler” who played in promotional challenge matches. In 1973, he took on the role of male chauvinist. Claiming that the women’s game was so inferior to the men’s game that even a 55-year-old like himself could beat the current top female players, he challenged and defeated Margaret Court 6-2, 6-1. King, who previously had rejected challenges from Riggs, then accepted a lucrative financial offer to play him.

How to feel poor on $500,000 a year

Monday Business Edition

Monday Business Edition is an Open Thread

The Angry Rich

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: September 19, 2010

(I)f you want to find real political rage – the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason – … (y)ou’ll find it … among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.



(W)hen Forbes magazine runs a cover story alleging that the president of the United States is deliberately trying to bring America down as part of his Kenyan, “anticolonialist” agenda, that “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.” When it comes to defending the interests of the rich, it seems, the normal rules of civilized (and rational) discourse no longer apply.



Tax-cut advocates used to pretend that they were mainly concerned about helping typical American families. Even tax breaks for the rich were justified in terms of trickle-down economics, the claim that lower taxes at the top would make the economy stronger for everyone.

These days, however, tax-cutters are hardly even trying to make the trickle-down case. Yes, Republicans are pushing the line that raising taxes at the top would hurt small businesses, but their hearts don’t really seem in it. Instead, it has become common to hear vehement denials that people making $400,000 or $500,000 a year are rich. I mean, look at the expenses of people in that income class – the property taxes they have to pay on their expensive houses, the cost of sending their kids to elite private schools, and so on. Why, they can barely make ends meet.

And among the undeniably rich, a belligerent sense of entitlement has taken hold: it’s their money, and they have the right to keep it.

In Which Mr. Deling Responds to Someone Who Might Be Professor Todd Henderson

J. Bradford DeLong, Department of Economics, U.C. Berkeley

September 18, 2010

As best as Michael O’Hare could determine (and Professor Henderson or whoever it is does not challenge him), the Henderson annual family budget is this:

$455,000 a year of income, of which:

  • $60,000 in student loan payments
  • $40,000 is employer contributions to 401(k) and similar retirement savings vehicles
  • $15,000 is employer contributions to health insurance
  • $60,000 is untaxed employee contributions to tax-favored retirement savings vehicles
  • $25,000 building equity in their house
  • $80,000 in state and federal income taxes
  • $15,000 in property taxes
  • $10,000 for automobiles
  • $55,000 in housing costs for a $1M house (three times the average price in the Hyde Park neighborhood
  • $60,000 in private school costs for three children
  • $35,000 in other living expenses

And of this budget, Professor Henderson (or whoever) writes:

Like most working Americans, insurance, doctors’ bills, utilities, two cars, daycare, groceries, gasoline, cell phones, and cable TV (no movie channels) round out our monthly expenses. We also have someone who cuts our grass, cleans our house, and watches our new baby…. [W]e have less than a few hundred dollars per month of discretionary income. We occasionally eat out but with a baby sitter, these nights take a toll on our budget. Life in America is wonderful, but expensive. If our taxes rise significantly… the (legal) immigrant from Mexico who owns the lawn service we employ will suffer, as will the (legal) immigrant from Poland who cleans our house a few times a month. We can cancel our cell phones and some cable channels, as well as take our daughter from her art class at the community art center…

Now it is time for a reality check on this “most working Americans.” The median household income in the United States today is $50,000. Half of all households make more than this. Half of all households make less. The big expenses in the Henderson family budget–their $60,000 a year in contributions to tax-favored retirement savings vehicles, their $25,000 a year savings building home equity, their $55,000 for housing, their $60,000 in private school costs, even their $10,000 a year for new cars–are simply out of reach for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Half of all households make less than $50,000 a year–the Hendersons make nine times that. 90% of households make less than $100,000 a year–the Henderson’s make 4.5 times that. The Henderson’s are solidly in the top 1% of American households, in the select 1% group that receives more than $350,000 a year.

By any standard, they are really rich.

But they don’t feel rich. They have a cash flow problem. When the bills are paid at the end of the month, the money is gone–and they feel that they have to scrimp.



Professor Henderson’s problem is that he thinks that he ought to be able to pay off student loans, contribute to retirement savings vehicles, build equity, drive new cars, live in a big expensive house, send his children to private school, and still have plenty of cash at the end of the month for the $200 restaurant meals, the $1000 a night resort hotel rooms, and the $75,000 automobiles. And even half a million dollars a year cannot (get) you all of that.



(W)hy does he think that that is the way things should be? … (H)ere is the dirty secret: Professor Henderson thinks that that is the way things should be because he knows people for whom that is the way it is.



Professor Henderson in 1980 would have known who the really rich were, and they would on average have had about four times his income–more, considerably more, but not a huge gulf. He would have known people who were truly rich, and he would have seen himself as one of them–or as almost one of them.



Now fast forward to today.



Of the 100 people richer than he is, fully ten have more than four times his income. And he knows of one person with 20 times his income. He knows who the really rich are, and they have ten times his income: They have not $450,000 a year. They have $4.5 million a year. And, to him, they are in a different world.

And so he is sad. He and his wife deserve to be successful. And he knows people who are successful. But he is not one of them–widening income inequality over the past generation has excluded him from the rich who truly have money.

And this makes him sad. And angry. But, curiously enough, not angry at the senior law firm partners who extract surplus value from their associates and their clients, or angry at the financiers, but angry at… Barack Obama, who dares to suggest that the U.S. government’s funding gap should be closed partly by taxing him, and angry at the great hordes of the unwashed who will receive the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security payments that the government will make over the next several generations.

And in the real world-

Poverty stats show the damage

By Carol Morello, Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, September 17, 2010

In the second year of a brutal recession, the ranks of the American poor soared to their highest level in half a century and millions more are barely avoiding falling below the poverty line, the Census Bureau reported Thursday.

About 44 million Americans – one in seven – lived last year in homes in which the income was below the poverty level, which is about $22,000 for a family of four. That is the largest number of people since the census began tracking poverty 51 years ago.

Business News below the fold.

Evening Edition

From Yahoo News Top Stories

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Twin Baghdad car bombs kill 29

by Sabah Arar, AFP

1 hr 46 mins ago

BAGHDAD (AFP) – Two near-simultaneous car bombs rocked the Iraqi capital on Sunday, killing at least 29 people and wounding 111 in the city’s deadliest day in a month.

The violence, which saw 38 people killed across the country, was the worst to hit Iraq since US troops declared an official end to combat operations on September 1, and comes with no new government yet formed since a March poll.

The twin blasts struck near the Aden junction in north Baghdad and in the residential district of Mansur in the west at around 10:10 am (0710 GMT), AFP journalists and security officials said.

Jon, You Blew This One: False Equivalencies

Oops. Glen Greenwald points out a major flaw in Jon Stewart’s premise for his rally in Washington DC on 10/30/10 to counter the extremism on either side. While Jon has always been fair in his criticism of both Democrats and Republicans, left and right, his comparison of those the left saying that Bush is a war criminal as opposed to the right saying that Obama is a socialist, Muslim, non-American is a false equivalence since there is ample evidence to the former but not the latter.

The perils of false equivalencies and self-proclaimed centrism

I think Jon Stewart is one of the most incisive and effective commentators in the country, and he reaches an audience that would otherwise be politically disengaged.  I don’t have any objection if he really wants to hold a rally in favor of rhetorical moderation, and it’s also fine if, as seems to be the case, he’s eager to target rhetorical excesses on both the left and right in order to demonstrate his non-ideological centrism.  But the example he chose to prove that the left is guilty, too — the proposition that Bush is a “war criminal” — is an extremely poor one given that the General in charge of formally investigating detainee abuse (not exactly someone with a history of Leftist advocacy) has declared this to be the case, and core Nuremberg principles compel the same conclusion.

Leave aside the fact that, as Steve Benen correctly notes, Stewart’s examples of right-wing rhetorical excesses (Obama is a socialist who wasn’t born in the U.S. and hates America) are pervasive in the GOP, while his examples of left-wing excesses (Code Pink and 9/11 Truthers) have no currency (for better or worse) in the Democratic Party.  The claim that Bush is “a war criminal” has ample basis, and it’s deeply irresponsible to try to declare this discussion off-limits, or lump it in with a whole slew of baseless right-wing accusatory rhetoric, in order to establish one’s centrist bona fides.

However, Mr. Greenwald gives Jon’s co-rally partner, Stephen Colbert, credit for being “extremely well-focused and on-point.”

Rally to Restore Sanity
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The Week In Review 9/12 – 18

268 Stories served.  38 per day.

This is actually the hardest diary to execute, and yet perhaps the most valuable because it lets you track story trends over time.  It should be a Sunday morning feature.

On This Day in History: September 19

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

September 19 is the 262nd day of the year (263rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 103 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1796, President George Washington’s Farewell Address to the Nation is published.

George Washington’s Farewell Address was written to “The People of the United States” near the end of his second term as President of the United States and before his retirement to Mount Vernon.

Originally published in David Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1796 under the title “The Address of General Washington To The People of The United States on his declining of the Presidency of the

United States,” the letter was almost immediately reprinted in newspapers across the country and later in a pamphlet form. The work was later named a “Farewell Address,” as it was Washington’s valedictory after 45 years of service to the new republic, first during the Revolution of the Continental Army and later as the nation’s first president.

The letter was originally prepared in 1792 with the help of James Madison, as Washington prepared to retire following a single term in office. However, he set aside the letter and ran for a second term after his Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, and his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, convinced him that the growing divisions between the newly formed Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, along with the current state of foreign affairs, would tear the country apart in the absence of his leadership.

Four years later, as his second term came to a close, Washington revisited the letter and with the help of Alexander Hamilton prepared a revision of the original draft to announce his intention to decline a third term in office; to reflect the emerging issues of the American political landscape in 1796; and to parting advice to his fellow Americans, express his support for the government eight years following the adoption of the Constitution; and to defend his administration’s record.

The letter was written by Washington after years of exhaustion due to his advanced age, years of service to his country, the duties of the presidency, and increased attacks by his political opponents. It was published almost two months before the Electoral College cast their votes in the 1796 presidential election.

Evening Edition

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Pope meets abuse victims, condemns ‘unspeakable’ crimes

by Gildas le Roux, AFP

2 hrs 38 mins ago

LONDON (AFP) – Pope Benedict XVI met clerical abuse victims on Saturday and condemned the “unspeakable crimes” of paedophile priests as thousands of protesters demonstrated against his state visit to Britain.

The Vatican said the pope met the five victims in London and was “moved by what they had to say and expressed his deep sorrow over what victims and their families had suffered”.

Earlier, the pontiff expressed his “deep sorrow” to abuse sufferers in one of his clearest public statements yet on the abuse scandal which has sent shockwaves through Catholicism.

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