According to the New York Times, a group of Wall Street executives have released a report detailing what went wrong and steps they can do to prevent it from hapening again.

OK, quit laughing.

According to the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/...

Wall Street failed to anticipate how wide-reaching problems with mortgage bonds would spread into seemingly distant corners of the financial markets, the report said. Awash in easy money, banks doled out credit without sufficiently charging for the risk. Wall Street also created complex structures that masked connections between asset classes as well as compensation incentives that pushed traders to take risky steps for short-term gain. The industry’s failings have now translated into pain for the broader economy, the report said.

Ya' think?

1928 - The U.S. dollar began to shrink. New bills, one third smaller than previous bucks, were issued by the U.S. Treasury Department.

1998 - A pair of major explosions near U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. "Clearly, this is a terrorist attack," U.S. State Department spokesman Lee McClenny said.

COINCIDENCE? I think NOT!

Quote:

"We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back."
-- Amazing James Randi

From the Church of Ineffable Stupidity:

The Republicans specialize in offering the phantasmagoric assessments of why Barack Obama deserves to lose, from citing his absence of flag pin, to the infamous "terrorist fist bump" controversy. David Brooks has adopted this tactic yet again with his column this week in the New York Times.

Operating under the patently false premise that Barack Obama, as a black man in a racist country, could win in a landslide in this election, Brooks then proceeds to level another petulant, subjective critique of Obama as "apart from the whole."

Why would Brooks willfully gloss over both American political history, and the substantive issues in this race?

You guessed it: Doing so would not help his preferred candidate, a one John McCain.

Just a little taste of what awaits me in Denver.

Last month, under pressure from the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, the city released a list of expenses related to the convention showing that the police were preparing for large demonstrations and mass arrests and that the department had spent $2.1 million on protection equipment for its officers, $1.4 million for barricades and $850,000 for supplies related to the arrest and processing of suspects.

In disclosing the cost breakdown, city officials denied rumors that had circulated for weeks that they had contemplated buying exotic nonlethal weapons that fired an immobilizing goo, or that used radiation or sonic waves to incapacitate people or vehicles.

For those of us who are sick and tired of so much of this country's resources going to fight the War in Iraq - a new article in the New York Times will make your blood boil.

Here's the uptake:

Soaring oil prices will leave the Iraqi government with a cumulative budget surplus of as much as $79 billion by year’s end, according to an American federal oversight agency. But Iraq has spent only a minute fraction of that on reconstruction costs that are now largely borne by the United States.

The unspent windfall, which covers surpluses from oil sales from 2005 through 2008, appears likely to reinforce growing debate about the approximately $48 billion in American taxpayer money devoted to rebuilding Iraq since the American-led invasion.

It's bad enough over 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died.

It's bad enough tens of thousands of troops have been injured.

It's bad enough the hundreds of billions we have spent on this war which should have gone to more important national priorities.

But we're spending money like a drunken sailor when the Iraqis are sitting on lottery money?!?!

WTF?!

More after the jump

Prominent neo-con writer David Brooks of the New York Times reiterated what has become an often-heard myth about Barack Obama and where he stands on issues.

Brooks argues that Obama has not made a leap forward in the polls because voters do not know where he stands, as if there is some ambiguous aura that surrounds Obama.

The media's narrative about Obama in this election just doesn't fit with the facts: They continue to try to pin Obama who doesn't take a stand on the issues while John McCain gets a free pass despite the fact that his principles have become incredibly ambiguous since he became the presumptive GOP nominee

In what can only be described as a contradictory, logic-impaired and stunningly dumb piece of horse-hockey, writers Stephen Biddle, Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack penned an op-ed for the NY Times today called "Not Quite Ready to Go Home" and I’d like to take a moment to deconstruct this mess.

Short version:  These guys basically agree with Barack Obama’s plan for withdrawal, but they go out of their way to try and prove that he’s wrong.  Head spinning yet?  Stay tuned.

(By the way, it may look like I cut and pasted most of their story in the following, but I actually cherry-picked.  Go to the link to see the entire piece in all it's glory.)

New York Times

In the 26 states and the District of Columbia where registration data were available, the total number of registered Democrats increased by 214,656, while the number of Republicans fell by 1,407,971.

More below, including completely unrelated poll question.

A fascinating perspective on Obama and family values.  Grand New Party, a book written by two young Republican conservatives Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam is getting a lot of attention.

David Brooks in the New York Times:

There have been other outstanding books on how the G.O.P. can rediscover its soul (like "Comeback" by David Frum), but if I could put one book on the desk of every Republican officeholder, "Grand New Party" would be it. You can discount my praise because of my friendship with the authors, but this is the best single roadmap of where the party should and is likely to head.

Follow me.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

I am not a real blogger, of course, merely a weekend pinch-hitter, a lowly brunch cook of blogtopia, as it were, trusted enough to competently sling out some slop for the regulars who wander in with nothing better to do until the jefe shows up on Monday.  After enough time I settled into being an essayist, duty means a 750 word piece (play with a net, as the demigod Krugman intoned) every weekend morning, every month, all year, unless you absolutely can’t.

Blogging has very accurately been described as a Death March of Bataan activity, a very difficult daily grind of unpaid lonely advocacy for nothing but pittance.  One might think two essays a week—often three—would be no big deal, but after about a year one gets an inkling of just how hard daily political writing often is, an arena of very dirty, lousy political play in a world of hurt.

Note: I'm the author of the book,Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest, but I'm not part of the Obama campaign.

My letter to the editor appears in the New York Times today,  and I've recently had letters published in the Chicago Tribune, and U.S News and World Report.

So I thought I'd offer my suggestions on how to write a letter to the editor and get it published.

From the New York Times:

Decisions like those suggest that what some economists call a neighborhood effect — putting factories closer to components suppliers and to consumers, to reduce transportation costs — could grow in importance if oil remains expensive. A barrel sold for $125 on Friday, compared with lows of $10 a decade ago.

. . .

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.

The study, published in May by the Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, calculates that the recent surge in shipping costs is on average the equivalent of a 9 percent tariff on trade. "The cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today," the report concluded, and as a result "has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades."

Continued...

Honestly, I didn't plan this. But once again, a powerful  NY Times op-ed by Bob Herbert, Running While Black, takes on the hot button issue of the week with more eloquence than I could have.

Why have so few had the kahunas to call out the fact that the only connection between Brittney, Paris Hilton & Obama is the blatant racism seen in the movie, "Reefer Madness"? Many have credited its thesis, that smoking weed makes white women want to have sex with black jazz musicians, for causing a medicinal herb used by doctors to be made illegal without consulting the AMA.

Now we see these tactics from the 1930s not-so-subtly used by a man born right between the release of the film and the "Marijuana Tax Act".

The two highly sexualized women (both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear) are shown briefly and incongruously at the beginning of a commercial critical of Mr.Obama.

I was just e-mailed this story by the New York Times about an hour ago. Essentially, McCain is sinking lower and lower, by the day it seems, into a pretty shameful campaign. All that talk about "the issues" and "the american people" has gone by the wayside when he realized - GASP! - the "american people" don't like him as much! I can only shake my head and say that I'm not surprised.

We all seem to appreciate the eye candy we get from Al Rodgers and other diarists.  I thought I would post some "brain candy" from The New York Times' Caucus Blog about Barack Obama's time teaching law at the University of Chicago.

There's a Page One article in today's Times entitled Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Apart.  It's been the subject of several diaries here at DailyKos including one that is fairly negative entitled New York Times Distorts Obama's U of Chicago's Years, and another that is more positive entitled Professor Obama. My view of the article was pretty positive but what's absolutely great are comments from other law professors on the Times' Caucus Blog praising Obama's professorial skills.  More down below.

From today's New York Times OpEd pages, the Editorial comes down hard and heavy on McSame's Bushit campaign tactics. (I scanned for a diary on this that might have already hit and didn't find one.)

It really is a heartening to see the WaPo and the Times develop a little journalistic backbone and stand up for the truth here - taking on the McSame and his campaign for singing their songs from the Karl Rove Bullshit Political Songbook after spending the late spring claiming he was going to take the high road in this campaign. More after the flip.

Note: I'm the author of a new book about Obama, Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest, but I'm not part of the Obama campaign.

Tomorrow's New York Times (July 30) features a lengthy story by Jodi Kantor about Obama's time as a teacher at the University of Chicago Law School. Since I took a class from Obama in the mid-1990s on "Race, Racism, and the Law," I thought I could offer some insights into Obama, and what this article gets wrong. Although the article offers some interesting insights, it also distorts Obama's past and tries to attack Obama's candidacy by using his experiences at the University of Chicago as a way to confirm many of the false assertions made about Obama: that he's a politician who doesn't stand for anything, that he's an aloof elitist, that he only pretends to listen to opposing viewpoints.