Month: July 2006

Mike Whitney: Is Cheney Betting on Economic Collapse?:

Wouldn’t you like to know where Dick Cheney puts his money? Then you’d know whether his “deficits don’t matter” claim is just baloney or not.

Well, as it turns out, Kiplinger Magazine ran an article based on Cheney’s financial disclosure statement and, sure enough, found out that the VP is lying to the American people for the umpteenth time. Deficits do matter and Cheney has invested his money accordingly.

The article is called “Cheney’s betting on bad news” and provides an account of where Cheney has socked away more than $25 million. While the figures may be estimates, the investments are not. According to Tom Blackburn of the Palm Beach Post, Cheney has invested heavily in “a fund that specializes in short-term municipal bonds, a tax-exempt money market fund and an inflation protected securities fund. The first two hold up if interest rates rise with inflation. The third is protected against inflation.”

Cheney has dumped another (estimated) $10 to $25 million in a European bond fund which tells us that he is counting on a steadily weakening dollar. So, while working class Americans are losing ground to inflation and rising energy costs, Darth Cheney will be enhancing his wealth in “Old Europe”. As Blackburn sagely notes, “‘Not all bad news’ is bad for everybody.”

The fact that a guy who has spent a lot of his life in government service has $50 million to worry about is interesting. That’s a pretty big windfall from a short period in private life. Not many of us do that well.

The original piece goes off on the plutocrats and swindlers — you can insert your own pejoratives — but what does it say that someone with as much influences as he has and, dare I say it, so little time to spend that loot, is more interested in socking it away than in investing it in the economy he claims is doing fine?

My Airport BaseStation (ca 2000) just went casters up.

Pennies a day, as best I can make out ( $400 / (5.5 years * 365 days/year) = $0.1992 ), so hard to complain.

My old G3 iMac DV is doing the job for now, until I get my mind around the LinkSys project.

free to good home?

chris craft:

this is a classic cabin cruiser made by chris craft. it is 28 foot long. slept 6 comfortably. it is a cavalier. 283 small block chevy. all there. it needs a new motor, wood work. it needs pretty much a restoration done to it. there is not any major damage done to the boat. the only damage is sun damage and damage to the canopy when we backed it into the driveway. like i said no major damage. hull is intact. all there. free to good home have all paper work. TRAILER IS NOT INCLUDED, but can be used to transport to destination. delivery neg. like i said free to good home. have pics

Looks like this, as best I can tell. Wow. You could live on that.

I blush to mention it:

Hmmm, reasons for my “success”…well, first of all, I have to say that I don’t measure success in terms of Technorati rank or traffic.

I measure success one comment at a time.

The hope, often unfulfilled, is that the words here engage people. I won’t say nothing makes me happier, but it does please me an awful lot.

Apple – Pro – Tips – Two Seconds to Sleep:

Want the fastest way to put your Mac right into a deep, sleepy-bear hibernation-like sleep (no whirling fan, no dialogs, no sound — nuthin’ — just fast, glorious sleep). Just press Command-Option and then hold the Eject button for about 2 seconds and Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. It doesn’t get much faster than that.

That’s faster than closing the lid.

Alternate lede:

After a decade of tracking 9/11 mastermind and financier Osama bin Laden, the CIA has disbanded and dispersed the staff of the unit, known as Alec Station, without ever bringing their quarry to justice. Al Queda, the group led and financed by bin Laden, was implicated in the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 that killed 17 US sailors.

Despite expanding its ranks in the wake of 9/11, the unit was never able to catch bin Laden who continues to inspire his followers with audio and video recordings broadcast throughout the Middle East, despite vows by President Bush to capture him “dead or alive.”

And the wingnuts think the Times is too hard on their leader.

C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden – New York Times:

C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden

By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, July 3 — The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice “dead or alive.”

Billmon waxes erudite on the so-called “Disunited State of America.”

A House Divided:

Talk of disunion and civil war may seem like hyperbole. I’m sure it would certainly seem so to the vast majority of Americans who don’t think much about politics or culture and just want to get on with their lives. I’m sure most Spaniards felt the same way in the summer of 1936, just as most Americans did in the winter of 1860.

But the historical truth is that civil wars aren’t made by vast majorities, but by enraged and fearful minorities. Looking at America’s traditionalists and the modernists today, I see plenty of rage and fear, most, though hardly all, of it eminating from the authoritarian right. For now, these primal passions are still being contained within the boundaries of the conventional political process. But that process — essentially a system for brokering the demands of competing interest groups — isn’t designed to handle the stresses of a full-blown culture war.

Compared to most countries, America has been very lucky so far — those kind of passions have only erupted in massive bloodshed once (well, twice if you count the original revolution.) By definition, however, something that has already happened is no longer impossible. It’s easy for newspaper columnists to fantasize about disunited states, but only madmen would actually try to make them so. Unfortunately, the madmen are out there. It’s up to the rest of us to keep them under control.

It’s a given that people don’t like change: the tension is between the minority who would risk destroying the state they claim to be preserving and the more reasonable people who can navigate the shoals of progress without losing their minds.

Billmon’s European History studies went further than mine, evidently. I know a little about the Spanish Civil War as a dress rehearsal for WWII and curious fact that patriotic Americans enlisted on both sides[1][2] but the underlying themes of fear and misguided patriotism suggest some further study. For a start, this list post deserves a closer reading than I have given it so far.

I get this via email: you’re welcome to sign up (the links are below). This kind of reporting is essential stuff in any open society: massaging or manufacturing the message is all too common and it’s harder to track down the facts. But this is a good source of who’s paying whom to say what, who’s saying one thing to you and another to someone else . . .

THE WEEKLY SPIN, July 5, 2006

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THIS WEEK’S NEWS

== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. BBC Archives Reveal Spooks Vetted Staff
2. Big-Spending Brethren
3. The Reach of Rupert Murdoch
4. International News Media as Collateral Damage
5. Victims of Our Own Advertising, Claims Drug Industry Boss

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Continue reading “the news some would rather you didn’t know about”