The frightening Taliban invasion of the Afghan capital Kabul, courtesy of Al Jazeera's Todd Baer. Compare the CNN and Al Jazeera stories.
Bailout? If by accident of birth, you were in Kabul yesterday, you'd be dying to bail out. You would have been running for your life while crazed Taliban stormed major government buildings and blew themselves up. A score of non-Taliban people were killed and fourscore wounded yesterday in Afghanistan's capital in the ominous assault.
Not to worry: Hell is on the way. U.S. troops, led by New York's 10th Mountain Division, are returning to Central Asia after being unjustifiably diverted from Uzbekistan (where they named their camp's muddy streets after the L.I.E., Fifth Avenue, and so on) to Iraq a few years ago to be blown up by Iraqi rebels. Bad news, everybody: There's a spring offensive coming against the Taliban, and it won't be like the relatively bloodless capture of Baghdad. It'll be like what happened afterGeorge W. Bush declared, "Mission accomplished!"
So, prepare yourselves for depressing news this spring of a non-financial variety: The expected sudden rise of U.S. deaths in Afghanistan will shove at least some of the Wall Street-inspired news off the front pages.
After all, if by the grace of Darwin or God you happen to live in the U.S., you may very well lose your home or job, but you probably won't be blown up. Unless you've been brainwashed by the government's ad campaigns and have joined the military. In which case, you, too, might find yourself in beautiful downtown Kabul trying to stamp out the Muslim fanatics.
It was only 25 years ago that Ronald Reagan hosted the Taliban in the White House, praised them as heroic "freedom fighters," and drummed up money for them. And Texas oilmen feted the creepily fundamentalist Taliban leaders with backyard barbecues.
Now the Taliban are returning the favor by trying to barbecue Americans. They no longer need a stimulus from the White House.
You need one, so have another cup of coffee and click on these headlines...
The Taliban conduct a night ambush against U.S. troops on January 24. A commenter on this YouTube video wrote: "holy cow, tracer rounds are so cool!" Yeah, really cool.
What a Sunday in sports and terror: Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer fought to the death in a Grand Slam final, and so did the Pittsburgh Steelers and Arizona Cardinals. Best Super Bowl I've ever seen. Best display of tennis skills I've ever seen.
Now that those matches are over, let the real games begin.
Sorry, Cardinal fans, but the worst news Sunday was the latest fight to the death in Afghanistan — yet another suicide bombing by the Taliban:
A man wrapped in explosives walked into a compound filled with Afghan police officers Monday morning and detonated his payload, killing 21 officers and himself, the Interior Ministry said.
The attacker struck in Tirin Kot, the capital of Oruzgan Province, a mountainous area where the government's authority is being contested by the Taliban. Oruzgan is the birthplace of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban movement.
This is ominous news, and not because of the location. Here's some context missing from the New York Times story quoted above. The BBC (yes, it uses a different spelling for the Taliban) explains:
The Taleban have changed tactics since facing foreign troops in open battles two years ago, says the BBC's Ian Pannell in Kabul.
The tactics of insurgents in Iraq are being duplicated, with more suicide bombings, roadside bombs and hit-and-run ambushes, our correspondent says.
Just another reason to rue the Bush regime's unjustified invasion of Iraq. Taliban fanatics were able to hone their killing skills by adopting a strategy perfected by other fanatics in Iraq. Once again, we're reminded of George W. Bush's most enduring legacy, his accidentally truth-telling words from 2004:
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
One could argue that the scary increase in suicide bombings in Afghanistan probably wouldn't be happening if not for the Bush-Cheney regime's vital contribution of spreading the "war on terror" to Iraq and thus giving fanatics the chance to think of new ways to commit suicide/homicide.
Question: what happens if you lose vast amounts of other people's money? Answer: you get a big gift from the federal government -- but the president says some very harsh things about you before forking over the cash.
Am I being unfair? I hope so. But right now that's what seems to be happening.
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about the Obama administration's plan to support jobs and output with a large, temporary rise in federal spending, which is very much the right thing to do. I'm talking, instead, about the administration's plans for a banking system rescue -- plans that are shaping up as a classic exercise in "lemon socialism": taxpayers bear the cost if things go wrong, but stockholders and executives get the benefits if things go right.
When I read recent remarks on financial policy by top Obama administration officials, I feel as if I've entered a time warp -- as if it's still 2005, Alan Greenspan is still the Maestro, and bankers are still heroes of capitalism.
The White House is expected to impose tougher restrictions on executive compensation at firms that get substantial government aid, as part of an effort to improve public perception of the $700 billion financial bailout.
President Obama watched last night's Super Bowl with a few political pals - and a couple of foes.
Obama, a Steeler fan, had 11 Democrats and four Republicans over -- including Arizona Rep. Trent Franks, who once warned electing Obama would spark "dancing in the streets among the terrorists of the world."
Here's a bottom line to keep you up at night: The economy is falling faster than Washington can get moving. President Obama says his stimulus plan will save or create four million jobs in two years. In the last four months of 2008 alone, employment fell by 1.9 million. Do the math....
What are Americans still buying? Big Macs, Campbell's soup, Hershey's chocolate and Spam -- the four food groups of the apocalypse.
As the Obama administration prepares its strategy to rescue the nation's banks by buying or guaranteeing troubled assets on their books, it confronts one central problem: How should they be valued?
Not just billions, but hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are at stake.
Just when it started to look as if The New York Times Co. had found a way to dig itself out from under its massive debt load, the beleaguered newspaper company may be on the verge of getting knocked down again.
The cash-strapped publisher last week reported that its pension plan was facing a $625 million shortfall at the end of 2008, compared with a deficit of $48 million a year earlier....
More than $1 billion in debt is looming over the ad-starved company, which was forced to get a $250 million loan from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim at a steep 14 percent interest rate, to put its stake in the Boston Red Sox up for sale and to negotiate the sale of part of its brand-new Eighth Avenue headquarters.
Now, the company is getting socked again by the financial crisis and subsequent market turmoil as it wreaks havoc on its pension plan. To be sure, the Times doesn't owe billions in retirement benefits like the Big Three automakers, but it's one of hundreds of US companies suffering from a severe pension squeeze.
Last week was a painful one for magazines, as Condé Nast decided to shutter Domino and Readers Digest's parent laid off a chunk of its staff. While advertising pages are down across the board, there are a number of mags that are fighting for their survival.
A group of angry Bank of America shareholders plans to demand that Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ken Lewis get the boot at the bank's upcoming annual meeting.
The Olympic swimming star Michael Phelps quickly acknowledged his poor judgment after a photograph showing him inhaling from a marijuana pipe was published Sunday in a British newspaper. Although his admission is unlikely to effect his swimming eligibility, it could affect the millions of dollars he has secured in endorsement deals....
Since his record-breaking performance in Beijing, Phelps has added Kellogg's, Mazda and Subway, among others, to an endorsement portfolio that already included Visa and AT&T. In a 60 Minutes interview that aired in December, Phelps's agent...said that Phelps could earn more than $100 million over his lifetime.
On his weekly radio show this just-past Motzoei Shabbos, Assemblyman Dov Hikind revealed that according to his information, [confirmed by VIN News] another victim has come forward with allegations that he was abused by the disgraced former principal of Elite High School of Brooklyn.
On the show, Mr. Hikind also discussed the accused principal's admission of guilt.
Most significantly, Hikind announced a major yom tefilah to be held on March 1, 2009 in front of the Borough Park "Y" on 48th Street to demonstrate a communal request for forgiveness from Hashem for not doing enough to protect our children from, and inform our community of, heinous crimes that have been occurring over the past decades in which we turned a blind eye to abuse victims.
Mr. Hikind said that he would continue his crusade, and said "those who are upset with what I do, I ask them: 'Take over what I do.' I even offered one of the biggest Chasidic institutions many months ago, when they were upset at my work, to take over--and I never heard back from them."
From the conservative, Jewish-establishment magazine Commentary:
...Perhaps this will set off a war of scarcity between Jewish groups fighting over the money of those who are still giving, but the initial indications are that cooperation may prevail over chaos.
Representatives of thirty-five of the largest Jewish foundations in the country met in New York on December 23, 2008, to coordinate their responses to the crisis and agreed to offer millions of dollars in loans to not-for-profits victimized by Madoff--a heartening display of a community banding together in a time of crisis.
But the real problem facing specifically Jewish charitable organizations is not a scarcity of dollars to be spread among rival Jewish causes, but rather competition from secular groups that have also been injured by the economic crisis.
An assimilated Jewish donor who feels the charitable impulse but has fewer dollars to contribute might feel a greater sense of affinity and cause with an environmentalist group or an arts organization, and focus his reduced power on them instead. Just as the openness of American society has made it less likely for Jews to marry other Jews, so, too, it is less likely that Jews will give primarily to Jewish causes....
The long-term threat for Jewish philanthropy, then, isn't Bernard Madoff but rather the overall threat facing the larger Jewish community in the United States--what came to be known, nearly two decades ago, as the "continuity crisis."
When the 1990 National Jewish Population Study reported alarming rates of intermarriage, numbers that offered the terrifying prospect of the eventual withering away of the Jewish population in the United States, a debate began in the organized Jewish world about how to address the approaching demographic disaster.
Peter Madoff's role in the scam, if any, remains unclear. But timing of the homestead exemption requests raises questions as to who knew what and when....
CBS News has learned that [Bernard] Madoff and his brother, along with their wives, took steps two years ago -- around the time that federal regulators started probing Madoff's business activities -- that could help prevent their Florida homes from being taken away from them, something possible under Florida state law.
"Florida has very unique laws and has been described by some as a debtor's haven," said John Pankauski, a Florida estate attorney. "People who may want to protect their property will seek the protection of Florida laws."
Florida's "homestead" laws, which are unlike what any other state has, in part allow homeowners facing legal judgments (or other financial issues) to protect their primary residence fully -- keeping it out of the hands of potential creditors. One of the key steps in qualifying for the home-protection is seeking "homestead exemption," which provides homeowners with a tax break.
On May 10, 2001, Peter Madoff bought the home at 200 Algoma Road in Palm Beach, Fla., along with his wife Marion. Both were listed as owners at the time.
Five years later, on Nov. 8, 2006, Peter transferred the title to Marion making her the sole legal owner of the home....
A bumbling New York Post reporter was busted Saturday after he tried to sweet-talk his way into Bernie Madoff's upper East Side penthouse, police said.
Josh Saul, 25, claimed to be a real-estate broker when he entered the Ponzi scheme swindler's building at 133 E. 64th St. around 1 p.m., police said. "He misrepresented himself," a police source said.
Saul was escorted upstairs by a doorman and was near the front door of the $50 billion scam artist's $7 million duplex when he was unmasked, cops said.
The hapless hack's weekend at Bernie's did not end with the exclusive interview he was angling for. Instead, he was arrested, charged with trespassing and issued a summons.
Saul, 25, of Greenwich Village, has been working at the Post for about a year. He is also the dubious star of a Web site that includes photos of him dancing in his underwear, chugging beer from a keg, wearing a woman's wig and balancing objects on his head.
Reached Saturday night, he referred all questions to his newspaper.
Post spokesman Howard Rubinstein declined to comment.
The fact-challenged tabloid quoted an anonymous source on Friday as saying that brokers have been invited by the trustee of Madoff's firm to assess the disgraced investor's apartment.
Hard times force hard choices on everyone. But that does not require bad decisions too. At Brandeis University, President Jehuda Reinharz has made hard times worse by deciding to close the university's Rose Art Museum and sell off more than 6,000 works in its collection....
The Madoff scandal and its effects on some of Brandeis's major donors have made new fund-raising possibilities especially bleak.
Selling the university's art collection would help plug its financial gap, but it would create a gaping hole in Brandeis's mission and its reputation. It would default on one of the great collections of contemporary art in New England, one built early on with extraordinary artistic acumen. The core works were acquired by the museum's founding director from such young artists (at young artist prices) as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.
In "Taliban resurgence pushes troops to change tack,"Al Jazeera's Josh Rushing joins U.S. troops on the frontline in Afghanistan. Watch this and then ask yourself: Why isn't this as freely available on your cable as CNN or Fox News? And yes, you've heard Rushing's name; he's the former Marine flack during the Iraq invasion who was featured in the documentary Control Room and then defied the Pentagon by talking about his experiences with Al Jazeera. Now he works for Al Jazeera.
Unlike Wall Street's short-sellers, I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but capitalism is not dead, despite the moaning and groaning from Davos to D.C.
The International Monetary Fund predicts that the global economy will come to "a virtual halt." No, not yet and not for everybody. For evidence, see "What Red Ink? Wall Street Paid Hefty Bonuses" in the Times:
Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year.
That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller.
While the payouts paled next to the riches of recent years, Wall Street workers still took home about as much as they did in 2004, when the Dow Jones industrial average was flying above 10,000, on its way to a record high.
On the other hand, you can say that capitalism is in trouble, judging by the surprisingly cynical, lively tone of Ben White's above story.
Yes, the fact that the bonuses sharply fell indicates trouble on Wall Street. But the main thing it indicates is that the bonuses in past years have been staggeringly unconscionable and are now falling back to being merely unconscionable.
In any case, Barack Obama, the nation's first Kenyan-Kansan president, has already used his bully pulpit to preach social responsibility and rail against greed. Looks as if he might have to summon these Wall Street gangsters to the basketball court and posterize them. You know, add them to his In-Your-Facebook.
And you can just ignore the caterwauling by Capitol Hill's Republicans about Obama's stimulus plan. Even the Wall Street Journalreports that corporate types look favorably on Obama's package.
For those of us accident victims bleeding after being run over on Wall Street or gasping for breath at the foot of Capitol Hill, that stimulus package can't come too soon. The depression is finally hitting home: I almost dropped my laptop when I heard that profits earned by my Sony baby daddy dropped by 95 percent. Poor little laptop overheats as it is.
If yours still works (and if you're reading this, it is), click on these items...
Astroland Park's popular Rocket won't be blasting out of Coney Island after all. City officials confirmed yesterday that the park's longtime operator, the Albert family, has donated...
Without a single Republican vote, President Obama won House approval for an $819 billion economic plan as Democrats sought to temper their own differences.
It takes a special kind of thief to get Morgy this mad. Manhattan's gentlemanly district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, yesterday needed a pair of profanities to describe a big-shot...
The seven defendants in the deadly assault on Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, are accused of assaulting or attempting to assault a total of eight other Latino men.
The wealthy Upper West Side woman charged with bilking $80 million from Fortune 500 firms is complaining that she can't live without her Rolex, Warhol and MontBlancs...
George Mitchell, President Barack Obama's special Middle East troubleshooter, was chairman of a law firm that was paid about $8 million representing Dubai's ruler in connection with a child-trafficking lawsuit.
The impact of the $819 billion economic stimulus package will be felt within weeks once the final version becomes law, but estimating its effectiveness is far more complex.
...the bank suddenly began pulling its millions out of [funds that invested with Madoff] in early autumn, months before Mr. Madoff was arrested, according to accounts from Europe and New York that were subsequently confirmed by the bank. The bank did not notify investors of its move, and several of them are furious that it protected itself but left them holding notes that the bank itself now says are probably worthless.
Bernie Madoff is whining to anyone who'll listen that he's being held captive in his palatial penthouse and unable to traipse around the Big Apple as he did before being busted for running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, a source familiar with the scam artist told the Post.
"I'm a prisoner in my own house!" Madoff fumed. "I can't go anywhere! I'm stuck here all day!"...
In recent days, The Post has learned, private contractors have been moving at the request of federal authorities to install wiretaps on Madoff's apartment phones and computers.
"If he surfs the Web or makes a call, it's going to be tracked," a source said.
As I noted yesterday, the Times has a particular problem calling a spade a spade in the Middle East. Witness one of its other war stories this morning, Steven Erlanger's "Rockets Fired From Lebanon Into Israel," which generally avoids the word "war" and features this lede:
Israel's conflict with Hamas in Gaza threatened to broaden on Thursday as at least three rockets were fired into the north of Israel from Lebanon.
Yeah, "conflict." Please. The pro-Israel New York Posthas no problem calling this a war.
Look, if people don't want to call what's going on in Gaza a "war," I'll settle for "blintzkrieg."
There was a time, oh about 40 years ago, when the Jews of Israel were an underdog state with a sense of humor (especially among their American Jewish supporters) melded into their fight for survival. See this Time story from 1967, in the midst of what became known as the Six-Day War, that rounded up jokes about that "conflict" under the headline "Blintzkrieg" (supply your own ba-dum-pum rim shots after each line):
"It's unfair," said a U.A.R.[United Arab Republic] spokesman. "They have 2,300,000 Jews on their side. And we have none." He denied, however, that Egypt had asked the Russians for their 2,500,000 Jews. Soon after the war's start, Nasser made a brief guest appearance on the popular Cairo TV show, Where's My Line? Reports from the second day of fighting indicated that the Egyptians had destroyed four Jeeps, a kosher mobile kitchen and 14 air-conditioned Cadillacs. The Israelis claimed 400 MIGs and 24 flying carpets. Ralph Nader launched a campaign to provide Arab tanks with back-up lights.
The unstoppable Israeli thrust through the Sinai Desert quickly became known as the blintzkrieg. It was led by the crack regiment known as the Bagel Lancers. When Israeli troops reached the Suez Canal, they grabbed the lox. At one point in the campaign, an Arab division spotted a lone Israeli sniper on a sand dune. The commander dispatched three men to get him. When they did not return, he sent a dozen. None of them came back. So he finally sent an entire company. Two hours later, one blood-splattered Egyptian soldier crawled back. "It was an ambush," he explained. "There were two of them."
The Six-Day War was a turning point. Forty years later, the laughter has died out. Israel acts less and less like an underdog and more and more like an overlord, thanks to its decades of harsh occupation policies, and as many commentators in Israel have noted with anguish, the decades of acting like occupiers have coarsened Israeli society.
The Jewish state's grim throttling of Palestinians these days is pretty much unleavened by humor. Insanely orthodox. Humanism is also kosher, but you wouldn't know it these days.
Anyway, I'm still willing to be assaulted by a blintzkrieg. Make mine raspberry...
Like so many Jewish writers of her generation, Hannah Arendt attempted in her work to shine the light of intellect on the extreme darkness she lived through...
This time, a picture was worth several dozen shoes. At least 150 pro-Palestinian New Yorkers rallied against Mayor Bloomberg for his recent trip to Israel and unfettered support of that country...
After admitting over $1B of value on its books was fictitious, Satyam (SAY) is dealing with the fallout, as are the accounting industry, investors and Indian markets. In frenzied premarket trading, Satyam shares lost 99.89% yesterday, plummeting from $9.35 to $0.01, and were halted before regular trading hours began.
U.S. computer maker Dell Inc. announced Thursday it will slash its Irish work force and shift its European manufacturing operations to Poland in a move certain to undermine Ireland's recession-hit economy.
Dell is Ireland's second-largest employer, its biggest exporter and in recent years has contributed about 5% to the national gross domestic product. Economists warn that each Dell job underpins another four to five jobs in Ireland.
You won't find the word "war" in this morning's lede story in the New York Times on Israel's bombardment and invasion of Gaza.
Is the Times afraid of offending New York's Jews, especially the right-wing Jewish establishment? Is it fearful of provoking a slew of accusations from that hawkish establishment that the paper is antisemitic? Probably.
But that's nuts. The word pops up several times in the city's main Jewish newspaper, the Daily Forward, which is definitely not a lefty publication.
For example, the Forward's lede story this morning is from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (the Chosen People's wire service), for whom Dina Kraft writes:
Just as in the summer of 2006, when the northern part of the country huddled in bomb shelters during the Second Lebanon War and the rest of the country carried on with its business, a new war has come that affects Israelis — at least in part — according to geography.
Practically all of the U.S. mainstream press goes through gyrations to avoid calling what's going on in the Middle East a "war."
That's why if you want to read the un-P.C. skinny about the current war between Arabs and Jews and about the complex, murky, often slimy world of American-Israeli politics, you have to read the Forward. Or at least the press in other countries.
Depending on your political or gastronomic persuasion, order another bagel or sfiha and click on these stories...
A high-ranking Israeli delegation was scheduled to arrive in Egypt to discuss the possibilities of a cease-fire in the Jewish state's 12-day assault on the Gaza Strip.
Online personality tests have helped retailers to automate hiring. But the tests are also creating a culture of cheating and raising questions about their fairness.
Department of Labor, please hold. A rush of out-of-work New Yorkers overwhelmed the state's unemployment system yesterday, forcing the program's automated phone banks and...
...Public campaigns have been launched on behalf of Jonathan Pollard, the Navy analyst who was sent to jail for spying on behalf of Israel, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a leading neoconservative and former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. Jewish philanthropist and former junk-bond king Michael Milken had his application for pardon submitted by Washington bigwig Ted Olsen.
Satyam Computer Services Ltd. Chairman B. Ramalinga Raju Wednesday resigned admitting to falsifying company accounts and inflating revenue and profit figures over several years, sending the company's shares plunging 78%.....
Satyam's clients include General Electric Co., General Motors Corp., Nissan Motor Co., Applied Materials Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Sony Corp.
Forty-five percent of Americans want Gov. Paterson to name Caroline Kennedy to replace Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, according to a poll released yesterday.
Ten days before his arrest, Bernard Madoff received $250 million from a man who helped give him his start on Wall Street, a move that shows how the investment manager tried to raise cash to stave off his firm's collapse.
Mr. Madoff received $250 million around Dec. 1 from Carl Shapiro, a 95-year-old Palm Beach, Fla., philanthropist and entrepreneur who is one of Mr. Madoff's oldest friends and biggest financial backers, according to people familiar with the matter.
Former SEC exec Meaghan Cheung, who oversaw a 2006 probe of swindler Bernard Madoff's firm, defended herself yesterday against claims that she and others blew it by not uncovering his huge...
New York University lost as much as $94 million when a hotshot money manager, against the school's wishes, invested the cash with swindler Bernie Madoff, its lawyers told a judge yesterday...
• October 21: "The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. Spc. Justin A. Saint, 22, of Albertville, Ala., died Oct. 15 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries sustained in a non-combat related incident. He was assigned to the Special Troops Battalion, XVIII Airborne Corps, Fort Bragg, N.C. The incident is under investigation." (DOD)
• October 21: "The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. Spc. Heath K. Pickard, 21, of Palestine, Texas, died Oct. 16 in Balad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when he received indirect fire in Baquaba, Iraq. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, Fort Wainwright, Alaska." (DOD)
• October 21: "In a bid to alleviate the suffering of internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in tent camps, the local authorities have built a makeshift camp in western Baghdad to house 150 families in wooden caravans." (IRIN)
• Iraq Body Count: "Tuesday 21 October: 26 Dead"
Baghdad: 1 body found.
Jurf al-Sakhr: 15 killed in attack on two tribes.
Shirqat: Gunmen kill oil refinery director.
Diyala: 5 in minibus killed by US forces.
Mandili: car bomb kills 3.
Mosul: 1 body found. (Iraq Body Count)
• "FACTBOX: Security Developments in Iraq, Oct 21
"Following are security developments in Iraq at 1600 GMT on Tuesday."
• BAGHDAD - A salvo of seven mortars struck Saidiya neighbourhood of southern Baghdad, wounding five people, police said.
• BAGHDAD - One dead body was discovered in Baghdad, police said.
• MOSUL - Police said they found one unidentified dead body with gunshot wounds to the head and chest in the northern city of Mosul.
• BAGHDAD - Iraqi army troops found a large cache of weapons, ammunition and explosives in an industrial area of Sadr City in eastern Baghdad, said Qassim Moussawi, government spokesman for security in the capital.
• LATIFIYA - Nine decomposed bodies were found on Monday in Latifiya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. The victims had been buried for more than a year.
• BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb near an army checkpoint wounded one Iraqi soldier and three electricity workers in Palestine street in northeastern Baghdad, police said. (JAVNO — Croatia)
• DOD Casualty Report:
U.S. military casualties during combat operations (March 19, 2003 to April 30, 2003): 139
U.S. military casualties "post combat ops" (May 1, 2003 to present): 4,038 (DOD Casualty Report)
Under the media radar, an amazing but true development: "Preventive war" will now be prevented.
Six years too late, the neocons' grip on U.S. foreign policy has finally been broken — by the Pentagon itself.
A new U.S. Army field manual has officially put the kibosh on the Bush-Cheney regime's self-proclaimed "preventive war" doctrine that it used to justify the Iraq invasion.
As a major new guide for U.S. military officials, FM 3-07: "Stability Operations specifically changes policy by calling for embracing "joint effort" with the rest of the world.
FM 3-07 repudiates the Bush Doctrine of unilateral war-making.
This drastic change in policy — because that's what this new document represents — has been practically ignored by the press. Even if there were no Wall Street war, its import would probably have been ignored.
Remember all that White House/Pentagon prattle about "regime change"? Here's what the new manual says:
Repeating an Afghanistan or an Iraq —forced regime change followed by nation-building
under fire — probably is unlikely in the foreseeable future.
Of course, this new, gentler Pentagon doesn't go so far as to announce the manual as a repudiation of the Bush Doctrine. But that's exactly what it is. (See the manual (PDF) and the Pentagon's press release.)
Here's a key passage in FM 3-07:
America’s future abroad is unlikely to resemble Afghanistan or Iraq, where we grapple with the burden of nation-building under fire. Instead, we will work through and with the community of nations to defeat insurgency, assist fragile states, and provide vital humanitarian aid to the suffering.
So, now we're going to "work through and with the community of nations"? That doesn't sound familiar. And we're officially not looking to do any more Afghanistans or Iraqs?
Next thing you know, we're going to start following the Geneva Conventions.
Officially, at least — and that really does mean something — the U.S. is rejecting bluster and embracing "soft power":
Achieving victory will assume new dimensions as we strengthen our ability to generate “soft” power to promote participation in government, spur economic development, and address the root causes of conflict among the disenfranchised populations of the world. At the heart of this effort is a comprehensive approach to stability operations that integrates the tools of statecraft with our military forces, international partners, humanitarian organizations, and the private sector.
Stop to consider the Army's even talking in one of its key guides for generals about trying to "address the root causes of conflict among the disenfranchised populations of the world." They're putting flowers in their own howitzers (OK, so maybe they're not quite doing that).
Another big shift: FM 3-07 gives "stability operations" equal rank with "offense" and "defense."
Such a rejection of the Bush regime's rigidly held preventive-war doctrine is an astonishing occurrence while Dick Cheney is still vice president. But these days, he's no doubt out of the loop. And as for the Wall Street war, it's doubtful that Cheney is even trying to whisper commands in Henry Paulson's ear. (Of course, maybe Cheney's busy trying to connive a McCain victory.)
The new field manual would have never happened while such hawks as Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Doug Feith roamed the Pentagon hallways.
It even strongly implies that the government has learned something from its disastrous Iraq venture and increasingly scary Afghan war:
Field Manual 3-07, Stability Operations, represents a milestone in Army doctrine. It is a roadmap from conflict to peace, a practical guidebook for adaptive, creative leadership at a critical time in our history. It institutionalizes the hard-won lessons of the past while charting a path for tomorrow.
Hard-won lessons, yes. That not to say that we have won either war. But this document should help rein in future White Houses from attempting invasions of future Iraqs.
Though Dan Mangan mistakenly assumes that needle-dick politicians are even capable of steaming up mirrors, he efficiently essays an effective presentation of these tabloidian buzz words: "disgraced," "secretly," "steamy," "affair," "confessing," "infidelity," "cancer-stricken," and "explosive":
Disgraced ex-presidential candidate John Edwards secretly rekindled his steamy affair with his campaign videographer after confessing his infidelity to his cancer-stricken wife, according to an explosive new report.
That's it. The thesaurus is exhausted. The dictionary has just declared bankruptcy. With Michael Phelps, all the fitting adjectives have been used and re-used and worn down to the nub: amazing, astounding, astonishing, remarkable. Incredible, unbelievable, implausible, inconceivable.
So stop writing you don't.
You'll want a better lede and a better read, so check out the reliable Filip Bondy in the Daily News:
Two more golds, two more world records, four Olympic immortals surpassed. Just another day at the office with leaky goggles, and Michael Phelps won't even file for overtime.
Phelps' journey has become so routine and so spectacular at the same time, you get confused sometimes about whether to get excited (yes, you should). Phelps himself doesn't seem particularly overjoyed very often, unless he has relay teammates or fellow medalists standing around him to share the glory.
Classic local-news reportage, courtesy of Lisa L. Colangelo. It's one thing to have a free parking spot in downtown Dubuque. It's another to have one in New York City.
While all Council members receive parking placards from the DOT that allow them to park in many restricted areas and even avoid paying the meter, four have their own private parking spots on city streets.
Despite Dick Cheney, a unilateral strike on Iran's nuke sites — and the resulting radioactive clouds circling the planet — now seem less and less likely.
Despite practically no mention in the U.S. press of this developing story during the past two months, we can read that no-nukes-is-good-news story this morning.
U.S. National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen both visited here in June and, according to the Washington Post, told senior Israeli defense officials that Iran is still far from obtaining nuclear weapons, and that an attack on Iran would undermine American interests. Therefore, they said, the U.S. would not allow Israeli planes to overfly Iraq en route to Iran. . . .
These private messages were accompanied by a series of leaks from the Pentagon that Israel interpreted as attempts to thwart any possibility of an attack on Iran. For instance, the Americans revealed details of a major Israel Air Force exercise in the Mediterranean; they also said they doubted Israel had adequate intelligence about Iran's nuclear facilities. In addition, Mullen spoke out publicly against an attack on Iran.
Two weeks ago, [Israeli Defense Minister Ehud] Barak visited Washington for talks with his American counterpart, Robert Gates, and Vice President Richard Cheney. Both conversations focused on Iran, but the two Americans presented conflicting views: Gates vehemently opposes an attack on Iran, while Cheney is the administration's leading hawk.
If piece-loverPaul Wolfowitz and dual-loyalistDoug Feith were still at the Pentagon, we might be instead planning end-of-the-world parties.
Dan Levin of the city's venerable Jewish daily that is the consistently best source of news in the U.S. about the formidable Jewish-establishment lobby — though it's not as good a paper as New York City's now-defunct Yiddischer Amerikaner Volks-Kalender, which my ancestor Alexander Harkavyedited a century ago — noted this yesterday, before this morning's splish-splash everywhere about Michael Phelps:
Usually it's Jewish mothers who boast and brag about their children's accomplishments. A big ego on a nice Jewish boy, however, is rather unbecoming. . . .
[Mark] Spitz, who is possibly the greatest living Jewish sports legend, has been pouting over the fact that he wasn't officially invited to the Beijing Olympics.
"I never got invited. You don't go to the Olympics just to say, I am going to go. Especially because of who I am," Spitz, 58, told AFP [Agence France Presse]. "I am going to sit there and watch Michael Phelps break my record anonymously? That's almost demeaning to me. It is not almost — it is."
You'd think that with all the practice over the past five years the Times would learn to cover a war, but no, the paper always insists — like the paper of record it thinks it still is — on going with what the top officials say and do.
Like this morning's story, which is careful to include the Russkie president's middle initial but misses the point of what's really going in Georgia:
The presidents of Georgia and Russia agreed early Wednesday morning on a framework that could end the war that flared up here five days ago, after Russia reasserted its traditional dominance of the region.
Declaring that "the aggressor has been punished," President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia announced early Tuesday that Russia would stop its campaign. Russian airstrikes continued during the day, however, and antagonisms seethed on both sides.
"Antagonisms seethed on both sides"? Typical of the Times to meticulously quote "world leaders" while being cautious and vague about real events. Read this morning's dispatch in the Guardian (U.K.):
'Georgian villages burned and looted as Russian tanks advance'
Villages in Georgia were being burned and looted as Russian tanks followed by "irregulars" advanced from the breakaway province of South Ossetia, eyewitnesses said today.
"People are fleeing, there is a mood of absolute panic. The idea there is a ceasefire is ridiculous," Luke Harding, the Guardian's correspondent, said.
Russia denied any advance, however Georgian authorities claimed that about 50 tanks and armoured vehicles were near the strategically important town of Gori.
Now this is a great job by the Times. John Darnton's lede:
Weeks before bombs started falling on Georgia, a security researcher in suburban Massachusetts was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.
Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in Lexington noticed a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites containing the message: "win+love+in+Rusia."
Other Internet experts in the United States said the attacks against Georgia's Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests —known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks — that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.
Two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
Hasani Gittens forces down our gullet some news that makes us hurl:
No wonder it's named after a bank - Met fans are going to have to open up their safe-deposit boxes to afford seats at Citi Field next season. The choicest seats will cost $495 - a 79 percent increase.
This will be especially bitter for those Mets fans who are among the tens of thousands laid off by Citigroup.
Love the hed, but the story itself is somewhat of a slog:
Regular straphangers took the MTA for a $74,000 ride by accident - in addition to the $800,000 authorities say a trio of scammers bilked from the agency.
A suspected software glitch allowed people to buy MetroCards and commuter railroad tickets without being charged - the same error authorities believe Christopher Clemente, 37, Lisa Foster Jordan, 37, and Cary Grant, 40, allegedly exploited in order to peddle hundreds of thousands of dollars in rides since 2005.
Cary Grant? What a shame. He was such a hero in North by Northwest.
A year after financial tremors first shook Wall Street, a crucial artery of modern money management remains broken. And until that conduit is fixed or replaced, analysts say borrowers will see interest rates continue to rise even as availability worsens for home mortgages, student loans, auto loans and commercial mortgages.
The conduit, the market for securitization, through which mortgages and other debts are packaged and sold as securities, has become sclerotic and almost totally dependent on government support. The problems, intensified by bond investors who have grown leery of these instruments, have been a drag on the economy and have persisted despite the exercise of extraordinary regulatory powers by policy makers.
It's the Times that's sclerotic, and it's a lack of regulation that caused this problem in the first place.
"Crucial artery of modern money management" — what a riot!
You wouldn't know it from this story, which treats mortgage securitization as something that practically sprang from the Founding Fathers' loins, but it's actually a devious diversion scheme that really got cooking in Wall Street's '80s heyday and that Wall Street has fought hard to keep unregulated.
It's more like a shunt that drains our mortgage payments directly into the pockets of Wall Streeters without even giving a taste to the millions of Americans who give them the ante to play with. What a scam.
I wrote about this back in June 2000 ("In the Land of Milk and Money") during the Senate race between Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio. One of the key figures behind Lazio was Lewis Ranieri, and I noted:
Ranieri created — yes, personally created — the multitrillion-dollar trading market on collateralized mortgage bonds, made possible by the Reagan era's relaxation of trading rules and his lobbying of Congress to establish federal agencies like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae to make mortgage-bond trading more lucrative. [See Wayne Barrett's recent "Andy's Kids" for the current crisis revolving around Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.]
Ranieri ranks with junk-bond king Michael Milken among "the most influential financiers of the 1980s," according to Edward Chancellor's highly respected book Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation.
Journalist Michael Lewis, a former bond trader for Salomon Brothers, where Ranieri was once the biggest of what were called the "Big Swinging Dick" traders, wrote in the best-seller Liar's Poker that Ranieri and Milken were "the great bond missionaries of the 1980s," crisscrossing the country, trying to persuade institutional investors to buy mortgage securities.
Russia called a halt to its incursion into Georgia, as prexy Dmitri Medvedev declared, in so many words, "Mission accomplished!"
Bad news for the Russkies. That means at least five more years of war, if George W. Bush's similar declaration in May 2003 is a harbinger.
For now, though, the Russkies just had to back off — or at least say they were. As Vlad "The Paler" Putin's troops marched through Georgia, Moscow's stock market started plunging.
Who says a globalized economy is all bad?
Here's how Kommersant, in Moscow, describes it this morning:
The continuing conflict between Russia and Georgia led to a 4-percent plunge in the Russian stock market at the beginning of the day yesterday . . .
Experts say the main cause of the drop in the ruble was the massive selloff of Russian securities by nonresidents, who converted the rubles from the sales into dollars. Currency investors also influenced the rate. "There were many investors who were oriented toward the strengthening of the rubles, and now those perspectives are clouded," an analyst commented. Between the beginning of the year and Friday, the ruble had gained 3.6 percent against the dollar.
At around 1:00, news wires began carrying a statement by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that Russia had completed a "significant part of the operation to enforce peace in Georgian and South Ossetia" and Tskhinvali was under the control of peacekeepers. Then there were reports that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had signed a ceasefire plan.
The indexes began to rise.
The New York Times's David Jolly basically had the story yesterday. It would have gotten wider play if his editors had only connected the dots between war and markets a little more closely and lifted the piece out of the business section. Under the lame, overly cautious hed "Investors Struggle With the Uncertainty of Fighting Between Russia and Georgia," Jolly wrote:
Markets in Moscow fell sharply for a time on Monday and then recovered after an escalation in the fighting between Russia and Georgia raised concerns among investors that the conflict might endanger Russia’s economic relations with the West.
Stocks dropped 5.7 percent at the open, to their lowest level since September 2006, as Russian troops crossed into Georgia amid heavy fighting, and Russian planes bombed targets across Georgia.
But stocks rallied after the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said military operations in South Ossetia, the area in dispute, were nearing a conclusion.
Always wait for the Times's usually stilted official obits. This one, however, is relatively loose, mentioning Hayes's "lascivious bass-baritone" and his sojourn in South Park that was cut short by the singer's Scientology obsession.
Kudos to the Times for running a photo of Chef with Stan and Kyle. But where's Cartman?
Alan Cumming exiting a dirty black Ford SUV hybrid on Avenue A and going in and out of Cafe Pick Me Up when he realized he'd left his wallet in the vehicle.
But where's "Russians packing heat in Georgian hot spot"?
The Russians bombed Tbilisi, so why not say "bomb Georgia capital"?
Don't fool around with the U.S. press. Go straight to sites like Eurasianet and the Armenia-based Caucasian Knot, where you can read Georgian bloggers.
But peace is on the way: The Bush administration says it will seek a U.N. resolution condemning Russia's actions. Here's George W. Bush over the weekend:
This situation can be resolved peacefully. We've been in contact with leaders in both Georgia and Russia at all levels of government. Georgia is a sovereign nation and its territorial integrity must be respected.
No doubt the world will take seriously this condemnation by Bush of unjustified invasions.
Thankfully, an unpretentious story about the Edwards scandal. Dan Mangan's lede:
Me-ow! John Edwards' nasty mistress cattily dissed his cancer-stricken wife to a friend - and later coldly blamed the ailing spouse for getting her fired from a videography job on her lover's presidential campaign, a new report claims.
Not just hypocrisy but sleazy hypocrisy — the worst kind, apparently.
This tsk-tskiest piece is sports columnist Mike Lupica's hysterical rant about pols screwing other women.
Surprised that Lupica didn't rag on Woody-Allen-like Grover Cleveland, who entered the White House as a bachelor and then entered the daughter of his good friendOscar Folsom — a girl whose upbringing he had supervised — and wound up marrying her in the White House. It was the best sex-related event in the White House until Marilyn Monroe's sleepovers with JFK.
Cleveland even admitted fathering an illegitimate child — astonishingly, the brief bio of Cleveland on the site of his birthplace museum in Caldwell, New Jersey, freely admits it, saying in its entirety:
Birthplace to the only United States President to serve two non-consecutive terms. He was the 22nd and 24th President of the United States and the first to also admit that he had an illegitimate son. Grover Cleveland was born in Caldwell on March 18, 1837. This Historic Birthplace is a National Park and Museum located at 207 Bloomfield Avenue next to St. Aloysius Church.
Edwards, like fellow wick-dippers Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bill Clinton, has never been much of a hidebound moralist about other people's sex lives, at least not compared with sex hypocrites such as David Vitter, Larry Craig, Roy Cohn, Billy James Hargis, Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker, J. Edgar Hoover . . . too many images of pols' genitals, so I'm stopping now.
Lupica excoriated Edwards for mentioning that his screwing around with Rielle happened during his wife's cancer fight. But read the BBC's Saturday story, which includes this from Elizabeth Edwards:
She described the affair as "a terrible mistake", and said that coming to terms with it had been "a long and painful process".
But she added that the healing process was "oddly made somewhat easier" when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2007.
Mrs Edwards said she was proud of her husband despite his shame, and she asked that her family's privacy be respected.
Making fun of a pol who does this is appropriate behavior. But at least Edwards, unlike Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer, and many other pols caught in sex scandals, didn't make his wife sit beside him as he answered questions on TV.
An unpopular story of the kind that nobody will like and which is extremely important to your present and future:
Five of the nation's largest credit unions are reporting big paper losses on mortgage-related securities, a sign that housing-market distress is spreading even to the most risk-averse financial sectors.
No, not the Olympics, but the clever hed on Matthew Yeomans's roundup of business news. His lede is even better:
China's productivity might have shrunk a bit, what with having to close down all those factories to reduce Olympic smog, but it's a only a minor blip. As the Financial Times reports, China will overtake the U.S. next year as the world's largest producer of manufactured goods. That's four years earlier than expected, and it comes on the back of the severely weakening economy.
Ooh! Breaking news lede this morning by Daphne Retter:
Residents of the Upper East Side gave more political contributions than any ZIP code in the nation, according to calculations by a Washington watchdog group.
I wrote the same thing four years ago in "The Best Votes Money Can Buy," in which I analyzed the top 50 ZIP codes and noted:
The parties are on the Upper East Side, and you're not invited.
Far and away the biggest-spending single zip code in the United States for donations to political parties, candidates, and PACs is 10021, the area of Manhattan once commonly known as the Silk Stocking District, stretching from 61st to 81st streets, Central Park to the East River.
Give it to Retter, even though her real news doesn't start until the fourth graf:
The top fund-raiser in the neighborhood is not former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, or even the presumptive nominee, Barack Obama.
Rather, it's native son Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) who is convincing New York's richest residents to get out their checkbooks.
Schumer heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), which collects and redistributes funds to candidates in his party who need the help.
Since taking the reins of the committee in 2005, Schumer has decimated any fund-raising records set before him.
Predictable hed on Bill Sanderson's important, though unsurprising, story:
Con Ed customers and electricity users across the state were scammed out of hundreds of millions of dollars - and New Yorkers were put at risk of a blackout - by an elaborate plan to sell power out of state, explosive documents filed with federal regulators charge.
And some of the estimated $240 million in consumer losses probably wound up in the pockets of companies that had no idea they were gaining from the scheme, experts say.
Bailout? If by accident of birth, you were in Kabul yesterday, you'd be dying to bail out. You would have been running for your life while crazed Taliban stormed major government buildings and blew themselves up. A score of non-Taliban people were killed and fourscore wounded yesterday in Afghanistan's capital in the ominous assault.
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