March 7th, 2008
It’s said that birds of a feather flock together, and having recently been reacquainted with the intricacies of chickens in and out of their coop, I’d have to agree.
Our flocking tends towards the left of the political spectrum, which is why my Staff and I get along so well with everyone in Santa Cruz. A while back, in the early years of the millennium, way back before the invasion of Iraq, in a more peaceful time, there was talk of relocating the News Staff from our Costal Range to Colorado’s Front Range.
Allegedly the most liberal place in Colorado, the Front Range is looked upon by natives of that mountain state as a hotbed of radical tofu-eating left-wingers. Imagine the surprise felt by my Staff and I when we arrived to find that the local definition of radical tofu-eating left-winger was wildly different from our own.
For instance, we used to assume that tofu-eaters actually have to eat tofu. Traveling in Colorado proved that once past the Western foothills of the Rocky mountains having once seen tofu on a menu is enough to mark you as suspect in the eyes of some.
And for left-wingers those mountain folk sure acted a lot like Reagan Democrats. A few weeks of reading newspaper editorials congratulating President Gilligan on his brilliant plan to wage a Global War on Terror convinced us that we were birds of a different feather entirely.
We flew back to our little liberal island on the coast of California and set up a roost in the redwoods.
I got to thinking about the birds again this week while pondering the results of Tuesday’s primary elections in several states to our east that aren’t nearly as liberal as they like to think. The county-by-county results show an interesting pattern, first noticed by my Staff as we went over the results of California’s primary election one month ago.
In California the most liberal counties voted overwhelmingly in favor of Mr. Obama. The rest of the state fell to Mrs. Clinton. Looking over the results from Texas and Ohio, the same pattern emerges. In liberal, educated urban areas Obama wins by landslides. Liberal Austin voted in lockstep for Obama. Conservative San Antonio went to Mrs. Clinton.
We recognize that many people are enamored with the idea of electing a woman to our country’s highest office, but we can do a lot better. Perhaps somebody who’s actually liberal, for instance.
Our own humble efforts here at the News Segment to tilt the balance in Mr. Obama’s favor haven’t gone unnoticed. Recently allegations were made linking the Timothy Jordan Show News Staff to a vast left-wing conspiracy that seeks to prevent another Clinton from reaching office.
I am here this evening to say for the record that we’re not a part of any left-wing conspiracies. As much as we’d like to help, the Staff here isn’t even part of the National left wing. We’re all living in Santa Cruz, which makes us an entirely different kind of bird.
• Texas results by county, via the AP
Roosting all the way to the left of your radio dial, this is the Timothy Jordan Show News for Friday, the 7th of March, Ought-Eight.
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It’s official, we’re looking at a recession.
This morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics released their February job figures for the U.S. economy. Over 63,000 jobs were lost in the last month, the substantial declines in both construction and manufacturing somewhat balanced by growth in food service and health care.
What does that mean in English? A growing number of Americans are unemployed, eating more fast food, and needing medical care because of it.
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation
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And don’t expect to see relief from rising consumer prices anytime soon. Our friends in the Gulf, the OPEC oil exporting consortium, voted against increasing their output of petroleum earlier this week.
OPEC representatives said that oil prices were likely to fall on their own because of an expected worldwide economic downturn.
That’d be the recession that I just mentioned. Oil is hovering just below $100 per barrel, pushing gas prices in this country ever closer to the $4 per gallon mark, because of the relative weakness of the dollar. This weakness is an intentional symptom of Bush administration economic policy. A cheap dollar favors large U.S. manufacturing companies by making American products less expensive overseas.
Unfortunately this top-down model of economic stimulus, paired with a bulldog determination to maintain tax breaks for the wealthiest companies and private citizens, hasn’t resulted in economic growth for the country.
The reason is pretty simple, really. A falling dollar means that investments made in this country are worth less than those made overseas as time passes. Six years ago one Euro bought eighty pennies. Now one Euro will buy you a buck-fifty. If you had a choice, and the wealthiest Americans definitely have a choice, would you rather have Euros or Dollars?
The people most likely to benefit from one aspect of the Bush economic plan, the top 5% who’ve received the vast majority of the tax cuts, are also the people most able to benefit from a falling dollar by shifting their liquid assets overseas.
It’s called capital flight, and it’s where 1.22% of the U.S. economy went with the Dow Jones closing bell earlier this afternoon.
• 148th Meeting of the OPEC Conference
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Where’s that money going? All over the place, really. If you’re Kellogg Brown & Root, it’s headed to a Caiman Islands holding company to avoid U.S. taxes and labor laws.
All this focus on labor and the economy had my Staff poking around in some dusty tubes of the Internet. One of the things that stood out were the records of Work Permits issued by the Lebanese government from ‘03 to ‘05.
The figures paint an interesting picture of the Lebanese economy. For instance in 2005, 89,794 people received a permit to serve as a household servant, but the country only gained one engineer.
There were 343 corporate directors issued work permits in 2005, but only one secretary.
And now while it shouldn’t be surprising that the ranks of professionals only saw one physician added to their numbers, in that same year of 2003 seven people became knights.
Yes, that’s knights with a “k”, as in sword, armor, and jousting for the attention of fair maidens. Just why is it that the Lebanese need so many knights, and so few secretaries?
Attempts by my Staff to discover how many knights are currently employed in Lebanon have been thwarted by the instability of the Lebanese Internet tubes. I promise our listeners that we’re way too tickled by this story to let it drop without some kind of followup. Keep tuned in for more.
• Lebanon Ministry of Labor, Employment: Work Permits
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Recently joining the ranks of the unemployed was Christopher Ward, former Treasurer for the National Republican Campaign Committee (RNCC), in the wake of allegations that he’d been falsifying audit data since 2003.
Since 1866 the RNCC has been tasked with providing direct campaign funding for Republican members of the House of Representatives. Mr. Ward is a longtime party activist, best known in recent years for his work for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth organization that successfully tainted the campaign of John Kerry in 2004.
According to the New York Times, the RNCC’s finances are now under investigation by the FBI, based on an internal committee review indicating that their records hadn’t been properly audited in the last four years.
The finance debacle comes at a time when many Republican Congressional candidates are attempting to overcome a national swing towards their Democratic political opponents. The FBI investigation is likely to lead to criminal charges against Mr. Ward, and widespread campaign finance problems for Republican candidates this fall.
• New York Times, FBI Investigates Missing GOP Money
• The Politico, New Details Emerge in NRCC Scandal
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Answering questions about warrantless wiretapping probably won’t be included in their problems, unfortunately. It’s looking like the House leadership is going to cave on the issue, granting some form of immunity for the telecommunications companies that assisted the Bush administration in wiretapping Americans.
More details of that program emerged this week, in documents provided to the Government Accountability Project by a whistleblower.
Babak Pasdar was called in by a major telecommunications firm to perform security updates on their computer network. In the process of doing his contracted work for what was most likely Verizon, Mr. Pasdar says that he learned about the existence of a bypass line very similar to the equipment described by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein.
What Mr. Pasdar saw was an extremely high-bandwidth connection, known within the company as “The Quantico Circuit”, that appeared to bypass all of the internal security systems. When he offered to install a device that would at the very least record logs of what was being accessed through this secret connection, Mr. Pasdar was told to move on and not discuss the line.
Allowing an unsecured connection into an internal network without any kind of access control or logging violates every aspect of good network security. Whoever’s on the other end of that connection has direct access to every aspect of this telecom company’s phone and data networks, with real-time access to voice conversations, data, cell phone location, and all private customer records.
While Quantico is home to several FBI facilities, to date there’s no indication of just exactly who’s listening on the other end of that unsecured network connection.
His allegations have caught, for now, the attention of Rep. John Dingell and a few others in Congress. This will last, predictably, until the White House starts fear-mongering again.
• via Wired: Threat Level, Pasdar affidavit to Government Accountability Project PDF (450.9KB)
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There were other violations of privacy in the news this week that could be tied directly to the government, but FBI abuse of National Security Letters isn’t excellent. For excellence, consider…
A near-winner of the Award of Excellence this week was the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the group responsible for proving that the cold-remedy product Airborne is so much snake oil. Yeah, you heard it here. All those people who swear by Airborne when they have a cold may as well be drinking sugar water.
Pretty cool, but not quite to the level of our winner this week. Our winner is an outlet for frustration, and a window into the tortured lives of a disrespected profession.
Angryjournalist.com is a place for writers and reporters to vent anonymously.
It asks, “Why are you angry today?”
“Tell us what’s making you upset at your journalism job.”
Since going live, over 1,800 people have written to talk about what’s making them angry. Today, Angry Journalist #1832 said that, “I am angry that people can post whatever they want about the stories we write but we can’t reply by telling them that they are complete dumbasses who need to stay inside their metail/tin can trailer and wait there until the next tornado zips through and grabs them. At least the Web has done one thing for us — it has awakened our profession to how truly stupid our audience really is.”
#1827 chimes in that, “I’m mad that not only is there a need for a Web site like this to exist, but that nearly 2,000 people have already vented.”
I have to agree that American journalism is in a sorry state, and that journalists needed a place to vent their problems. That place is angryjournalist.com, and it’s this week’s recipient of the Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.
And that’s the News for March 7th, Ought-Eight.
March 14th, 2008 at 11:18 am
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