http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/32277034#32277034

WOW, just when I was beginning to think that Keith Olbermann had been silenced or at least neutered. He comes back from two weeks off and lays into "The Corporation". Kudos to Keith! He & Rachel are still the only people in the MSM that I can tolerate.

I happened to be passing by on the AM dial when I heard a man pathetically groveling for sympathy from his audience, begging for donations to aid his sad cause. It seems that contemporary right-wing purveyor of maniacal lunacy Michael Savage has something in common with Irish radical blast from the past Bernadette Devlin. Both are on no-fly lists. Savage (actual name: Weiner, which seems rather apt) was recently placed on a UK no entry list, meant to “name and shame” purveyors of extremist hate. He has taken his case to the airwaves, pleading in that annoying Glenn Beck-like whiner’s tone to convince listeners to contribute to his “defense fund” in order to rescind this order, as if he hasn’t already fleeced his audience enough with his hate-filled idiocy.

Bernadette Devlin was placed on the Bush administration’s “no-fly” list in 2003. Devlin was the radical Northern Irish Catholic activist who was called “Fidel Castro in a mini-skirt” and was the youngest Member of Parliament when she was a surprise election winner in 1969. Devlin has existed on the radical fringes since the mid-1970s, and her unrepentant militancy (she opposed the Good Friday agreement) has for the most part kept her a lonely voice in the wilderness in Irish politics. Why she was deemed a “national security” threat by the Bush administration when in the UK she was never more than an irritant with a temper—she once punched the Home Secretary for claiming that British soldiers only fired in self-defense on Black Sunday—is a measure of its paranoia and juvenile arbitrariness. Most people had never heard of or had forgotten who Devlin was. I suspect that the British putting an inconsequential booby like Weiner (err, Savage) on their own list was a bit of tit-for-tat.

Fascinating website mentioned on MSNBC's "Morning Meeting," with a self-test:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

"It is well known that people don't always 'speak their minds', and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds'. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short."

Teabaggers are Tonsil-Sticks now

Right Wing Think Tanks, Tom? Really? Oxymoron much? Try Right Wing Thought Pits or Thought Plots (as in cemetery).

Think implies current action.

Paul Krugman should be a sloganeer for the Progressive movement. The following article contains such quotables as: "social value ", "a society that lavishly rewards those who make us poorer", and "If you aren’t outraged, you haven’t been paying attention". I think that framing the arguement about our numerous societal woes in terms of "Social Value" would be helpful. - Making Progress

Rewarding Bad Actors
by Paul Krugman

Americans are angry at Wall Street, and rightly so. First the financial industry plunged us into economic crisis, then it was bailed out at taxpayer expense. And now, with the economy still deeply depressed, the industry is paying itself gigantic bonuses. If you aren’t outraged, you haven’t been paying attention.

But crashing the economy and fleecing the taxpayer aren’t Wall Street’s only sins. Even before the crisis and the bailouts, many financial-industry high-fliers made fortunes through activities that were worthless if not destructive from a social point of view.

And they’re still at it. Consider two recent news stories.

One involves the rise of high-speed trading [1]: some institutions, including Goldman Sachs, have been using superfast computers to get the jump on other investors, buying or selling stocks a tiny fraction of a second before anyone else can react. Profits from high-frequency trading are one reason Goldman is earning record profits and likely to pay record bonuses.

On a seemingly different front, Sunday’s Times reported on the case of Andrew J. Hall [2], who leads an arm of Citigroup that speculates on oil and other commodities. His operation has made a lot of money recently, and according to his contract Mr. Hall is owed $100 million.

What do these stories have in common?

The politically salient answer, for now at least, is that in both cases we’re looking at huge payouts by firms that were major recipients of federal aid. Citi has received around $45 billion from taxpayers; Goldman has repaid the $10 billion it received in direct aid, but it has benefited enormously both from federal guarantees and from bailouts of other financial institutions. What are taxpayers supposed to think when these welfare cases cut nine-figure paychecks?

But suppose we grant that both Goldman and Mr. Hall are very good at what they do, and might have earned huge profits even without all that aid. Even so, what they do is bad for America.

Just to be clear: financial speculation can serve a useful purpose. It’s good, for example, that futures markets provide an incentive to stockpile heating oil before the weather gets cold and stockpile gasoline ahead of the summer driving season.

But speculation based on information not available to the public at large is a very different matter. As the U.C.L.A. economist Jack Hirshleifer showed back in 1971, such speculation often combines “private profitability” with “social uselessness.”

It’s hard to imagine a better illustration than high-frequency trading. The stock market is supposed to allocate capital to its most productive uses, for example by helping companies with good ideas raise money. But it’s hard to see how traders who place their orders one-thirtieth of a second faster than anyone else do anything to improve that social function.

What about Mr. Hall? The Times report suggests that he makes money mainly by outsmarting other investors, rather than by directing resources to where they’re needed. Again, it’s hard to see the social value of what he does.

And there’s a good case that such activities are actually harmful. For example, high-frequency trading probably degrades the stock market’s function, because it’s a kind of tax on investors who lack access to those superfast computers — which means that the money Goldman spends on those computers has a negative effect on national wealth. As the great Stanford economist Kenneth Arrow put it in 1973, speculation based on private information imposes a “double social loss”: it uses up resources and undermines markets.

Now, you might be tempted to dismiss destructive speculation as a minor issue — and 30 years ago you would have been right. Since then, however, high finance — securities and commodity trading, as opposed to run-of-the-mill banking — has become a vastly more important part of our economy, increasing its share of G.D.P. by a factor of six. And soaring incomes in the financial industry have played a large role in sharply rising income inequality.

What should be done? Last week the House passed a bill setting rules for pay packages at a wide range of financial institutions. That would be a step in the right direction. But it really should be accompanied by much broader regulation of financial practices — and, I would argue, by higher tax rates on supersized incomes.

Unfortunately, the House measure is opposed by the Obama administration, which still seems to operate on the principle that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America.

Neither the administration, nor our political system in general, is ready to face up to the fact that we’ve become a society in which the big bucks go to bad actors, a society that lavishly rewards those who make us poorer.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Published on Monday, August 3, 2009 by The New York Times

mstaggerlee,

'Love that William Shatner (tho Spock was always my favorite --- the "cerebral" type. LOL)

Quark - or, as Ms Palin said on Twitter last week (quoted by William Shatner on the Tonight Show) - No rain ... no rainbow. :D

Quark - I suspect that Rasta comes in here with hit & run posts. Writing him back in this venue is a simple waste of time and energy, because he doesn't READ anything here. He simply drops his hate-filled bomb of the day, and moves on.

mstaggerlee,

Even flowers need rain...

And here I thought Rasta might actually miss a day ... no such luck. :(

Crease,
We all create God (and Jesus) in our own image. You see Jesus as a socialist, as being as all about love & peace because that is your world view, thus those are the scriptures that stick out for you. The conservative sees the "tuff" love Jesus, ignores the scriptures about love & peace. The scripture "I come not to bring peace, but to to bring a sword" is the one that sticks out for them. The conservative/fundamentalist much prefers the old testament God. (In the old testament your wealth was a sign of your righteousness).

This can all be done because the Bible is a book written by many different men, with many different world views. Thus, you can make the Bible say pretty much what you want it to say. It's all in how you "interpret" the scriptures.

Re: Jesus
Are you aware that there is no historical evidence that he actually existed. The only evidence for his existence is in the New Testament. Jesus is most likely a mythological character.

MORE "HUMAN RIGHTS" FROM ZIONIST SUPREMACISTS.......WILL THOM AND HIS RACIST ALLEGIANCE TO THE PALESTINIAN ETHNIC CLEANSING EVER STOP?

NOT LIKELY ANY TIME SOON FROM THE SOUNDS OF HIS DENIAL TODAY

Israel Evicts 50 Palestinians from Home in East Jerusalem

Israeli police have evicted more than fifty Palestinians, including nineteen children, from their homes in East Jerusalem after an Israeli court ruled their homes were owned by Jewish settlers. The court’s ruling was based on nineteenth century documents. The eviction has been widely condemned by the international community, including the United Nations and the Obama administration. The British consulate said it was “appalled” by the court’s decision. In a statement, the consulate said, “These actions are incompatible with the Israeli professed desire for peace. We urge Israel not to allow the extremists to set the agenda.”

Hatem Abdel Qader, a leader of Fatah in Jerusalem: “For sure, the battle in Sheikh Jarrah has not ended. There are confiscation orders for twenty-eight houses. Three of them have already been carried out. There is a battle to save the other houses. We will be firm in this battle on a political, social and legal level. There is an Israeli project in Sheikh Jarrah which aims to remove this neighborhood and connect it with Shepherd Hotel and the Mufti neighborhood and to locate a huge settlement close to the Old City of Jerusalem in order to make the Old City of Jerusalem Jewish.”

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/3/headlines#13