The Obama administration won’t initiate Executive Branch investigations of the Bush administration officials in order to prosecute them; but that hardly precludes some sort of lustration process—say, in Congress, with grants of immunity—that documents their misdeeds and leads to prosecutions outside the US.
FT, 18 Nov ’08, US front page:
Ever since Martin Lukes went away, it just hasn’t been the same.
WiReD 4.05 (May ’96), “Seek and Ye Shall Find (Maybe),” on Yahoo[!]:
Starting with the ad hoc categories she inherited from Yang and Filo, Srinivasan began slowly and deliberately steering Yahoo!’s ontology toward completeness. Mainly, it’s been a matter of adding new categories and reorganizing hierarchies as the Web evolves from containing only specialized, technical information [...]
13 Dec ’07:
According to the FT article [“Bank co-ops keep US afloat”], the top 10 FHLB loans as of 30 Sep 07 are:
“Member” Advances % of tot
Citibank [...]
AP, “Obama Has More Threats Than Other Presidents-Elect” (15 Nov ’08):
[I]n a Maine convenience store, an Associated Press reporter saw a sign inviting customers to join a betting pool on when Obama might fall victim to an assassin. The sign solicited $1 entries into “The Osama Obama Shotgun Pool,” saying the money would go to [...]
Next up: Switzerland.
AFP (“Swiss Fear More Pressure on Bank Secrecy after Obama Victory,” 10 Nov ’08):
Switzerland is likely to come under further pressure from the United States over its prized system of banking secrecy after the election last week of Barack Obama, key sector players predicted. The newly-elected US president, who formally takes office in [...]
No Google street view for West 44th St (and sometimes 45th St too), between 7th and 8th Aves, in Manhattan:
Viacom?
A new genre:
Street with a view.
NYT:
Google Maps hasn’t quite heard of Mountain House:
Ths sponsored link homegain.com links to findmeaforeclosure.com…
…which has the same registrant as tracyrealestate.com:
(Both sites’ “Community” links are blank.)
Repeat ad nauseam nationwide.
Krugman, “The Obama Agenda,” NYT (7 Nov ’08):
This year, however, Mr. Obama ran on a platform of guaranteed health care and tax breaks for the middle class, paid for with higher taxes on the affluent. John McCain denounced his opponent as a socialist and a “redistributor,” but America voted for him anyway. That’s a real [...]
DPA, “Queen Baffled at Delay in Spotting Credit Crunch,” Sydney Morning Herald (6 Nov ’08):
Prof Garicano said afterwards: “The Queen asked me: ‘If these things were so large, how come everyone missed them? Why did nobody notice it’?”
Her Royal Hghness must’ve been awfully upset to ask “How come”; but, then, losing lots of money does [...]
GM CEO Rick Wagoner “referring to GM, Ford Motor and Chrysler,” in the FT (Simon+Guerrera, “GM Chief Defends Reliance on SUVs,” 6 June ’08; liberated version here).
Is it the US manufacturers who are stupid? I don’t think so. You have to recognise that the consumer makes the call here … and we are reacting.
So how [...]
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the WP’s Dan Froomkin wrote (“Who’s in Charge? Karl Rove!”, 15 Sep ’05):
Rove’s leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye [...]
Angry Bear:
OK this is simple, there is risk that can’t be hedged by everyone.
Leonard Cohen’s version:
There is a crack
in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
FT (van Duyn/Bullock, “New York Governor Urges State Spending Cut,” 28 Oct ’08):
Mr Bloomberg, addressing a securities industry gathering, said he was already seeing a direct impact of the financial crisis. He said he had dinner on Monday night in a usually full Italian restaurant in Brooklyn in which only three tables were being used. [...]
A trailer for a book?
Strange genre.
[Added: A better approach:
A page from Tom Phillips’s A Humument.]
Including fake markets for fake nukes:
I [“A-”-list blogger] immediately turned to the chapter [of Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?] on black markets, where [Brian] Jenkins [Wikipedia] quite sensibly argues that we should flood the zone with fake purveyors of nuclear weapons, materials, and technology to make it harder for terrorists to connect with actual merchants of [...]
Jerry Sanders, the Mayor of San Diego, explains his change of heart:
He puts the lie to the stone-faced doom-mongering and martial mummery right-wing cowards are forever hiding behind.
Mark Schapiro, “Nuclear [Intelligence] Fallout,” Muckraker blog, 29 Aug ’08):
When we were conducting our final reporting back in March, I researched Urs Friedrich Tinner—the one of the three considered most deeply involved in [A. Q.] Khan’s illicit enterprise—through the electronic database Accurint. I was astounded at the time to see that his U.S. address was [...]
According to Rebecca Abrahams (“White House Emails: The Missing Link?”, Huffington Post, 21 Oct ’08), Mike Connell,
the architect and cyber keymaster of George W. Bush election websites including GeorgeWBush.com and GWB43.com, the site Karl Rove used for 95-percent of his email communication…is also the CEO of Govtech Solutions, the company responsible for building and managing [...]
Slate’s Ray Fisman (“They Made a Killing,” 29 Oct ’08) reports that forensic economists have discovered that “the Cabots, Dulleses, or other insiders were using their privileged information to profit personally from [the] future coup” in Guatemala by gaming the stock market. What’ll they discover next? Zero?
Fortunately, the article is a pedestrian prologue to the [...]
Misunderstood in a class today: user-degenerated content.
NYT head (29 Oct ’08):
Intelligence Agencies Face Austerity
Body:
Spending on intelligence operations increased by some 9 percent last year, to $47.5 billion, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, said on Tuesday. That figure includes most intelligence spending, including the budget for the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the operations of spy satellites, [...]