Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

DeMarco’s Law (surely you’ve heard of it?) states: “They always go too far.” It doesn’t matter who “they” are: Give people enough rope and they generally find a way to wrap it around their own necks. Perhaps the ayatollahs that have been dictating the social policy of the Republican Party have stepped off the platform, after more than two decades of tightening the rope.

From the LA Times http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-koster3sep03,1,7404809.story?coll=la-news-a_section

When moderates feel lost in the GOP

A Missouri state senator abruptly declares himself a Democrat, angrily citing the influence of social conservatives.

By Stephanie Simon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 3, 2007

RAYMORE, MO. — Talk about a nasty divorce. In an announcement last month that left Missouri politicos agape, state Sen. Chris Koster, a rising Republican star and chairman of the Senate’s GOP caucus, abruptly declared himself a Democrat.

Not only did Koster join the marginalized minority party in Missouri, but he did so with a thundering speech that lambasted his former colleagues as ignoring the needs of their constituents and slavishly following the dictates of “religious extremists.”

The former prosecutor denounced several Republican positions he had once supported, such as steep cuts in Medicaid coverage and subsidized family-planning programs.

But Koster reserved his harshest criticism for GOP efforts to overturn a voter-approved constitutional amendment that protects embryonic stem-cell research in Missouri.

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This from a friend. Obviously I don’t have any inside pipeline – I don’t circulate in the circles that could do such things — but I’m expecting the markets to tank shortly anyway, just from accumulated chickens coming home to roost. My bet would be a simple market crash, worldwide because everything is tied in together, caused strictly by fundamentals.

Could we instead, or also, have a terrorist attack? A false-flag attack? An attack on Iran? Sure. But they’d hardly be necessary.

The thing that sticks out, for me — assuming that the financial facts reported below really are facts and not fiction — is that nobody places that kind of bet unless he knows; and how better to know than to be in the position to make it happen? That’s how the bear pools operated in the 1920s to move the markets up and down like an organ, until Roosevelt used Joe Kennedy (who knew from the inside how the game was played) to re-write the rules as SEC commissioner. Of course, brilliant, honest, far-seeing, compassionate Ronald Reagan led the undoing of those reforms, beginning 25+ years ago.

Stand by, it may be that we are not going to return to our regularly scheduled broadcast.

Behind the scenes

There is a story making the rounds on the internet for over a week now that an entity or entities have been shorting the market to the tune of billions of
dollars, essentially betting that US, European and Japanese markets are going
to drop up to 25% by September 21. The following is an excerpt from an article posted at:
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/tetreault/2007/0831.html
(Financialsence.com is an old and well-respected financial website).

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From the Canadian paper The Star http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/252625

Lives are saved, but a country is lost

Sep 03, 2007 04:30 AM
Rosie DiManno

Foreign governments might as well open up a concession stand in Afghanistan.

For sale: Good intentions.

Trade-ins accepted.

The Taliban will give us hostages; we’ll give them authenticity. Crisis resolved on our side, specious legitimacy accrued on theirs.

There is rejoicing among the insurgent cadres in Afghanistan, their leaders afforded the unspeakable privilege of marching unmolested into Kabul, under a white flag of diplomatic immunity, then conducting a news conference to bask in their blood-soaked triumphalism.

A duly elected central government, straining for authority and assailed on all sides, could do nothing but watch, reduced to impotent bystanders in their own country.

Everyone understands the implications of South Korea’s successful “negotiations” last week for the return of 19 Christian missionaries, two others executed, the Taliban making their point early in the game: They can abduct and murder at will.

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From the Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star (for which I once worked) of Norfolk, Virginia, by way of the daily Schwartzreport, an article on — well, there’s an old line about producing chicken salad out of ch –.

Maybe we’d better just let the article speak for itself.

Next in biofuels: Poultry power

By SCOTT HARPER, The Virginian-Pilot
© September 2, 2007

BLACKSBURG

Poultry poop is a serious ecological problem in Virginia. So is the burning of fossil fuels.

So it’s not surprising that environmentalists and farmers are so enthused by a Virginia Tech scientist who is developing technology to turn poultry waste into a safer fertilizer and a biofuel that resembles maple syrup.

Staked with more than $1 million in grants, associate professor Foster A. Agblevor, a native of Ghana in west Africa, expects to test his mobile poop reactor this fall at a chicken farm in the Shenandoah Valley, the heartland of Virginia’s poultry industry.

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From the Voice of America, of all sources, via UrbanSurvival.com

American Unions’ Long March for Labor Day

By Andrew Baroch
Washington DC
31 August 2007

Today [Monday, September 3] is Labor Day in the United States, a national holiday established more than a century ago to honor the American worker. Americans typically spend the day away from work, enjoying picnics in the park or visiting the beach or swimming pools on what for many is the last holiday of the summer vacation season.

It’s easy to forget that U.S. workers had to literally fight for their rights to a decent wage and improved working conditions and many risked their lives trying to organize.

This wood engraving shows a riot by Baltimore and Ohio railway workers who went on strike in 1877 when the Company cut their wages

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CLUELESS SUITS

Austin Chronicle

August 31, 2007

MICHAEL VENTURA

Your faithful reporter can state with no exaggeration that he has spent days — nearly every waking hour (no kidding) — deep in study, in a crazy-making attempt to achieve at least a kindergarten understanding of our present financial crisis. And he promises you that if you, too, spent days perusing jargon-jangled articles packed with sentences in which clauses and sub-clauses abut one another in a maze of anti-clarity, subverting both grammar and sanity, then you, too, might refer to yourself in the third person, if only to achieve some illusionary distance from the blazing eyes of the stark-staring madness that roils beneath the tidy title “economics.”

Pity anyone who attempts to absorb the meanings of such usages as 25-standard deviation moves (which is actually one thing, sort of, not 25), commercial paper (it’s not what you might think), exposure, neo-credit, securitization, private-label issuers, asset-backed securities (also not what you might think), jumbo-mortgage providers, multi-strategy funds, quantitative funds (quaintly called “quants”), subprime, collateralized-debt obligations, off-balance-sheet units, and how an “Internet bank” is very different from a “brick-and-mortar bank.” Since the newspaper and broadcast talking-heads who comment on the crisis mostly employ this jargon, TV news barely covered it (except for CNBC) and the print accounts are mostly bores. Most citizens not in direct danger of losing their homes are aware only that the housing market is slumping, the stock markets are behaving wildly, the Federal Reserve Board has responded someway or other, and things may or may not have calmed down a little, and what has that to do with us?

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This article speaks for itself. From the Vancouver Sun http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=8e2ca83d-c6e9-4943-84ca-9cb4597adbdf

Northwest Passage is wide open for shipping
Rapid climate change heats Arctic rights fight
Randy Boswell, CanWest News Service
Published: Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Just a week after Canada and the U.S. agreed to disagree over the ownership of the Northwest Passage, this summer’s record melt of Arctic sea ice has unlocked the fabled polar shipping route more completely than ever before, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center has announced.

“It’s open,” Mark Serreze, a senior scientist with research institute based in Boulder, Colo., said in an interview Tuesday. “It’s unprecedented. Theoretically you could take a ship from Tokyo through the Northwest Passage to Boston. Not an easy sail, not a Sunday cruise, but it has started to happen.”

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