Author: swanksalot

Always good to have a second user look at things

Bookmarks for September 28th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading September 28th from 00:15 to 10:37:

  • The Next Up-and-Coming Neighborhoods – BusinessWeek – My photo got republished by BusinessWeek, with a half-assed photo credit. Is it really so hard to use my real name? I guess if they don't, they don't have to pay, right? oh well. Still cool.
  • James Fallows-on Strategy and Tactics – But Obama either figured out, or instinctively understood, that the real battle was to make himself seem comfortable, reasonable, responsible, well-versed, and in all ways "safe" and non-outsiderish to the audience just making up its mind about him. (And yes, of course, his being a young black man challenging an older white man complicated everything he did and said, which is why his most wittily aggressive debate performance was against another black man, Alan Keyes, in his 2004 Senate race.) The evidence of the polls suggests that he achieved exactly this strategic goal. He was the more "likeable," the more knowledgeable, the more temperate, etc.
  • How McCain Stirred a Simmering Pot – Maybe why McCain was so pissed at Obama
    " Obama then jumped in to turn the question on his rival: "What do you think of the [insurance] plan, John?" he asked repeatedly. McCain did not answer.

    One Republican in the room said it was clear that the Democrats came into the meeting with a "game plan" aimed at forcing McCain to choose between the administration and House Republicans. "They had taken McCain's request for a meeting and trumped it," said this source."
    Ha ha, McLame's plan turned into a trap

Bookmarks for September 26th through September 27th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links for September 26th through September 27th:

  • The Capitol Fax Blog » Not that you may care what I think, but… – "both candidates have no real clue how to execute pivots on a regular and effective basis. Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan were masters of this. Both need to watch tapes of those two guys. After McCain made the point about a federal earmark to study the DNA of bears, Obama could’ve come back with Gov. Palin’s request of a federal earmark to study the DNA of harbor seals. It would’ve been a great comeback line, and set up next week’s veep debate as well. The Obama zinger about Spain’s prime minister and McCain’s attenuated line about Obama’s fake presidential seal didn’t work because nobody in the target audience really understood what was going on.

    Sharp pivots – when a candidate takes a big hit, turns it around and throws it right back at his opponent with devastating impact – usually end up being “grand slam” debate moments. Learning to pivot means you’ve learned how to win a debate."

  • What Is This Money Even For? – "1% of all mortgages — the amount now in default — comes out to $111 billion. Triple that, and you've got $333 billion. Let's round that up to $350 billion. So even if we reach the point where three percent of all mortgages are in foreclosure, the total dollars to buy all those mortgages would be half of what the Bush-Paulson-McCain plan calls for.
    a purchased mortgage isn't worth zero..come with property attached. Even with home prices falling and some of the homes lying around unsold, it's safe to assume that some portion of these values could be recovered. Then the real outlay for taxpayers would be $175 billion.

    Which, frankly, is a number that Wall Street should be able to handle without our help. After all, the top firms on Wall Steet payed out $120 billion in bonuses alone between 2000 and 2006. why do they need us to step in now? And why do they need twice as much as all the mortgages that are even likely to implode?"

Bookmarks for September 25th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading September 25th from 20:35 to 22:40:

  • Poor Sarah – Judith Warner Blog – NYTimes.com – "Frankly, I’ve come to think, post-Kissinger, post-Katie-Couric, that Palin’s nomination isn’t just an insult to the women (and men) of America. It’s an act of cruelty toward her as well."
  • Technorati State of the Blogosphere Parts 3 and 4: How, and How Much? – "High revenue bloggers skew the mean revenue. The median revenue for U.S. bloggers is $200 annually (and the median annual investment is only $50).
    The top 10 percent of blogger respondents earned an average of $19,000 annually."
    For the record, I'm slightly above the median average, for both revenue, and investment, but only slightly.

Bookmarks for September 24th through September 25th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links for September 24th through September 25th:

  • John McCain Snubs the Snopeses – " two live-TV statements from the candidates regarding postponing the debate tomorrow night in order to stave off a rerun of The Great Depression, this time in HD. Of the two, no question Obama came across as more presidential: composed, expansive, willing to take questions afterwards, balanced and modulated in his manner. By contrast, McCain beat Obama to the punch on the cable news channels at the expense of preparation and deportment; his announcement looked like it was thrown together by a short-order cook and its desperate haste revealed its insincerity as an opportunistic play posing as congressional statesmanship. It looked like a gadget play meant to flummox the defense, only to result in a fumble."
  • Talking Points Memo | Lying McCain Watch – "Lemme see, two of McCain's press spokespeople on TV attacking Obama; McCain attack ads up on TV across the country. This is the suspension? What did I miss?

    The guy is literally out of control. At what point do his friends need to start discussing an intervention?"

  • The Arena – Mickey Edwards – Republican former Congressman – "It ranks somewhere on the stupidity scale between plain silly and numbingly desperate. McCain and Obama are both members of the senate and they're both able to help craft a solution if they wish to do so without putting the presidential campaign on hold; after all, I’m sure congressional leaders would be willing to accept their calls if they have some important insights to impart. And while one of them will eventually become president, neither one is president yet, nor is either one a member of the congressional leadership; I’m confident that somehow the administration and the other 533 members of congress will be able to muddle through without tapping into the superior wisdom and intellect of their nominees. Sorry, john; it really sounds like you're afraid to debate. This sounds like the sort of ploy we used to use in junior high school elections."
  • Quote of the Day – "Why $700 billion?

    “It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

    nice.

Bookmarks for September 24th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading September 24th from 09:30 to 16:35:

Rebuilding America

swanksalot0 comment

We’re all fairly sick of hearing about the so-called “greatest generation”, but let there be no doubt, the Civilian Conservation Corps did awesome work for the nation, and the spirit of the WPA should be resurrected to rebuild our current crumbling country. Just think how much good could be accomplished with the $700,000,000 proposed to bail out Wall Street fat cats (not to mention taxpayer funds handed over to AIG, IndyMac, Fannie Mae and all the rest. Money that could instead be spent beautifying our nation.)

WPA Project No 960

Before surging ahead, however, let’s look back. Seventy-five years ago, our country faced an even deeper depression. Millions of men had neither jobs, nor job prospects. Families were struggling to put food on the table. And President Franklin Delano Roosevelt acted. He created the Civilian Conservation Corps, soon widely known as the CCC.

From 1933 to 1942, the CCC enrolled nearly 3.5 million men in roughly 4,500 camps across the country. It helped to build roads, build and repair bridges, clear brush and fight forest fires, create state parks and recreational areas, and otherwise develop and improve our nation’s infrastructure — work no less desperately needed today than it was back then. These young men — women were not included — willingly lived in primitive camps and barracks, sacrificing to support their families who were hurting back home.

My father, who served in the CCC from 1935 to 1937, was among those young men. They earned $30 a month for their labor — a dollar a day — and he sent home $25 of that to support the family. For those modest wages, he and others like him gave liberally to our country in return. The stats are still impressive: 800 state parks developed; 125,000 miles of road built; more than two billion trees planted; 972 million fish stocked. The list goes on and on in jaw-dropping detail.

Not only did the CCC improve our country physically, you might even say that experiencing it prepared a significant part of the “greatest generation” of World War II for greatness. After all, veterans of the CCC had already learned to work and sacrifice for something larger than themselves — for, in fact, their families, their state, their country. As important as the G.I. Bill was to veterans returning from that war and to our country’s economic boom in the 1950s, the CCC was certainly no less important in building character and instilling an ethic of teamwork, service, and sacrifice in a generation of American men.

[From Tomgram: William Astore, Rebuilding America, Remaking Ourselves]

and don’t forget the cash pissed away in the sands of Iraq:

Here’s where our federal government really should step in, just as it did in 1933. For we face an enormous national challenge today which goes largely unaddressed: shoring up our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. The prestigious American Society of Civil Engineers did a survey of, and a report card on, the state of the American infrastructure. Our country’s backbone earned a dismal “D,” barely above a failing (and fatal) grade. The Society estimates that we need to invest $1.6 trillion in infrastructure maintenance and improvements over the next five years or face ever more collapsing bridges and bursting dams. It’s a staggering sum, until you realize that we’re already approaching a trillion dollars spent on the Iraq war alone.

Dedicated to all the EPP High Contrast Blue Shadow Fans

swanksalot0 comment

Ektachrome Professional Plus High Contrast Blue Shadow film emulation (Alien Skin).

details better viewed in large version

www.b12partners.net/photoblog/index.php?showimage=130

tried several variations of this photo, using various filters.

Bookmarks for September 23rd

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading September 23rd from 10:25 to 15:36:

  • W I L C O – "an audio postcard of sorts from a summer's night in Oregon with our friends the Fleet Foxes & a lovely Bob Dylan tune. All we ask is you check the "I pledge to vote in the 2008 Election" button below. If you can spare it, we also encourage you to consider a donation to Feeding America "
  • Daily Kos: Things Become More Serious – billmon – Ru-oh.
    "The price tag, we're now told (by the very same people who a year ago assured us the problem was limited to a few low-income deadbeats) is in the neighborhood of $700 billion, although I would suggest doubling that figure — and then doubling it again — if you want a more realistic estimate of what this fiasco ultimately will cost the taxpayers. And that doesn't include the indirect costs, such as higher interest rates on the rest of the national debt, higher cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security and other inflation-protected benefits, and the higher federal spending and lost revenues caused by the steep recession the US economy now appears to be heading into.

    All this would be bad enough, but the crisis could easily get much, much worse."

  • 250 Million Pounds of Drugs Flushed Down the Toilet by Hospitals : TreeHugger – "Creative Commons: Swanksalot

    You can't win. The entire environmental movement is down on bottled water (and making progress) when the word comes out that hospitals and nursing homes are flushing about 250 million pounds of pharmaceuticals down the toilet every year"