Link: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/09/18/privacy/index.html

The hacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account has led to a firestorm of invective about how reprehensible this was.
The ironic and laughable aspect of this firestorm is that much of it is coming from commentators who, until very recently, thought that it was perfectly ok for the government to illegally intercept your emails, phone calls and other electronic communications. After all, if you haven't done anything wrong, why do you have anything to hide? (The right response to this being "no I haven't done anything wrong, and it is still none of the government's business to read my private communications until they can find a probable cause to do so").
Glenn Greenwald does an excellent job of thoroughly eviscerating all of the suddenly-outraged commentators and their sudden attacks of pompous bloviating about violations of privacy. I have never seen more outrageous hypocrisy so rightfully slammed.

Courtesty of the blog The Cunning Realist, comes this witty take-down of one of Sarah Palin's more vacuous question responses in her ABC interview:

Pressed about what insights into recent Russian actions she gained by living in Alaska, Palin answered: “They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”
In response, forum member Krista said: And when I look out my window I can see the moon. Doesn’t make me a fucking astronaut now, does it?

Link: http://bonddad.blogspot.com/2008/09/from-one-disaster-to-another.html

Courtesy of Hale "Bonddad" Stewart we get this cogent, easy-to-absorb explanation of why and how the US financial sector has slid into a meltdown of epic proportions (Note to John McCain: repeating the mantra "the economy is fundamentally sound" won't stop the crisis...)
NOTE: In another blog posting, I read that Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 claiming $613 billion in debt and around $660 billion in assets. I never normally hear of a corporation filing for bankruptcy re-organization when its assets exceed its debts. One or both of those numbers is false. I am inclined to believe that the $660 billion asset value is a polite fiction.
UPDATE: This posting here on Piggington by a former REO broker helps to explain why the housing market has not yet hit bottom in the USA. Be very wary of any housing market player who claims otherwise. My experience with housing price recessions in the UK leads me to believe that we will not hit bottom until late 2009 or even 2010.
UPDATE 2 - With the rescue of AIG (this is a nationalization, but I will note that this phrase is not being used by the government or supporters of the intervention because, well, it sounds collectivist , and dare I say it, socialist...), Bonddad has another posting summarizing the amount of money that the Federal Government is borrow...er, spending on our behalf to prop up the financial sector...around $900 bn is his current estimate. At this rate, the cost of the Iraq misadventure might start to look reasonable...
A commenter over at Lawyers, Guns and Money put it quite neatly, in response to a previous comment:

"If the deal saves the company and makes money, the profits will go to the private sector, accompanied by hosannas from the business press about how government shouldn't suck money out of the economy.
If the deal fails, American taxpayers will pay for it."
I really cannot believe anyone thinks anything other than this. This might be a good deal for the government???? AIG holds a bunch of worthless shit. AIG's insurance, default swaps, and whatever-the-fucks prop up even more worthless shit held by other companies. The bailout might have been "necessary" for any number of reasons, but a good deal for Uncle Sam (and you and me) it will never be. Unless by "good deal" you mean something like giving up your wallet when someone points a gun at your head-- a hundred bucks and some credit cards being a small price to pay for your life.

Link: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/11/14119/1262/889/595083

After publishing an article about Sarah Palin, which ended with a summary of her activity in requesting earmarks for Alaska, the WSJ has gone back and removed the summary entirely from its web site without acknowledging that a change has been made.
This kind of post-hoc revisionism is unethical when not noted or documented. Shame on the WSJ. And people wonder why I have no time for the mainstream US media? I rest my case.

Via this article in the Washington Post, you can read about the real underlying cause of many issues that impact the USA today. To be blunt, overall, the electorate is woefully under-informed and incapable of making rational, reasoned decisions.
Some examples:

According to an August 2006 Zogby poll, only two in five Americans know that we have three branches of government and can name them. A 2006 National Geographic poll showed that six in ten young people (aged 18 to 24) could not find Iraq on the map. The political scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, surveying a wide variety of polls measuring knowledge of history, report that fewer than half of all Americans know who Karl Marx was or which war the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought in. Worse, they found that just 49 percent of Americans know that the only country ever to use a nuclear weapon in a war is their own.

Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after months of unsubtle hinting from Bush administration officials, some 60 percent of Americans had come to believe that Iraq was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, despite the absence of evidence for the claim, according to a series of surveys taken by the PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll. A year later, after the bipartisan, independent 9/11 Commission reported that Saddam Hussein had had nothing to do with al-Qaeda's assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 50 percent of Americans still insisted that he did. In other words, the public was bluntly given the data by a group of officials generally believed to be credible -- and it still didn't absorb the most basic facts about the most important event of their time.

We can see the results all around us right now. I hear the results every day, in the substitution of slogans and strawman assertions for argument (even pointing out a strawman fallacy is in itself an interesting exercise, since most people appear to not understand even the most basic concepts of logical fallacy).
A lot (and I mean a LOT) of people need to wake up and start taking politics and current affairs seriously. This is not stuff that you get around to after everything else has been taken care of.

Link: http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2008/09/your-questions-anwered.html

...are, quite correctly in my view, leading to some zingers in blog comment threads. Two examples from Lawyers, Guns and Money:

"Libertarian streak" is western Republican speak for "batshit crazy and totally inconsistent." We are quite familiar with it here in Montana.

She's libertarian the way the fringe on a toddler's Davy Crockett suit makes him a mountain man.

And an interesting new concept is surfaced here:

She, like most Alaskan republicans, is a dependent individualist.

I like that phrase...it seems to sum up for me the paradox that many people I talk with are in favour of "big government", as long as it is their kind of big government...

In the NFL, the offseason is like watching a collection of soap operas unfold. this offseason has been no exception.
The #1 story was Brett Favre's decision to retire, his prolonged hemming and hawing, then his decision to un-retire, which caused a train-wreck in his relationship with the Packers. There were other stories, but none as interesting as this one, which reminded me of the Western movie where you get to watch the train-wreck - everybody in the movie theater can see it coming, but the folks on the train are blissfully unconcerned and whistling a merry tune right up until just before the wreck.
One interesting reality is how many teams have no real stability at the quarterback position. A handful of teams have an established starter, with no doubts about his preparation or fitness. Most do not. Many teams appear to have no certainty who their starting quarterback will be. This cannot be good for their chances.
Some other thoughts from around the league, classified by SMART or DUMB.

SMART
=====

1. Michael Strahan staying retired. There was no reputational upside to him returning to the NFL, and he seemed to be well aware of the wear-and-tear aspect of returning. Like Jerome Bettis, he left at the top.

2. The Miami Dolphins signing Chad Pennington and making him the starting quarterback. Never mind his arm strength, Pennington is a smart game manager who will not do Dumb Stuff under center. He will give the Dolphins the best chance to win games. Never mind the whining about arm strength. Arm strength is overrated in the NFL. If it was a big success criterion, Ryan Leaf and Jeff George would have Superbowl rings.

DUMB
====

1. The Oakland Raiders signing Javon Walker. They gave him untold amounts of guaranteed money, only to have him consider retirement during training camp, and become a victim of a bizarre assault in Las Vegas. Something is wrong with Javon Walker, and it appears to be between his ears.

2. Mike Nolan even talking about Alex Smith. Nolan drafted Smith in 2005, and has left him to twist in the wind with the 49ers. After last year, when he apparently pressured Smith to return to action even though he had a damaged shoulder that required surgery, Nolan should STFU about Smith and focus on trying to help him, instead of muttering two-faced platitudes in public. Right now the 49ers appear to be entering the season with the relatively unknown J.T. O'Sullivan at quarterback. If this works, Mike Martz is more likely to get the credit than Mike Nolan, and if it fails, Nolan will be the fall guy.

3. Shawne Merriman trying to play for the Chargers with a torn MCL and PCL in his knee. Merriman or his advisors need to ask Tiger Woods about the state of his knee after he played for over 6 months with a torn ACL. I suspect that Woods would tell Merriman that his knee was in pretty bad shape when the doctors finally operated on it. I have no idea who is responsible for Merriman deciding to play, but whoever it is needs to be taken outside and beaten upsides the head with a piece of 2x4. This is a bad decision which could end Merriman's career.

4. The New York Jets signing Brett Favre. Every other picture I saw of Favre when he arrived in New York, he had a "why am I here?" look on his face. It seemed that he really wanted to play for another club (the Minnesota Vikings?) and regarded the Jets as a second-best destination. Lost in the hoopla was the reality that Favre can simply quit at the end of this season. If they are unlucky, the Jets will get one season of play from a quaterback on the backside of his career. There may be a reason why Favre threw the interceptions in the playoff game last season. He may be physically over the hill. His body has a lot of miles on it. If Favre walks away at the end of the season, the Jets have a quarterback development issue all over again. They have bought themselves one "win or bust" season but that merely postpones the day when they will need a new team leader. They ran Chad Pennington, a great leader of men, out of town on a rail for...this?

5. the Kansas City Chiefs firing kicker Jay Feely after 2 days. When something like this happens to an experienced kicker, the phrase "clusterfuck" springs to mind. Feely has put up the numbers in real games over a number of seasons. The Chiefs' other two kickers have potential, but no results (and as Bill Parcells once observed, when you say a player "has potential", what you're really saying is that he hasn't done anything yet). Quite why the Chiefs signed Feely for 2 days is a mystery. Pre-season competitions for this position tend to prove nothing. When the season is under way, a lot of inexperienced kickers start missing easy kicks. Why do you think that older kickers suddenly find themselves signed come October time? Beauty and distance may look good in the pre-season, but accuracy and consistency are more important in the season. If the Chiefs want to see what can go wrong, let them study Tom Coughlin's last season at Jacksonville, when by mid-season the team seemed to be hiring and firing kickers every other week. The results were terrible, and Coughlin lost his job.

6. The Arizona Cardinals not naming Kurt Warner the starting quaterback (yet). It is like everybody in the universe except the Cardinals leadership can see that Matt Leinart is not ready to be the starting quarterback. He has played inconsistently (recently, very poorly) in the pre-season, yet Ken Whisenhunt is still hemming and hawing about whether he is the starter. Kurt Warner energizes the team to do better every time he appears under center. Leinart does not. This reality alone should be sufficient for the leadership to promote Warner over Leinart.

UPDATES: The Cardinals did name Warner the starter and that is working out well so far. Brett Favre is playing well for the Jets, and so is Aaron Rodgers for the Packers, so that might turn out (after all of the drama) to be a win:win for both franchises. Jay Feely signed with a team, but is still missing field goals, so perhaps the Dolphins were right.
Chad Pennington cannot help the Dolphins win when his team spends almost an entire game blowing coverages, committing penalties, abandoning the running game almost immediately, and generally engaging in bush-league behaviour. The team's performance in last Sunday's game was every bit as bad as any of the games from kast season. If this level of performance continues, somebody needs to ask why they hired Bill Parcells and all of this acolytes when they could have had the same performance under Cam Cameron.
Mike Nolan has been freed from The Alex Smith Question since Smith is now on injured reserve and will most likely never take another game snap for the 49'ers.
Shawne Merriman played one game for the Chargers and then realized that he could not perform at any decent level with a defective knee encased in a bulky brace. He had surgery yesterday and is done for the season. Right decision, but 6 months too late.
As for the Oakland Raiders...the focus seems to have shifted to the Lane Kiffin Firing Watch.

...in which he explores the negative impacts on children of domineering parents, using Mel Gibson as an example of what we can see publicly of the results.

...which, if substantively correct, screams "campaign money laundering" about as loud as one can scream...and this is from one of the authors of McCain-Feingold, that attempt to regulate political contributions? Ah, the transience of scruples...

In the 1960's oil was discovered under the North Sea. The two largest oil-producing sectors were determined to belong to the UK and Norway. Both countries assigned exploration and extraction licenses to oil companies, and were rewarded with a lot of oil and gas production, and a large influx of tax revenues.
The similarities end there. While the UK used the North Sea tax revenues as a day-to-day augmentation for tax revenues, and invested none of the money, Norway put a percentage of its revenues into a Sovereign Wealth Fund. This Wikipedia article explains how this was done.
The result is that, as North Sea oil production moves to the end stages of the extraction cycle, with steadily declining production into the future, the UK has no fiscal fund for that future, whereas Norway is sitting on a very large sum of invested money that can be used for post-petroleum infrastructure and energy investment.
Could the UK have implemented a similar fund? Difficult to say. The main difference between Norway and the UK is the disparity of population size - 4.7 million against 60 million. The UK is running "pedal to the metal" a lot more than Norway economically. The UK, unlike Scandinavia, has always tended more towards the US model of instant gratification, and has a poor record on recent strategy. I suspect that UK politicians might have found it impossible to keep their hands off of a strategic fund like the one set up by Norway. Even in Norway, there has been pressure to raid the fund, mainly because of the high value of the fund compared to the country's population.
However, what is not in doubt is that Norway has consistently executed a strategy (despite pressure to divert some of the monies in the fund for other uses), where the UK had no strategy for what happens after the oil runs out. Guess which country I am going to bet on in the post-petroleum era?