hman:
“Others expected to appear at the convention are comedian Larry the Cable Guy, musical acts Marshall Tucker Band and Pure Prairie League, an Elvis impersonator, NASCAR team owner Richard Childress and conservative commentator Michael Reagan.”
— Washington Post: Palin to deliver address at gun convention.
I’m not going to get into an argument over whether Obama rebuked the left — if the right wants to believe that, it’s fine with me — because it’s entirely irrelevant. That’s because Obama’s message that political rhetoric didn’t cause the shooting wasn’t just directed at the left. The more important point is that it was also directed at the right.
Simply put, Obama made that core point because it was the only way he could get conservatives to listen to his larger message at all.
” —Greg Sargent“There was no crusading journalist, no nonprofit group taking up his cause, just Inmate 95A2646, a high-school dropout from Brooklyn, alone in a computerless prison law library. Jabbar Collins pried documents from wary prosecutors, tracked down reluctant witnesses and persuaded them, at least once through trickery, to reveal what allegedly went on before and at the trial where he was convicted of the high-profile 1994 murder of Rabbi Abraham Pollack.”
this is very much worth reading - the story of how an innocent man convicted of a crime he did not commit had to rely only on his own ability to advocate for himself from jail in order to clear his name. while it’s wonderful and frankly amazing that this man was able to find out that witnesses had been railroaded into false testimony and gather the necessary evidence to clear himself all while incarcerated, it is a shitty shitty system that relies on such miracles to correct the errors made by the criminal justice system.
They are allowed to accrue interest on non-performing mortgages until the actual foreclosure takes place, which on average takes about 16 months.
All the phantom interest that is not actually collected is booked as income until the actual act of foreclosure. As a result, many bank financial statements actually look much better than they actually are. At foreclosure all the phantom income comes off the books of the banks.
This means that Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, among hundreds of other smaller institutions, can report interest due them, but not paid, on an estimated $1.4 trillion of face value mortgages on the 7 million homes that are in the process of being foreclosed.
Oh. Letting banks pretend to be way better-capitalized than they really are by including nonexistent interest payments the banks have already given up on? This seems entirely legit.
Incidentally - $1.4 trillion is about 10% of the annual US GDP. In case you were having trouble establishing a comparison, there.
As more journalists have joined [Quora] over the last week there has been a surge in journalism related questions and discussions. If your beat is among those discussed there, the site can be extremely useful for access, ideas, story leads, networking and crowd sourcing. In other words, much of the same things as Twitter, but not confined to 140 characters.
This presumes journalists currently use Twitter for ideas and story leads instead of just for background chatter. I don’t think they do. (It’s probably safe to assume Twitter isn’t being used for access and that journalists aren’t too interested in having their reportage crowd-sourced by the mouth-breathing masses; that’s the forte of a content manager.)
“We don’t understand the feedback loops between [computerized trading algorithms]. We don’t understand what causes individual stocks or entire market indices to move. We have an incredibly complex system with only the most rudimentary controls. And we got a hint of what could happen last May, during the flash crash, but we have no idea what other things might happen.
I’ve spent the better part of five years ghostwriting for people and companies involved in this kind of stuff. In many ways, computerized trading is similar to, well, any communications process that has a highly technological component: It’s sheer awesomeness does not make it perfect. A cell phone call, for instance, goes from an iPhone all the way up into bloody space, hits a satellite, and is redirected to another handset that’s anywhere from a block to fifty-thousand miles away. This happens in only a couple of milliseconds; it’s profound and amazing. But sometimes the signal gets lost — sometimes, the technology messes up — and the call drops.
The technology that powers the markets is like that — imperfect — too. It misbehaves, and when it makes a mistake there’s no unscrambling that proverbial egg. The vast majority of the time those mistakes are very benign and cost the trading desk insignificant sums of money, and no one outside that desk even hears about them. But instead of cutting off a call mid-sentence, the worst that can happen is global economic catastrophe that costs a literally incalculable sum of money to market participants.
Now, Michael Arrington has never hesitated to speak his mind. That’s one reason people read him and one reason AOL paid $25+ million for his blog. And AOL certainly must have expected that some of this would come along with the deal.
But to say that behavior like this is rare in the corporate world would be an understatement. Even fire-breathing personalities like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly aim their flame-throwers outward—they don’t torch their colleagues and the hand that feeds them. In fact, we cannot remember a single instance when a commentator has trashed colleagues publicly and remained an employee for long.
So in the wake of Arizona comes what we most fear: That it will lead to more violence.
The State Patrol was asked Monday to investigate an e-mail sent to a group of state senators by a man who supports getting tougher on illegal immigrants.
The e-mail states that “we will shed blood again” to accomplish such a goal.
It was sent Sunday night to members of the State Legislature’s Judiciary Committee, which will hold a hearing this session on an Arizona-style immigration law proposed by Fremont Sen. Charlie Janssen.
The e-mail appeared to be sent from a Fremont resident who has been a leading supporter of tougher immigration laws and of an ordinance approved by Fremont voters last summer. The e-mail urges the senators to advance Janssen’s bill to debate by the full Legislature.
A postscript, in red letters, says: “we shed blood to build this country and we will shed blood again to take it back.”
It ends with: THE ONLY THING FOR EVIL TO TRIUMPH IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING.”
This isn’t the only case today either. Danny Davis, a representative of South Chicago, has reported receiving death threats.
I realize that the killer in Arizona was not guided by a comprehensible ideology, and was somebody with what sounded like serious problems. While I hope these remain idle threats, it really worries me what may come in the next few weeks.
Some progress on sustainable energy for automobiles. From a news release:
“Ford is recruiting salaried engineers specializing in batteries, system controls, software and energy storage to work on electric vehicles in Detroit and eight other cities including Boston; Chicago; Cincinnati; Columbus, Ohio; Milwaukee; Raleigh and Durham, N.C.; and San Jose, Calif. This recruitment launches at the 2011 North American International Auto Show during industry preview days on Jan. 12 and Jan. 13.”
