I’ve been following the events in Ukraine with some interest, but the US press has generally been more interested in reporting on the holiday sales figures instead. One of the Kos diarists has posted an excellent primer on the situation here.
It’s a rare day that I am in agreement with anything the Bush administration says or does, but this time they do seem to be siding with the right guy.
By way of Atrios, some nasty gay-bashing (targetted at the black community) in the Washington Post.
I’d excerpt it but I don’t have the stomach for it. AmericaBLOG has a PDF of the whole nasty thing if you’re really interested.
Bleh. Bigoted crap coming to your home, by way of the paper that brought down Richard Nixon. How times have changed.
Digby delivers a big fat kick in the pants this morning and he’s got a hugely valid point, which is: all the trumpeting about how ‘moral’ the Red States are is plain old hypocracy. We should not pander to it.
the fact is that somebody in the red states is watching Will and Grace and somebody is watching Girls Gone Wild and a whole bunch of somebodies are downloading pornography. I’m sure they tut-tut those terrible liberals while they pass the popcorn and laugh over The Bachelor’s latest catfight.The biggest hit of the TV season is the sexually adventurous Desperate Housewives and it ain’t just because people in New York and LA are watching it. The National Enquirer and the Globe are hugely popular in Middle America with their fascination with Hollywood dirt.
This is mass consumer culture and it plays very successfully all across that great swathe of red. Somebody’s watching all this stuff and buying all this stuff and consuming all this stuff.
I could quote the whole thing becasue it’s all good, but that’s the gist. Enjoy.
So Arafat is really dead this time.
At one point I might have been sad to see the man go, but taking his legacy all in all, he could not bring himself the be the man who made a real peace with Israel. And all I can say is, good riddance.
What will happen next, we don’t know. Depending on the outcome of the political infighting, it could be good or bad. But at least there’s a chance to get some new cards on the table now.
Sorry for the longer than usual quote, but Josh Marshall has the beginning of a highly interesting take on the red state / blue state issue that’s worth a notice:
The oddity of this Red State moralism argument emerges most clearly when you look at statistics for virtually every form of quantifiable social dysfunction. Divorce, out-of-wedlock birth, poverty, murder, incidence of preventable disease — go down the list and you
Atrios is back after a few days R&R and he’s on fire about the upcoming proposed changes to Social Security and the tax code. All the pieces are good, but this is a point I particularly like:
As I’ve written before, my opposition to a forced savings plan [note to Democrats: “forced savings” has a nice ring to it, and is in fact what such a plan would be.] is largely due to the fact that it opens the door for Fund firms, one way or another, to loot the US Treasury and to loot these mandatory accounts. Conservative trolls like to write “Oh, but if you lose all your money it’s all your fault!” which, after I get a good laugh at how stupid they are, depresses the hell out of me. First, investments are not deterministic. They are risky. People who do well in the market like to believe they’re “smart investors.” Maybe they are. But, most of them just got lucky. Being a “smart investor” means that you know more than the market does, something which can’t exist if we believe the markets are efficient, as our conservative trolls usually do.
Emphasis added. And this is where the rubber meets the road:
Someone earning $40,000 per year is going to be putting just $800 per year into one of these accounts.
Mutual fund companies hate low-dollar accounts like this — they do not make money for the company. And thus, they are going to try to find ways of making these accounts more profitable, to the detriment of the account holders. Tacking on lots of fees is a possibility, although I suspect that the eventual legislation will cover that obvious loophole. A more likely one is a tactic the industry has already been indulging in — one much easier to abuse:
The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating about a dozen brokerage firms – including Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Ameritrade, Charles Schwab and E*Trade Financial – on suspicion that they failed to secure the best available price for stocks they were trading for their customers, according to people who have been briefed on the inquiry.
At issue is the way the companies executed trades of Nasdaq-listed securities when the markets opened in the morning, a period of intense trading activity resulting from the backlog of orders since the market’s close the previous day.
After examining trading data from the last four years, the investigation found evidence that trades were often processed in ways that favored the firms over their clients, these people said.
Securing the best price is one of the industry’s critical obligations to investors. If the investigators’ suspicions are confirmed, these practices are not likely to add up to significant costs for individual investors – the difference would be pennies a share traded – but in total they could represent substantial amounts of money for the brokers.
Frankly, I find the whole thing somewhat academic, because I’m one of those who thinks that the odds are good the entire Social Security system will not exist when it comes time for me to retire. That said, this all sounds to me like a good way to hasten the liklihood of it happening.