Democracy Now hosts Casey Porter and Colby Buzzell, two soldiers who have been stop-lossed and show an excerpt of the Stop Loss film:
Video (until Monday) Transcript

JUAN GONZALEZ: What’s been the impact on morale of your fellow soldiers from the massive use of this stop-loss policy?

SPC. CASEY PORTER: Well, I haven’t seen any soldier that’s thrilled about it. I could tell you that. They—a lot of them kind of feel that they’re trapped, that there’s nothing they can do, although I try to encourage soldiers to do, is I encourage them to join organizations like Iraq Veterans Against the War, which I’m a member of, to stand up for themselves. But they feel like, you know, there’s no legal recourse, there’s nothing they can do. It lowers morale, incredibly so. And even—and just the mission itself, I mean, driving around, waiting to get blown up, which is essentially what we still do, that is just—you know, just compounds that low morale.

I just heard it on the local morning news. He was only 53, so that's sad for his wife and children. I suppose we'll see a lot of tributes from the MSM.

Jim Cramer was ranting about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this morning, but I just caught this news on PBS Nightly Business Report.

IndyMac Seized by Regulators
U.S. Shuts Big Bank As Crisis Intensifies

IndyMac Bank, a prolific mortgage specialist that helped fuel the housing boom, was seized Friday by federal regulators in one of the largest bank failures in U.S. history.

The Pasadena, Calif., thrift was one of the largest savings and loans in the country with about $32 billion in assets. ... IndyMac specialized in Alt-A loans, a type of mortgage that can often be offered to borrowers who don't fully document their incomes or assets.

IndyMac Seized by U.S. Regulators Amid Cash Crunch

IndyMac came under fire last month from U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, who said lax lending standards and deposits purchased from third parties left it on the brink of failure. In the 11 business days after Schumer explained his concerns in a June 26 letter, depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion, the OTS said.

Schumer makes himself the convenient scapegoat.

Bankers Use Secret Clinics, Nurses to Beat Breakdowns

On a private island 20 minutes by helicopter from central London, a hovercraft sits on the lawn of a turreted Edwardian manor house as swallows swoop around.

Trees and wildflowers line a lane that leads to a cluster of buildings that house a pool table, a 12-seat movie theater and an art studio. A yacht is moored nearby.

The island isn't a country hideaway. It's the Causeway Retreat, a mental health and addiction center that charges as much as 10,000 pounds ($20,000) a week for treatment away from the prying eyes of colleagues and the media. There is a waiting list for the facility's 15 rooms.

"We get lots of CEOs of companies, traders, high-end business guys,'' says Managing Director Brendan Quinn. "They want treatment, but they want it to be discreet.''

Sounds like a setting.from The Avengers.

Andrew Sullivan's been posting all these continuous track YouTube clips:

I Am Cuba

Boogie Nights

Goodfellas

Weekend - Godard, a great comment on not driving - if you can stand the noise

And I still like Kate Bush:

The Sensual World - My wife said this reminded her of Cali wildfires
 
Aerial

An Architect's Dream

Kate Bush & Rowan Atkinson

NY Times: Rush Limbaugh's Newest Lapdog

The lengthy Times profile took that trend to a whole new level, because unlike most previous half-hearted attempts to outline, in very general ways, what Limbaugh says and explain why he's controversial, the Times clearly never had any intention of shedding even the dimmest light on the content of Limbaugh's program. Instead, it hired a conservative writer to wistfully dismiss Limbaugh's critics in two or three sentences. And in exchange for playing dumb, the Times was granted unusual access to the talk-show host.

I guess we're supposed to be surprised. Every morning, we hear Meredith or Katie or whoever promising an interview with the current news focus, but delivering nothing but softball questions and predictable answers. On Sunday, the supposedly hard news shows take a bit longer to do the same thing. Yet the MSM wonders why they are losing viewers and readers to the internet.

Bloomberg and Peak Oil Blues offer competing grim scenarios for the immediate future:  

Granddad, Tell How Capitalism Committed Suicide
by Mark Gilbert  

"Granddad Benny, is it true that capitalism committed suicide?''

Granddad looked up from the fire he was stoking with bundles of 2006 and 2007 vintage mortgage-backed bonds. ``In a way, Joel, yes. In developed countries, people got too greedy, especially bankers, and everyone borrowed too much. In less developed countries, people racing to improve their living standards reawakened the slumbering inflation monster.''

Joel put down the stick he was using to scratch the dirt. ``Why did the Gigantic Global Bubble Burst of 2008 catch people unawares? Weren't there any warning signs, Granddad?''

Peak Toil
by Frank Lee

Wednesday August 4, 2010.

Another hot and muggy day in what seemed to be an endless summer of scorchers. Mary Cole was fighting an intestinal flu, but found it impossible to take time off from her job at Wal-mart. She couldn’t “afford” to be sick. When her bowels told her that she had to “go,” she notified her boss, who blandly told her that it wasn’t her “break time.” She tried to explain, but he walked away. Within three minutes, she soiled herself and started crying. Frank, another clerk, hears what happens, and begins an angry exchange with Harold, the manager. Enraged at being yelled at, Harold fires Frank on the spot. A small group of employees surround the two in a tight huddle. Frank, instead of leaving, continues to argue, as other employees join in. It escalates with Harold being dragged into the employee lounge and assaulted. Someone calls the police, and four men, including Frank, are arrested. Mary is eventually fired for “instigating” the incident.

One expects this sort of thing from Peak Oil doomers, but reading it at Bloomberg is a bit of a shock. And the Bloomberg piece is more doom-laden than the Peak Oil Blues piece.

When the tech bubble was popping, I used to browse a site named f**kedcompany.com. The NY Times has found a successor:

Loan Pains Turned Site Into a Hit

As millions of homeowners fall behind on their mortgages, a fledging Web site called the Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter is gleefully tallying the number of lenders that run into trouble too. On Monday, the count was 265 — and rising.

Watch the UK, then wait about six weeks for it to happen here:

Britain's economy is coming unglued quickly

It is really rather difficult to give a sense of exactly how quickly Britain's economy is coming unglued. According to Nationwide, the British mortgage lender, house prices fell by 2.5 percent in June alone, and some economists are forecasting multiyear falls of as much as a third. Mortgage lending is down by 64 percent year on year in May as banks recoil from lending into a falling market and also because of the simple fact that Britons collectively don't deposit enough to cover their borrowing needs.

John Lewis, a British retailer, said sales at its department stores dropped 8.3 percent in the week that ended June 28, compared with the same week a year earlier, while a rival, Marks & Spencer, also reported disappointing results.

The banking sector is racing to recapitalize, not entirely successfully, with shares of the mortgage specialist Bradford & Bingley well below the level at which a new offering of stock was underwritten.

Construction activity fell at its fastest pace in at least 11 years in June, while the crucial services sector shrank at its sharpest rate since just after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

Britain's openness and its willingness to adopt innovation, especially financial innovation, allowed it to finance a consumption and property bubble that could persist only so long as money flowed to its consumers from abroad. Its banks, notably Northern Rock, borrowed from abroad, and its house buyers did so, too, through securitized mortgages. That all ended last summer.

I usually read the Falls Church News-Press for Tom Whipple's latest PO editorial. This commentary is driven by GLBT issues, but I found it interesting that the author thinks McCain has only recently begun pandering to the religious right:

Unfortunately, McCain made a strategic decision last week that he could not win without securing the party's right wing base. My guess is that the campaign's internal polling suggested that Obama - aided by his bloated bank account - was winning too many Independents, so McCain had no choice but to make peace with social conservatives.

Leaders from the Religious Right were reinforcing this reality by making it clear that if McCain did not grovel, they wouldn't help get out the vote.

"We told him that if he didn't come out and share his pro-family stances on these issues, then he can kiss Ohio goodbye," said influential anti-gay Ohio activist Phil Burress, according to the Los Angeles Times.

With his divisive new strategy in place, McCain met with prominent social conservatives in Ohio and all but licked their boots. At the meeting, he announced his support for an initiative in California to ban same-sex marriage. In his speech he said that Californians ought to "recognize marriage as a unique institution between a man and a woman, just as we did in my home state of Arizona. I do not believe judges should be making these decisions." (Despite McCain's anti-gay campaigning, the Arizona amendment failed)

McCain's efforts seemed to work and suggest there is time to rally the right to his side.

"It was obvious there were a lot of changed hearts in the room," said Burress. "We realized that he's with us on the majority of the issues we care about."

McCain also said that he hoped to meet with James Dobson, the virulently anti-gay leader of Focus on the Family. Dobson has said he would not vote for McCain and claimed that neither candidate gives "a hoot about the family."

To convert a skeptical Dobson, McCain would have to make extraordinary promises and essentially sell his soul. Such a move would signal that McCain has dropped all pretenses of appealing to mainstream Americans and that his campaign has decided to follow the Karl Rove playbook of using red meat to create red states. This incipient strategy is depressing and ends hope of a classy campaign that could have united Americans.

Given the headlines, starting a garden seems like a good idea on so many levels.

The average yard in this country consumes money in three major ways. First, hundreds of dollars are wasted because few yards are planned to take advantage of solar heating or basic cooling techniques for the house. Second, yards that have large lawns, particularly in the arid West, where constant watering is necessary, often have high maintenance costs. And, finally, few yards are designed to cut food and gift-giving expenses.

Heating and cooling experts estimate that up to 20 percent of air-conditioning bills and 20 to 30 percent of heating bills for residences can be cut by proper placement of landscaping elements. The larger your yard, the more savings you can realize by strategically placing trees and shrubs. Well-placed evergreen shrubs and trees help cut down the effects of winter winds against the house; by removing evergreen shrubs and trees near the south-facing wall, the homeowner allows the winter sun to warm the wall. Conversely, in the summer, deciduous trees, shrubs, and vines can shade the south and west walls, preventing the heat from building up in the house.

The diagram below shows a very small backyard full of bountiful, yet beautiful, plants: they do double duty. There are genetic dwarf fruit trees: two apples, a peach, and a pear. These flower and fruiting large shrubs make quite a delightful background for the patio area. On either side are black and red raspberry bushes trained on decorative trellises and clusters of blueberry bushes. On both sides of the patio and in the middle of the back planting bed is a combination vegetable and flower border, which is planted with extra-productive species such as tomatoes, snow peas, chard, peppers, and eggplants and flowers that are good for cutting, such as calendulas, statice, coreopsis, and baby’s breath.

The patio has containers for vegetables and herbs and is covered with an arbor that has two kiwi vines on it. Grapevines are espaliered on the south wall on either side of the house; with the kiwi vines on the arbor they provide shade on hot days and help cut air-conditioning bills. In addition, the grape prunings can be used to make wreaths in the winter.

"Expensive oil is going to transform the American culture as radically as cheap oil did."

The WSJ article (sub) mostly concerns efforts to build smart communities - where homes, stores and workplaces are within walking or biking distance - in a larger city, Sacramento, rather than in smaller New Urbanist experiments like Celebration , Kentlands or Seaside .

I suspect, however, that the coming changes will outpace our ability to plan safe, gentrified communities close to work. Middle class families, especially those with small children, will have a very tough time accepting the noise and ethnic diversity that is the city.

One of the most emailed from the NY Times (sub), a long article about bipartisan failures to raise CAFE standards:

  In 1990, Richard H. Bryan, a Nevada Democrat, teamed up in the Senate with Slade Gorton, Republican of Washington, and proposed lifting fuel standards again over the next decade, with a goal of 40 m.p.g. for cars. Amid furious opposition from Detroit, liberal Democrats from automaking states, like Carl Levin of Michigan, joined conservative Republicans like Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who died on Friday, to block new CAFE standards. “It was one of the most frustrating issues in my Senate career,” says Mr. Gorton, who left the Senate in 2001.

Dan Becker, then a lobbyist for the Sierra Club, still remembers his shock when he saw Mr. Levin and Mr. Helms, diametrically opposed on most issues, walk amiably together onto the Senate floor to cast their votes. “This wasn’t East-West, right-left, or North-South,” he says. “But had we passed that bill, we’d be using three million barrels less oil a day now.”

That amount may not sound like much, given total global consumption of 85 million barrels a day, but it’s more than OPEC’s spare capacity now.

 Mr. Levin didn’t return calls for comment. But Representative John D. Dingell, the powerful Democrat from Detroit who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, argues — as he did more than a decade ago — that tightening CAFE standards unfairly penalizes domestic automakers while rewarding foreign rivals who make more small cars.

Mr. Dingell, who has defended the automakers fiercely during his 52 years on Capitol Hill, decided to support the stronger CAFE standards last year. But he does not apologize for his longtime stance. “The American auto industry has sold the cars people wanted,” he says. “You’re going to blame the auto industry for that or the American consumer? He likes it sitting in his driveway, he likes it big, he likes it safe.”

Once again, TPM recognized me right up until I tried to post this article, whereupon I had to leave this page and login on the main page.