We were in the parking lot, loading our groceries in the trunk, when a local TV reporter came up and asked if we would speak on camera about Obama choosing Biden. "Ask him," my wife said. Fortunately I had read TPM this morning because it had been a busy day with little time for reflection.

So I said, "I thought Obama might go for Clinton, but I think Biden might be a good choice. Biden tends to reinforce some of the things that Obama was lacking in terms of foreign policy experience," and continued on about the warlike situation in the former Soviet Union. She paraphrased, "So you think Biden's experience makes up for Obama's age," and after a pause I said yes, although I didn't really like the way she phrased it.

Anyway we watched the local news, WTAJ, and they ran my quote from above, omitting the "warlike" part, then some fatalistic woman saying that, "Whoever's in charge is in charge and that's just twist of fate, that's how it's gonna go," and some gap-toothed fellow saying, "I don't think it's gonna hurt him, but I don't think it's any great help. I personally don't like Joe Biden."

Later, at another store, we ran into my wife's nephew, who served in Afghanistan, was called back, but seems to be out for good now. He's convinced that Obama is a Muslim and claimed it says so in his book. I read The Audacity of Hope, and that's a new one for me. The woman in front of us said choosing Clinton would have helped him more, but predicted that if he wins, someone will probably shoot him.

So Biden's Scranton roots might be a bit overrated, and Obama has his work cut out for him in carrying rural PA.

Dem: <your ideal pick>
Dem: <your likely pick>
# trolls posting wrong pick
# TPM people that knew it all along
% TPM people predicting certain victory
% TPM people predicting certain defeat
% TPM people predicting cautious optimism

Rep: <your ideal pick>
Rep: <your likely pick>
# trolls posting wrong pick
# TPM people that knew it all along
% TPM people predicting certain victory
% TPM people predicting certain defeat
% TPM people vaguely pessimistic

The Eagle Has Been Grounded

As gold prices tumbled from their highest level ever, investors and collectors loaded up on one-ounce "American eagle" gold-bullion coins. The buying spree came to an abrupt halt this week after the U.S. Mint stopped selling the coins for the first time since production began 20 years ago.

"Due to the unprecedented demand...our inventories have been depleted," the Mint -- part of the U.S. Treasury Department -- told its dealers Friday. "We are therefore temporarily suspending all sales of these coins."

The move shocked sellers and collectors of the coins, which are the most widely traded in the U.S.

Great comment in response to a CS Monitor article:

Isn’t this really a sign that a McCain administration would bring us another four years of “I don’t recall” governance? I mean, I know the play worked for Reagan, Bush, and Gonzales. But haven’t we had about enough of Republican “leaders” who can never recall a damn thing about anything they do? Puh-lease.

I think tying in McCain's bad memory to Gonzales, etc. could make for a convincing youtube video.

Great comment in response to a CS Monitor article:

<blockquote>Isn’t this really a sign that a McCain administration would bring us another four years of “I don’t recall” governance? I mean, I know the play worked for Reagan, Bush, and Gonzales. But haven’t we had about enough of Republican “leaders” who can never recall a damn thing about anything they do? Puh-lease.</blockquote>

I think tying in McCain's bad memory to Gonzales, etc. could make for a convincing youtube video.

Boundary Issues

David Remnick quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, speaking soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union:

We were recently entertained by a naïve fable of the happy arrival at the “end of history,” of the overflowing triumph of an all-democratic bliss; the ultimate global arrangement had supposedly been attained. But we all see and sense that something very different is coming, something new, and perhaps quite stern. No, tranquility does not promise to descend on our planet, and will not be granted us so easily.

Then goes on to describe the after effects of empire throughout the former USSR, finishing with Putin:

... But Putin is not Hitler or Stalin; he is not even Leonid Brezhnev. He is what he is, and that is bad enough. In the 2008 election, he made a joke of democratic procedure and, in effect, engineered for himself an anti-constitutional third term. The press, the parliament, the judiciary, the business élite are all in his pocket—and there is no opposition. But Putin also knows that Russia cannot bear the cost of reconstituting empire or the gulag. It depends on the West as a market. One lesson of the Soviet experience is that isolation ends in poverty. Putin’s is a new and subtler game: he is the autocrat who calls on the widow of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. To deal with him will require statecraft of a kind that has proved well beyond the capacities of our current practitioners.

How Obama Reconciles Dueling Views on Economy

A generally positive article.

“I think I can tell a pretty simple story. Ronald Reagan ushered in an era that reasserted the marketplace and freedom. He made people aware of the cost involved of government regulation or at least a command-and-control-style regulation regime. Bill Clinton to some extent continued that pattern, although he may have smoothed out the edges of it. And George Bush took Ronald Reagan’s insight and ran it over a cliff. And so I think the simple way of telling the story is that when Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over, he wasn’t arguing for an era of no government. So what we need to bring about is the end of the era of unresponsive and inefficient government and short-term thinking in government, so that the government is laying the groundwork, the framework, the foundation for the market to operate effectively and for every single individual to be able to be connected with that market and to succeed in that market. And it’s now a global marketplace.

Key U.S. Iraq strategy in danger of collapse

BAGHDAD — A key pillar of the U.S. strategy to pacify Iraq is in danger of collapsing because the Iraqi government is failing to absorb tens of thousands of former Sunni Muslim insurgents who'd joined U.S.-allied militia groups into the country's security forces.

American officials have credited the militias, known as the Sons of Iraq or Awakening councils, with undercutting support for the group al Qaida in Iraq and bringing peace to large swaths of the country, including Anbar province and parts of Baghdad. Under the program, the United States pays each militia member a stipend of about $300 a month and promised that they'd get jobs with the Iraqi government.

But the Iraqi government, which is led by Shiite Muslims, has brought only a relative handful of the more than 100,000 militia members into the security forces. Now officials are making it clear that they don't intend to include most of the rest.

Farouk Abd al Sattar Hassan Mohammed al Obeidi, a deputy Sunni militia commander in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Adhamiyah, wore a military uniform in an interview with McClatchy last week because he considered his men and himself to be soldiers.

He voiced frustration that his men had applied repeatedly to join the Iraqi Security Forces, to no avail.

"We wish we were part of the army. With deep remorse the government is sectarian," Obeidi said. He described his alliance with the U.S. forces as "the enemy of your enemy is your friend."

"The Sons of Iraq achieved security. Don't they deserve to enter the army?"

Obeidi will never see that happen. On Sunday, a suicide bomber on a bicycle killed him, along with five of his men and nine civilians.

 ... doesn't mean the economy isn't in trouble.

Dr. Doom

The ’90s were an eventful time for an international economist like Roubini. Throughout the decade, one emerging economy after another was beset by crisis, beginning with Mexico’s in 1994. Panics swept Asia, including Thailand, Indonesia and Korea, in 1997 and 1998. The economies of Brazil and Russia imploded in 1998. Argentina’s followed in 2000. Roubini began studying these countries and soon identified what he saw as their common weaknesses. On the eve of the crises that befell them, he noticed, most had huge current-account deficits (meaning, basically, that they spent far more than they made), and they typically financed these deficits by borrowing from abroad in ways that exposed them to the national equivalent of bank runs. Most of these countries also had poorly regulated banking systems plagued by excessive borrowing and reckless lending. Corporate governance was often weak, with cronyism in abundance.

...

After analyzing the markets that collapsed in the ’90s, Roubini set out to determine which country’s economy would be the next to succumb to the same pressures. His surprising answer: the United States’. “The United States,” Roubini remembers thinking, “looked like the biggest emerging market of all.” Of course, the United States wasn’t an emerging market; it was (and still is) the largest economy in the world. But Roubini was unnerved by what he saw in the U.S. economy, in particular its 2004 current-account deficit of $600 billion. He began writing extensively about the dangers of that deficit and then branched out, researching the various effects of the credit boom — including the biggest housing bubble in the nation’s history — that began after the Federal Reserve cut rates to close to zero in 2003. Roubini became convinced that the housing bubble was going to pop.

Was he prescient, or just pessimistic at the right time?

Not if you like drinking it, but putting it in the car may be a waste of money. My wife just sent me this link about making your own ethanol fuel, and I found a youtube video. Comments from this Scientific American article cast a lot of doubt on the efficiency and safety:

The numbers don't add up--even with their Carbon Credit discount, and even at the lower estimated sugar price (15 cents/lb), at 14 lbs of sugar to make a gallon of gasoline that's $2.10 a gallon, which last time I checked wasn't less than $1.00. And at the (more-realistic) higher estimated sugar price of 30 cents/lb, it's actually more expensive than gasoline, even not counting its lower energy content (and therefore lower mpg). The bit about saving even more by adding water is pure B.S.; you can't burn the water for energy, and in fact vaporizing it absorbs some otherwise-useable energy, so you will most likely waste money by doing this, in addition to having to refuel more often. And this isn't even addressing the question of how they plan to get around the U.S. law requiring anyone producing ethanol any more concentrated than what you can get by simple fermentation to have a distiller's license. This sounds like a total scam to me.

Non anahydrous ethanol won't blend with gasoline. True it can run in an internal combustion engine, but sooner or later you will have to stop for gas, or E85. Blending these liquids will cause the water to seperate out and then you have problems. Might be a good short range fuel source if that's all you will run. (plus you will need a cheap sugar, or feedstock source. That's hard to find) We should be making ethanol out of garbage, crop waste, wood waste and dead trees, and even sewage from out treatment plants. Ethanol itself is a fine fuel. Just what are we going to make it from?

Did SciAm run the numbers on this before publishing it? At 30cents/lb of feedstock and 14 lbs/gallon of ethanol, it would cost $4.20 to produce a gallon of ethanol (not counting maintenance and electricity costs). If you factor in the fact that ethanol only has 2/3 the energy content of gasoline by volume, you're actually paying $10,000 in up-front costs for the dubious privilege of making your own equivalent of $6.30/gallon gasoline.

They were clearly outmaneuvered by Putin, but Whitney lays war crimes at the feet of Saakashvili and Bush:

There are no military installations in the city of Tskhinvali. In fact, there are no military targets at all. It is an industrial center consisting of lumber mills, manufacturing plants and residential areas. It is also the home to 30,000 South Ossetians. When Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered the city to be bombed by warplanes and shelled by heavy artillery last Thursday, he knew that he would be killing hundreds of civilians in their homes and neighborhoods. But he ordered the bombing anyway.

There was no "Battle of Tskhinvali"; that's another fiction. A battle implies that there is an opposing force that is resisting or fighting back. That's not the case here. The Georgian army entered the city unopposed; after all, how can unarmed civilians stop armed units. Most of the townspeople had already fled across the border into Russia or hid in their basements while the tanks and armored vehicles rumbled bye firing at anything that moved.

What took place in South Ossetia on August 7, was not an invasion or a siege; it was a massacre. The people had no way to defend themselves against a fully-equipped modern army.  It was a war crime.

For the most part, Americans are still in the dark about what really happened last weekend. There's a great video circulating on the Internet by a Russian citizen that has been living in USA for the last 10 years. He sums up the role of the US media with great precision. He says, "The western media--especially CNN--is feeding you complete horseshit. Russia did not invade Georgia first."  The youtube can be seen here:

War or the economy?

US bank 'to fail within months'

Despite hopes that the US economy had turned the corner, Mr Rogoff claimed it was "not out of the woods".

"I would even go further to say 'the worst is to come'," he said.

"We're not just going to see mid-sized banks go under in the next few months," said Mr Rogoff, who held the IMF role between 2001 and 2004.

"We're going to see a whopper, we're going to see a big one, one of the big investment banks or big banks."
   
Speaking at a conference in Singapore, Mr Rogoff, now an economics professor at Harvard, forecast that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would "probably" not exist in their present form in a few years.

"We have to see more consolidation in the financial sector before this is over."

Several years ago, my wife and I attended an Audubon talk on wind power. I'm generally for wind power, but besides stats about killing birds and bats, they had some good environmental arguments against carving out areas of deep forest to place windvanes. I came away with the impression that wind companies were comporting themselves no differently than Big Oil or King Coal, hence my nickname of Mighty Wind, which implies that things don't smell right.

In Rural New York, Windmills Can Bring Whiff of Corruption sub

Lured by state subsidies and buoyed by high oil prices, the wind industry has arrived in force in upstate New York, promising to bring jobs, tax revenue and cutting-edge energy to the long-struggling region. But in town after town, some residents say, the companies have delivered something else: an epidemic of corruption and intimidation, as they rush to acquire enough land to make the wind farms a reality.

The local debates over wind power are driven in a part by a vacuum at the state level. There is no state law governing where wind turbines can be built or how big they can be. That leaves it up to town officials, working part time and on advice from outside lawyers, some of whom may have conflicts of their own.

There is no doubt that NIMBY is an obstacle to wind, but ramming it into communities is not going to help.