A leisurely slide down San Francisco's Market Street... in 1905

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The music is "La Femme D'Argent" by Air.

Thanks, Jack!

Frontline: The Warning

Last April I wrote a post about Brooksley Born, the Stanford Law School graduate who headed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Clinton administration. Her mid-1990s warnings about the dangers of over-the-counter derivatives were quashed by Alan Greenspan, Bob Rubin, and Larry Summers. These securities--sold by AIG and other financial companies--ended up being key factors in bringing about the Great Recession of the 21st century.

My dad and my friend Dat both gave me heads up on Frontline's new episode out about Born entitled "The Warning." Highly recommended! Watch it here or on Netflix.

In The Warning, veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk unearths the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.

"I didn't know Brooksley Born," says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton's powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. "I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable." Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group -- former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin -- convinced him that Born's attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was "clearly a mistake."

Born's battle behind closed doors was epic, Kirk finds. The members of the President's Working Group vehemently opposed regulation -- especially when proposed by a Washington outsider like Born....

"It'll happen again if we don't take the appropriate steps," Born warns. "There will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience."

How to handle terrorism suspects

Should we rely on the criminal justice system? Or take a military approach, treating them as enemy combatants? Or some hybrid of the two?

While politicians speak in soundbites, it's nice that programs like public radio's Radio Times actually delve into the complexities of these issues. Here's a link to their February 17th program on the topic:

The virtual debate this past Sunday between Vice President Biden an and his predecessor Dick Cheney provides further evidence of the legal and political complications involved in trying and detaining terror suspects. In this hour of Radio Times we look at this issue – particular as it relates to the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the treatment of Umar Abdulmutallab. Then we’ll tackle the larger issue of the development and laws and policies required to detain, prosecute terrorists and prevent future attacks. Our guests are University of Texas law professor ROBERT CHESNEY and BENJAMIN WITTES of the Brookings Institute.

Cognoscor Ergo Sum

Stephen Colbert comments on Twitter, Blippy (see pic below, shoot me now), and every other new social networking tool for proclaiming, "We exist!" :-)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Cognoscor Ergo Sum
http://www.colbertnation.com/
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Skate Expectations

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And here's an example of the riveting ticker over at Blippy, the "fun and easy way to see and discuss the things people are buying":

Why one senator is quitting

I don't know if he'll make a difference, but wouldn't it be ironic if the biggest impact Senator Evan Bayh made in Washington was in quitting and focusing the nation on what's wrong in Washington? Here are his thoughts on the matter.

The failure of the best

David Brooks has a really interesting column on the notion that America's post-WASP experiment with meritocracy hasn't necessarily produced better results in government, banking, or journalism, and he outlines some reasons why.

Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. Now financial firms recruit from the cream of the Ivy League. In 2007, 47 percent of Harvard grads went into finance or consulting. Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?

Government used to be staffed by party hacks. Today, it is staffed by people from public policy schools. But does government work better than it did before?

Journalism used to be the preserve of working-class stiffs who filed stories and hit the bars. Now it is the preserve of cultured analysts who file stories and hit the water bottles. Is the media overall more reputable now than it was then?

Sorority Girls from Hell

Bette just forwarded me a link to an early 90s classic, a video that we often watched in our Midnight Sun days in San Francisco.

(Video link)

It was also the inspiration for one of one of our RSVP Cruise costume contest entries. :-)

Selling health insurance across state lines

Right now health insurance is regulated by each state. Ezra Klein explains why the Republican idea of selling health insurance across state lines is a bad idea:

Conservatives want the opposite: They want insurers to be able to cluster in one state, follow that state's regulations and sell the product to everyone in the country. In practice, that means we will have a single national insurance standard. But that standard will be decided by South Dakota. Or, if South Dakota doesn't give the insurers the freedom they want, it'll be decided by Wyoming. Or whoever.

This is exactly what happened in the credit card industry, which is regulated in accordance with conservative wishes. In 1980, Bill Janklow, the governor of South Dakota, made a deal with Citibank: If Citibank would move its credit card business to South Dakota, the governor would literally let Citibank write South Dakota's credit card regulations....

Citibank wrote an absurdly pro-credit card law, the legislature passed it, and soon all the credit card companies were heading to South Dakota. And that's exactly what would happen with health-care insurance. The industry would put its money into buying the legislature of a small, conservative, economically depressed state. The deal would be simple: Let us write the regulations and we'll bring thousands of jobs and lots of tax dollars to you. Someone will take it. The result will be an uncommonly tiny legislature in an uncommonly small state that answers to an uncommonly conservative electorate that will decide what insurance will look like for the rest of the nation.

A simple primer on climate change

Thomas Friedman argues for a simple, easily understood summary on climate change from the world's scientific community. Some things he'd like to be see stressed in the report:

1) Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.

The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.

2) Historically, we know that the climate has warmed and cooled slowly, going from Ice Ages to warming periods, driven, in part, by changes in the earth’s orbit and hence the amount of sunlight different parts of the earth get. What the current debate is about is whether humans — by emitting so much carbon and thickening the greenhouse-gas blanket around the earth so that it traps more heat — are now rapidly exacerbating nature’s natural warming cycles to a degree that could lead to dangerous disruptions.

The national debt and the quote for the day

When asked if he would co-chair President Obama's debt reduction commission, former Republican Senator Alan Simpson from Wyoming had this to say:

“I’ll just say I’m very frustrated and I can’t believe what’s happening to our country.”

“There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress, not one, that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed,” Mr. Simpson continued. “And to use the politics of fear and division and hate on each other–we are at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”

Meanwhile, Washington is mired in the worst gridlock I've ever seen, with Democratic Senator Evan Bayh announcing yesterday his decision to not run for re-election (comments from James Fallows here):

“For some time, I have had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should,” Mr. Bayh said. “There is too much partisanship and not enough progress — too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving. Even at a time of enormous challenge, the people’s business is not being done.”

Can Congress rise to the challenge?

After decades of warnings that budgetary profligacy, escalating health care costs and an aging population would lead to a day of fiscal reckoning, economists and the nation’s foreign creditors say that moment is approaching faster than expected, hastened by a deep recession that cost trillions of dollars in lost tax revenues and higher spending for safety-net programs.

Yet rarely has the political system seemed more polarized and less able to solve big problems that involve trust, tough choices and little short-term gain. The main urgency for both parties seems to be about pinning blame on the other, before November’s elections, for deficits now averaging $1 trillion a year, the largest since World War II relative to the size of the economy....

“I used to think it would take a global financial crisis to get both parties to the table, but we just had one,” said G. William Hoagland, who was a fiscal policy adviser to Senate Republican leaders and a witness to past bipartisan budget summits. “These days I wonder if this country is even governable.”

The Washington Times analyzes some of Obama's claims on the budget deficit here. Meanwhile, the numbers keep ticking upwards on the U.S. Debt Clock. I haven't read all the details of the Ryan Plan, but maybe we need some such paradigm shift...

Song for today

Sade's "Morning Bird" from her new album, Soldier of Love.

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Olympic memories

Scary... it was 30 years ago when Rodnina & Zaitsev squared off against Tai & Randy in the 1980 Olympic pairs figure skating competition. I was so caught up in the drama.

Here's Rodnina & Zaitsev's winning long program performance.

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Obama soft on terrorism

A raid only resulted in the capture of the Taliban's number two guy. Jeez. Can't you work a little harder. ;-)

More here.

Quote for the day 2

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

-- Shakespeare

Quote for the day

Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.

-- Joan Crawford

A brief history of just about everything

One art student's project.

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Song for a Valentine's Day

"Mystery" by the Indigo Girls.

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Thursday in Iran

Thursday was an important day of protests in Iran, with Green Movement supporters attempting to use the anniversary of the Iranian Revolution to demonstrate against fraud in the election that gave President Ahmadinejad a second term. The Daily Dish and Huffington Post both provided extensive coverage of the day's events; Juan Cole provides some analysis as to why the protests were not as successful as hoped.

Good listening

I heard these programs on NPR yesterday, they're worth a listen:

• James Fallows was interviewed on Radio Times about his recent article in The Atlantic which examined America's troubled political culture:

  America still has the means to address nearly any of its structural weaknesses. Yes, the problems are intellectually and politically complicated: energy use, medical costs, the right educational and occupational mix to rebuild a robust middle class. But they are no worse than others the nation has faced in more than 200 years, and today no other country comes close to the United States in having the surplus money, technology, and attention to apply to the tasks. (China? Remember, most people there still live on subsistence farms.) First with Iraq and now with Afghanistan, the U.S. has in the past decade committed $1 trillion to the cause of entirely remaking a society. We know that such an investment could happen here—but we also know that it won’t.
  
  That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” ... And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.
  
  The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation. If Henry Adams were whooshed from his Washington of a century ago to our Washington of today, he would find it shockingly changed, except for the institutions of government. Same two political parties, same number of members of the House (since 1913, despite more than a threefold increase in population), essentially same rules of debate in the Senate. Thomas Jefferson’s famed wish for “a little rebellion now and then” as a “medicine necessary for the sound health of government” is a nice slogan for organizing rallies, but is not how his country has actually operated.
  
  Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”

• Fresh Air's Terry Gross interviewed James Lewis about cybersecurity and America's vulnerability to cyberattack. It's not just about hacking into Gmail accounts; Lewis discusses, for instance, that the U.S. Central Command headquarters was infiltrated by someone who simply left a bunch of USB drives in the parking lot. Someone picked one up, plugged it into their office PC, and bam, software was installed on the network that gave the infiltrators access. And a tidbit I didn't know: the Internet was originally designed as a system that would allow military communications to take place even in the midst of a nuclear war, a scenario in which a number of U.S. cities (and the telephone switches in them) would be destroyed.

Song for the day

Sade's new album, Soldier of Love, comes out tomorrow. I've said on several occasions that if I could be any performer, I'd be Sade. So beautiful, elegant, and talented...

I saw her on the Lovers Live tour almost ten years ago. Hopefully she'll make a swing through Portland.

(Video link)

My Google story

My friend Jack sent me this Super Bowl ad (which is as close as I got to the game :-). The ad showcases Google but reminded me of how dependent we've become on the search engine. Which then took me back to a funny experience I had a few years ago...

I was at my old office in Beaverton, and a co-worker asked me if I had a certain computer cable. I knew I did but wasn't sure where I had stored it. So I sat down at my computer and started to type the name of the cable into Google. Then I remembered that I was looking for a physical item in the real world! I had gotten so used to using Google to find things that I had over-generalized its use.

(Video link)

This post, in turn, has reminded me of an article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal that I read not long after moving there. Unfortunately their online archives only appear to go back to January 2008, so I can't link to it. The article focused on how the casinos had seen a shift in their revenues, with most money now coming from slot machines rather than table games. And the change was no accident: the people who make the machines had worked hard to make them an increasingly immersive experience, one that people can't easily walk away from. The money quote in the article came from one avid slot player who told the reporter that she really didn't like to win anymore because it interfered with the flow of her game!

Struggling on NW 23rd Avenue

When I first came to Portland for a business trip about ten years ago, a co-worker suggested dining on NW 23rd Avenue. It was winter, and the scene was enchanting: lights decorating the trees along this narrow street, a lot of people bundled up on the sidewalks, windows looking into warm restaurants.

When I first moved to Portland, 23rd Avenue was always a good street for a stroll, some shopping, coffee, and food. I almost bought a place nearby in 2002 but opted for the Pearl. After all of these years, I'm finally living in the neighborhood, apparently just in time to see the district experiencing a particuarly severe downturn. From the NW Examiner (pdf):

Last April, The Oregonian reported that 23rd Avenue was “fraying under the weight of the recession.... From every street corner between Everett and Raleigh streets—13 blocks—shoppers can spot a ‘For Lease’ sign or plywood-covered window.”

Those were the good old days. At the end of January, 23 locations on 23rd were either closed, temporarily closed or for lease.

Retail activity came to a near standstill when crews blocked off the southbound lane Jan. 4, but the worst is yet to come. Early this month, both lanes will be closed simultaneously in two-to-three block stretches as the street is excavated to its base, old streetcar lines are removed and a new street is built from the bottom up. That work is scheduled to finish in May, but business leaders are braced for it extending into June....

Some retailers are predicting that the vibrant shopping scene that once garnered national attention will be gone in the next few months. A recession seems like a heckuva time to tear up the street in a retail district...

The mechanics of the filibuster

Ezra Klein explains how repeated filibusters chew up days of the Senate's time:

People think of the filibuster in terms of defeating a bill. But they don't think about the power it has to keep the Senate from doing anything else. But that's the power the hold uses. To break a filibuster, the majority leader has to file for cloture. Then there's a two-day waiting period before a vote. Then there's a 30-hour post-vote debate period. And voting on one bill might require breaking multiple filibusters, because the motion to proceed to debate can be filibustered and the amendments can be filibustered and the motion to vote can be filibustered and each filibuster requires the same lengthy workaround. Even if you can crush every one of these filibusters without breaking a sweat, you've still just seen a whole week -- or maybe much more -- of the Senate's time chewed up.

The Gitmo suicides

Scott Horton at Harper's and Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic have been shining light on the strange deaths of three inmates at Guantánamo, which the government is claiming were suicides. From Horton's January 18th article:

According to the NCIS [U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service] documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

Horton wrote a more recent piece on the autopsies that were conducted, which Sullivan discusses here:

Horton has the actual letter [from the families] requesting the organs (see after the jump). So either it got lost in the mail or this is another demonstrable untruth from the government. Now Horton has asked one of the most respected autopsy pathologists inn the country to review the procedures of the autopsies as performed at Gitmo. Read the whole disturbing thing. It seems extremely clear that they violated standards and procedures that are routine for both civilian and military autopsies. For example, organs removed from bodies are always returned to the next of kin for secondary autopsies if requested. That didn't happen.

Another Sullivan post here.

The government's story on what happened has enough holes and inconsistencies to leave me feeling pretty skeptical. We need some change we can believe in... and we need to close Guantánamo now.

Politics and the deficit

Fareed Zakaria details three changes that Washington could make to resolve America's long-term budget problems, but notes that they're politically unlikely:

If you take those three things -- health care, middle class entitlements and taxes -- we have effectively solved America's budget crisis. So the good news here is that we have a $14 trillion economy.

There's more than enough money to have a very substantial federal budget, moderate taxes (we are still at the low end of the industrialized world in terms of taxes as a percentage of GDP). So it really is worth thinking about how strange it is, that a fairly sensible set of discreet measures could put us back into a situation where we would be the envy of the world in terms of our fiscal condition.

The steps I outlined are economically simple and sensible and yet they're political dynamite.

Paul Krugman, meanwhile, thinks the current hand-wringing over the budget deficit and the U.S. debt overstates the problem:

But there’s no reason to panic about budget prospects for the next few years, or even for the next decade. Consider, for example, what the latest budget proposal from the Obama administration says about interest payments on federal debt; according to the projections, a decade from now they’ll have risen to 3.5 percent of G.D.P. How scary is that? It’s about the same as interest costs under the first President Bush.

Why, then, all the hysteria? The answer is politics.

The main difference between last summer, when we were mostly (and appropriately) taking deficits in stride, and the current sense of panic is that deficit fear-mongering has become a key part of Republican political strategy, doing double duty: it damages President Obama’s image even as it cripples his policy agenda. And if the hypocrisy is breathtaking — politicians who voted for budget-busting tax cuts posing as apostles of fiscal rectitude, politicians demonizing attempts to rein in Medicare costs one day (death panels!), then denouncing excessive government spending the next — well, what else is new?

The trouble, however, is that it’s apparently hard for many people to tell the difference between cynical posturing and serious economic argument. And that is having tragic consequences.

Obama uses prayer breakfast as an opportunity to speak against anti-gay bill in Uganda

From CNN:

President Obama on Thursday strongly criticized controversial anti-homosexuality legislation being considered by Uganda's legislature.

It is "unconscionable to target gays or lesbians for who they are," Obama said during an appearance at the National Prayer Breakfast.

The measure being considered in Uganda is "odious," he added.

The organization which sponsors the breakfast, the Fellowship Foundation, has been associated with efforts to pass the bill, according to the ethics group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The measure would punish sexual activity between persons of the same sex with long jail terms or death.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also criticized the bill during an appearance at the breakfast.

CREW had protested Obama's appearance at the breakfast, claiming in a statement that the event "designed to appear as if government-sanctioned, actually serves as a meeting and recruiting event for the shadowy Fellowship Foundation," also known as "The Foundation" and "The Family."

A Ugandan legislator who introduced the bill -- which has been roundly condemned by human rights groups -- was scheduled to attend the breakfast before his invitation was revoked, CREW claimed.

The Family, of course, is one of those holier-than-thou organizations that politicians like Nevada's philandering Senator John Ensign join. More on The Family from NPR's Fresh Air.

Unbelievable: Alabama Senator Richard Shelby has put a hold on ALL of Obama's nominees

This is disgusting. From Congress Daily:

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., has placed a blanket hold on all executive nominations on the Senate calendar in an effort to win concessions from the Obama administration and Pentagon on a variety of fronts affecting his home state, according to aides to Senate Majority Leader Reid.

Reid spokeswoman Regan Lachapelle said Shelby is blocking more than 70 pending nominations. Reid can force a vote on any nomination by filing cloture [which requires 60 votes].

Because of the time required to vote on multiple nominations, the Senate processes most nominations by unanimous consent. Any one senator can block any of those nominations by objecting to a unanimous consent request to take it up....

While holds are frequent, Senate aides said a blanket hold represents a far more aggressive use of the power than is normal.

"He should not be holding up 70-plus nominees for a parochial issue," a Democratic aide said. "They're qualified and they should be moving forward."

Disclosure of the blanket hold came after two days in which top Democrats voiced mounting frustration with Republican holds on executive nominees.

Is this the government we deserve???

UPDATE: Even worse, Shelby is a total hypocrite. From a 2005 issue statement that is posted on his Senate website:

As a U.S. Senator, I believe that the review of judicial nominations is one of the most important responsibilities of the Senate, and I firmly believe that each of the President's nominees should be afforded a straight up-or-down vote. I do not think that any of us want to operate in an environment where federal judicial nominees must receive 60 votes in order to be confirmed. To that end I firmly support changing the Senate rules to require that a simple majority be necessary to confirm all judicial nominees, thus ending the continuous filibuster of them.

More from Ezra Klein here, and an explanation of exactly what a Senate "hold" is here.

Quote for the day

Passed on by my friend Michael in Portland:

When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.

-- Epitaph of Leonard P. Matlovich, 1988

Carly Fiorina is creepy

If I ever find myself living in California again, one thing I now know for certain: I would never vote for Carly Fiorina for anything after seeing this ad from her senate campaign.

(Video link)

Weird!!!

Two of a kind

Timothy Egan finds John Edwards and Sarah Palin to be two of a kind: grifters, actually.

Palin and Edwards are two of an American archetype, opportunists playing to outrage while taking care of themselves. They are both attractive, with that lucky combination of genes that rarely lands on more than one member of an extended family. They can both hold an audience without saying anything of substance, or even making sense.

In particular with Palin, he notes her comewhat cynical support of the Tea Partiers (she's charging $100,000 to speak at their convention):

[During an interview, Glenn] Beck to Palin: “Who’s your favorite founder?”

Palin: “You know, well, all of them.”

Beck was skeptical.

So Palin, who can’t name a founder any more than she could think of a Supreme Court decision, wants to lead a movement inspired by the founders. If the original tea party had charged a week’s wages to register political outrage, we might still be wearing fussy stockings and bowing to some Lordship arriving in Boston Harbour.

Palin says she’ll plow her take back into “the cause.” Her favorite cause, of course, is Sarah Palin. It came to light this week that her political action committee spent $63,000 to buy copies of “Going Rogue.” It’s a sweet deal: get average people to donate to Palin. She then spends their money on her book, increasing her royalties and exposure.

DADT news

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen testified yesterday that it's time to end Don't Ask Don't Tell.

Former JCOS Chairman and Secretary of State Colin Powell now agrees (he argued against letting gays and lesbians openly serve 17 years ago).

John McCain flip-flops (here and here).

What Republicans believe

The Daily Dish posts the results of a poll of Republicans with these alarming findings:

• Nearly 40% think Obama should be impeached
• Over half think Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president
• One in four believe that their state should secede from the United States
• Only 8% believe that gays and lesbians should be allowed to teach in public schools
• Nearly one third believe contraception should be illegal

More here and here.

Quote of the day

"Il descend, réveillé, l’autre côté du rêve."

-- Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations