The capable second string at the Daily Dish points to the following TNR article:

Before Palin left the state to become John McCain’s running partner, she cultivated a good, if not exactly chummy, working relationship with Alaskan Democrats by pushing for an oil-tax increase and ethics reform. And state Republicans embraced Palin as the new face of a party that had been tarnished by scandal-ridden politicians like Ted Stevens. But upon returning to Juneau last fall, “she managed to alienate most of the 60 members of [the Alaska] House and Senate,” says Larry Persily, an aide to state Republican Representative Mike Hawker. “It wasn’t a matter of burning bridges–she blew them up.”

Palin is a bridge burner. Pit Bull in a china shop. One of the many traits that make her ineffective as a leader and continues to push her disapproval ratings up.

I would bet the pictures of detainee torture and abuse we haven’t seen are worse than what we know, it isn’t more of the same.
Joint chiefs chairman ‘infuriated’ about [the content of] suppressed detainee abuse photographs. [via CNN.com]

lou Dobbs is not afraid to ask…the same previously answered question.
[via Huffngton Post]

On the July 14th edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews, Comedian Bill Maher asserted that Mark Sanford comes off better than other politicians who have cheated because “at least Sanford was truly in love, and I think he looks very good next to all the other cheating politicians we’ve seen in recent years”. Matthews agreed saying “I’m with you on this one”.

Well, if you just judge these public figures solely within the context of their sex acts, then Sanford may come off better than other folks. For instance, Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s hiring of hookers in a jurisdiction where prostitution is illegal implicitly exposes his own inability to follow the laws he is hired to endorse and/or enforce. Being that he was a “john”, you could probably reasonably assume Spitzer was softer on illegal “high end” prostitution than he was on criminal tax cheats and robber barons who hid in Wall Streets board rooms. We know many of the other culprits: Hart, Clinton, Livingston, McGreevey, Foley, Vitter, Craig, the aforementioned Spitzer, Edwards, Ensign, Pickering…I am sure I missed many more. But to prove the error of that contextual focus, I would like to pose a specific hypothetical situtation while using one of these cheating executives: Rudy Guiliani. Continue reading

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation’s pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling.

Police arrived at Gates’s Ware Street home near Harvard Square at 12:44 p.m. to question him. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, had trouble unlocking his door after it became jammed.

The full arrest report is available here.

CNN’s Campbell Brown interviewed Chasidy Buckley and Jessica Shivers, two students featured in the HBO documentary “Prom Night In Mississippi” about Charleston High School’s first integrated prom in the spring of 2008. One of the points these young women make is they believed the prom was segregated because the “old money” folks who controlled purse strings in their town desired the prom to remain segregated. These moneyed bigots enabled other bigots to say things like: “I don’t want no niggers grinding up on my daughter” during a school meeting concerning switching from a segregated prom to an integrated one. Continue reading

Read Revolutionary Road Blogs live blog of it here:

If we do not have the votes of the people behind us, we will have nothing. The guardian council, the expediency council, EVERYONE gets their legitimacy from the vote of the people.

CNN coverage here.

NPR has the list

NPR.org, July 15, 2009 · To some people, the Land of the Free doesn’t always seem so free. And America the Beautiful doesn’t look so pretty.

That’s the viewpoint of two Washington-based groups — the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, and the National Coalition for the Homeless — that have targeted the country’s mingiest municipalities.

1. Los Angeles
2. St. Petersburg, Fla.
3. Orlando, Fla.
4. Atlanta
5. Gainesville, Fla.
6. Kalamazoo, Mich.
7. San Francisco
8. Honolulu
9. Bradenton, Fla.
10. Berkeley, Calif.

They built this index by how people treated the poorest folks. Its funny this list is Cali and Florida heavy. I am probably just throwing out a nutty a hypothesis, but I wonder if this list speaks somewhat to the reasons Florida and California are sub-prime/alt-a mortgage ground zeros. Brokers peddling that garbage to consumers was pretty mean as well.

Maybe if they averaged their data with indexes for sub-prime/alt-a mortgages, pay day loans and other predatory lending, this list would change significantly.

Carlos Watson leads a discussion with Matt Taibbi, Dylan Ratigan and Jean Chatzky regarding his Rolling Stone article identifying Goldman Sachs as the center of the boom and bust bubble cycle in American financial markets. Dylan Ratigan calls it stealing and says to protect themselves, private US Investors need to divest themselves from the stock market. Taibbi smartly replys that even if you are not a private investor, big bank machinations affect everyday financial matters including: gas prices, heating oil, pension returns and of course mortgage rates. Video after the jump.
Continue reading

With rising unemployment in June, a Alt-A mortgages expected to add new fuel for to the fire things don’t look very good for the “green shoots” and I don’t even know if it looks good for the Obama administration’s positive outlook for recovery by next year.

Amid rising unemployment and falling home prices, mortgage defaults have surged to record levels this year. Until recently, many banks have put off launching foreclosure action on the troubled properties, in part because they had signed up for the Obama administration’s home-stability plan, which required them to consider the alternative of modifying loans to make it easier for borrowers to make payments.
[…] But rising foreclosures will depress home values, pushing more homeowners underwater. Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com estimates that 15.4 million homeowners — or about 1 in 5 of those with first mortgages — owe more on their homes than they are worth.

Also, consumer confidence is already exceedingly low, and another jolt to the housing market could further crimp spending, which has been pummeled by the deep recession and persistent weakness in the job market. The latest unemployment rate, for June, rose to 9.5%, and many analysts predict that it will keep rising until the middle of next year.

Don Lee, LA Times, 7/4/2009