Senate

Meant to blog this when it came out, but it's one of the funniest/creepiest things I've ever read in the Times: a really odd Q&A with Karl Rove.

Jeremy Scahill
AlterNet
November 21, 2008

A who’s who guide to the people poised to shape Obama’s foreign policy.

The ballots are being recounted in the Senate race in Minnesota between Norm Coleman and Al Franken because the initial tally was almost too close to call. MPR has a look at some of the ballots that are being challenged...it's amazing how many weird ways people can mark a ballot that uses a simple fill-in-the-circle design.

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Naomi Klein's must-read piece in Rolling Stone about the $700 billion Wall Street bailout begins by examining Reuben Jeffery III, the man first tapped to serve as the program's chief investment officer. Snip:

[Landis Comment]  Syria is expecting change with Obama’s election. The Syrian people were overwhelmingly in favor of Obama. The Syrian leadership are Obama fans as well because he promises to draw down the US involvement in Iraq within the next two years, re-open regular US communication with Syria, and follow the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report, which stressed on the importance of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Dear Senator Obama:

In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words “hope and change,” “change and hope” have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not “hope and change” but the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo.

A controversial move to establish a Milton Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago will be debated Wednesday by the first formal meeting of the faculty in a decade.

But the university administration has decreed that talk won't lead to action. Some 150 faculty members oppose the $200-million project, named after the outspoken free-market economist. They argue the intitute could compromise academic research and the school's non-partisan standing.

Here is below the text of an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations; the interview took place on Sunday October 5th but the message and policy recommendations that I proposed to prevent a systemic financial and corporate sector meltdown are still very relevant as the Fed and other central banks are still fiddling while Rome is burning.

It is now clear that the US financial system - and now even the system of financing of the corporate sector - is now in cardiac arrest and at a risk of a systemic financial meltdown. I don’t use these words lightly but at this point we have reached the final 12th step of my February paper on “The Risk of a Systemic Financial Meltdown: 12 Steps to a Financial Disaster” (Step 9 or the collapse of the major broker dealers has already widely occurred).