Gloria R. Lalumia's World Media Watch for
November 16, 2007

post from BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash on 16 November 2007 11:25:52 AM. © BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash

WORLD MEDIA WATCH

Summaries are excerpted from the source articles; the featured article follows the summary section.

1//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong
MUQTADA MOVES TO STOP A SUNNI 'SURGE'

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http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/lalumia/309

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The Most E-Mailed

post from Ezra Klein on 16 November 2007 11:17:00 AM. © Ezra Klein

I'm open to the idea that newspapers should give much more attention to their "most e-mailed lists." Before reading the article, I wouldn't have been, because I was pretty sure the most e-mailed lists were mainly composed of stories about...[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/the-most-e-mail.html

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Your Most Trusted Name In News

post from Eschaton on 16 November 2007 11:16:00 AM. © Eschaton

CNN:

Maria Luisa, the UNLV student who asked Hillary Clinton whether she preferred "diamonds or pearls" at last night's debate wrote on her MySpace page this morning that CNN forced her to ask the frilly question instead of a pre-approved query about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

"Every single question asked during the debate by the audience had to be approved by CNN," Luisa writes. "I was asked to submit questions including "lighthearted/fun" questions. I submitted more than five questions on issues important to me. I did a policy memo on Yucca Mountain a year ago and was the finalist for the Truman Scholarship. For sure, I thought I would get to ask the Yucca question that was APPROVED by CNN days in advance."

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/blogspot/bRuz/~3/185875704/2007_11_11_archive.html

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Senate blocks vote on Iraq redeployment bill.

post from Think Progress on 16 November 2007 11:16:00 AM. © Think Progress

An Iraq redeployment proposal adopted by the House earlier this week received a 53-45 vote in the Senate today, falling short of the 60 needed to advance. The vote “came minutes after the Senate rejected a Republican proposal to pay for the Iraq war without strings attached.”

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/11/16/senate-blocks-vote-on-iraq-redeployment-bill/

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No More Curtain Calls For "BALCO Barry"

post from The Liberal Doomsayer on 16 November 2007 11:11:00 AM. © The Liberal Doomsayer

I really don?t want to devote much time to posting about Barry Bonds and the four-count perjury indictment handed down against him yesterday, but I?m only mentioning this to provide an opportunity to revisit this column about Bonds written by the late, great David Halberstam. As with many people of talent, the author spends a sizeable amount of effort here featuring himself (interesting though Halberstam?s life was), but what he writes about Bonds is typically dead-on accurate.

Read The Full Article:
http://liberaldoomsayer.blogspot.com/2007/11/no-more-curtain-calls-for-balco-barr
y.html

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Proving The Point

post from Eschaton on 16 November 2007 11:08:00 AM. © Eschaton

Someone showed up at the end of the Social Security thread to write this:

So math isn't one of your skills, then? The system goes into the red around 2017 - a decade from now. At that point, money that would otherwise flow towards discretionary programs will start bleeding to Social Security and Medicare. It will get worse over the course of the following 2 decades, until eventually, there won't be any money left for discretionary spending at all.

Essentially this is the prefunding con job. Since FICA revenues will cease to support general expenditures in the near future what we must do is... increase the FICA tax so it continues to support general expenditures. In other words, we need to increase the regressive payroll tax so that we don't need to raise other taxes. And we're doing it to "save" social security.

This is the con, laid out clearly for all to see. This has nothing to do with "saving Social security" and everything to do with increasing the regressivity of the tax code.

Someone had an idea for a lockbox, but the Village Elders decided that was a very silly idea.

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/blogspot/bRuz/~3/185848140/2007_11_11_archive.html

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More Planted Questions...

post from THE LIBERAL JOURNAL on 16 November 2007 11:02:00 AM. © THE LIBERAL JOURNAL

While Hillary Clinton got a boost from the debate, one wonders how contrived of a boost it was. As I mentioned in my earlier analysis, the crowd seemed pro-Clinton, and booed at the slightest hint of criticism of her.

The debate questions were also structured in her favor--at least the opening sequence and the final one. The opening question enabled Hillary to get the criticism of her out of the way and allowed her to frame it in the best light. She was prepared to address it, and was prepared to attack Barack for being equally duplicitous, which wasn't exactly the case.

During the debate, Wolf never followed up on Hillary's drivers license immigration stance. Then there was the last question of whether she preferred diamonds or pearls--I mean that just doesn't pass the smell test. That an educated young woman, which the questioner was, would even try get on national TV to ask such a meaningless question boggles my mind. And it should:

Maria Luisa, the UNLV student who asked Hillary Clinton whether she preferred "diamonds or pearls" at last night's debate wrote on her MySpace page this morning that CNN forced her to ask the frilly question instead of a pre-approved query about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

"Every single question asked during the debate by the audience had to be approved by CNN," Luisa writes. "I was asked to submit questions including "lighthearted/fun" questions. I submitted more than five questions on issues important to me. I did a policy memo on Yucca Mountain a year ago and was the finalist for the Truman Scholarship. For sure, I thought I would get to ask the Yucca question that was APPROVED by CNN days in advance."

Now, Luisa is getting "swamped" with critical e-mails.

So what happened?

Writes Luisa:

"CNN ran out of time and used me to "close" the debate with the pearls/diamonds question. Seconds later this girl comes up to me and says, "you gave our school a bad reputation.' Well, I had to explain to her that every question from the audience was pre-planned and censored. That's what the media does. See, the media chose what they wanted, not what the people or audience really wanted. That's politics; that's reality. So, if you want to read about real issues important to America--and the whole world, I suggest you pick up a copy of the Economist or the New York Times or some other independent source. If you want me to explain to you how the media works, I am more than happy to do so. But do not judge me or my integrity based on that question."Rivals to Clinton believe that the debate audience had a pro-Clinton tilt. UNLV was responsible for distributing most of the tickets.

I liked the array of topics touched upon during the debate, but CNN clearly bent over backwards to help Hillary. But her campaign couldn't write a better closing question than 'Diamonds or Pearls'. The fix was in after the debate, too, as it featured Clinton confidante James Carville lauding her performance while in the supposed role of an unbiased pundit. Ugh.

Read The Full Article:
http://liberaljournal.blogspot.com/2007/11/more-planted-questions.html

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The Master Debaters

I stayed up way too late last night watching the Democratic “debate” on CNN. I have not sat through many of these events, partly because, like Christmas, it just seems like presidential campaign season just comes earlier and earlier every year and all the commercialism is just taking the spirit out of it; and also [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.kiav.net/?p=188

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Mikes Blog Round Up

Greetings and salutations, minxes and mondains. Melissa McEwan, aka The Pink Petulance, coming to you from Superblogger Headquarters, where SuperKos is delegating responsibilities before taking off for Planet Newsweekia. It’s busy busy busy at Superblogger HQ, and I’ve just been told that Captain Atrios needs to discuss staff rotation at Battlestation Alpha with me, so [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/11/16/mikes-blog-round-up-512/

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Part of the Problem

Link:

In early September, a senior Moody's executive....at a small private dinner....said, "Moody's would never lower the credit ratings of a financial guarantor, because that would put the guarantors out of business."

Obviously one way to see this is that it's an issue of cozy crony corruption - and it's that too, of course - but also it's clear that there are structural problems in the financial industry. Lowering the credit rating of certain entities should be a perfectly mundane thing, a minor hit but nothing more. But for a variety of reasons it's actually more like dropping a nuke on the firm. Instead of being an additional signal to investors, a better reflection of the underlying reality, the act of lowering a credit rating can pretty much destroy these companies. Of course over time this is self-reinforcing, as everyone knows that there's a great resistance by the rating agencies to lower credit ratings for certain types of firms, which increases their reaction if it ever does happen, which leads to further resistance to cutting the ratings, etc...