Last winter, the economy was improving. Absent a new problem, we were headed towards a recovery.

Then, Greece happened.

Obviously, it was much shittier for the Greeks, but it dramatically slowed our economy. For months, our economy started to look as if it were heading towards a double dip recession. Since then, our unemployment rates have remained stagnant.

Now, we are starting to get some good news again. It looks as though we've starting to get through the temporary problems caused by the Greek crisis/bankster holdup. Here are some examples.

US jobless claims hit 3-mo low as soft patch fades (Reuters 10/7/10)

Mortgage Rates At Record Lows (ABC News 10/7/10) [Note: Rates have been artificially high compared to the prime rate since the Crash of 2008.]

U.S. service sector growth picks up (CBC )

GDP report: Economic growth slightly faster (CNN Money 9/30/10)

Things aren't fabulous, but they are starting to show early signs of improvement. The freezes on home foreclosures by many major banks caught doing illegal foreclosures should help the economy too.

 

Think what we could have done with all the money we wasted.

 

Our society is reticent about discussing suicide in general. However, there are two specific forms of suicide which have gotten very little discussion in corporate media outlets, being blocked out even more than suicide in general. One of them is the high suicide rates of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. This censorship is due to corporate media outlets trying to keep as many people supporting these pointless wars as possible and to keep potential military recruits from finding out what they might be getting themselves into.

The other form of suicide that is especially censored is queer teen suicide. This has been motivated by prejudice. That may be changing.

A Rutgers student was outed sensationally by having video of him having sex with a man posted on the Internet. He killed himself. This story was so bizarre and extreme that it broke a media taboo. Other news stories of teenagers killing themselves after being bullied in school have surfaced.

This is long overdue. Ellen DeGeneres has eloquently responded to this. What she said is more than worth listening too.



The Trevor Project has been working on the issue of queer teen suicide for over a decade. Hopefully, the recent publicity on this concern will cause more people to take note and take action.

Hopefully, the coverage and interest of suicides and bullying of queer youth in the corporate media will not be a "flavor of the month" story to be dropped when the next trend comes along. I also hope that suicide among veterans gets the attention that issue deserves too.

 

Photo: Muffett

Meg Whitman's multi million dollar campaign to buy the California governor's office keeps running the same repetitive ad where her creepy spokesperson likes to brag about the jobs she created at the consumer hostile EBay. Yet, Whitman's campaign keeps quiet about the job killing effects of the corporation she ran.

Job killing effects of EBay? Is that heresy?

Yeah, it's heretical. Heresy is fun and generally quite rational.

The first industry where EBay killed jobs is the news industry. EBay, along with Craig's List, Monster, and Dice, devastated one of the biggest revenue streams for newspapers: classified advertising. Not only were jobs lost in classified ad sales, the lost ad revenue cost a lot of jobs in the newsroom as well.

Then, there are small Internet stores and online presences of small businesses online that were choked out by EBay's marketing juggernaut. Most of these businesses treated customers much better than EBay did while Queen Meg ran it.

It would be interesting to see a detailed accounting of the net jobs effect of Meg Whitman's EBay.

 

Today, there was a tornado watch for NYC. WTF?

There were tornadoes and a microburst a couple of weeks ago here too. Of the 10-12 tornadoes in NYC since the 50s, four of them have happened in the past four years. Yesterday was the hottest day in recorded history in Los Angeles.

The weather keeps getting stranger and further out of normal ranges. Yet, most corporate media reporting fails to even mention Global Warming, which must be playing some roll in the odd weather here in the US and abroad.

Big Coal and Big Oil are major advertisers and auto companies are bigger advertisers. The people who are executives and corporate media owners are nutty rightists who don't give a rats butt about the planet or the unwashed masses who can't flee from the consequences of climate change.

The same pliant media that lied on behalf of British Petroleum, laughably parroting claims that microbes had eaten most of the spilled oil (which is at the Gulf bottom where one would expect it to be), is using Pravda style censorship on Global Warming. And, they wonder why people don't want to pay for their defective products.

 

Evil NewsCorp CEO and Major Shareholder Rupert Murdoch

Supporting the Greedy Oily Pedophiles GOP may not be your intention, but any time you watch any of Rupert Murdoch's networks, you are helping to finance the Republican Party.

There was some controversy after Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp (the company that owns the Fox Networks and a lot of other crap) gave $1 million to the Republican Governor's Association so they can support politicians who will cut your government services. You can get a much more exhaustive list of Murdoch's personal campaign contributions at Newsmeat, the overwhelming majority of which have gone to Republican candidates and PACS.

Then, there is the de facto campaign contribution Murdoch is giving to past GOP governor and potential GOP presidential candidate Sarah Palin by using her as a contributor on Faux News, despite the fact that she has no skills or qualifications for doing any kind of analysis on anything.

Then, when you add in the constant barrage of GOP campaigning done on Faux News and the New York Post, among other Murdoch propaganda venues, you can see that patronizing Murdoch's Newscorp and supporting the GOP are completely intertwined.

Also keep in mind that the New York Post is a money losing proposition which is subsidized by the Fox Network, among other Murdoch media junk generators. The Post may be a shitty NYC tabloid, but it also has a significant readership in New Jersey and Connecticut, where former WWE CEO is trying to buy a Senate seat.

Here are some of the other programs that are part of the House of Murdoch: Cops, Family Guy, Fringe, House, Kitchen Nightmares, Master Chef, and the execrable American Idol.

Photos: World Economic Forum

fimoculous

 

Sarah Palin was laughing and being totally obsequeous while Mt. Limbaugh did this. She isn't just stupid. She's evil.

News reports about an anti immigrant party getting its first seats in the Swedish parliament have reinforced a pattern I have observed elsewhere over the past few months. Groups of people marketed as outsiders are the foci of raging hate campaigns.

The groups are defined by racial, religious, or ethnic lines. Far right politicians almost always are leading the charge. The scapegoating takes place in wealthy countries devastated by the Great Recession. It is all so similar, whether the targets are African Americans or Latinos in the US, Roma in France, or Muslims throughout the West.

Immigrant populations are especially convenient because they have less economic and political power to push back.

Scapegoating has long been a rather effective tactic used by power elites to maintain control, especially during bad economic times when people are angry. However, this is all so cookie cutter that it suggests some kind of coordination is involved between wealthy elites and rightist politicians, to their mutual benefit.

In any, case, we should not allow ourselves to be fooled by it.

I suppose it's a coincidence, but you never know for sure about these things.



You can hear Martin Gore singing Condemnation in this live concert. David Gahan usually sings it. (This is a true treat for real Depeche Mode fans.)




View Song Lyrics

 

(Hat Tip: Queer Isn't It)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

There are lots of corrupt people on the far right who have utter contempt of the loss of life on 911. Their lack of patriotism, integrity, and human decency knows no bounds.

 

I don't often talk about voting rights issues in this blog because there is so much other stuff going on, and it can get depressing. Mark Crispin Miller does an excellent job of discussing voting rights issues in his blog. He was one of the most vocal and effective voices in exposing the thefts of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.

However, I just voted with the new system, and it adds new problems to the old one. It uses optical scanners. It could be worse. We could be stuck with touch screen voting which is completely unreliable and unverifiable. However, it is just as easy to hack the optical scanner machines, so their counts are not particularly trustworthy. The optical scanner system at least results in paper ballots that could be hand counted. However, detecting fraud is not easy, and I don't know how difficult it is to get a hand recount.

There can be fraud in hand counted paper ballots too, but it is much more difficult to pull off, and hand recounts can catch some of it. Besides, we have been in a period of joblessness that has lasted over a decade. People need work. Hand counted paper ballots are the method of choice if you want the most reliable and trustworthy elections.

As if that isn't bad enough, there is another problem with voting that has nothing to do with the methods and machines. It has to do with write in voting. If a candidate in the primary doesn't have an opponent who managed to get on the ballot, there is no election at all, which means you can't write in anybody. Primaries where there is only one candidate are the ones where one would generally like to write somebody in the most.

This time, I would have loved to vote against rightist Phonycrats like Andrew Cuomo, Chuck Schumer, and my local congresscritter. Yet, I didn't have the opportunity. I'll have to wait for the general election and vote Green in those races. But, there is something deeply offensive to democracy that you can't vote for the candidate of your choice.

Hand counted paper ballots appear to be banned by federal law, when they should be absolutely mandatory...no exceptions. Write in voting should be available for all elective offices...no exceptions. Our democracy had flaws before the voting machines which have made matters much worse.