(Jim Morin via GoComics.com)
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So… who else has got plans for the weekend?
Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.
Late Night Open Thread: Barbarians!
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Via Dave Weigel, at Slate, the Glitterati Go Large.
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He found the perfect tongue-in-check counterpoint, too, but you’re gonna have to click over to appreciate it.
Open Thread: Thursday Garden Chat
From commentor Pukebot (last Friday):
I’ve been meaning to you send some shots of my western mass garden and so when I saw your post that you were fresh out of shots I decided that it was about time. Everything you see was forest 15 years ago. I’ve been picking away at it ever since making new beds and filling in with easy things like day lillies. My garlic is drying in the basement, artichokes are growing and it’s the time of year when you can’t eat enough to keep up with the garden. I have a quick job to do today and then I get to spend the rest of the weekend in the garden, weeding, supporting phlox, and picking veggies. Tell me if the world blows up.
Of course this weekend all the Northeastern gardeners are gonna be frantically tying up what can’t be taken down, as our Southeastern neighbors hunker down and wait to see how bad the damage from Hurricane Irene will be. The latest local predictions are that Pukebot’s garden will get the flooding rains, while my area north of Boston gets “tropical storm strength” winds. So if there’s no Sunday Garden Chat, it may be that we’ve lost power due to a fallen branch. Here’s hoping nobody has anything worse to report than some tomato trellises turned into tomato tunnels…
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How are things looking in your gardens, whether or not you’re in the storm track?
Open Thread: Michele, Farewell?
(Steve Sack via GoComics.com)
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Dave Weigel breaks down the new Gallup poll:
… The most-covered non-Perry candidates, Bachmann and Huntsman, both lost support. Bachmann lost around a fifth of her support after she won Ames. But I doubt the media has much to do with this. There is a Tea Party conservative vote, and Perry has swooped in to take it from Bachmann. He grabs 33% of it; she has 12%. He gets 34% of weekly churchgoers; she has 9%. He even leads Bachmann in the Midwest, where she trails Ron Paul, too. The best thing Perry has going for him — the problem Romney was always going to have — is his Southern base. He leads Romney by the margin of error in every region of the country except for the South, where he leads 39-12.
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So, call it: The Bachmann surge is over…
Perry/Romney/Perry 2012 — It’s not just a campaign, it’s a cage match!
Yeaaaah, I don’t think it’s that easy, either, much as it would please the robber-baron faction of the GOP. The theory is that Perry’s own personal come-out-of-nowhere Texas-Miracle-ness was sponsored by the self-styled “conservative elite” to distract the teahadist mouthbreathers (and the Media Village idiots) after St. Michele of the Heartland proved a little too popular with her fellow Dominionists. But for all the pro-forma submit-to-your-menfolk rhetoric, I suspect that Bachmann may decide her own personal hotline to Jesus outranks her loyalty to a bunch of guys in tailored suits. Rick Perry is willing to bang bibles with the Dominionists because their agenda dovetails, at the moment, with the greater glory of Rick Perry. Michele Bachmann is a believer, and that’s hard to fake and harder to dissuade.
Then again, maybe I’m just desperate to avoid 14 months of non-stop WILLARD!
Pull Up the Drawbridge, Stockpile Now
You don’t have to watch squirrels’ acorn-gathering efforts or measure wooly-bear caterpillar bands to predict an ongoing cranky, isolationist, get-away-from-MY-stuff season:
Consumers can expect to see a jump in prices for pasta, meat, vegetable oil and many other grocery items in the coming months as a pair of new government reports forecast on [Aug. 11] that a brutal mixture of heat, drought or flooding has taken a toll on the corn, soybeans and wheat grown on American farms.
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Futures prices for those important crops jumped on [Aug. 11], and commodities experts said that would lead to higher prices for manufacturers and consumers.
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“The message, based on today’s report, is these higher costs should not be expected to abate any time soon,” said Bill G. Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, a commodity consulting firm that works with restaurant companies and food manufacturers. “It implies higher cost forthcoming and subsequent margin pressure, and at some point the need to increase prices at the retail level or on the menus.” …
The geeks at Wired chip in to explain how “Food Prices Could Hit Tipping Point for Global Unrest“:
“When you have food prices peak, you have all these riots. But look under the peaks, at the background trend. That’s increasing quite rapidly, too,” said Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute. “In one to two years, the background trend runs into the place where all hell breaks loose.”…
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The researchers are hardly the first to portray food problems as a spark that inflames social inequality and stokes individual desperation, unleashing and amplifying impulses of rebellion. The role of food prices in triggering the Arab Spring has been widely described. Their innovation is a pair of price points on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s food price index: about 215 in current prices, or 190 when corrected for inflation.
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It’s at those points where, on a graph of food prices and social unrest between 2004 and 2011, unrest breaks out. But whereas they were crossed by price jumps in 2008, Bar-Yam and colleagues calculate that the underlying, steady trend — driven primarily by commodity speculation, agricultural crop-to-fuel conversion and rising prices of fertilizer and oil — crosses those points between 2012 and 2013.
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“Once we get there, the peaks aren’t the problem anymore. Instead it’s the trend. And that’s harder to correct,” said Bar-Yam. At that point, widespread political unrest and instability can be expected, even in countries less troubled than those in North Africa and the Middle East.
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“The GOP Wants to Raise Your Taxes”
Harold Meyerson, bless him, is shrill. The WaPo‘s only non-Villager columnist has the perfect short-form payroll-tax summary to email your low-information-voter acquaintances and family members:
America’s presumably anti-tax party wants to raise your taxes. Come January, the Republicans plan to raise the taxes of anyone who earns $50,000 a year by $1,000, and anyone who makes $100,000 by $2,000.
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Their tax hike doesn’t apply to income from investments. It doesn’t apply to any wage income in excess of $106,800 a year. It’s the payroll tax that they want to raise — to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent of your paycheck, a level established for one year in December’s budget deal at Democrats’ insistence. Unlike the capital gains tax, or the low tax rates for the rich included in the Bush tax cuts, or the carried interest tax for hedge fund operators (which is just 15 percent), the payroll tax chiefly hits the middle class and the working poor…
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Republicans like to complain that Democrats practice “class warfare” and “the politics of division,” as House GOP leader Eric Cantor argued on this page Monday. What the Republicans’ position on the payroll tax makes high-definitionally clear is their own class warfare on working- and middle-class Americans. Their double standard couldn’t be more obvious: Tax cuts for the wealthy are sacrosanct; tax cuts for everyone else don’t really matter. Norquist, Cantor, Ryan, Camp, the Journal editorialists and the whole Republican crew give hypocrisy a bad name.
Couldn’t Happen to A More Deserving Vampire Squid
Per commentor Argive, the Guardian reports that “Goldman Sachs [is] braced for legal battles over financial crisis“:
Goldman Sachs, the embattled investment bank, will face an array of legal claims focusing on its conduct during the financial crisis, one of Wall Street’s most feared lawyers warned last night.
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The prediction of an escalation in cases is being made by Jake Zamansky, the US attorney nicknamed “Jaws” who spearheaded the successful pursuit of the investment banks after the dotcom crash. It follows a move by Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, to hire Reid Weingarten, one of America’s top criminal defence lawyers, to help him address claims that the bank misled clients in the run-up to the financial crisis and, afterwards, Congress.
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“I consider this to be a very significant event. For Lloyd Blankfein to be hiring a top criminal lawyer indicates that there may be allegations of wrongdoing forthcoming from the Department of Justice [DoJ],” Zamansky said. “Investors are asking why there have been no criminal cases against Goldman Sachs or any investment bank arising from the financial crisis. This may be a sign of more cases to come. It may be the beginning of a series of cases against Wall Street firms”. […] __
Shares in Goldman fell in late trading on Monday after Weingarten’s appointment emerged – shedding 4.7% to $104.25, their lowest level since April 2009.They had dropped again on Tuesday.
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Blankfein turned to the high profile lawyer after the DoJ began investigating the way Goldman sold subprime mortgages – the toxic investments that triggered the credit crunch. The banker has also been accused of misleading a Senate committee – a claim that is emphatically denied by Goldman. Blankfein has not been charged with any offence. Goldman itself was charged in April 2010 with defrauding investors of more than $1bn (£606m), and later paid a $550m fine. In June, the bank was served with a subpoena by the Manhattan prosecutor…
NYMag takes the blog equivalent of a victory lap:
“Nervous? What would I be nervous about?” Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein echoed in June, when we asked him if he was worried about the possibility that his firm might face criminal charges for its mortgage-backed securities activities. “I’m not worried that there’s any criminal activity,” said Blankfein. Nor was he concerned that he, personally, would be sent to “pound me in the ass prison,” as a source of Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi colorfully put it. “Do I think I’m going to be convicted of a crime? No,” he continued, a bit crossly. “I don’t think anyone really thinks I missold CDOs in mortgage desk and picked up the phone and called people and did that, so.” But it was such an odd time, we said to him. People were so angry. Wasn’t he worried about being made an example of?
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