600,000 Dead in Iraq

Today the public health department at Johns Hopkins has released a new study of deaths in Iraq, based on a new larger sample of the population. Around 600,000 have died in Iraq since the U.S. attacked in the spring of 2003.

September foreclosures up 19 percent
Foreclosures in the state grew 19 percent from August to September, pushing California to the top of the list for the most new foreclosure filings in September. The number of foreclosures in the state tripled since September 2005, with 14,806 properties entering some stage of foreclosure, or about one for every 825 households. This represents an increase of 40 percent since July.

Quick Overview

• The U.S. Treasury said the federal government posted a $247.7 billion deficit in 2005-2006, down from $319 billion the previous year and the smallest in four years.
  

• Minutes from the Fed September policy meeting showed officials remain "concerned" about upside inflation risks.
  
  

• GDP in the EU-12 was up 0.9% QoQ and up 2.7% YoY.
  

Iowa 'futures' show Republican weakness
"The best guess coming from the market is that it will be a divided Congress," says Prof. Forrest Nelson of the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business, which has operated the markets since since 1988.

Quick Overview

• Machinery orders in Japan were up 6.7% in August, less than expected.
  

• (Bloomberg) -- The Bank of Japan will probably keep interest rates unchanged at a policy meeting this week, judging that gains in consumer prices are not yet sufficient to warrant raising the lowest borrowing costs among major economies.
  
  

• The world continues to be surprised by the significance of Australia's parched wheat fields that will yield only a fraction of last year's production. There is talk that Australia may have to purchase wheat to meet commitments. Argentina is also suffering dry conditions.
  
  
• The International Copper Study Group said that world copper production exceeded usage in the first half of 2006 by 13,000 tons.
  

Quick Overview

• The U.S. Federal Reserve could do "fairly little" and let the bond market stabilize the economy, St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President William Poole told the Financial Times in an interview published on Tuesday.
  
  

• The Australia Grains Council said the domestic wheat crop could be as low as 10 million tons, which is below recent industry forecasts and is less than half last year's crop of 25 million tons.
  
  

• OPEC agreed to reduce oil production by one million barrels a day.
  

• Industrial production in Germany rose 1.9% in August.
  
  

Legislating Morality
John Pugsley

This is a test. Can you see the relationship between these two news stories?

"The U.S. Congress has passed a law, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, banning the use of credit cards, checks, and electronic fund transfers for Internet gaming, and President Bush is expected to sign it."

"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called on state legislators to take "swift and dramatic action" to fix what he called a "dangerous situation" in California's jam-packed prisons. Prison officials warn they will simply run out of prison beds by June. Already inmates are stacked on double- and triple-bunks in gymnasiums and day centers."


Answer: It's cause and effect. Any law that forbids individuals from using their own property as they please is certain to increase the need for prisons. Criminalizing voluntary exchanges between individuals (victimless crimes) increases the profitability of supplying outlawed products, creates a black-market rife with violence, decreases respect for law, fills prisons, and increases the power of the state. It doesn't matter if it's gambling, drugs, alcohol, sex, or cigarettes.

A special comment about lying
Keith Olbermann on the difference between terrorists and critics

Quick Overview

• U.S. Interest rates may not be high enough to quell a recent bout of inflation, Philadelphia Federal Reserve President Charles Plosser said on Thursday.
  
  

• First-time U.S. jobless claims fell 17,000 to 302,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday.
  
  

• Statistics Canada estimated Canada's wheat crop at 26.3 million tons, down 2% YoY.
  

• The European Central Bank increased its interest rate from 3.00% to 3.25%.
  

• OPEC reportedly decided to cut production by 1 million barrels a day.
  

• The U.S. DoE said that underground supplies of natural gas were up 73 billion cubic feet last week to 3.327 trillion cubic feet.
  

• Conflicting opinions arose on Thursday whether the European Central Bank had sold its full 500-t yearly quota of gold under the five-year Central Bank Gold Agreement.

Quick Overview

• The U.S. Federal Reserve remains worried inflation is too high, but is also watching to see how much a "substantial correction" in housing markets will slow economic growth, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Wednesday.
  
  

• The U.S. economy’s service sector grew at its slowest rate in three years, the Institute for Supply Management said Wednesday.
  

• U.S. Factory orders were unchanged in August, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.
  

• The MBA mortgage applications index rose sharply by +11.9%.
  

• The U.S. Department of Energy said that::
  Supplies of crude oil were up 3.3 million barrels last week to 328.1 million barrels.
  Supplies of unleaded gasoline were up 1.2 million barrels
  Supplies of heating oil supplies were down 400,000 barrels.
  

• Dow-Jones reported that in the first nine months of 2006, the U.S. bought 70% of Brazil's 2.3 billion liters of ethanol exports.
  

• The Australian central bank left its key interest rate unchanged.
  

• YoY Retail sales volume in the EU-12 up 2.4% in August.
  

• Services index in the U.K. up 0.9% QoQ
  

Are You an 'Unlawful Combatant'?
Maybe so… Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner, all Republicans, grandstanded for weeks over the torture provisions, then capitulated. Another "Republican maverick," Arlen Specter, zeroed in on the real
issue, however, when he said the bill would set us back 800 years by repealing the habeas corpus protections against arbitrary arrest and jailings – and then went ahead and voted for it, anyway.

Is Olbermann on Thin Ice?
But MSNBC is still owned by GE's conservative bosses, and managed by NBC's ever-timid executives. Olbermann knows this reality as well as anyone; six months ago on C-SPAN, while expressing confidence that good ratings would keep them at bay, he remarked: "There are people I know in the hierarchy of NBC, the company, and GE, the company, who do not like to see the current presidential administration criticized at all."

A National Driver's License and the Fading Right of Anonymity Real Bad ID
By STAN COX
REAL ID mandates nine data elements that the national driver's license must have, but puts no limit on the kinds of data that may be stored on the card's chip or in any database that the card might link to. It says the card must be readable by all state goverments and the US government but doesn't say that it cannot be readable by businesses or other entities. So far, those questions have been left up to Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and to the states.

Quick Overview

• The U.S. economy is likely heading for a soft-landing rather than a full-blown recession as slowdowns in the housing and job markets constrain consumer spending, the National Retail Federation trade group said on Tuesday.
  

• The Renewable Fuels Association said the U.S. consumed 360,000 barrels ar day of ethanol in July, more than the 316,000 daily barrels that were produced.
  

• December gold tumbled $21.80 to end at $581.50, the lowest close in three months, in sympathy with the lower price of crude oil.
  

• The European Aug unemployment rate rose to 7.9% from 7.8% in July, which was the first rise in the unemployment rate in nearly 3 years.
  

• Retail sales in Australia were up 0.3% in August, better than expected.
  

• Japan's Finance Minister Kohi Omi said that, "Judging from the current state of the economy, we can declare Japan's deflation is over."
  

• Oil tumbled more than two dollars on Tuesday to below $59 a barrel, sinking to the lowest level since February and prompting OPEC's president to call on the exporter group to deepen supply cuts
  

• The yen dropped against the dollar and Euro after North Korea said it will conduct a nuclear test.

The St. Petersburg Times and The Miami Herald were given copies of the e-mail, as were other news organizations, including Fox News.

Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rice All Received 9/11 Report They Denied Receiving
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The State Department's disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don't remember the warning.

Quick Overview

• The Institute for Supply Management said Monday its manufacturing index fell to 52.9 in September, its lowest level since last May.
  
  

• Construction spending rose 0.3% in August, the Commerce Department said Monday
  
  

• The Bank of Japan's Tankan business survey increased from 21 to 24 stronger than expected, putting the Japanese economy back in a more positive light and increasing the chances for another BOJ rate hike before year-end.
  

• The People's Bank of China expects the economy to grow 10.5% this year.
  

Decimating the Constitution with Military Tribunals
Given all the glorification being bestowed on three U.S. senators for displaying “principle” in standing against President Bush’s plan to amend the Geneva Convention to permit torture of detainees, followed by their quick compromise abandoning any semblance of principle, it is easy to lose sight of something much bigger: The military tribunals that the president and the Congress are set to approve will constitute the most radical, dangerous, and disgraceful transformation in the U.S. criminal-justice system since our nation’s inception.

Bush 'kept Blair in the dark over Iraq' An explosive new book claims that Tony Blair pleaded in vain with George Bush to share vital combat intelligence about the Iraq war.

Congress Adds Internet Gambling Ban To U.S. Port Security Bill
Lawmakers added Internet gambling prohibitions at the last minute as they were finishing legislation on increasing security at U.S. ports. They connected unrelated measures to try to get approval, according to sources.

World finance watchdogs focus on opaque derivatives market
The world's three most powerful financial regulators want to tighten up derivatives markets, where explosive growth in recent times has sparked fears of a potential financial disaster.
Officials from Britain's Financial Services Authority, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the US Securities and Exchange Commission warn that countries must join forces to help contain risks posed by the rapid global expansion of derivatives.

Top Republicans accused of cover-up over sex scandal
Within hours of the departure of Mark Foley, a lawmaker from the Palm Beach area dogged for years by rumours about his sexuality, the party of "family values" turned on itself in an unseemly sequence of
denials, accusations and counter-accusations in which the party's top leaders appeared frantic to save their own political skins.

Detainee bill lifts Bush's power to new heights
President now has legal authority even courts can't challenge
"The president walked away with a lot more than most people thought," Ackerman said. He said the bill "further entrenches presidential power" and allows the administration to declare even a U.S. citizen an unlawful combatant subject to indefinite detention. "And it's not only about these prisoners," Ackerman said. "If Congress can strip courts of jurisdiction over cases because it fears their outcome, judicial independence is threatened."

Benjamin Franklin's prescient warning should give us pause: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."

Swiss plan tunnel under Strait of Gibraltar
The Swiss Lombardi engineering firm has won the contract to design a railway tunnel between Europe and Africa running under the Strait of Gibraltar.

G.O.P. Leaders Knew in Late ’05 of E-Mail
Top House Republicans knew for months about e-mail traffic between Representative Mark Foley and a former teenage page, but kept the matter secret and allowed Mr. Foley to remain head of a Congressional caucus on children’s issues, Republican lawmakers said Saturday.

White House on a Rampage Against the Constitution RALPH NADER
So long as the lawyers and their bar associations in America do not challenge the advancing dictatorial powers of George W. Bush, so long as citizen groups, labor unions and libertarians, conservatives and liberals avoid uniting together, these constitutional crimes against due process, probable cause, habeas corpus, together with torture and indefinite imprisonment at the whim of the Executive branch, will worsen and erode American jurisprudence with serious consequences for both the nation's security and its liberties.

Remember that telling thought by the British Parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, at the time of the American Revolution: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Rounding Up U.S. Citizens
Because the bill was adopted with lightning speed, barely anyone noticed that it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens, "unlawful enemy combatants."
Bush & Co. has portrayed the bill as a tough way to deal with aliens to protect us against terrorism. Frightened they might lose their majority in Congress in the November elections, the Republicans rammed the bill through Congress with little substantive debate.

Benjamin Franklin's prescient warning should give us pause: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."

Bush faces wave of challenges to terror law
"The fact that they are denying the right of habeas corpus is so unlawful and unconstitutional that it throws us back to before King John and the Magna Carta," said Michael Ratner, president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights"

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety: Benjamin Franklin

The Blind Leading the Willing
A compromise between those who don't care and those who don't want to know.
By Dahlia Lithwick
We've reached a defining moment in our democracy when our elected officials are celebrating their own blind ignorance as a means of keeping the rest of us blindly ignorant as well.

The Antifederalists Were Right
September 27 marks the anniversary of the publication of the first of the Antifederalist Papers in 1789. The Antifederalists were opponents of ratifying the US Constitution. They feared that it would create an overbearing central government, while the Constitution's proponents promised that this would not happen. As the losers in that debate, they are largely overlooked today. But that does not mean they were wrong or that we are not indebted to them.