I am sick of this Reverend Wright non-scandal the media is using to smear Obama. Taking what one man said over 30 years out of context and implying that it proves Obama is out of the main-stream public opinion is ridiculous. Furthermore, maligning what Obama himself said about his own Grandmother is appalling. Anyone manipulated by this crap is mindless and addicted to television pundits thinking for them.

The real Reverend scandal involves Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who has owned the Washington Times newspaper for the last 15 or so years, and has links with the GOP that are as long as Reverend Wright. The difference is that Wright actually provides a service to the community. What does the Korean Reverend Moon do? Click here for a short film on the insanity that is Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

I bring you Cliff Schecter.

Progressive author John Gorenfeld recently released a book exposing the unsavory ties between the GOP and billionaire, Washington Times Publisher (and convicted tax cheat) Reverend Sun Myung Moon. In his book, Bad Moon Rising, Gorenfeld shows the relationship between many in the Republican hierarchy, including the Bush clan, and a man who has often been charged with being a leader of a cult.

What is beyond question, however, is that a high-ranking McCain Campaign official, Charlie Black, has planned ceremonies for Moon to be crowned "King Of America," and Moon has had damning things to say about the Christian faith.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

First from an email chain between Gorenfeld and Black: From: John Gorenfeld

To:"CHARLIE BLACK" cc: Subject: Re: Moon event at Dirksen Senate Office Building, 3/23

05/06/2004 09:31 PM

Dear Mr. Black,

Thanks for your reply.

It's kind of an amazing event, with Moon being coronated as the king and declaring himself the Messiah at a federal building. Can you tell me how you got involved with inviting people? Is this an annual event, or just a one-time thing?

sincerely,

John

On Apr 28, 2004, at 10:34 AM, CHARLIE BLACK wrote:

John,

I lent my name and sent invitations to a few friends. Unfortunately, I had a conflict and couldn't go to the event.

Charlie

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

... what is clear from this email is that top Mccain advisor Charlie Black is admitting that he helped plan, and would have attended, an event where a convicted tax fraud would have been crowned King Of America and declared himself the Messiah--all on U.S. Government federal property (on March 23, 2004).

According to The New York Times: "Mr. Moon, an eccentric billionaire, convicted tax cheat, conservative publisher and power broker, grandly donned scarlet robes and a golden crown at the Dirksen Office Building. ''I am God's ambassador, sent to earth with his full authority..."

I guess I'm a little prolific this afternoon. Nothing like a cafe with free wi-fi, and a double latte to sip -- which helps the nausea. Its my way to deal with the rampant insanity of the modern world, and the zombies who live here.

The latest in a long, long line of scandals plaguing Iraq contracting company KBR, today the Times of London reports that British employees of KBR working in the British Embassy in Iraq have been accused of sexual harassment. One Iraqi woman, a cleaner at the embassy, says that the KBR employee offered to double her pay if she slept with him; when she refused, she was fired:

The Iraqis accuse the embassy of leaving the abuse unchallenged and failing adequately to respond to complaints against several British managers for KBR. The company was allowed to conduct its own inquiry, an arrangement criticised as a very serious conflict of interest.

The complainants — the cleaner and two male cooks who worked in the embassy canteen — say that some KBR managers groped Iraqi staff regularly, paid or otherwise rewarded them for sex and dismissed those who refused or spoke out.

All three Iraqis lost their jobs in the Green Zone. Two KRB employees who worked in the embassy spoke out in support of the women; a few days later, KBR sent them home on paid leave and later fired them. The women also say KBR never interviewed them when conducting their internal review.

[SOURCE: Deborah Haynes in Baghdad, and Sonia Verma in Dubai | London Times | 8 May 2008]

Clinton's "street cred" on national security consists, of course, of being massively wrong on the most important national security issue of her career. Paradoxically, a lot of folks find her massive wrongness on this hugely important issue reassuring because they and their friends were also wrong and they view having made the right call to be a suspicious quality. After all, the Iraq War may have led to thousands of U.S. deaths, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and millions of Iraqi refugees all at a cost of over $1 trillion and in ways that's damaged the strategic position of the United States, but war opponents were all a bunch of hippies.

the US military and its Iraqi "allies" are laying siege to a sprawling neighborhood in Baghdad housing roughly 2.5 million Iraqis, launching air strikes, artillery attacks, tank shells and other assorted ordnance, shutting down hospitals and bombing others, cutting off the supply of food and walling off entire sectors of the embattled region, causing a refugee crisis by their actions - and now actually pursuing a policy with the intent of creating a larger refugee crisis!

For what reason: because a majority of residents in these regions support a political movement, and militia, that oppose our presence. Can't have that. Because we have to keep 150,000 troops in Iraq to safeguard the Iraqi people. After all, whose gonna set up the tents in the refugee catch basins we so magnanimously helped set up to receive the overflow from our relentless assault on political movements that would make it harder for us to stay in Iraq. To safeguard the Iraqi people.

The link provides a summary of the events from 2 reputable news sources : BBC and McClatchy News Services.

This is how we bring them freedom. We bomb and kill the Iraqi civilians merely because the citizens of Iraq support resistance groups which oppose being occupied by American troops at 14 military bases. They will love us more when we flatten their cities and create tens of thousands of refugees, some of whom were not involved with the resistance groups.

I look at all these people driving around with "Pray for Our Troops" or "God Bless America" stickers and fight the urge to scream at their clueless dumb asses thinking they are exerting patriotic pride when they put a sticker on their vehicle.

How much have these suburbanites really sacrificed to support this invasion? Are they buying bonds to support the war effort? Are donating scrap metal to support the war effort? Are they sending more taxes to support the government's ability to pay the exorbitant contracts of the cost-plus government contractors? Are they bothered when the god damn VA is cutting back on services to the veterans who return home? Are they helping Vets from the National Guard make their mortgage payments when they can no longer work at their old jobs after they were stop-lossed 3 times in a row? Do they concern themselves with the children who grow up never knowing their father or mother because they got killed in this conflict? Do these bumper sticker patriots even give a shit how the average Iraqi feels about our actions half way across the world?

No. They have their heads shoved so far up their god damn asses, that it's impossible for them to understand the morbid hypocrisy that they exude every single moment of their pathetic lives.

I need to throw up.

This is hella funny. Click here for a sequence of comedic word problems that poke fun at hedge fund managers.

Here's two examples:

Among those earning 10-figure incomes, Mr. Soros's total annual compensation is greater than Mr. Falcone's. Mr. Falcone's is greater than Mr. Griffin's. Mr. Griffin's is smaller than Mr. Soros's, and Mr. Paulson's is greater than Mr. Soros's.

In descending order, list the men by the respective hotness of their trophy wives.

~ ~ ~

Your middle-class parents have a combined household income of $115,000. You receive an allowance of $20 per week. If you save all your allowance for two years, how much debt will you have to finance to hostilely take over your family? How will you structure the debt?

"With the enemy's approach to Moscow, the Moscovites' view of their situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger approaching.

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant."

--Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace"

hat tip to Barry Ritholtz.

Today, The New York Times has more details on this malpractice, including the fact that senior KBR and Pentagon officials repeatedly ignored warnings by KBR electricians:

One electrician warned his KBR bosses in his 2005 letter of resignation that unsafe electrical work was “a disaster waiting to happen.” Another said he witnessed an American soldier in Afghanistan receiving a potentially lethal shock. A third provided e- mail messages and other documents showing that he had complained to KBR and the government that logs were created to make it appear that nonexistent electrical safety systems were properly functioning.

KBR itself told the Pentagon in early 2007 about unsafe electrical wiring at a base near the Baghdad airport, but no repairs were made. Less than a year later, a soldier was electrocuted in a shower there.

John McLain, the electrician who in 2007 told a visiting defense contracting agency official about his concerns over the logs, was fired shortly after the incident. Another employee “said his KBR bosses mocked him for raising safety issues.”

Today, The New York Times has more details on this malpractice, including the fact that senior KBR and Pentagon officials repeatedly ignored warnings by KBR electricians:

One electrician warned his KBR bosses in his 2005 letter of resignation that unsafe electrical work was “a disaster waiting to happen.” Another said he witnessed an American soldier in Afghanistan receiving a potentially lethal shock. A third provided e- mail messages and other documents showing that he had complained to KBR and the government that logs were created to make it appear that nonexistent electrical safety systems were properly functioning.

KBR itself told the Pentagon in early 2007 about unsafe electrical wiring at a base near the Baghdad airport, but no repairs were made. Less than a year later, a soldier was electrocuted in a shower there.

John McLain, the electrician who in 2007 told a visiting defense contracting agency official about his concerns over the logs, was fired shortly after the incident. Another employee “said his KBR bosses mocked him for raising safety issues.”

[SOURCE: James Risen | New York Times | 4 May 2008]

No doubt you've already gleaned the beaming news that instead of the 75,000-80,000 or even greater job losses and higher unemployment rate that the soothsayers were prognosticating, payrolls last month were trimmed by a much more modest 20,000, and the unemployment rate dipped to 5%, from 5.1%. Hallelujah! It's such a happy contrast to those nasty expectations and to the 81,000 jobs that vanished in March.

What makes the report all the more extraordinary is that it comes in the face of otherwise dismal dispatches from the employment front. Layoffs last month, according to Challenger Gray & Christmas, the placement firm, tallied 90,015, a hefty 68% greater than in March. New claims for unemployment insurance in the last full week in April rose to 380,000, from 345,000 the week before, while continuing claims topped the three million mark. Monster, the online want-ad outfit, reported a 6% drop in its April index compared with the same month a year ago, and the Conference Board's help-wanted index sagged to a new low while its measure of employment opportunities showed, not surprisingly, jobs are ever-harder to come by.

The BLS report, then, was like a burst of sunshine dispelling the gloom. So we take this occasion to tip our hat to the bureau's artistry in being able to fashion a comparatively heartening picture of the job market out of some very unpromising raw material. The populace, as recent soundings make clear, is plenty uneasy and disgruntled about the stumbling economy, feeling the pinch and worried about a paycheck; so anything that can provide a lift to sagging spirits is more than welcome.

Actually, the praise really belongs to the unknown (at least to us) and certainly unsung numbers-bender who crafted the so- called birth/death adjustment, supposedly created to capture the additional jobs of firms too new to be captured by the survey. As it has demonstrated time and again, it's much more a product of the imagination than of dull data, as, of course, any worthwhile work of fiction is.

We have on occasion pointed out the contribution the birth/death adjustment has made to the payroll total, but we have trouble remembering when the additional slots it conjured up were anywhere near as massive as they were in the April reckoning, when it "generated" 267,000 jobs. Put another way, ex the adjustment, last month's job loss would have ballooned to 287,000. Bit of a difference, eh?

Just one illustration points up the, shall we say, peculiarity of what the BLS adjustment has wrought. According to the birth/death model, 8,000 jobs were added in April -- are you sitting down? -- in the financial sector. Which, we assume, will come as a stunning surprise to the gosh knows how many poor souls who have been laid off by the banks, the brokerage houses and the rest of the not-very-robust financial fraternity. Must be something really wrong with our vision, moreover, since new firms in that sector appear to be conspicuous by their absence.

As Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood, the very bright bulbs who run The Liscio Report, point out -- though they usually view the birth/death model more kindly than we do -- among the stranger additions made via its agency in the April report was the 45,000 to construction jobs. (In case you've been vacationing on the moon, construction is not exactly booming.)

They also suggest that the 83,000 new slots supposedly created in the leisure and hospitality field is definitely suspect. "With vacation plans at near-record lows and restaurants reporting reduced traffic," they feel many of these supposed job gains could simply disappear come the next benchmark revision.

After reviewing the defects in the household version of last month's employment trends, Philippa and Doug warn, "given all its internal blemishes," it would be wrong to conclude from the April report that the economy and the job market are stabilizing. And they caution, "An economy providing lots of part-time jobs to the young and few full-time jobs to the prime-aged" is an economy that could have a tough time "sustaining life."

Here is a graphic of the jobs market from Bloomberg which does not include the "imaginary jobs" created by imaginary new companies (which is what the B/D adjustment does in declining economy).

Feel better now?

Here is how Bary Ritholtz mentions the overstatement of jobs in the 4 sectors that are laying off employees by the tens of thousands.

As noted earlier, the Birth/Death model was a major distortion. (in several months, we will get the revisions). Lets look at how the B/D has changed from April 2007 (+262) to April 2008 (+267):

• +45k construction jobs v 37k April 2007
• +8k jobs were added in financial activities versus 1k last April.
• +72k in professional/business services versus 48k last April.
• +83k in leisure/hospitality (95k last April).

I am certain that some country on some planet in our galaxy is adding more jobs in construction and finance versus one year ago, but it ain't the USA on planet Earth, that's for sure.

[SOURCE: Barry Ritholtz | The Big picture blog | 2 May 2008]

Click here for source number one.

Click here for source number two -- the American Conservative magazine !!!!

There are sleeper cells in the United States. They are from extremist Israeli reactionaries, passing United States military secrets to spy networks, and infiltrating the United States State Department in order to manipulate US policy in the interests of hard-right Israel reactionaries.