Jessica Simpson Shocks Fans With Noticeably Fuller Figure
Once renowned for her famously taut abs and sculpted legs, it seems that country singer Jessica Simpson has eased up on her fitness regimen a bit.
The former “Newlyweds” star and ex-wife of Nick Lachey showed off her noticeably fuller curves at the Radio 99.9 Kiss Country's annual Chili Cookoff in Florida Sunday.
Donning mom-jeans, a tight black tank top and a muffin-top-inducing leopard belt, the songstress' appearance left the gossip-world abuzz.
Is Jess preggers? Did she gain sympathy weight for sis Ashlee (who just had a baby with hubby Pete Wetnz)? Is it all a ploy to get her on the cover of a magazine? Or is it, more likely, that the star has been eating the same diet that her Dallas Cowboys quarterback boyfriend Tony Romo does?
Indeed, the singer even admitted that she and Romo love to have “movie nights” where they cook and order in.
Still, don’t expect the singer — who seemed as happy as ever as she dedicated her performance to Romo — to be down in the mouth about her fuller frame.
She famously told Harpers Bazaar magazine that she prefers curves on a woman to a super-skinny frame.
“Curves are better,” she said. “I don’t get the whole rail thing. It’s not good for your heart, it’s not good for your mind; it’s emotionally destructive, it really is.”
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
More on the Drug War in Mexico...
'Stewmaker' stirs horror in Mexico
Gruesome recipes of drug cartel's 'disposal expert' shocks the public
MEXICO CITY - As the nation's drug war rages on, with its weekly tallies of headless torsos, it is getting harder to produce a shock wave in the Mexican media. But the gruesome recipes of "The Stewmaker" have gripped public attention here, as authorities describe how a "disposal expert" working for a Tijuana drug cartel boss allegedly got rid of hundreds of bodies by dissolving the corpses in vats of acid.
The sour-faced mug shot of Santiago Meza López, 45, made the front pages Saturday and again on Monday, as federal agents presented new details about "El Pozolero." A pozole is a traditional Mexican stew made of hominy, pork and chilies. It is important to keep stirring the soup while it is on the stove.
In a news conference in Tijuana on Friday, Mexican army and law enforcement officials said that Meza confessed to disposing of more than 300 corpses, though they have not provided any evidence to support such a high number.
"They paid me $600 a week," Meza told journalists at a news conference overseen by masked soldiers and federal agents. "I ask for forgiveness from the families of the dead." Meza told agents he boiled the latest victim in acid 15 days earlier.
Key cog in the cartel machinery?
On Sunday, at a second news conference, this time in Mexico City, federal agents described Meza as an important cog in the cartel machinery — the man who disposed of bodies killed by hit men working for Teodoro "El Teo" García Simental, who is vying for control of the Tijuana drug trafficking cartel. Officials say much of the violence that killed more than 5,700 people last year was the result of fighting among cartels for control of lucrative smuggling corridors into the United States.
On Monday, a group of men armed with heavy weapons attacked the municipal police station in La Mision, a Baja California coastal town between Tijuana and Ensenada, where Meza was arrested while attending a party at an RV resort by the beach. No one was hurt in the attack on the police station, which was hit by 200 rounds. Afterward, trucks stolen from California were found abandoned nearby.
Baja officials told El Universal newspaper that they did not know who fired at the police station or why but said they suspect the attack was in reprisal for the arrest of Meza and two companions. One of his companions was the personal chef for cartel boss García. The other man was the chef's assistant. García was also reportedly at the beach party but escaped, according to Mexican news accounts.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration identified García as the chief rival of alleged Arellano Félix cartel leader Fernando Sánchez Arellano, known as "El Ingeniero," the engineer. Fighting between the armies of El Teo and El Ingeniero is responsible for much of the daily slaughter around the border city of Tijuana, according to Mexican law enforcement officials.
At the Sunday news conference, federal agents described "the recipe" followed by the Stewmaker: "The procedure to dispose of the corpses was to fill a drum with 200 liters of water and then put two sacks of caustic soda, put it over a fire and when it started to boil, put in the bodies."
Nine years of human disposals
The human remains, according to the federal agents, cooked for eight hours, and afterward there was nothing left but teeth and nails. After the liquid cooled, Meza allegedly put the remains in a plastic tub, took it to an empty lot and burned it with gasoline, according to federal agents.
The attorney general of Baja California, Rommel Moreno, said Meza will be shown photos of missing persons to see if he recognizes any. According to authorities, Meza said that when he received the bodies, the victims were already dead. Meza, a former truck driver, told authorities he had been disposing of corpses for the past nine years.
This has been a violent month along the border. On Friday, a prominent Tijuana businessman was shot and killed outside his home by what police describe as drug-addicted robbers. Rafael Fimbres Hernández was a well-known member of the Tijuana family that founded the Calimax supermarket chain. In Ciudad Juarez, the most deadly city in Mexico, local reporters have tallied 104 murders in January, including nine on Sunday.
© 2009 The Washington Post Company
Gruesome recipes of drug cartel's 'disposal expert' shocks the public
MEXICO CITY - As the nation's drug war rages on, with its weekly tallies of headless torsos, it is getting harder to produce a shock wave in the Mexican media. But the gruesome recipes of "The Stewmaker" have gripped public attention here, as authorities describe how a "disposal expert" working for a Tijuana drug cartel boss allegedly got rid of hundreds of bodies by dissolving the corpses in vats of acid.
The sour-faced mug shot of Santiago Meza López, 45, made the front pages Saturday and again on Monday, as federal agents presented new details about "El Pozolero." A pozole is a traditional Mexican stew made of hominy, pork and chilies. It is important to keep stirring the soup while it is on the stove.
In a news conference in Tijuana on Friday, Mexican army and law enforcement officials said that Meza confessed to disposing of more than 300 corpses, though they have not provided any evidence to support such a high number.
"They paid me $600 a week," Meza told journalists at a news conference overseen by masked soldiers and federal agents. "I ask for forgiveness from the families of the dead." Meza told agents he boiled the latest victim in acid 15 days earlier.
Key cog in the cartel machinery?
On Sunday, at a second news conference, this time in Mexico City, federal agents described Meza as an important cog in the cartel machinery — the man who disposed of bodies killed by hit men working for Teodoro "El Teo" García Simental, who is vying for control of the Tijuana drug trafficking cartel. Officials say much of the violence that killed more than 5,700 people last year was the result of fighting among cartels for control of lucrative smuggling corridors into the United States.
On Monday, a group of men armed with heavy weapons attacked the municipal police station in La Mision, a Baja California coastal town between Tijuana and Ensenada, where Meza was arrested while attending a party at an RV resort by the beach. No one was hurt in the attack on the police station, which was hit by 200 rounds. Afterward, trucks stolen from California were found abandoned nearby.
Baja officials told El Universal newspaper that they did not know who fired at the police station or why but said they suspect the attack was in reprisal for the arrest of Meza and two companions. One of his companions was the personal chef for cartel boss García. The other man was the chef's assistant. García was also reportedly at the beach party but escaped, according to Mexican news accounts.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration identified García as the chief rival of alleged Arellano Félix cartel leader Fernando Sánchez Arellano, known as "El Ingeniero," the engineer. Fighting between the armies of El Teo and El Ingeniero is responsible for much of the daily slaughter around the border city of Tijuana, according to Mexican law enforcement officials.
At the Sunday news conference, federal agents described "the recipe" followed by the Stewmaker: "The procedure to dispose of the corpses was to fill a drum with 200 liters of water and then put two sacks of caustic soda, put it over a fire and when it started to boil, put in the bodies."
Nine years of human disposals
The human remains, according to the federal agents, cooked for eight hours, and afterward there was nothing left but teeth and nails. After the liquid cooled, Meza allegedly put the remains in a plastic tub, took it to an empty lot and burned it with gasoline, according to federal agents.
The attorney general of Baja California, Rommel Moreno, said Meza will be shown photos of missing persons to see if he recognizes any. According to authorities, Meza said that when he received the bodies, the victims were already dead. Meza, a former truck driver, told authorities he had been disposing of corpses for the past nine years.
This has been a violent month along the border. On Friday, a prominent Tijuana businessman was shot and killed outside his home by what police describe as drug-addicted robbers. Rafael Fimbres Hernández was a well-known member of the Tijuana family that founded the Calimax supermarket chain. In Ciudad Juarez, the most deadly city in Mexico, local reporters have tallied 104 murders in January, including nine on Sunday.
© 2009 The Washington Post Company
Hahahaha -- Cougars in Michigan. At some bar in Royal Oak, probably...
Supplemental Notice Of Legislative Committees
TUESDAY, JANUARY 27
Senate Economic Development and Regulatory Reform (Committee Record), (Chr. Sanborn, 373-7670), Rm. 402/403 Capitol, 3:30 p.m.
· ERGONOMICS RULES BAN (Sanborn) Prohibits promulgation of rules regarding workplace ergonomics. (Bill request No. 1016; to be introduced.)
THURSDAY, JANUARY 29
Senate Agriculture (Committee Record), (Chr. VanWoerkom, 373-1635), Rm. 110 Farnum, 9 a.m.
· Presentation on the presence of cougars in Michigan
TUESDAY, JANUARY 27
Senate Economic Development and Regulatory Reform (Committee Record), (Chr. Sanborn, 373-7670), Rm. 402/403 Capitol, 3:30 p.m.
· ERGONOMICS RULES BAN (Sanborn) Prohibits promulgation of rules regarding workplace ergonomics. (Bill request No. 1016; to be introduced.)
THURSDAY, JANUARY 29
Senate Agriculture (Committee Record), (Chr. VanWoerkom, 373-1635), Rm. 110 Farnum, 9 a.m.
· Presentation on the presence of cougars in Michigan
Becky and Amy -- BEWARE...
Octuplets' births surprise California doctors
(CNN) -- A woman in California delivered what may be the nation's second live-born set of octuplets on Monday morning, surprising doctors who expected seven babies.
The six boys and two girls -- ranging in weight from 1 pound 8 ounces to 3 pounds 4 ounces -- were generally doing well in incubators following their Caesarean-section delivery at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Bellflower, California, doctors said.
Three of the babies need breathing assistance, but otherwise the eight don't appear to have serious problems, doctors said at a news conference Monday evening.
"It was a truly amazing delivery," said Dr. Karen Maples, chief of the hospital's obstetrics and gynecology department.
Doctors initially believed the mother -- whom they did not identify -- was pregnant with seven fetuses. The woman was 23 weeks pregnant when she was hospitalized seven weeks ago and ordered to bed rest.
Over a seven-week period, a team of 46 physicians, nurses and other staff prepared for the births. When they started the delivery Monday -- more than nine weeks before the babies would be full term -- they were in for a surprise.
"After we got to Baby G, we were surprised by the discovery of a Baby H," Maples said.
Getting the number correct with ultrasounds before delivery is difficult with so many babies, said Dr. Harold Henry, the hospital's chief of fetal medicine.
"It is quite easy to miss a baby when you're expecting seven," Henry said.
The hospital said the woman didn't want her personal information released to the news media, and it would not answer questions about whether she'd had fertility treatments.
Preliminary research indicates this is the second set of live-born octuplets in the United States, according to the hospital.
Eight babies believed to be the United States' first set of live octuplets were born in Houston, Texas, in 1998. One of the infants died days after birth. The seven other siblings recently celebrated their 10th birthday, the Houston Chronicle reported last month.
The first three to seven days will be critical for the California babies, said Dr. Mandhir Gupta, one of the doctors at the news conference. The infants could be in incubators for six to eight weeks and in the hospital for 10 weeks, Gupta said.
The mother is doing "very well" after the deliveries, which took about five minutes, Gupta said.
"She is very excited that she [has] all these babies and that the babies are looking good so far," Gupta said.
(CNN) -- A woman in California delivered what may be the nation's second live-born set of octuplets on Monday morning, surprising doctors who expected seven babies.
The six boys and two girls -- ranging in weight from 1 pound 8 ounces to 3 pounds 4 ounces -- were generally doing well in incubators following their Caesarean-section delivery at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Bellflower, California, doctors said.
Three of the babies need breathing assistance, but otherwise the eight don't appear to have serious problems, doctors said at a news conference Monday evening.
"It was a truly amazing delivery," said Dr. Karen Maples, chief of the hospital's obstetrics and gynecology department.
Doctors initially believed the mother -- whom they did not identify -- was pregnant with seven fetuses. The woman was 23 weeks pregnant when she was hospitalized seven weeks ago and ordered to bed rest.
Over a seven-week period, a team of 46 physicians, nurses and other staff prepared for the births. When they started the delivery Monday -- more than nine weeks before the babies would be full term -- they were in for a surprise.
"After we got to Baby G, we were surprised by the discovery of a Baby H," Maples said.
Getting the number correct with ultrasounds before delivery is difficult with so many babies, said Dr. Harold Henry, the hospital's chief of fetal medicine.
"It is quite easy to miss a baby when you're expecting seven," Henry said.
The hospital said the woman didn't want her personal information released to the news media, and it would not answer questions about whether she'd had fertility treatments.
Preliminary research indicates this is the second set of live-born octuplets in the United States, according to the hospital.
Eight babies believed to be the United States' first set of live octuplets were born in Houston, Texas, in 1998. One of the infants died days after birth. The seven other siblings recently celebrated their 10th birthday, the Houston Chronicle reported last month.
The first three to seven days will be critical for the California babies, said Dr. Mandhir Gupta, one of the doctors at the news conference. The infants could be in incubators for six to eight weeks and in the hospital for 10 weeks, Gupta said.
The mother is doing "very well" after the deliveries, which took about five minutes, Gupta said.
"She is very excited that she [has] all these babies and that the babies are looking good so far," Gupta said.
Way to go, secret government agencies...
Thrift store MP3 player contains secret military files
(CNN) -- A man walks into a thrift store.
It sounds like the opening line to a bad joke. And this case was a bad joke -- for the Pentagon.
Chris Ogle of New Zealand was in Oklahoma about a year ago when he bought a used MP3 player from a thrift store for $9. A few weeks ago, he plugged it into his computer to download a song, and he instead discovered confidential U.S. military files.
"The more I look at it, the more I see, and the less I think I should be," Ogle said with a nervous laugh in an interview with TVNZ.
The files included the home addresses, Social Security numbers and cell phone numbers of U.S. soldiers. The player also included what appeared to be mission briefings and lists of equipment deployed to hot spots in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of the information appears to date to 2005.
The New Zealand journalist who first reported the story was able to contact at least one of the soldiers by dialing a phone number found in the files. He hung up once she explained why she was calling. Watch how man discovered secret military files »
Pentagon officials told CNN that they are aware of the MP3 player, but can't talk about it until investigators confirm that the information came from the U.S. Department of Defense.
"The government isn't doing a good job of protecting the information that it collects," said Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington.
Despite government efforts to protect sensitive information, this is a growing problem, privacy experts say.
Two years ago, the Department of Veterans Affairs lost track of a laptop with the personal information of millions of soldiers. And computer hard drives with classified military information have been found for sale at street markets in Afghanistan.
"When you can identify American personnel, when you have their names, their home address, their cell phone numbers, you put people in a dangerous position," Rotenberg said.
In this case, the personal information for several hundred soldiers landed in friendly hands. Ogle told CNN the MP3 player is being kept in a safe place and he will happily turn it over to U.S. military officials if they ask for it.
(CNN) -- A man walks into a thrift store.
It sounds like the opening line to a bad joke. And this case was a bad joke -- for the Pentagon.
Chris Ogle of New Zealand was in Oklahoma about a year ago when he bought a used MP3 player from a thrift store for $9. A few weeks ago, he plugged it into his computer to download a song, and he instead discovered confidential U.S. military files.
"The more I look at it, the more I see, and the less I think I should be," Ogle said with a nervous laugh in an interview with TVNZ.
The files included the home addresses, Social Security numbers and cell phone numbers of U.S. soldiers. The player also included what appeared to be mission briefings and lists of equipment deployed to hot spots in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of the information appears to date to 2005.
The New Zealand journalist who first reported the story was able to contact at least one of the soldiers by dialing a phone number found in the files. He hung up once she explained why she was calling. Watch how man discovered secret military files »
Pentagon officials told CNN that they are aware of the MP3 player, but can't talk about it until investigators confirm that the information came from the U.S. Department of Defense.
"The government isn't doing a good job of protecting the information that it collects," said Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington.
Despite government efforts to protect sensitive information, this is a growing problem, privacy experts say.
Two years ago, the Department of Veterans Affairs lost track of a laptop with the personal information of millions of soldiers. And computer hard drives with classified military information have been found for sale at street markets in Afghanistan.
"When you can identify American personnel, when you have their names, their home address, their cell phone numbers, you put people in a dangerous position," Rotenberg said.
In this case, the personal information for several hundred soldiers landed in friendly hands. Ogle told CNN the MP3 player is being kept in a safe place and he will happily turn it over to U.S. military officials if they ask for it.
Monday, January 5, 2009
How is 20 Years A Lifetime??
Scientists: True love can last a lifetime
(CNN) -- Love's first blush fading? Lost that loving feeling? Love is not all around?
Sick of cliches?
Take heart, scientists have discovered that people can have a love that lasts a lifetime.
Using brain scans, researchers at Stony Brook University in New York have discovered a small number of couples respond with as much passion after 20 years together as most people only do during the early throes of romance, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported.
The researchers scanned the brains of couples together for 20 years and compared them with results from new lovers, the Sunday Times said.
About 10 percent of the mature couples had the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as those just starting out.
Previous research has suggested that the first stages of romantic love fade within 15 months and after 10 years it has gone completely, the newspaper said.
"The findings go against the traditional view of romance -- that it drops off sharply in the first decade -- but we are sure it's real," said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook, told the Sunday Times.
(CNN) -- Love's first blush fading? Lost that loving feeling? Love is not all around?
Sick of cliches?
Take heart, scientists have discovered that people can have a love that lasts a lifetime.
Using brain scans, researchers at Stony Brook University in New York have discovered a small number of couples respond with as much passion after 20 years together as most people only do during the early throes of romance, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported.
The researchers scanned the brains of couples together for 20 years and compared them with results from new lovers, the Sunday Times said.
About 10 percent of the mature couples had the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as those just starting out.
Previous research has suggested that the first stages of romantic love fade within 15 months and after 10 years it has gone completely, the newspaper said.
"The findings go against the traditional view of romance -- that it drops off sharply in the first decade -- but we are sure it's real," said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook, told the Sunday Times.
Bitch, you better have my money...
Obama plan includes $300 billion in tax cuts
The New York Times
WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama plans to include about $300 billion in tax cuts for workers and businesses in his economic recovery program, advisers said Sunday, as his team seeks to win over Congressional skeptics worried that he was too focused on government spending.
The legislation Mr. Obama is developing with Congressional Democrats will devote about 40 percent of the cost to tax cuts, including his centerpiece campaign promise to provide credits up to $500 for most workers, costing roughly $150 billion. The package will also include more than $100 billion in tax incentives for businesses to create jobs and invest in equipment or factories.
The overall economic package, of $675 billion to $775 billion, is taking shape as Mr. Obama arrived in Washington and planned to begin trying to build support in Congress and among the broader public for his approach to stimulating the economy. Mr. Obama, who flew to the capital on Sunday to join his family in a hotel suite while awaiting his inauguration, planned to meet with Congressional leaders on Monday and deliver a speech on Thursday laying the ground for his emerging economic program.
Although some tax cuts were always expected to be included in Mr. Obama’s economic package, his team disclosed the scope and some details of the plans on Sunday at a time when Republicans have begun voicing criticism of what they describe as an open-checkbook approach to spending. By focusing more attention on the tax cuts in the plan, Obama aides hope to frame it as a balanced, pragmatic approach.
'Radical reforms'
Mr. Obama will use his public events this week to promise what one adviser called “radical reforms” to impose more control over the regular federal budget down the road. Among other areas, the president-elect will focus on changing Pentagon contracting and aid to corporate America, advisers said. He will also designate a chief performance officer and a chief technology officer on Wednesday to help make government more efficient, they said.
Still, Democratic leaders in Congress acknowledged that the economic package would not be ready for Mr. Obama’s signature immediately after his inauguration on Jan. 20, as they once hoped.
“It’s going to be very difficult to get the package put together that early so that it can have sufficient time to be reviewed, and then sufficient time to be debated and passed,” Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Mr. Hoyer said a more likely goal would be mid-February before Congress leaves on a Presidents’ Day recess. “We certainly want to see this package passed through the House of Representatives no later than the end of this month, get it over to the Senate, and have it to the president before we break for the presidential break,” Mr. Hoyer said.
Congressional Republicans continued to press for more public hearings and study, and some of their leaders threw out their own ideas for what should be in the plan. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, proposed Sunday that any money distributed to the states be provided as loans rather than outright grants.
“Nobody thinks we ought to be spending this money on things like mob museums and waterslides,” Mr. McConnell said on “This Week” on ABC. “And if the money were lent rather than just granted, states would I think spend it wisely, and the states that didn’t need it at all wouldn’t take any.”
Mr. McConnell said Republicans were more likely to favor tax relief and tax credits as part of the economic measure and said Congress should consider reducing the 25 percent income tax rate to 15 percent.
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House speaker, said Congress would also take on the issue of waste in federal agencies, though she was not ready to disclose details of her approach. “We will have reforms related to waste, fraud and abuse,” she said in an interview.
Other Congressional officials said House Democrats would consider a plan this week requiring a new audit of all federal agencies and mandating Congressional hearings whenever inspectors general identify potential waste or fraud.
Mr. Obama’s team argued Sunday that the short-term cost of its economic plan was not a priority in the face of the dire problems in the economy. “There is no short run, other than keeping the economy from absolutely tanking. That’s the only short run,” Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said on “This Week.” He added, “We’ve got to begin to stem this bleeding here, and begin to stop the loss of jobs and the creation of jobs.”
The economic package under consideration by the president-elect and his Congressional allies would commit $675 billion to $775 billion over two years. If the tax cuts represent 40 percent of that, as Mr. Obama’s advisers said Sunday, that would mean about $270 billion to $310 billion.
About half of that would go to workers under what Mr. Obama during his campaign called the Making Work Pay credit, worth up to $500 for individuals and $1,000 for families. The Obama campaign estimated that about 150 million Americans making less than $200,000 would qualify, including those who make too little to pay federal income taxes but would receive a check that would offset Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes.
Focus on stimulating spending
Mr. Obama’s advisers said Sunday that they were searching for a way to get that credit into Americans’ pockets quickly to help stimulate spending, but would not duplicate the rebate checks sent last year as part of an economic package signed by President Bush. Instead, they said, they were discussing making the credit retroactive to the 2008 tax year and adjusting withholding formulas so paychecks would start reflecting that right away.
Mr. Obama’s advisers said they were still discussing with Congressional leaders the precise plan for phasing out the credit for wealthier Americans. They said no tax increases were included in the plan because it was focused on measures that create jobs. Obama aides have signaled that they will wait to let Mr. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire in 2010, rather than try to repeal them sooner.
Likewise, other tax proposals Mr. Obama made in the campaign are not in the economic package because they are not aimed directly at job creation. Aides said the president-elect might return to those later on, possibly as early as the annual budget proposal he is to present in February.
“There are lots of priorities that are not included here, not because they are any less important in the long run but because we really want to stick to the principle that this is an economic recovery plan,” one adviser said.
To encourage businesses to expand their work forces and operations, Mr. Obama wants a tax credit for each job created. During the campaign, he proposed $3,000 for each job. Advisers said he was now also trying to figure out a way to give incentives to businesses to resist cutting jobs, as so many have been doing.
The economic plan will also include other tax breaks intended to stir capital investment. The stimulus package Mr. Bush signed last year included a provision generally allowing businesses immediate depreciation of half of their spending in 2008 on new equipment, rather than spreading out that depreciation over years, reducing their immediate tax burdens. Mr. Obama’s advisers said they were planning to build on that, either by extending it to investment in 2009 and 2010 or through some other mechanism.
The Obama plan would also allow businesses to apply net operating losses from last year to offset tax liabilities from prior years, enabling them to claim refunds from the government now in hopes of encouraging capital investment, much as was done in a 2002 economic stimulus plan.
The New York Times
WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama plans to include about $300 billion in tax cuts for workers and businesses in his economic recovery program, advisers said Sunday, as his team seeks to win over Congressional skeptics worried that he was too focused on government spending.
The legislation Mr. Obama is developing with Congressional Democrats will devote about 40 percent of the cost to tax cuts, including his centerpiece campaign promise to provide credits up to $500 for most workers, costing roughly $150 billion. The package will also include more than $100 billion in tax incentives for businesses to create jobs and invest in equipment or factories.
The overall economic package, of $675 billion to $775 billion, is taking shape as Mr. Obama arrived in Washington and planned to begin trying to build support in Congress and among the broader public for his approach to stimulating the economy. Mr. Obama, who flew to the capital on Sunday to join his family in a hotel suite while awaiting his inauguration, planned to meet with Congressional leaders on Monday and deliver a speech on Thursday laying the ground for his emerging economic program.
Although some tax cuts were always expected to be included in Mr. Obama’s economic package, his team disclosed the scope and some details of the plans on Sunday at a time when Republicans have begun voicing criticism of what they describe as an open-checkbook approach to spending. By focusing more attention on the tax cuts in the plan, Obama aides hope to frame it as a balanced, pragmatic approach.
'Radical reforms'
Mr. Obama will use his public events this week to promise what one adviser called “radical reforms” to impose more control over the regular federal budget down the road. Among other areas, the president-elect will focus on changing Pentagon contracting and aid to corporate America, advisers said. He will also designate a chief performance officer and a chief technology officer on Wednesday to help make government more efficient, they said.
Still, Democratic leaders in Congress acknowledged that the economic package would not be ready for Mr. Obama’s signature immediately after his inauguration on Jan. 20, as they once hoped.
“It’s going to be very difficult to get the package put together that early so that it can have sufficient time to be reviewed, and then sufficient time to be debated and passed,” Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Mr. Hoyer said a more likely goal would be mid-February before Congress leaves on a Presidents’ Day recess. “We certainly want to see this package passed through the House of Representatives no later than the end of this month, get it over to the Senate, and have it to the president before we break for the presidential break,” Mr. Hoyer said.
Congressional Republicans continued to press for more public hearings and study, and some of their leaders threw out their own ideas for what should be in the plan. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, proposed Sunday that any money distributed to the states be provided as loans rather than outright grants.
“Nobody thinks we ought to be spending this money on things like mob museums and waterslides,” Mr. McConnell said on “This Week” on ABC. “And if the money were lent rather than just granted, states would I think spend it wisely, and the states that didn’t need it at all wouldn’t take any.”
Mr. McConnell said Republicans were more likely to favor tax relief and tax credits as part of the economic measure and said Congress should consider reducing the 25 percent income tax rate to 15 percent.
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House speaker, said Congress would also take on the issue of waste in federal agencies, though she was not ready to disclose details of her approach. “We will have reforms related to waste, fraud and abuse,” she said in an interview.
Other Congressional officials said House Democrats would consider a plan this week requiring a new audit of all federal agencies and mandating Congressional hearings whenever inspectors general identify potential waste or fraud.
Mr. Obama’s team argued Sunday that the short-term cost of its economic plan was not a priority in the face of the dire problems in the economy. “There is no short run, other than keeping the economy from absolutely tanking. That’s the only short run,” Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said on “This Week.” He added, “We’ve got to begin to stem this bleeding here, and begin to stop the loss of jobs and the creation of jobs.”
The economic package under consideration by the president-elect and his Congressional allies would commit $675 billion to $775 billion over two years. If the tax cuts represent 40 percent of that, as Mr. Obama’s advisers said Sunday, that would mean about $270 billion to $310 billion.
About half of that would go to workers under what Mr. Obama during his campaign called the Making Work Pay credit, worth up to $500 for individuals and $1,000 for families. The Obama campaign estimated that about 150 million Americans making less than $200,000 would qualify, including those who make too little to pay federal income taxes but would receive a check that would offset Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes.
Focus on stimulating spending
Mr. Obama’s advisers said Sunday that they were searching for a way to get that credit into Americans’ pockets quickly to help stimulate spending, but would not duplicate the rebate checks sent last year as part of an economic package signed by President Bush. Instead, they said, they were discussing making the credit retroactive to the 2008 tax year and adjusting withholding formulas so paychecks would start reflecting that right away.
Mr. Obama’s advisers said they were still discussing with Congressional leaders the precise plan for phasing out the credit for wealthier Americans. They said no tax increases were included in the plan because it was focused on measures that create jobs. Obama aides have signaled that they will wait to let Mr. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire in 2010, rather than try to repeal them sooner.
Likewise, other tax proposals Mr. Obama made in the campaign are not in the economic package because they are not aimed directly at job creation. Aides said the president-elect might return to those later on, possibly as early as the annual budget proposal he is to present in February.
“There are lots of priorities that are not included here, not because they are any less important in the long run but because we really want to stick to the principle that this is an economic recovery plan,” one adviser said.
To encourage businesses to expand their work forces and operations, Mr. Obama wants a tax credit for each job created. During the campaign, he proposed $3,000 for each job. Advisers said he was now also trying to figure out a way to give incentives to businesses to resist cutting jobs, as so many have been doing.
The economic plan will also include other tax breaks intended to stir capital investment. The stimulus package Mr. Bush signed last year included a provision generally allowing businesses immediate depreciation of half of their spending in 2008 on new equipment, rather than spreading out that depreciation over years, reducing their immediate tax burdens. Mr. Obama’s advisers said they were planning to build on that, either by extending it to investment in 2009 and 2010 or through some other mechanism.
The Obama plan would also allow businesses to apply net operating losses from last year to offset tax liabilities from prior years, enabling them to claim refunds from the government now in hopes of encouraging capital investment, much as was done in a 2002 economic stimulus plan.
Almost There!
President-elect Barack Obama bid a lonely and emotional farewell to his Hyde Park home Sunday afternoon as he left Chicago to join his wife and daughters in taking up residence in Washington, D.C.
After boarding a government Boeing 757 at Chicago's Midway airport, Obama met Col. Scott Turner, who will be his chief Air Force One pilot, and visited with the small press pool on board.
"Well guys, I am looking forward to seeing you guys in Washington," Obama told them. "I gotta say, I choked up a little bit leaving my house today."
"Malia's friend had dropped off an album of the two of them together," he continued. "They had been friends since pre-school, and I just looked through the pages, and the house was empty and it was a little tough, it got me."
Girls Arrived Saturday
Michelle Obama and their girls – Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7 – arrived in Washington on Saturday to get settled into a hotel across from the White House in advance of starting classes Monday at the private Sidwell Friends school.
On Jan. 15, they move into the presidential guest quarters at Blair House and, after Obama's inauguration on Jan. 20, into the White House.
Obama, who uncharacteristically ordered a cheeseburger for his in-flight dinner, said Mrs. Obama and the girls were "having fun" in their five-star temporary home.
"Although living in a hotel for two weeks, we kind of did that for two years" on the campaign trail, he added.
Its About Time...
Panel to declare Franken winner of Senate race
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (CNN) -- A state election board on Monday will announce Democrat Al Franken has defeated Republican incumbent Norm Coleman in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race, state officials told CNN Sunday.
The canvassing board on Monday will say a recount determined Franken won by 225 votes, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie told CNN.
However, Coleman's campaign, which contends the recount should have included about 650 absentee ballots it says were improperly rejected in the initial count, has indicated it will challenge the certification.
Coleman campaign manager Cullen Sheehan said his team believes the recount process was broken and that "the numbers being reported will not be accurate or valid."
"The effort by the Franken campaign, supported by the secretary of state, to exclude improperly rejected absentee ballots is indefensible and disenfranchises hundreds of Minnesota voters," Sheehan said.
After the results are certified, Coleman's campaign will have seven days to file a challenge.
The initial count from the November 4 election put Coleman, a first-term senator, 215 votes ahead of Franken -- known for his stint on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" and as a former talk-show host on progressive radio network Air America.
The slim margin triggered an automatic recount.
During the recount, Franken's campaign alleged that thousands of absentee ballots had been improperly rejected and asked that they be counted. The state's Supreme Court eventually ordered that rejected absentee ballots be counted if local officials and each campaign could agree that the selected ballots were rejected mistakenly.
About 950 initially rejected absentee ballots were counted Saturday after all parties agreed on them. However, Coleman's campaign said about 650 other rejected absentee ballots -- many of them from pro-Coleman areas -- also were improperly rejected and should have been counted.
The Coleman campaign has also alleged that more than 100 ballots may have been accidentally counted twice and may have unfairly benefited Franken.
"When a candidate is leading because of double counted votes, and votes that get counted even when ballots don't exist, it clearly means that a [post-election challenge] is the only likely remedy to ensure a fair outcome," Sheehan said.
Franken's attorney, Marc Elias, in a statement said: "The next step is the canvass board's meeting tomorrow, where we have every expectation they will declare that Al Franken won this election."
Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann, who oversaw Saturday's tallying of the 950 improperly rejected absentee ballots, said the only thing left for the canvassing board to do Monday is certify the numbers. The board's meeting will convene at 2:30 p.m.
"Candidates may have objections or suggestions or comments that they want to make," Gelbmann said. "I would assume the canvassing board will allow that as long as they're brief."
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York and chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, issued a statement Sunday declaring Franken the winner and expressing confidence Franken would remain on top following any legal battle.
"There is no longer any doubt who will be the next senator from Minnesota," Schumer said. "Even if all the ballots Coleman claims were double counted or erroneously added were resolved in his favor, he still wouldn't have enough votes to win."
Schumer also said it is "crucial" Minnesota's second seat in the Senate not go empty, implying Franken should be seated when the rest of the Senate convenes to be sworn in Tuesday.
Minnesota's other seat is held by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat.
Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has pledged a GOP filibuster if the Democrat-controlled Senate attempts to seat Franken before all legal battles play out and before Minnesota's Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, can co-sign the secretary of state's certificate.
Ritchie said the state has no problem with not having two sworn-in senators Tuesday until the process is completed.
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (CNN) -- A state election board on Monday will announce Democrat Al Franken has defeated Republican incumbent Norm Coleman in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race, state officials told CNN Sunday.
The canvassing board on Monday will say a recount determined Franken won by 225 votes, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie told CNN.
However, Coleman's campaign, which contends the recount should have included about 650 absentee ballots it says were improperly rejected in the initial count, has indicated it will challenge the certification.
Coleman campaign manager Cullen Sheehan said his team believes the recount process was broken and that "the numbers being reported will not be accurate or valid."
"The effort by the Franken campaign, supported by the secretary of state, to exclude improperly rejected absentee ballots is indefensible and disenfranchises hundreds of Minnesota voters," Sheehan said.
After the results are certified, Coleman's campaign will have seven days to file a challenge.
The initial count from the November 4 election put Coleman, a first-term senator, 215 votes ahead of Franken -- known for his stint on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" and as a former talk-show host on progressive radio network Air America.
The slim margin triggered an automatic recount.
During the recount, Franken's campaign alleged that thousands of absentee ballots had been improperly rejected and asked that they be counted. The state's Supreme Court eventually ordered that rejected absentee ballots be counted if local officials and each campaign could agree that the selected ballots were rejected mistakenly.
About 950 initially rejected absentee ballots were counted Saturday after all parties agreed on them. However, Coleman's campaign said about 650 other rejected absentee ballots -- many of them from pro-Coleman areas -- also were improperly rejected and should have been counted.
The Coleman campaign has also alleged that more than 100 ballots may have been accidentally counted twice and may have unfairly benefited Franken.
"When a candidate is leading because of double counted votes, and votes that get counted even when ballots don't exist, it clearly means that a [post-election challenge] is the only likely remedy to ensure a fair outcome," Sheehan said.
Franken's attorney, Marc Elias, in a statement said: "The next step is the canvass board's meeting tomorrow, where we have every expectation they will declare that Al Franken won this election."
Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann, who oversaw Saturday's tallying of the 950 improperly rejected absentee ballots, said the only thing left for the canvassing board to do Monday is certify the numbers. The board's meeting will convene at 2:30 p.m.
"Candidates may have objections or suggestions or comments that they want to make," Gelbmann said. "I would assume the canvassing board will allow that as long as they're brief."
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York and chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, issued a statement Sunday declaring Franken the winner and expressing confidence Franken would remain on top following any legal battle.
"There is no longer any doubt who will be the next senator from Minnesota," Schumer said. "Even if all the ballots Coleman claims were double counted or erroneously added were resolved in his favor, he still wouldn't have enough votes to win."
Schumer also said it is "crucial" Minnesota's second seat in the Senate not go empty, implying Franken should be seated when the rest of the Senate convenes to be sworn in Tuesday.
Minnesota's other seat is held by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat.
Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has pledged a GOP filibuster if the Democrat-controlled Senate attempts to seat Franken before all legal battles play out and before Minnesota's Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, can co-sign the secretary of state's certificate.
Ritchie said the state has no problem with not having two sworn-in senators Tuesday until the process is completed.
Funniest Story by Newsweek EVER
Make. It. Stop.: The case for ending our long national nightmare.
I like to play a game with my son, Joseph. We sit on a bench in touristy Old Town, Alexandria, Va., and we're not allowed to get up until we see a dozen pairs of Crocs. It usually doesn't take long. But the other day we were stuck at eight after a few minutes, and I was getting a little concerned. Just then my boy leaned over and said, "Don't worry, Dad. A family of dorks will come along any minute." To paraphrase Hank Hill, if he wasn't my son, I would have hugged him right then, I was so proud.
I know what you're thinking: what kind of sick father lets his impressionable young son call people dorks because of the shoes they wear? Well, who else will teach him that wearing sweaty bright purple clown shoes in public is not OK? He certainly won't learn that lesson at school. Teachers seem to be some of the biggest abusers of this horrid fad.
I know what else you're thinking: "I like Crocs … they're so comfortable. I'll tell you who the dork is … the guy writing this story, that's who! And who died and made him the fashion authority anyway?" Well, no one. I own pitted-out T shirts that are more than a quarter of a century old, and I've been known to strut around town in some pleated khaki Dockers. I own one belt. A female colleague even told me once I'd be a "perfect candidate for 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy'." I think she was trying to be helpful. My complete lack of fashion sense actually supports my theory, because even I know these things are an abomination.
Yes, I'm really, really late to the Crocs-bashing party. Really late. Plenty of fashionistas have written screeds over the years. But the damn things are still here, so this is no time to stop fighting. To quote the great John Belushi: "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell, no!"
I've been following the good work of Web sites like I Hate Crocs Dot Com for some time, even going so far as to submit a photograph of a stuffed skunk spraying a pair of pink Crocs. The fantastic Best Page In The Universe posted a hilarious rant a while back joking that people who bought Crocs on Amazon.com also bought frozen corn dogs, Pabst Blue Ribbon Light and trucker balls, as well as the CD single "Hey There, Delilah" by the Plain White T's. The rant's author, Maddox, writes: "People who wear Crocs go on and on about how comfortable they are, and how it's supposedly odor resistant because it's made out of some kind of anti-bacterial foam … You know what else it's resistant to? You getting laid."
A popular YouTube video called "Dorcs" parodies the trend: "Wow, but they're so ugly," says an office worker to her friend. "That's how you know they're comfortable," he says. By the end, she's a convert: "I've given fashion the finger, and joined the Dorcs revolution!" The Crocs Empire is acutely aware of us haters. Even their own commercials make fun of the irrational and over-the-top rage their shoes instill in people like me. In one, an unshaven lunatic holds a neon blue Croc in front of his face and screams, "Why are you wearing these!" for 30 seconds. I only wish I'd known about the tryouts for this commercial.
Crocs's stock price has cratered of late, so there is hope. According to the Rocky Mountain News, the shoes, "which were once so popular that the company couldn't keep pace with demand, are now piling up in warehouses." Maybe the company's just a victim of its own success. If practically every person in the U.S. already has a pair and they're indestructible, how many more can you sell? The same thing happened to Wham-O back in the 1950s with the Hula Hoop.
But the company isn't giving up. They've been diversifying, sponsoring Olympic teams and veering off into sandals and other designs, trying to fool us. They've even gone so far as to create a high-heeled Croc. OMG, as the kids say. These have to be seen to be believed. I recommend only the strong of heart should attempt to Google "high-heeled Croc." The company Web site has this ominous warning for us: "Today, Crocs™ Shoes are available all over the world and on the internet as we continue to significantly expand all aspects of our business" (italics added). That sounds like a threat to me. They're even suing other companies like Skechers for allegedly stealing their great idea. Skechers says the lawsuit is "baseless," "outlandish," and "ridiculous." I'll tell you what's outlandish and ridiculous: that these things sell so much that another company would feel compelled to copy them, allegedly. Don't we have enough eye pollution with just the originals still out there? Don't be fooled, America! Soylent Green is CROCS!!!
If you think about it, the Crocs company should really be admired. P. T. Barnum would be proud. They've managed to separate money from the wallets of millions and millions of seemingly sane people who wake up, look in the closet, and actually decide: "Today I'll leave the house wearing these neon-green Dutch bubble shoes with Swiss-cheese holes in them. Maybe I'll even buy some little plastic strawberries or bananas and jam them in the sweat holes, just to jazz things up and make the bacteria incubate faster." That's fine. I say do whatever you want in the privacy of your own home. Let your Crocs freak flag fly. But don't make the rest of us watch.
I realize this article might not go down too well even in my own editorial office and certainly not in our ad sales department. My boss in Washington read an early draft and said it was funny, but that I had a "somewhat demented obsessiveness." At least he threw me a "somewhat." Another editor wondered aloud if I had perhaps been trampled by Crocs at some point in my life. I also worry about writing this because some of my best friends—and their sweet, innocent children—wear them. One of my dearest—the sister I never had—introduced me to the shoes years ago when she waltzed into a garden party in a pair of bright hot-pink Crocs. I couldn't stop staring at them. "What are those things?!" I whimpered nervously, hoping maybe she was rehabbing from some sort of strange Achilles mishap. "Oh, they're called Crocs … I got them for gardening," she said, so innocently.
Oh, if only we'd known what a tsunami of fashion idiocy was about to be unleashed, maybe we could have stopped it somehow, and they would have stayed in the garden where they belong, covered with manure, a trendy item to be featured on www.stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. If only. Then they wouldn't be out there in the American mainstream, that big, vast, sweaty mainstream traipsing through our airports and over our beaches and around our great shopping malls. Plop, plop, plop, they go, stuffing their Crocs faces with ice cream and Doritos and giant sodas. Plop, plop, plop. Stuff, stuff, stuff. Yuck, yuck, yuck. And the rest of us have to watch. I spent eight hours waiting on a flight at Dulles over the 4th of July week and I was just minutes from tackling the next group of Crocs ploppers I saw. Luckily for me—and the ploppers—my flight finally arrived and I wasn't arrested for assault. Knowing my luck, I'd have shown up in court to find 12 pairs of Crocs sitting in the jury box.
It would have probably been better for my career if I just posted this as an anonymous Craigslist rant as CrocsHatah35 or something. Plenty of others have spouted off about Crocs there. And sure, I would have had a lot more readers. But Craigslist doesn't write my paychecks, and this is just too important to ignore another day. Some times you just have to make a stand, even if it's a few years late. Do we really think we're going to stop global warming if we can't even end this fashion Chernobyl once and for all? I think the U.S. government should institute a Crocs buyback policy, like they do in the inner city for guns. It would do more to beautify this great land than Lady Bird's highway beautification program ever did.
So I'm begging you, America. Just stop. When you wake up tomorrow and look at your options, choose flip-flops. Go barefoot. Wear boots. Anything but Crocs. By next summer—if we all work together—we can have this plague of bad taste virtually eliminated. Yes! We! Can!
http://www.newsweek.com/id/150240
I like to play a game with my son, Joseph. We sit on a bench in touristy Old Town, Alexandria, Va., and we're not allowed to get up until we see a dozen pairs of Crocs. It usually doesn't take long. But the other day we were stuck at eight after a few minutes, and I was getting a little concerned. Just then my boy leaned over and said, "Don't worry, Dad. A family of dorks will come along any minute." To paraphrase Hank Hill, if he wasn't my son, I would have hugged him right then, I was so proud.
I know what you're thinking: what kind of sick father lets his impressionable young son call people dorks because of the shoes they wear? Well, who else will teach him that wearing sweaty bright purple clown shoes in public is not OK? He certainly won't learn that lesson at school. Teachers seem to be some of the biggest abusers of this horrid fad.
I know what else you're thinking: "I like Crocs … they're so comfortable. I'll tell you who the dork is … the guy writing this story, that's who! And who died and made him the fashion authority anyway?" Well, no one. I own pitted-out T shirts that are more than a quarter of a century old, and I've been known to strut around town in some pleated khaki Dockers. I own one belt. A female colleague even told me once I'd be a "perfect candidate for 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy'." I think she was trying to be helpful. My complete lack of fashion sense actually supports my theory, because even I know these things are an abomination.
Yes, I'm really, really late to the Crocs-bashing party. Really late. Plenty of fashionistas have written screeds over the years. But the damn things are still here, so this is no time to stop fighting. To quote the great John Belushi: "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell, no!"
I've been following the good work of Web sites like I Hate Crocs Dot Com for some time, even going so far as to submit a photograph of a stuffed skunk spraying a pair of pink Crocs. The fantastic Best Page In The Universe posted a hilarious rant a while back joking that people who bought Crocs on Amazon.com also bought frozen corn dogs, Pabst Blue Ribbon Light and trucker balls, as well as the CD single "Hey There, Delilah" by the Plain White T's. The rant's author, Maddox, writes: "People who wear Crocs go on and on about how comfortable they are, and how it's supposedly odor resistant because it's made out of some kind of anti-bacterial foam … You know what else it's resistant to? You getting laid."
A popular YouTube video called "Dorcs" parodies the trend: "Wow, but they're so ugly," says an office worker to her friend. "That's how you know they're comfortable," he says. By the end, she's a convert: "I've given fashion the finger, and joined the Dorcs revolution!" The Crocs Empire is acutely aware of us haters. Even their own commercials make fun of the irrational and over-the-top rage their shoes instill in people like me. In one, an unshaven lunatic holds a neon blue Croc in front of his face and screams, "Why are you wearing these!" for 30 seconds. I only wish I'd known about the tryouts for this commercial.
Crocs's stock price has cratered of late, so there is hope. According to the Rocky Mountain News, the shoes, "which were once so popular that the company couldn't keep pace with demand, are now piling up in warehouses." Maybe the company's just a victim of its own success. If practically every person in the U.S. already has a pair and they're indestructible, how many more can you sell? The same thing happened to Wham-O back in the 1950s with the Hula Hoop.
But the company isn't giving up. They've been diversifying, sponsoring Olympic teams and veering off into sandals and other designs, trying to fool us. They've even gone so far as to create a high-heeled Croc. OMG, as the kids say. These have to be seen to be believed. I recommend only the strong of heart should attempt to Google "high-heeled Croc." The company Web site has this ominous warning for us: "Today, Crocs™ Shoes are available all over the world and on the internet as we continue to significantly expand all aspects of our business" (italics added). That sounds like a threat to me. They're even suing other companies like Skechers for allegedly stealing their great idea. Skechers says the lawsuit is "baseless," "outlandish," and "ridiculous." I'll tell you what's outlandish and ridiculous: that these things sell so much that another company would feel compelled to copy them, allegedly. Don't we have enough eye pollution with just the originals still out there? Don't be fooled, America! Soylent Green is CROCS!!!
If you think about it, the Crocs company should really be admired. P. T. Barnum would be proud. They've managed to separate money from the wallets of millions and millions of seemingly sane people who wake up, look in the closet, and actually decide: "Today I'll leave the house wearing these neon-green Dutch bubble shoes with Swiss-cheese holes in them. Maybe I'll even buy some little plastic strawberries or bananas and jam them in the sweat holes, just to jazz things up and make the bacteria incubate faster." That's fine. I say do whatever you want in the privacy of your own home. Let your Crocs freak flag fly. But don't make the rest of us watch.
I realize this article might not go down too well even in my own editorial office and certainly not in our ad sales department. My boss in Washington read an early draft and said it was funny, but that I had a "somewhat demented obsessiveness." At least he threw me a "somewhat." Another editor wondered aloud if I had perhaps been trampled by Crocs at some point in my life. I also worry about writing this because some of my best friends—and their sweet, innocent children—wear them. One of my dearest—the sister I never had—introduced me to the shoes years ago when she waltzed into a garden party in a pair of bright hot-pink Crocs. I couldn't stop staring at them. "What are those things?!" I whimpered nervously, hoping maybe she was rehabbing from some sort of strange Achilles mishap. "Oh, they're called Crocs … I got them for gardening," she said, so innocently.
Oh, if only we'd known what a tsunami of fashion idiocy was about to be unleashed, maybe we could have stopped it somehow, and they would have stayed in the garden where they belong, covered with manure, a trendy item to be featured on www.stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. If only. Then they wouldn't be out there in the American mainstream, that big, vast, sweaty mainstream traipsing through our airports and over our beaches and around our great shopping malls. Plop, plop, plop, they go, stuffing their Crocs faces with ice cream and Doritos and giant sodas. Plop, plop, plop. Stuff, stuff, stuff. Yuck, yuck, yuck. And the rest of us have to watch. I spent eight hours waiting on a flight at Dulles over the 4th of July week and I was just minutes from tackling the next group of Crocs ploppers I saw. Luckily for me—and the ploppers—my flight finally arrived and I wasn't arrested for assault. Knowing my luck, I'd have shown up in court to find 12 pairs of Crocs sitting in the jury box.
It would have probably been better for my career if I just posted this as an anonymous Craigslist rant as CrocsHatah35 or something. Plenty of others have spouted off about Crocs there. And sure, I would have had a lot more readers. But Craigslist doesn't write my paychecks, and this is just too important to ignore another day. Some times you just have to make a stand, even if it's a few years late. Do we really think we're going to stop global warming if we can't even end this fashion Chernobyl once and for all? I think the U.S. government should institute a Crocs buyback policy, like they do in the inner city for guns. It would do more to beautify this great land than Lady Bird's highway beautification program ever did.
So I'm begging you, America. Just stop. When you wake up tomorrow and look at your options, choose flip-flops. Go barefoot. Wear boots. Anything but Crocs. By next summer—if we all work together—we can have this plague of bad taste virtually eliminated. Yes! We! Can!
http://www.newsweek.com/id/150240
10 Most Under-reported Stories of 2008
What We Missed: The 10 most overlooked stories of 2008.
Newsweek -- What a year of huge stories: the Dow descended, Obama ascended and the world had the pleasure of getting to know a family of Palins, a country called Georgia, a pregnant man (remember that?) and the opportunity to say buh-bye to scores of commercial banks. But amid all the economic crises and political campaigns, much was happening beyond the front pages of America's newspapers: attacks in Africa and Afghanistan, important health legislation, even a few Pentagon snafus that largely escaped the public's attention. What follows is NEWSWEEK's list of 10 stories that deserved more ink and airtime in 2008. And tell us which events and people you think were undercovered during the year, in our comments section below. The best responses will be featured on Readback, our feedback blog. In the meantime, our picks:
1. Already at War in Afghanistan
Throughout the campaign and Barack Obama's subsequent preparations to take office, the president-elect has mentioned that he would look into a surge in Afghanistan to fight against the Taliban. Maybe that's too late, considering the current administration spent 2008 increasing the amount of troops deployed there by more than 85 percent. The Defense Department reported during the year that troop levels have reached their highest levels in Afghanistan since 2001, with roughly 40,000 American soldiers fighting. Though troops in Iraq were once triple that number, the lack of coverage (and antiwar protests) surrounding Afghanistan could lead to a longer war and continued deployment.
2. Chaos in Congo
In October, the United Nations sponsored a partial ceasefire between the Congolese government and rebel leaders of the African nation, which has been in demographic and political disrepair for more than a decade. A mere week later the ceasefire fell apart, paving the way for continued devastation in a violent country where an estimated 5 million people have already been killed. As militia groups—even entire countries—have joined the fighting, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is quickly becoming Africa's worst war zone.
3. U.S. Nuclear Fuses Arrive in Taiwan
Oops! In March, it was announced that the Pentagon had accidentally shipped nuclear fuses in place of spare helicopter batteries that the Taiwanese government had ordered in 2006. The larger problem here? It highlights a string of incidents in which the Pentagon has mishandled nuclear equipment. Not surprisingly, the Chinese were disappointed; Washington quickly sent a nervous missive insisting that America stands by its policy not to arm Taiwan.
4. Insurance Coverage for Mental Health
Nearly everyone bemoaned the "sweeteners" that were part of the $700 billion financial bailout passed by Congress in October. But one unexpected—and undercovered—surprise was that the plan included the passing of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008. Under this bill, employers who provide insurance coverage for the treatment of physical illnesses must now do so on an equal basis for mental-health coverage, beginning when plans renew after October 2009. Sweet, indeed.
5. Iraq Goes Ignored
Though studies vary, 2008 was likely the year when casualties hit the 1 million mark in Iraq. So why are news outlets pulling their correspondents from Baghdad bureaus, and where did all those Iraq headlines go? Ironic, considering that Obama was elected partly on a get-out-of-Iraq platform.
6. Solar Energy? Not So Hot.
As solar panels have become a common solution for providing clean energy, it was revealed in the fall that a compound involved in their production may be the farthest thing from green: nitrogen trifluoride is used to treat titanium solar panels, and reports show that the gas may be 20,000 times worse than carbon dioxide at contributing to global warming. Worse yet, the Kyoto Protocol—which provides regulations for greenhouse gases—still says nil about protecting the environment from this gas.
7. Our New Missile-Defense Program ...in India
After meetings in New Delhi, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates quietly announced in February that the United States may develop a missile-defense shield on Indian soil. The program is admittedly in very early stages, but as countries around Asia ascend to economic power, meddling with a missile shield on the Subcontinent could have detrimental effects for stability between the United States and China, and tilt the power balance throughout the region.
8. A Kick in the Knee to Venezuelan Relations
In September, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela decided to expel the American ambassador from his country after saying he had learned of an American plot to stage a coup against him. This was the low point in a year of deteriorating relations between the United States and the oil-rich South American nation.
9. Fairly Fighting AIDS ... Finally
As President Bush's approval ratings hovered at historical lows, one unsung success was his role in contributing billions to the fight against AIDS, mostly through funding programs in Africa. In 2008 he also signed a renewed and expanded President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which, among other things, paved the way for reversing a longstanding regulation that prevents those with HIV from visiting or immigrating to the United States. The Department of Health and Human Services still has to approve this change, so the fight isn't over—but Bush won this round.
10. Church Refuses Protection From Pedophiles
When delegates from the Southern Baptist Convention met in June, they went on record to admit that sex abuse is reprehensible, sinful—and happening. That said, they refused pressure to create a database that would screen church workers and, presumably, prevent pedophiles from re-employment. It's a blow to many congregations around the country, as local churches are forced to rely on mere instinct (or God's will?) in the hiring and screening of their staffs.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/177355
Newsweek -- What a year of huge stories: the Dow descended, Obama ascended and the world had the pleasure of getting to know a family of Palins, a country called Georgia, a pregnant man (remember that?) and the opportunity to say buh-bye to scores of commercial banks. But amid all the economic crises and political campaigns, much was happening beyond the front pages of America's newspapers: attacks in Africa and Afghanistan, important health legislation, even a few Pentagon snafus that largely escaped the public's attention. What follows is NEWSWEEK's list of 10 stories that deserved more ink and airtime in 2008. And tell us which events and people you think were undercovered during the year, in our comments section below. The best responses will be featured on Readback, our feedback blog. In the meantime, our picks:
1. Already at War in Afghanistan
Throughout the campaign and Barack Obama's subsequent preparations to take office, the president-elect has mentioned that he would look into a surge in Afghanistan to fight against the Taliban. Maybe that's too late, considering the current administration spent 2008 increasing the amount of troops deployed there by more than 85 percent. The Defense Department reported during the year that troop levels have reached their highest levels in Afghanistan since 2001, with roughly 40,000 American soldiers fighting. Though troops in Iraq were once triple that number, the lack of coverage (and antiwar protests) surrounding Afghanistan could lead to a longer war and continued deployment.
2. Chaos in Congo
In October, the United Nations sponsored a partial ceasefire between the Congolese government and rebel leaders of the African nation, which has been in demographic and political disrepair for more than a decade. A mere week later the ceasefire fell apart, paving the way for continued devastation in a violent country where an estimated 5 million people have already been killed. As militia groups—even entire countries—have joined the fighting, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is quickly becoming Africa's worst war zone.
3. U.S. Nuclear Fuses Arrive in Taiwan
Oops! In March, it was announced that the Pentagon had accidentally shipped nuclear fuses in place of spare helicopter batteries that the Taiwanese government had ordered in 2006. The larger problem here? It highlights a string of incidents in which the Pentagon has mishandled nuclear equipment. Not surprisingly, the Chinese were disappointed; Washington quickly sent a nervous missive insisting that America stands by its policy not to arm Taiwan.
4. Insurance Coverage for Mental Health
Nearly everyone bemoaned the "sweeteners" that were part of the $700 billion financial bailout passed by Congress in October. But one unexpected—and undercovered—surprise was that the plan included the passing of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008. Under this bill, employers who provide insurance coverage for the treatment of physical illnesses must now do so on an equal basis for mental-health coverage, beginning when plans renew after October 2009. Sweet, indeed.
5. Iraq Goes Ignored
Though studies vary, 2008 was likely the year when casualties hit the 1 million mark in Iraq. So why are news outlets pulling their correspondents from Baghdad bureaus, and where did all those Iraq headlines go? Ironic, considering that Obama was elected partly on a get-out-of-Iraq platform.
6. Solar Energy? Not So Hot.
As solar panels have become a common solution for providing clean energy, it was revealed in the fall that a compound involved in their production may be the farthest thing from green: nitrogen trifluoride is used to treat titanium solar panels, and reports show that the gas may be 20,000 times worse than carbon dioxide at contributing to global warming. Worse yet, the Kyoto Protocol—which provides regulations for greenhouse gases—still says nil about protecting the environment from this gas.
7. Our New Missile-Defense Program ...in India
After meetings in New Delhi, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates quietly announced in February that the United States may develop a missile-defense shield on Indian soil. The program is admittedly in very early stages, but as countries around Asia ascend to economic power, meddling with a missile shield on the Subcontinent could have detrimental effects for stability between the United States and China, and tilt the power balance throughout the region.
8. A Kick in the Knee to Venezuelan Relations
In September, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela decided to expel the American ambassador from his country after saying he had learned of an American plot to stage a coup against him. This was the low point in a year of deteriorating relations between the United States and the oil-rich South American nation.
9. Fairly Fighting AIDS ... Finally
As President Bush's approval ratings hovered at historical lows, one unsung success was his role in contributing billions to the fight against AIDS, mostly through funding programs in Africa. In 2008 he also signed a renewed and expanded President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which, among other things, paved the way for reversing a longstanding regulation that prevents those with HIV from visiting or immigrating to the United States. The Department of Health and Human Services still has to approve this change, so the fight isn't over—but Bush won this round.
10. Church Refuses Protection From Pedophiles
When delegates from the Southern Baptist Convention met in June, they went on record to admit that sex abuse is reprehensible, sinful—and happening. That said, they refused pressure to create a database that would screen church workers and, presumably, prevent pedophiles from re-employment. It's a blow to many congregations around the country, as local churches are forced to rely on mere instinct (or God's will?) in the hiring and screening of their staffs.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/177355
Don't Ever Let Me Live This Long...
114-year-old U.S. woman to be world's oldest
Gertrude Baines, 114, likely to be named world's oldest woman
(CNN) -- Gertrude Baines, a 114-year-old California resident, will likely be crowned the world's oldest woman, according to the organization that keeps track of such honors.
The previous oldest woman was Maria de Jesus, who died this week in Portugal at age 115, Guinness World Records said.
Baines -- born to former slaves in a small town south of Atlanta, Georgia, in 1894 -- now lives in a Los Angeles nursing home.
Baines appeared cheerful and talkative when the Los Angeles Times interviewed her in November as she cast her vote for Barack Obama for president, whom she said she supported because "he's for the colored people."
"I'm glad we're getting a colored man in there," she said.
Baines apparently prefers using the older term for her race. She was well into her 70's when "African-American" became the common reference in the United States.
She told the Times she spends most of her time "doing nothing but eating and sleeping."
When CNN interviewed Baines two years ago, she was asked to explain why she thought she has lived so long.
"God. Ask him. I took good care of myself, the way he wanted me to," Baines said.
Her only child, a daughter, died of typhoid fever at age 18.
Much of her long life was lived in Ohio, where she worked as a "house mom" at a state university. She eventually divorced and traveled to Los Angeles, where she retired.
Baines will not officially be given the title until after Guinness World Records completes an investigation, the organization said.
"Maria was crowned the world's Oldest Living Woman by Guinness World Records on 28 December upon the death of Edna Parker," the group said.
Parker -- an American -- was 115 years, 220 days old when she died November 26, 2008, in an Indiana nursing home, it said.
Gertrude Baines, 114, likely to be named world's oldest woman
(CNN) -- Gertrude Baines, a 114-year-old California resident, will likely be crowned the world's oldest woman, according to the organization that keeps track of such honors.
The previous oldest woman was Maria de Jesus, who died this week in Portugal at age 115, Guinness World Records said.
Baines -- born to former slaves in a small town south of Atlanta, Georgia, in 1894 -- now lives in a Los Angeles nursing home.
Baines appeared cheerful and talkative when the Los Angeles Times interviewed her in November as she cast her vote for Barack Obama for president, whom she said she supported because "he's for the colored people."
"I'm glad we're getting a colored man in there," she said.
Baines apparently prefers using the older term for her race. She was well into her 70's when "African-American" became the common reference in the United States.
She told the Times she spends most of her time "doing nothing but eating and sleeping."
When CNN interviewed Baines two years ago, she was asked to explain why she thought she has lived so long.
"God. Ask him. I took good care of myself, the way he wanted me to," Baines said.
Her only child, a daughter, died of typhoid fever at age 18.
Much of her long life was lived in Ohio, where she worked as a "house mom" at a state university. She eventually divorced and traveled to Los Angeles, where she retired.
Baines will not officially be given the title until after Guinness World Records completes an investigation, the organization said.
"Maria was crowned the world's Oldest Living Woman by Guinness World Records on 28 December upon the death of Edna Parker," the group said.
Parker -- an American -- was 115 years, 220 days old when she died November 26, 2008, in an Indiana nursing home, it said.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Does this strike anyone else as odd?
U. of C. to introduce 'open housing' (Chicago Tribune)
December 20, 2008
The University of Chicago, proud home of Nobel laureates, will undertake a bold experiment in chemistry: coed dorm rooms.
The pilot program allowing male and female students to sleep in the same room will start next month. It's not intended for romantic couples, but they won't be excluded, because the university won't ask students why they want to live together.
The proposal was a student-led initiative, university officials said.
Coed dorm rooms are allowed at more than 30 campuses nationwide, but they have generally been socially liberal institutions, such as Wesleyan University, Oberlin College and Oregon State University. The policy is a departure at U. of C., which has a no-nonsense, nose-in-a-book reputation.
The program won't apply to freshmen, and students won't need permission from their parents to live in "open housing." A letter announcing the program went out to parents this week.
"In today's day and age it's not really fair to discriminate based on gender anymore," said Asha Woodall, 19, a sophomore at the U. of C. and a supporter of the plan. "Sexuality is more of a spectrum."
Notions about sexuality and personal choice helped propel the program. In the university's letter to parents, the director of undergraduate housing said the gender-neutral plan "allows us to meet the needs of students for whom traditional, same-sex room assignments are not ideal."
Josh Gana, assistant director for operations and facilities with university housing at Oregon State University, said their "gender inclusives" program has been a great success. The program was introduced in fall 2007, Gana said, and the university will have more than doubled the number of mixed-gender arrangements this year.
"It's a way to accommodate diverse lifestyles," he said. "It's what students are demanding more and more."
To be sure, not every student likes the idea, and university officials are quick to point out that students will not be assigned to mixed-gender housing.
"Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable," said Anna Tenuta, a 19-year-old freshman at U. of C. "Changing, and personal things in your bedroom—I would feel more comfortable having another woman."
Still, Tenuta said, she supported letting other students make their own choice.
Plenty of college officials have yet to embrace the concept. Some critics say the arrangement encourages promiscuity and caters to a politically correct handbook.
Northwestern University, for one, does not allow men and women to share dorm rooms. At Tufts University in Medford, Mass., a Boston suburb, coed suites are fine but officials have rejected the idea of coed dorm rooms.
Bruce Reitman, dean of student affairs at Tufts, told The Boston Globe this spring that the concept raised practical and moral concerns.
Alexandra Markiewicz, a 19-year-old sophomore at U. of C., said the idea isn't necessarily a racy one. Two of her close friends, platonic friends of the opposite sex, would simply make great roommates. The pair hope to take advantage of the new rule at some point, Markiewicz said.
D.J. Zissen, a 20-year-old junior at Oregon State University, is spending his second year in a residence hall that includes gender-inclusive rooms. Last year, he said his neighbor was transgender and going through the process of sex reassignment and hormone therapy. No one batted an eye, Zissen said.
"I enjoy that it's letting us live with whomever we want," he said.
December 20, 2008
The University of Chicago, proud home of Nobel laureates, will undertake a bold experiment in chemistry: coed dorm rooms.
The pilot program allowing male and female students to sleep in the same room will start next month. It's not intended for romantic couples, but they won't be excluded, because the university won't ask students why they want to live together.
The proposal was a student-led initiative, university officials said.
Coed dorm rooms are allowed at more than 30 campuses nationwide, but they have generally been socially liberal institutions, such as Wesleyan University, Oberlin College and Oregon State University. The policy is a departure at U. of C., which has a no-nonsense, nose-in-a-book reputation.
The program won't apply to freshmen, and students won't need permission from their parents to live in "open housing." A letter announcing the program went out to parents this week.
"In today's day and age it's not really fair to discriminate based on gender anymore," said Asha Woodall, 19, a sophomore at the U. of C. and a supporter of the plan. "Sexuality is more of a spectrum."
Notions about sexuality and personal choice helped propel the program. In the university's letter to parents, the director of undergraduate housing said the gender-neutral plan "allows us to meet the needs of students for whom traditional, same-sex room assignments are not ideal."
Josh Gana, assistant director for operations and facilities with university housing at Oregon State University, said their "gender inclusives" program has been a great success. The program was introduced in fall 2007, Gana said, and the university will have more than doubled the number of mixed-gender arrangements this year.
"It's a way to accommodate diverse lifestyles," he said. "It's what students are demanding more and more."
To be sure, not every student likes the idea, and university officials are quick to point out that students will not be assigned to mixed-gender housing.
"Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable," said Anna Tenuta, a 19-year-old freshman at U. of C. "Changing, and personal things in your bedroom—I would feel more comfortable having another woman."
Still, Tenuta said, she supported letting other students make their own choice.
Plenty of college officials have yet to embrace the concept. Some critics say the arrangement encourages promiscuity and caters to a politically correct handbook.
Northwestern University, for one, does not allow men and women to share dorm rooms. At Tufts University in Medford, Mass., a Boston suburb, coed suites are fine but officials have rejected the idea of coed dorm rooms.
Bruce Reitman, dean of student affairs at Tufts, told The Boston Globe this spring that the concept raised practical and moral concerns.
Alexandra Markiewicz, a 19-year-old sophomore at U. of C., said the idea isn't necessarily a racy one. Two of her close friends, platonic friends of the opposite sex, would simply make great roommates. The pair hope to take advantage of the new rule at some point, Markiewicz said.
D.J. Zissen, a 20-year-old junior at Oregon State University, is spending his second year in a residence hall that includes gender-inclusive rooms. Last year, he said his neighbor was transgender and going through the process of sex reassignment and hormone therapy. No one batted an eye, Zissen said.
"I enjoy that it's letting us live with whomever we want," he said.
The Descent...
What in god's name has happened to Mickey Rourke's face? And when did it become cool to look like a Pirate when you're not in a movie? Oh wait...it hasn't.
Mexico's Death Toll
Kristin Bricker - the narcosphere - December 31, 2008
A record-breaking 5,612 people were executed in Mexico’s drug war in 2008, making the drug war more deadly than the drugs (plus 18 more before the ball dropped on 2008)
Mexico's daily El Universal, which began counting drug war executions four years ago, reports that 5,612 people were executed in Mexico’s drug war in 2008. This year’s deaths more than doubled 2007’s total of over 2,700 executions. By El Universal's estimates, about 8,463 drug executions have occurred during the first two years of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s six-year term in office. Calderon deployed the army and federal police to combat drug cartels almost immediately upon assuming office in December 2006.
The 2008 death toll means that the drug war in Mexico alone (that is, not including the copious number of drug war deaths in Colombia) is more deadly than illicit drugs in the United States, which is the biggest drug market in the world and the destination for the overwhelming majority of the American continent’s drugs.
In 2005, the latest year the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) has published statistics for fatal drug overdoses, 22,400 people fatally overdosed in the US—this statistic includes both intentional and unintentional overdoses. However, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines/amphetamines caused only 39%, or about 8,736, of those overdoses. Marijuana does not cause fatal overdoses. When presenting the 2005 statistics, the CDC stated that it expected the number of fatal overdoses to increase in subsequent years, but said that prescription drugs would be responsible for the increase. Prescription medications are the cause of more fatal overdoses than any other drug in the US.
The drugs in question in Mexico’s drug war—cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines/amphetamines, and marijuana—were responsible for 8,736 drug deaths in one year in the US, although 100% of these drugs do not pass through Mexico. Mexico has only recently become a major source for methamphetamines/amphetamines; it currently supplies about 53% of the meth found in the US. About 90% of the US’ cocaine passes through Mexico. About 11% of heroin seized in the US comes from Asia and does not pass through Mexico. For our purposes, the percentage of US marijuana that originates in Mexico is a moot point because it does not cause fatal overdoses. Therefore, it can be said that Mexico’s drug trafficking industry is not responsible for 100% of the US’ 8,736 fatal overdoses. However, because the CDC does not offer a drug-by-drug breakdown of overdose deaths, which would allow a more accurate calculation of how many US overdose deaths are related to Mexican drug trafficking, we’ll continue assuming that all 8,736 overdose deaths are related to Mexican drug trafficking, knowing that this is an inflated estimate.
The US has a population of approximately 305,522,804 people, meaning that approximately 1 out of every 34,972 US residents fatally overdose on drugs that could have possibly originated in or passed through Mexico.
Mexico has a population of approximately 108,700,891 people. In 2008, 5,612 people, or 1 out of every 19,369 Mexicans, died in the drug war, meaning that the drug war is almost twice as deadly for Mexicans as illicit drugs are for US residents. Does this mean that a US resident’s life is nearly twice as valuable as that of a Mexican?
The death toll only continues to rise in Mexico. In addition to more than doubling 2007’s death toll and breaking an all-time execution record in Mexico, the drug war death toll has steadily—and rapidly—increased in 2008. During the last two months of 2008, drug executions reached a rate of one per hour.
Chaos and Violence: Anticipated and Desired
Drug war experts as well as Mexico’s own National Defense Department (Sedena in its Spanish initials) expected that drug trafficking-related deaths would increase as a result of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s war on drugs. US President George W. Bush and President Calderon have both said that the increased homicides and drug-related deaths are signs of success because they mean that the drug cartels are getting desperate.
Rather than being an undesired consequence of the drug war, the increased death toll appears to be part of Sedena’s strategy. In a report obtained by the Mexican daily Milenio entitled “The National Defense Department in Combat Against Drug Trafficking” Sedena’s thirst for war is obvious. Sedena refers to its current military campaign as a “crusade” in which Milenio reports its “top priority is to attack the adversary in a coordinated manner on all fronts in order to be ready for a sign of weakness that would allow it to “annihilate”’ the cartels. The report states that one of Sedena’s four fundamental “aspects of combat” is to “cause [the cartels] the greater number of deaths; create divisionism in their structures; provoke internal confrontations and induce their self-destruction.” The chaos and violence caused by Calderon’s deployment of troops against the cartels was not only anticipated, but desired.
Plan Colombia has demonstrated that eliminating cartels does not eliminate the drug market. Plan Colombia destroyed Colombia’s two biggest cartels, but they were quickly replaced by numerous smaller boutique cartels. Thanks to drug traffickers’ ability to adapt to new circumstances, coca production has increased 15% during Plan Colombia, and cocaine production has increased 4%.
The Institute for Policy Studies’ Sanho Tree explained to Pacifica Radio’s Drug War News why Mexico’s strategy of “annihilating” cartels has caused what he refers to as a “bloodbath.” Tree argues, “When you have this kind of turf battle going on between rival cartels, the worst thing the state can do is get in the middle of that.” He says he explained this to staffers on Capitol Hill when Congress was debating Plan Mexico, also known as the Merida Initiative. Plan Mexico throws the might of the US military industrial complex behind Mexico’s drug war.
Tree's warnings obviously fell on deaf ears in Congress, which passed the first year of Plan Mexico funding.
Tree compares Mexico’s turf wars to street dealing in the US:
If you pull a small-time dealer off a street corner, you've opened up a very valuable piece of real estate, and so other groups try to move in, to control that space, because that's where people go to buy drugs. You can't really go to a judge and say "Your Honor, I've been dealing drugs in this city for 15 years, and here comes this upstart gang from across town moving in on my turf." So the way they settle that is with violence or threats of violence, and you can see that on the macro level in Mexico. There, the Gulf cartel and the Sinaloa cartel are having this ongoing turf battle, and President Calderon's reaction when he first came into office was to be Mr. Tough Guy: "I'm gonna go down there and kick some butt and put the army in there.” And all that does is keep these rival cartels off-balance. Because the profits are so extreme, they're going to keep struggling to get the upper hand. It's an endless cycle. Being tough is not the same as being effective.
A record-breaking 5,612 people were executed in Mexico’s drug war in 2008, making the drug war more deadly than the drugs (plus 18 more before the ball dropped on 2008)
Mexico's daily El Universal, which began counting drug war executions four years ago, reports that 5,612 people were executed in Mexico’s drug war in 2008. This year’s deaths more than doubled 2007’s total of over 2,700 executions. By El Universal's estimates, about 8,463 drug executions have occurred during the first two years of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s six-year term in office. Calderon deployed the army and federal police to combat drug cartels almost immediately upon assuming office in December 2006.
The 2008 death toll means that the drug war in Mexico alone (that is, not including the copious number of drug war deaths in Colombia) is more deadly than illicit drugs in the United States, which is the biggest drug market in the world and the destination for the overwhelming majority of the American continent’s drugs.
In 2005, the latest year the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) has published statistics for fatal drug overdoses, 22,400 people fatally overdosed in the US—this statistic includes both intentional and unintentional overdoses. However, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines/amphetamines caused only 39%, or about 8,736, of those overdoses. Marijuana does not cause fatal overdoses. When presenting the 2005 statistics, the CDC stated that it expected the number of fatal overdoses to increase in subsequent years, but said that prescription drugs would be responsible for the increase. Prescription medications are the cause of more fatal overdoses than any other drug in the US.
The drugs in question in Mexico’s drug war—cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines/amphetamines, and marijuana—were responsible for 8,736 drug deaths in one year in the US, although 100% of these drugs do not pass through Mexico. Mexico has only recently become a major source for methamphetamines/amphetamines; it currently supplies about 53% of the meth found in the US. About 90% of the US’ cocaine passes through Mexico. About 11% of heroin seized in the US comes from Asia and does not pass through Mexico. For our purposes, the percentage of US marijuana that originates in Mexico is a moot point because it does not cause fatal overdoses. Therefore, it can be said that Mexico’s drug trafficking industry is not responsible for 100% of the US’ 8,736 fatal overdoses. However, because the CDC does not offer a drug-by-drug breakdown of overdose deaths, which would allow a more accurate calculation of how many US overdose deaths are related to Mexican drug trafficking, we’ll continue assuming that all 8,736 overdose deaths are related to Mexican drug trafficking, knowing that this is an inflated estimate.
The US has a population of approximately 305,522,804 people, meaning that approximately 1 out of every 34,972 US residents fatally overdose on drugs that could have possibly originated in or passed through Mexico.
Mexico has a population of approximately 108,700,891 people. In 2008, 5,612 people, or 1 out of every 19,369 Mexicans, died in the drug war, meaning that the drug war is almost twice as deadly for Mexicans as illicit drugs are for US residents. Does this mean that a US resident’s life is nearly twice as valuable as that of a Mexican?
The death toll only continues to rise in Mexico. In addition to more than doubling 2007’s death toll and breaking an all-time execution record in Mexico, the drug war death toll has steadily—and rapidly—increased in 2008. During the last two months of 2008, drug executions reached a rate of one per hour.
Chaos and Violence: Anticipated and Desired
Drug war experts as well as Mexico’s own National Defense Department (Sedena in its Spanish initials) expected that drug trafficking-related deaths would increase as a result of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s war on drugs. US President George W. Bush and President Calderon have both said that the increased homicides and drug-related deaths are signs of success because they mean that the drug cartels are getting desperate.
Rather than being an undesired consequence of the drug war, the increased death toll appears to be part of Sedena’s strategy. In a report obtained by the Mexican daily Milenio entitled “The National Defense Department in Combat Against Drug Trafficking” Sedena’s thirst for war is obvious. Sedena refers to its current military campaign as a “crusade” in which Milenio reports its “top priority is to attack the adversary in a coordinated manner on all fronts in order to be ready for a sign of weakness that would allow it to “annihilate”’ the cartels. The report states that one of Sedena’s four fundamental “aspects of combat” is to “cause [the cartels] the greater number of deaths; create divisionism in their structures; provoke internal confrontations and induce their self-destruction.” The chaos and violence caused by Calderon’s deployment of troops against the cartels was not only anticipated, but desired.
Plan Colombia has demonstrated that eliminating cartels does not eliminate the drug market. Plan Colombia destroyed Colombia’s two biggest cartels, but they were quickly replaced by numerous smaller boutique cartels. Thanks to drug traffickers’ ability to adapt to new circumstances, coca production has increased 15% during Plan Colombia, and cocaine production has increased 4%.
The Institute for Policy Studies’ Sanho Tree explained to Pacifica Radio’s Drug War News why Mexico’s strategy of “annihilating” cartels has caused what he refers to as a “bloodbath.” Tree argues, “When you have this kind of turf battle going on between rival cartels, the worst thing the state can do is get in the middle of that.” He says he explained this to staffers on Capitol Hill when Congress was debating Plan Mexico, also known as the Merida Initiative. Plan Mexico throws the might of the US military industrial complex behind Mexico’s drug war.
Tree's warnings obviously fell on deaf ears in Congress, which passed the first year of Plan Mexico funding.
Tree compares Mexico’s turf wars to street dealing in the US:
If you pull a small-time dealer off a street corner, you've opened up a very valuable piece of real estate, and so other groups try to move in, to control that space, because that's where people go to buy drugs. You can't really go to a judge and say "Your Honor, I've been dealing drugs in this city for 15 years, and here comes this upstart gang from across town moving in on my turf." So the way they settle that is with violence or threats of violence, and you can see that on the macro level in Mexico. There, the Gulf cartel and the Sinaloa cartel are having this ongoing turf battle, and President Calderon's reaction when he first came into office was to be Mr. Tough Guy: "I'm gonna go down there and kick some butt and put the army in there.” And all that does is keep these rival cartels off-balance. Because the profits are so extreme, they're going to keep struggling to get the upper hand. It's an endless cycle. Being tough is not the same as being effective.
News No One Pays Attention To
MEXICO UNDER SIEGE (LA TIMES)
Mistrust bedevils war on Mexican drug cartels
The U.S. and Mexico agree that cartels have morphed into crime syndicates that pose an urgent security threat to the region. But working together has not been easy.
By Josh Meyer
December 31, 2008
Reporting from Washington — The U.S. has begun pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Mexico to help stanch the expansion of drug-fueled violence and corruption that has claimed more than 5,000 lives south of the border this year.
The bloodshed has spread to American cities, even to the heartland, and U.S. officials are realizing that their fight against powerful drug cartels responsible for the carnage has come down to this: Either walk away or support Mexican President Felipe Calderon's strategy, even with the risk that counter-narcotics intelligence, equipment and training could end up in the hands of cartel bosses.
Both nations agree that the cartels have morphed into transnational crime syndicates that pose an urgent threat to their security and that of the region. Law enforcement agencies from the border to Maine acknowledge that the traffickers have brought a war once dismissed as a foreign affair to the doorstep of local communities. The trail of slayings, kidnappings and other crimes stretches through at least 195 U.S. cities.
The rapidly escalating problem will probably present the Obama administration with hard choices on how to work with Mexico to combat the cartels and the gun-running, money-laundering and other illicit businesses that nourish them.
So far, the fight has largely been waged by the Calderon administration, which deployed thousands of federal troops and police to 18 states to take on the cartels, some of which have paramilitary forces protecting them and many police officers and politicians in their pockets.
"They know they have a monumental undertaking, but you have to start somewhere," Michael A. Braun, former assistant director and chief of operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration, said of the Mexican government. "If you don't, in another five years the cartels will be running Mexico."
The U.S. answer for fighting the cartels is contained in a package known as the Merida Initiative, named for the Mexican city where it was unveiled by Presidents Calderon and Bush in October 2007. When Congress passed the first installment of the three-year aid package in June, it contained at least 33 programs, giving about $400 million to Mexico for this fiscal year and $65 million for drug-fighting efforts in various Central American and Caribbean countries.
The first tranche of money was delayed until this month, and squabbling and other problems have held up delivery of most direct assistance. A senior State Department official confirmed that Mexico would have to wait more than a year for at least two U.S. transport helicopters and a reconnaissance plane that it says it desperately needs.
Starting from scratch
Some senior U.S. counter-narcotics officials and lawmakers say the U.S.-Mexico relationship has been so polluted for decades by mistrust, neglect and failure to collaborate that the countries must build much of their anti-drug strategy from scratch, even at a time when beheadings and other brutal slayings have become commonplace in Mexico.
They fear the cartels are so strong and well-funded that Mexican government forces will continue to be undertrained, under-equipped and outgunned for years, even with U.S. aid. And they say it could take decades and billions of dollars more to establish the corruption-resistant criminal justice institutions needed to eliminate the cartels and their government benefactors.
"You need a robust internal capacity to identify the cancer, cut it out and move on while checking the margins to make sure it hasn't spread," said Braun, who is now managing partner at Spectre Group International, a security consulting firm. "And they have never done that. They never institutionalized law enforcement at any level."
U.S. authorities remain deeply troubled that corruption in the top echelons of Calderon's administration could undermine the Merida effort. Some said the recent arrest of Mexico's former drug czar, Noe Ramirez Mandujano, on suspicion of taking a $450,000 bribe from the cartels showed that Calderon's effort to root out corruption was working.
Some U.S. officials say they share more information than ever with Mexico. Others are conducting damage assessments after Ramirez's arrest, and after Mexico revealed that cartel operatives had infiltrated Interpol, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and even DEA operations.
Calderon will probably discover more corruption within his government and his administration, but he deserves credit for requesting assistance and battling the cartels since his election two years ago, Braun and other current and former U.S. officials said.
Since it was first unveiled in Merida, the drug plan has been criticized as a confusing patchwork of questionable programs, including military and law enforcement training, high-tech drug-detection scanners and gang-prevention programs.
Then Congress set about making it even more complicated.
Some lawmakers got more money for U.S. counter-narcotics efforts, and others focused on more funding for Central American regional security programs. Many have complained that no one is coordinating the initiative, and that turf battles and confusion reign among the many agencies that have a piece of it.
"You've got so many different agencies involved -- who would you even put in charge of it?" said an official with the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Hard feelings
Privately, Mexican officials are furious with Bush for not doing more to investigate and stop the flood of assault weapons coming in from U.S. gun shops and gun shows. One senior Mexican official said the weapons made up about 90% of the cartels' arsenals.
And Mexico continues to accuse Washington of doing far too little to diminish the southbound flow of billions of dollars in laundered drug proceeds and drug precursor chemicals, even though both are addressed in the initiative.
Washington, particularly the DEA, is so distrustful of Mexican authorities that they share sensitive counter- narcotics intelligence and evidence with only a small group of Mexican officials.
These include a handful of recently installed top aides to Calderon and about 225 Mexican law enforcement officials who have been thoroughly investigated and trained, and who can be continually monitored by the U.S.
They say they have no choice.
"It is very troubling from the standpoint that in order for us to help the government of Mexico help themselves, we've got to have the confidence to share very sensitive information without the fear that that information is going to be leaked to the traffickers or to others in a way that could compromise operations and ultimately get people killed," said Anthony Placido, the DEA's director of intelligence.
"It would be easy to take the path of least resistance and say they're all corrupt and we can't work with them," Placido said. "But the reality is it is simply much too important not to. They have taken on these traffickers, and now they have to win. And they deserve and need our support."
The contentiousness surrounding the Merida plan is no surprise to veteran counter-narcotics officials and policymakers. They say it is emblematic of a turbulent relationship between the two countries that has often been defined by bickering, public finger-pointing and an overall atmosphere of mistrust.
For more than two decades, U.S. officials have accused Mexico of ignoring hard evidence that violent homegrown crime syndicates were gaining power and corrupting its police, army and government in a lucrative campaign to flood American streets with cocaine, heroin and other drugs.
Mexican officials said Washington had done little to diminish Americans' voracious demand for illicit drugs, and had made Mexico vulnerable by cracking down on the Colombian cartels, which then turned to Mexican organizations to move their drugs to the U.S.
And after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. turned away from the drug fight, some Mexican officials say.
As the two countries watched and often feuded, the drug groups grew into sophisticated and deadly organized-crime cartels with a global reach, a strong U.S. presence and a stranglehold over many of the Mexican governmental institutions responsible for stopping them.
DEA intelligence now estimates that the cartels are paying hundreds of millions in bribes a year and that they have expanded their operations to Africa, Europe and elsewhere.
Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador to the U.S. and a former counter-narcotics official, cautioned that Merida was only a first step.
He said it wouldn't be easy to improve cross-border interdiction, intelligence-sharing and an integration of both countries' counter-narcotics efforts after so much neglect.
"Obviously, the longer you take to address a challenge or disease, the harder it is to root out," Sarukhan said. "And whoever thinks that the Merida Initiative or the type of cooperation that we have implemented since President Calderon arrived is a silver bullet that will eliminate a decades-old challenge in Mexico is wrong."
Mistrust bedevils war on Mexican drug cartels
The U.S. and Mexico agree that cartels have morphed into crime syndicates that pose an urgent security threat to the region. But working together has not been easy.
By Josh Meyer
December 31, 2008
Reporting from Washington — The U.S. has begun pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Mexico to help stanch the expansion of drug-fueled violence and corruption that has claimed more than 5,000 lives south of the border this year.
The bloodshed has spread to American cities, even to the heartland, and U.S. officials are realizing that their fight against powerful drug cartels responsible for the carnage has come down to this: Either walk away or support Mexican President Felipe Calderon's strategy, even with the risk that counter-narcotics intelligence, equipment and training could end up in the hands of cartel bosses.
Both nations agree that the cartels have morphed into transnational crime syndicates that pose an urgent threat to their security and that of the region. Law enforcement agencies from the border to Maine acknowledge that the traffickers have brought a war once dismissed as a foreign affair to the doorstep of local communities. The trail of slayings, kidnappings and other crimes stretches through at least 195 U.S. cities.
The rapidly escalating problem will probably present the Obama administration with hard choices on how to work with Mexico to combat the cartels and the gun-running, money-laundering and other illicit businesses that nourish them.
So far, the fight has largely been waged by the Calderon administration, which deployed thousands of federal troops and police to 18 states to take on the cartels, some of which have paramilitary forces protecting them and many police officers and politicians in their pockets.
"They know they have a monumental undertaking, but you have to start somewhere," Michael A. Braun, former assistant director and chief of operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration, said of the Mexican government. "If you don't, in another five years the cartels will be running Mexico."
The U.S. answer for fighting the cartels is contained in a package known as the Merida Initiative, named for the Mexican city where it was unveiled by Presidents Calderon and Bush in October 2007. When Congress passed the first installment of the three-year aid package in June, it contained at least 33 programs, giving about $400 million to Mexico for this fiscal year and $65 million for drug-fighting efforts in various Central American and Caribbean countries.
The first tranche of money was delayed until this month, and squabbling and other problems have held up delivery of most direct assistance. A senior State Department official confirmed that Mexico would have to wait more than a year for at least two U.S. transport helicopters and a reconnaissance plane that it says it desperately needs.
Starting from scratch
Some senior U.S. counter-narcotics officials and lawmakers say the U.S.-Mexico relationship has been so polluted for decades by mistrust, neglect and failure to collaborate that the countries must build much of their anti-drug strategy from scratch, even at a time when beheadings and other brutal slayings have become commonplace in Mexico.
They fear the cartels are so strong and well-funded that Mexican government forces will continue to be undertrained, under-equipped and outgunned for years, even with U.S. aid. And they say it could take decades and billions of dollars more to establish the corruption-resistant criminal justice institutions needed to eliminate the cartels and their government benefactors.
"You need a robust internal capacity to identify the cancer, cut it out and move on while checking the margins to make sure it hasn't spread," said Braun, who is now managing partner at Spectre Group International, a security consulting firm. "And they have never done that. They never institutionalized law enforcement at any level."
U.S. authorities remain deeply troubled that corruption in the top echelons of Calderon's administration could undermine the Merida effort. Some said the recent arrest of Mexico's former drug czar, Noe Ramirez Mandujano, on suspicion of taking a $450,000 bribe from the cartels showed that Calderon's effort to root out corruption was working.
Some U.S. officials say they share more information than ever with Mexico. Others are conducting damage assessments after Ramirez's arrest, and after Mexico revealed that cartel operatives had infiltrated Interpol, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and even DEA operations.
Calderon will probably discover more corruption within his government and his administration, but he deserves credit for requesting assistance and battling the cartels since his election two years ago, Braun and other current and former U.S. officials said.
Since it was first unveiled in Merida, the drug plan has been criticized as a confusing patchwork of questionable programs, including military and law enforcement training, high-tech drug-detection scanners and gang-prevention programs.
Then Congress set about making it even more complicated.
Some lawmakers got more money for U.S. counter-narcotics efforts, and others focused on more funding for Central American regional security programs. Many have complained that no one is coordinating the initiative, and that turf battles and confusion reign among the many agencies that have a piece of it.
"You've got so many different agencies involved -- who would you even put in charge of it?" said an official with the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Hard feelings
Privately, Mexican officials are furious with Bush for not doing more to investigate and stop the flood of assault weapons coming in from U.S. gun shops and gun shows. One senior Mexican official said the weapons made up about 90% of the cartels' arsenals.
And Mexico continues to accuse Washington of doing far too little to diminish the southbound flow of billions of dollars in laundered drug proceeds and drug precursor chemicals, even though both are addressed in the initiative.
Washington, particularly the DEA, is so distrustful of Mexican authorities that they share sensitive counter- narcotics intelligence and evidence with only a small group of Mexican officials.
These include a handful of recently installed top aides to Calderon and about 225 Mexican law enforcement officials who have been thoroughly investigated and trained, and who can be continually monitored by the U.S.
They say they have no choice.
"It is very troubling from the standpoint that in order for us to help the government of Mexico help themselves, we've got to have the confidence to share very sensitive information without the fear that that information is going to be leaked to the traffickers or to others in a way that could compromise operations and ultimately get people killed," said Anthony Placido, the DEA's director of intelligence.
"It would be easy to take the path of least resistance and say they're all corrupt and we can't work with them," Placido said. "But the reality is it is simply much too important not to. They have taken on these traffickers, and now they have to win. And they deserve and need our support."
The contentiousness surrounding the Merida plan is no surprise to veteran counter-narcotics officials and policymakers. They say it is emblematic of a turbulent relationship between the two countries that has often been defined by bickering, public finger-pointing and an overall atmosphere of mistrust.
For more than two decades, U.S. officials have accused Mexico of ignoring hard evidence that violent homegrown crime syndicates were gaining power and corrupting its police, army and government in a lucrative campaign to flood American streets with cocaine, heroin and other drugs.
Mexican officials said Washington had done little to diminish Americans' voracious demand for illicit drugs, and had made Mexico vulnerable by cracking down on the Colombian cartels, which then turned to Mexican organizations to move their drugs to the U.S.
And after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. turned away from the drug fight, some Mexican officials say.
As the two countries watched and often feuded, the drug groups grew into sophisticated and deadly organized-crime cartels with a global reach, a strong U.S. presence and a stranglehold over many of the Mexican governmental institutions responsible for stopping them.
DEA intelligence now estimates that the cartels are paying hundreds of millions in bribes a year and that they have expanded their operations to Africa, Europe and elsewhere.
Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador to the U.S. and a former counter-narcotics official, cautioned that Merida was only a first step.
He said it wouldn't be easy to improve cross-border interdiction, intelligence-sharing and an integration of both countries' counter-narcotics efforts after so much neglect.
"Obviously, the longer you take to address a challenge or disease, the harder it is to root out," Sarukhan said. "And whoever thinks that the Merida Initiative or the type of cooperation that we have implemented since President Calderon arrived is a silver bullet that will eliminate a decades-old challenge in Mexico is wrong."
American Apparel must be trying to sell meth, not clothes...
Check these girls out. I know, its mean or whatever to call people ugly...I blame the marketing team and the model scouts. and whatever your angle is, this does NOT convince me to buy your clothes. So, if that was your goal, to get people to gawk at your site and think: Ew. No thanks. then: Success! If it wasn't, you might want a go in another angle. like...attractive.
I think they're trying to be like cutting edge or something. with the white background and the stupid 70's sunglasses. but my god, my computer screen actually vomited when I clicked in these images.
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