December 2008 Archives

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum pointed to a chilling article about the retail sector in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week:

Corporate-turnaround experts and bankruptcy lawyers are predicting a wave of retailer bankruptcies early next year, after being contacted by big and small retailers either preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection or scrambling to avoid that fate.

Analysts estimate that from about 10% to 26% of all retailers are in financial distress and in danger of filing for Chapter 11. AlixPartners LLP, a Michigan-based turnaround consulting firm, estimates that 25.8% of 182 large retailers it tracks are at significant risk of filing for bankruptcy or facing financial distress in 2009 or 2010. In the previous two years, the firm had estimated 4% to 7% of retailers then tracked were at a high risk for filing. Retailers are particularly vulnerable to a recession because of their high fixed costs.

The most vulnerable retailers are those with debt coming due, says AlixPartners Chief Executive Fred Crawford. "There are companies in virtually every retail sector in distress, whether it's a jeweler or a high-end luxury store. But if they have a lot of debt and it's coming due soon, that's probably a better predictor that they may need to file," said Mr. Crawford.

Can you imagine what things are going to look like if one-quarter of retail chains are in bankruptcy over the next two years? A bankruptcy process, the Wall Street Journal article later notes, that became much more difficult from which to emerge after changes made in 2005.

Given this situation, will we really accept the radical Republican plan to obstruct the desperately needed federal stimulus plan?

As a Chicago Cubs fan (ouch) and a fan of the National Hockey League, I am excited for the New Years Day NHL Winter Classic. Al at Bleed Cubbie Blue has some photos of Wrigley Field decked out for the hockey game and NHL Fanhouse's by Eric McErlain has taken some video in the upper deck after getting a chance to skate on the ice for 20 minutes.

Because 2008 was such a fine year, we can be thankful it will be one extra second long. I hope you enjoy your leap second this afternoon (here in North America).

The extra second will happen at midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), as 2008 will end with 23:59:58, 23:59:59, 23:59:60, and then 2009 begins with 00:00:00.

The leap second is necessary because the earth's rotation is slowing. And you thought the economic crisis was worth your worry.

Here's a surprise: while Republicans play hardball, Democratic efforts to play nice have no lasting impact. Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) yesterday told reporters he would be absolutely against the provisional seating of Al Franken should he be certified the winner in the Minnesota Senate race. Yet, Democrats played by different rules two years ago, as the Votemaster at Electoral-vote.com reminds us:

Cornyn also said he was against provisionally seating Franken if he is certified the winner. What Cornyn didn't mention is that in January 2007, the House, then controlled by the Democrats, did provisionally seat Vern Buchanan (R) of Florida even though there was a lot of evidence that something was wrong (large number of undervotes in Democratic counties that used voting machines but not in other counties).

Ah, that good will sure comes in handy.

I found Joshua Klein's TED presentation absolutely fascinating when I heard it a couple days ago.

FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver has an outstanding analysis of the actions the United States Senate could take to try to block Illinois Governor Blagojevich's appointment of Roland Burris.

It's not going to be as easy to block as some are suggesting.

Remember this story recounted by Digby about a seven-year-old girl's genital mutilation the next time someone tries to tell you that the situation in Iraq has improved so much.

During intermissions at Stockton Thunder games, we are often forced to watch a Reebok ad featuring Pittsburgh Penguin star Sidney Crosby.

I often mention my displeasure at the ad, as I am (to be generous) not a huge fan of Crosby. (My wife finds these outbursts slightly annoying.)

As a Washington Capitals fan, I find most things Pittsburgh Penguin annoying or worse. The Penguins have caused far too much heartache and frustration.

Now I am forced to watch the NHL focus its advertising on Crosby, while overlooking the league's reigning MVP, Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin.

Even someone like the New York Post's Larry Brooks is noting the NHL's stupidity:

Look, Crosby is an admirable individual and great player. But the NHL has made a drastic error in anointing No. 87 as The Chosen One. The NHL's All-Crosby-All-The-Time marketing machine has been detrimental to the sport by virtue of its exclusionary policy.

We get it, Crosby is Canadian and Ovechkin is Russian. But we also get that focusing on one athlete at the expense of a contemporary at least his equal and now clearly his superior, is stupid strategy that makes for horrible business policy.

Even I have to admit Crosby's greatness as a player. But the NHL's decision to overlook Ovechkin is an all-too-typical poor marketing decision that will cost the league in the future.

Josh Marshall thinks he has figured out a key part of the Republican Party's post-election strategy:

I think I have this right. The Republican party has decided on the racial joke issue as the vehicle to reintroduce themselves to the American people after the 2008 blow out.

Over at the California Progress Report, Peter Schrag offers an excellent summary explaining how California got into this budget mess.

Term limits, the outrageous 2/3rds vote requirements for passing a budget or increasing taxes, unfunded initiatives, Governor Schwarzenegger's car tax cut (which also increased spending), the unseen consequences of Proposition 13 have a role in this crisis.

Over the past 30 years, many decisions have been made in this state that focus on short-term political posturing and a radical anti-government philosophy. Now we are paying the price.

This is not about overspending, as Dan Walters and George Skelton have explained, and we must not fall for that radical Republican talking point.

Those text messages you pay so much to send? Professor Randall Stross explains how they cost the wireless phone companies virtually nothing to process.

It's just business.

This is an outrage -- will our broadcast networks really have no full-time correspondents in Iraq while our nation continues to have troops engaged in active combat?

Former State Department official Hillary Mann Leverett, who participated in secret talks with Iran, has a post on the Washington Note explaining why she believes our Secretary of State is wrong to assert the United States is winning the battle with Iran over who will have the most influence in Iraq.

Juan Fernando Gómez hasn't done anything wrong, but he gets detained when he travels back into the United States because he's on a Transportation Security Administration list.

He's not sure which one. No one will tell him. There also appears to be no way to get off the list.

As I have written before, I will be quite glad when the incompetant Bush Administration has left office. The Kafkaesque world Gómez faces when he travels is unacceptable.

(Hat tip: Kevin Drum)

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the National Football League better hope there is more to this story, because being a fan of the visiting team should not lead to being placed in handcuffs, a full-body frisking, detention, and ejection from the stadium.

(Hat tip: Deadspin)

I don't think this is a wise bet. CNNMoney's Peter Valdes-Dapena reports:

After nearly a year of flagging sales, low gas prices and fat incentives are reigniting America's taste for big vehicles.

Trucks and SUVs will outsell cars in December, according to researchers at the automotive Website Edmunds.com, something that hasn't happened since February.

Meanwhile the forecast finds that sales of hybrid vehicles are expected to be way down.

(Hat tip: The Oil Drum)

Does anyone really believe that Vice President Dick Cheney does not understand why he is so unpopular?

He may not agree with the reasons the American people disapprove of his actions. But I cannot believe he does not know what those reasons are.

Matthew Yglesias looks at a Tyler Cowen article in the New York Times that asks whether the "Committee to Save the World"'s decision to save Long Term Capital Management lead to more risky actions among our financial class -- and our present economic crisis.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald does an excellent job of explaining how awful a year it was in political journalism by taking a Politico story about the "Top Ten Political Scoops of 2008" and using it as an example of what is wrong with political coverage in this country. Greenwald writes:

Most notably, the only story on Politico's list that actually mattered in any meaningful way and to which one can apply the term "scoop" with a straight face -- namely: David Barstow's superb exposé on the Pentagon's domestic propaganda program -- was the only story of the 10 that didn't receive endless attention from our nation's television journalists. To the contrary, it was blackballed entirely. There's the central axiom driving coverage by our American media: the more significant a matter it is, the less attention it receives (if one wants to be generous, one could also include the Couric-Palin interview as a marginally meaningful story).

That's right. the political scoops of the year were stories about personalities and gotcha moments -- not policies during this difficult time in our nation's history. As Greenwald notes:

By contrast, a country that was plagued by actual political problems might focus on such dreary, boring revelations as the choerographing and approving of torture techniques at White House Principals Meetings; or the creation of a massive, likely illegal domestic surveillance system of sprawling data bases built and maintained with no Congressional approval or oversight by the NSA; or the issuance of a memo by the Bush DOJ endlessly expanding the definition of "torture" and declaring the Fourth Amendment inoperative to "domestic military operations" inside the U.S.; or the massive contributions received from the telecom industry by Sen. Jay Rockefeller immediately before he became the key advocate of immunity for that lawbreaking industry; or the flagrant abuse of unchecked NSA eavesdropping powers for purely prurient and invasive ends; or the patently false denials by the U.S. military -- bolstered by an ostensibly first-hand report from Oliver North on Brit Hume's "news" broadcast -- of massive civilian deaths in Afghanistan; or the endless holes in the attempts by the FBI to blame the anthrax attacks on a dead scientist; or so many other similar boring disclosures.

But not our media.

Perhaps the most annoying and sad part of this story lies with the fact that our media pundits pretend like there is nothing they can do about this. They pretend that they have no control over the narrative they put into their newspapers, web sites, and television networks.

They are just powerless victims. It's not like they write the scripts or figure out what stories to tell.

"No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Rachel Maddow is one of the few media people who has made our nation's crumbling infrastructure a major subject of her radio and television shows. It is one of the reasons she is a national treasure.

Here's her latest report from earlier in the week.

Like the Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters earlier this year, Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton examines the competing claims about how California has arrived at its current budget armageddon.

Unsurprisingly, Skelton -- like Walters -- finds wanting the Republican argument that all of the problems can be focused on out-of-control spending.

To begin with, inflation and population combined have grown nearly 25% since Schwarzenegger took office. So that's responsible for much of the increased spending.

"None of us decided, 'Oh, boy, let's have a party and grow government,' " said Finance Director Mike Genest. "In all those years, there was virtually no money for new spending commitments."

Well, there was one commitment. And it amounts to the single biggest chunk of the spending growth, nearly 25% worth. That was paying for Schwarzenegger's car-tax cut, his first -- and most fiscally imprudent -- act in office.

All the revenue from the car tax -- officially the vehicle license fee -- had gone to local governments. Schwarzenegger cut the tax by two-thirds and generously agreed to "backfill" local governments for their loss with money from the general fund. That's a $6.2-billion annual hit.

Prisons have swallowed 17% of the spending growth. It's all those tougher sentences.

Some so-called social programs also have been cost-drivers. Medi-Cal accounts for 17% of the spending increase. As the economy tanks, more people qualify.

Mental healthcare costs are escalating. More kids are being treated and so are a new category of "sexually violent predators." The cost of developmental services is rising as more children are diagnosed with autism and the population ages. In-home supportive services are costing more because pay is rising for providers. They got tired of bathing and dressing invalid shut-ins on minimum wages.

Education? K-12 schools account for only 12% of the spending growth.

One other item: We're up to $6.1 billion in annual debt payments on loans.

It all adds up to relatively modest, real spending growth, less than under most modern governors.

The biggest sin of Schwarzenegger and Legislature has been muddling along, unwilling to confront the inevitable need for both spending cuts and tax increases.

And the greatest transgression was that car-tax cut. Largely because of it, Sacramento again will be kicking the aged, blind and disabled. Bah, humbug.

As Walters found, once you strip out the increase in spending created by population growth and inflation, the major spending pressures come from Republican priorities: tougher sentences and the cost of the car tax cut.

Democrats have not been spending like crazy social activists. In recent years, they have been cutting important programs because the 2/3rds vote requirement to pass a budget has given the Grover Norquist worshipping Republican legislators a veto on the budget process. So, no, we have not been able to touch the $12 billion a year in tax cuts enacted since 1994.

The reality is far different from the rhetoric when it comes to the California budget crisis. One wonders how long it is going to take to get people to understand what is really going on in Sacramento.

Over at Fox News, you can "learn" that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal prolonged the Great Depression.

In the real world, economists understand that it was FDR's decision to balance the federal budget and cut spending in the midst of the crisis that added to the economic misery.

David Sirota has the details of the historic fiction being peddled over at the Fox News Channel.

Digby once again has an outstanding post about how tasers are not nearly as safe as their advocates would have us all believe.

It is a shame that a serious conversation about their potential deadly impact is taking place not here in the United States, but in England.

Via Cernig at Crooks and Liars, we learn of another global embarrassment recently achieved by the Bush Administration:

By a vote of 180 in favour to 1 against (United States) and no abstentions, the Committee also approved a resolution on the right to food, by which the Assembly would "consider it intolerable" that more than 6 million children still died every year from hunger-related illness before their fifth birthday, and that the number of undernourished people had grown to about 923 million worldwide, at the same time that the planet could produce enough food to feed 12 billion people, or twice the world's present population. (See Annex III.)

By the terms of the text, the Assembly would express concern that, in many countries, girls were twice as likely as boys to die from malnutrition and childhood diseases and that twice as many women as men were estimated to suffer from malnutrition. Accordingly, it would have the Assembly encourage all States to take action to address gender inequality and discrimination against women, including through measures to ensure that women had equal access to resources, including income, land and water, so as to enable them to feed themselves and their families. By further terms of the draft, the Assembly would urge Member States to promote and protect the rights of indigenous people, who have expressed in different forums their deep concerns over the obstacles and challenges faced in the full enjoyment of the right to food.

After the vote, the representative of the United States said he was unable to support the text because he believed the attainment of the right to adequate food was a goal that should be realized progressively. In his view, the draft contained inaccurate textual descriptions of underlying rights.

Just when one might think that our national reputation could not be debased any further, we learn that our government believes that the right to food is controversial. Little kids starving requires much more study.

The Bush Administration cannot be finished soon enough.

"Each problem has hidden in it an opportunity so powerful that it literally dwarfs the problem. The greatest success stories were created by people who recognized a problem a turned it into an opportunity." -- Joseph Sugarman

Despite what you may think by reading the news, Scientific American has a story on how homo sapiens are continuing to evolve -- and what that might mean for our species over the next millennium.

(Hat tip: Alexander Rose at the The Long Now blog)

James Fallows rightly vents about the post-September 11 security regime that does little to make us actually safer:

As Jeff Goldberg is the latest (and most amusing) to demonstrate, security routines like those of the TSA gum up travel and cost countless billions in salary, wasted time, and general hassle (not to mention the thrown-away bottled water and cigarette lighters!) without adding much that would thwart a serious terrorist.

My heart sank when I read recently about a truly idiotic last-minute Bush Administration step to lock in security theater. This is converting the "Air Defense Identification Zone," which had been "temporarily" in effect in the skies of the Mid-Atlantic since soon after 9/11, to a permanent federal regulation. (Splenetic background from me, here and here. News of the conversion to permanent status here.) Sigh. And commercial airports in the U.S. still ring with the ignored-by-all announcements warning that the "threat level" is "elevated."

If you haven't spent much time out of the country recently, it may be hard to convey how fraidy-cat all this ritual makes the US seem. Yes, the 9/11 attacks were a disaster of historic proportions. Yes, some group, somewhere, will probably manage to attack the United States again. But many, many societies around the world face an ongoing risk of attack. Life is dangerous. Over the long run, we judge societies by how they bear up under such threats (and, of course, what they do to contain them.) Compared with the Brits, the Indians, not to mention the Israelis and I bet also the Iraqis, our security theater makes us look like chickens. Reclaiming Gary Cooper, not Chicken Little, as our national icon is part of what I argued here.

But given the way politics works, security theater is a ratchet. If a public figure dares suggest reducing some for-show "protective" measure, then when an attack occurs -- as it will, someday, in a country this large and open -- the politician will be in trouble. So it's easy to add extra "safeguards"; almost impossible to remove them.

Because feeling safe is more important than actually being safe.

I also strongly agree with Fallows' plea that the Department of Homeland Security be renamed into something that does not sound like it would be at home in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union.

Governor Schwarzenegger, during his December 18 press conference after announcing he will not accept the $18 billion in budget solutions voted by Democratic legislators, opined:

I'm willing to stay here and I don't think that anyone should go and celebrate Christmas, none of the legislators and have people out there suffering. I think that the legislature owes it to the people of California to solve this problem before Christmas, so I will urge them to stay here.

Our governor, yesterday, as reported by the Sacramento Bee's Kevin Yamamura:

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, and Bass, D-Los Angeles, met twice with Schwarzenegger on Tuesday and said they plan to continue negotiating through Friday by phone and videoconference. The governor left the state for Christmas vacation late Tuesday. (emphasis added)

Our governor got away with his little sound bite last week, but when the time to work arrived, Schwarzenegger left the state for the holidays.

After five years, our governor has not figured out that governing requires more than photo-ops, press conferences, and props. He has figured out that he will not be held to account for his sound bites.

New America Foundation's Joe Mathews recounts how then-candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger fell for the radical conservative "no taxes" line rather than pragmatic advice about the California budget crisis.

In the meeting, [Ed] Leamer was the only one to speak up and argue that it made sense to increase taxes then in 2003. The economy had recovered from recession, and the budget was badly out of balance. Leamer went further: the economy wouldn't stay strong, so borrowing and hoping the economy will grow would not be enough to pull the state out of its budget crisis. And, Leamer added, if the budget imbalance was pushed off into the future, the state might have to raise taxes later at a bad economic time. Leamer argued that Schwarzenegger should propose a package of tough spending cuts and temporary tax increases.

Instead, the Governor laid the foundation for the current budget crisis with his ill-advised decision to slash the vehicle license fee without finding an offsetting source of revenue or spending cuts. That one decision had a $8 billion annual impact on the California budget -- and added to the debt this Governor has run up on his gubernatorial credit card.

The Republican line on taxes the past two decades has always been "cut them." At the top of the business cycle and at the bottom. In times of budget surplus, and budget deficit.

But when the answer stays the same regardless of the facts of the situation, one should realize that he or she has run into an ideology and not a way to govern.

Murray Waas has an important exclusive:

Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.

Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame's role in arranging her husband's Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer.

Cheney denied to the investigators, however, that he had done anything on purpose that would lead to the outing of Plame as a covert CIA operative. But the investigators came away from their interview with Cheney believing that he had not given them a plausible explanation as to how he could focus attention on Plame's role in arranging her husband's trip without her CIA status also possibly publicly exposed. At the time, Plame was a covert CIA officer involved in preventing Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and Cheney's office played a central role in exposing her and nullifying much of her work.

The Vice President may need a pardon.

Hey, I have a blog on which I can link to articles and vent about issues bothering me.

Andrew Sullivan offers a grave look at the economics of the newspaper business in his latest column.

I am quite worried that the current recession is going to spell the end of numerous newspapers in the coming year. Today's news about the Tribune Company (owners of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and others) teetering on the edge of bankruptcy solidifies this concern.

Worse, as Sullivan notes, blogs cannot fill the void.

The terrifying problem is that a one-man blog cannot begin to do the necessary labour-intensive, skilled reporting that a good newspaper sponsors and pioneers. A world in which reporting becomes even more minimal and opinion gets even more vacuous and unending is not a healthy one for a democracy. Perhaps private philanthropists will step in and finance not-for-profit journalistic centres, where investigative and foreign reporting can be invested in and disseminated by blogs and online sites. Maybe reporter-bloggers will start rivalling opinion-mongers such as me and give the whole enterprise some substance. Maybe papers can slim down sufficiently to produce a luxury print issue and a viable online product. There's always a hunger for news, after all.

Losing the oversight and investigatory role newspapers play in relationship to our government will be a major blow. Not just at the national level -- but also in local and state coverage.

Many governmental decisions are made in cities, counties, and states that receive far too little coverage or analysis. Who will be there as newspapers shut down government bureaus -- or shut down altogether?

What is next for news gathering? Because a free nation requires some entity to do this vital and expensive work.

President-Elect Barack Obama's decision to nominate General Eric Shinseki (Ret.) to head the Department of Veterans Affairs is a triumphant pick on so many levels.

This department has sadly been neglected even as the ranks of veterans requiring services as swelled during the past decade's two major wars. General Shinseki is a man of deep honor and true accomplishment. A person of his talents is needed to head the VA -- and the president-elect deserves great credit for putting him there.

And all of this is before we consider the political messages this pick represents. Those are also transcendent.

Shinseki, remember, was the general who was right before the Iraq War. Time's Mark Thompson reminds us of the important details:

Shinseki has avoided the public eye since retiring five years ago. One month before the Iraq War began, Shinseki testified before Congress that several hundred thousand soldiers would be needed to secure Iraq after the U.S. invasion, far more than the Administration had said were needed. He supported the military tradition of preparing for the worst, deploying more troops than might be necessary and then bringing the surplus home. He accurately predicted that ethnic tensions would trigger violence in Iraq and require significant ground forces to contain. The war ultimately required a "surge" of 30,000 additional troops beginning in January 2007, validating Shinseki's premonition. But Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz belittled his assessment.

"Beware a 12-division strategy for a 10-division Army," Shinkseki warned at his retirement ceremony, an event attended by neither Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz. It was a public rebuke that sent a shiver through the officer corps, and made clear that professional dissent -- however carefully considered and delivered by a top officer, with 38 years in uniform -- could derail an exemplary career. (Contrary to public perception, however, Shinseki was not fired by Rumsfeld. He served out his term as Army chief of staff, although Rumsfeld's allies had already hacked away at Shinseki's influence by proclaiming him a lame duck during his final year, even before his controversial testimony.)

James Fallows has two outstanding must-read posts about the Shinseki pick. In the first, Fallows talks about his experience writing his book, Blind into Baghdad, and how he tried -- without success -- to get Shinseki to do the standard Washington thing of placing blame on other people (who even happened, in this case, to deserve it):

Here's one other point that is not as widely known as Rumfeld's and Wolfowitz's bullying of Shinseki: Despite being unfairly treated, despite being 100% vindicated by subsequent events, Shinseki kept his grievances entirely to himself. Although my book contains accounts of Shinseki's inside arguents with Rumsfeld et al, and his discussions with his own staff, zero of that information came from Shinseki.

That is pretty rare inside the power circles in D.C.

Fallows then devotes a post to the political elegance of the pick -- which I want to emphasize. Because this is the rare story of someone who was right, when so many others were wrong, getting a second act in Washington.

Whenever he talks about this selection, Obama (plus his lieutenants) can describe it completely, sufficiently, and strictly in the most bipartisan high-road terms. They have selected a wounded combat veteran; a proven military leader and manager; a model of personal dignity and nonpartisan probity: an unimpeachable choice. Symbolic elements? If people want them, they can work with Shinseki's status as (to my recollection at the moment) the first Asian-American in a military-related cabinet position, not to mention a Japanese-American honored for lifelong military service on Pearl Harbor Day.

As for the other symbolic element -- that Obama is elevating the man who was right, when Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, et al were so catastrophically wrong -- that is something that neither Obama nor anyone around him need say out loud, ever. The nomination is like a hyper-precision missile, or what is known in politics as a "dog whistle." The people for whom this is a complete slap in the face don't need to be told that. They know -- and know that others know it too. So do the people for whom it is vindication. And all without Obama descending for one second from his bring-us-together higher plane.

The artistry here is remarkable. Along with the inspired nature of this choice.

And as Fallows and others noted, this is precisely what the president-elect did on Meet the Press yesterday. "He was right."

That, and his obvious expertise in managing organizations and his care and love for our Veterans, makes this an outstanding pick that gives me hope that we may start doing much better for the men and women who have served this nation in uniform.

Could he, or any of the other people on the right side of the political spectrum who have been whining about this recently, show me the leader of this effort to revive the fairness doctrine? Because I missed that meeting.

As Matthew Yglesias puts it:

Meanwhile, how dominant can liberals really be in the mainstream media if we can't even stop George Will from just making stuff up about us in his widely syndicated Washington Post column?

I'm sure the Post's inept ombudsperson will find some other made-up horror to address.

Via Brian Leubitz at Calitics, we see this troubling report about the state of the Sierra snowpack from the Associated Press:

Skiers and snowboarders are keeping their fingers crossed for snow as the Sierra snowpack is off to another slow start.

The Lake Tahoe Basin snowpack on Thursday was only 2 percent of average for the date.

The situation is similar to last year, when the Tahoe Basin snowpack was only 1 percent of normal on the same date.

This is a huge problem for this state. Given our already dry situation, another bad snow year will lead to inevitable severe water rationing.

California faces several crises right now. Keep water on that list.

I'm a couple days late to watching Rachel Maddow's Friday show via podcast, but Rep. Barney Frank made an outstanding point about 5:17 into this segment which is deserving of additional highlighting:

"One of the troubling things here is that there is strong evidence in the reaction of some of my colleagues, and others in the society, of a white-collar/blue-collar double standard. People have said, 'Well, you know, those auto workers get too much money.' Did you hear anybody say that the average CitiCorp worker gets too much money? Or the average AIG worker gets too much money? Because I guarantee you that they get more than an autoworker.

And this notion that we will take enormous risks and put in hundreds of billions of dollars for financial institutions, but we will have people cavil at trying to help this real, physical part of the economy -- in similar circumstances and with similar terms -- is very troubling."

Absolutely.

I don't want to hear stories of "bailout fatigue" as our nation confronts this economic crisis. As a life-long deficit hawk, I recognize that these serious times require massive economic stimulus and enormous deficits to keep us from facing worse alternatives.

But let's stop this game of forcing Detroit to justify its every move when the Wall Street "titans" who got us into this mess are handed the key to the Treasury without much oversight.

Watch the entire segment below:

Why, oh why, did I listen to this song three times tonight while driving? Should I blame the iPod? Or seek professional help?

From the Shadow Government Statistics web site, an analysis that adds to the concern we should feel about the recent official jobs-loss announcement from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Today, the BLS reported a statistically-significant, seasonally-adjusted jobs loss of 533,000. The figure would be 732,000 Net of Revisions, and is down a total of 873,000 Net of Concurrent Seasonal Factor Bias.

I became aware of Shadow Government Statistics while reading this outstanding must-read article by Kevin Phillips, which explains how official government statistics have been manipulated over the past couple of decades.

Here's the chart: there's much here to cause worry.

Note about the SGS Alternate figure above from the Shadow Government Statistics web site: "The SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated "discouraged workers" defined away during the Clinton Administration added to the existing BLS estimates of level U-6 unemployment."

Josh Marshall has some excellent thoughts about the state of the newspaper industry here.