Reasonably Logical

I’m currently listening to the VP debate live. Honestly, I’m somewhat surprised at how well Palin is handling herself. I was expecting this to be somewhat like watching a train wreck. Instead, she’s actually doing a fairly damn decent job. Of course, even as I type this she just dodged the question about restricted budgets and first things to cut.

For the record, I love this moderator. She’s cutting them off and forcing them to actually answer the questions!

<--- Missing sections first 1/2 hour --->

Update (9:32pm): Climate Change
Palin - “we’re allowing them to …pollute more than America would ever stand for.” - Any body else concerned by that wording
Biden - faced man-made impact face on, support for clean coal & safe nuclear, export clean coal technology

Update (9:34pm) - Carbon Caps
Palin - Seemingly ignored carbon caps question. Two word answer. (”I do.”) Support for large scale domestic drilling and energy production
Biden - Yes, strict caps.

Update (9:38pm) - Same Sex Rights
Biden - Support for equal constitution rights. Do not support same-sex marriage.
Palin - Can’t support “redefine marriage”. Emphasizing tolerance. No civil rights discussion. Dodged the equal civil rights part of questions.

Update (9:43pm) - Iraq
Palin - Plan for withdrawal, but no early withdrawal. Emphasis on surge and NATO allies (what allies?). Attack with “white flag of surrender”. Slander about voting not to fund the troops.
Biden - Shift responsibility to Iraqis and draw troops over 18 months. Defense of Obama.

Update (9:50pm) - Pakistan vs Iran
Biden - Solid comparison. Redirect issue towards Afghanistan. Build schools to compete for hearts and minds. Point about control of Iran not in the hands of nut job (whose name I can’t remember.)
Palin - Mention nut job leader of Iran and says should not have nuclear power or weapons. Attack on “meet without preconditions”.

Update (9:53pm) - Israel solution
Palin - Two state solution is the solution. Israel is our strongest ally and we will not allow a second holocausts. Enough is enough looking backwards. (After everything she’s said so far? Hah!) Divert to domestic issues.
Bidin - Both friends on Israel. Attack on elections in Gaza strip, not putting NATO troops in Lebanon. “I haven’t heard how his policy on [] will be different from George Bush’s”

Update (10:10pm) - Usage of Nuclear Weapons
Palin - Dodged main question. Went in direction of proliferation. Then went to Afghanistan. Disputed claim of general in Iraq.
Bidin - “Facts matter”. General said, surge will not work. 3 weeks in Iraq is more than 6.5 years in Afghanistan. Caught own over extension about McCain’s record, stepped back.

Update (10:05pm) - Interventionism
Biden - Dafur (no fly zone, “rally the world to act”). genocide -> does not have right to national sovereignty
Palin - Attack on Biden for reversed stance war vote. Agreement on Dafur. Also “all options are on the table” statement. (Does that worry anyone else? Isn’t that a Bushism we can avoid?)

Update (10:07) - “A heat beat away”
Bidin - Carry out Obama’s policies. Rinse repeat.
Palin - Acknowledge differences in positions. Continue policies. Rinse repeat.

<--- Questions are less straight forward and descrete. As such, I'm breaking out by issue, not question now. -->

Education (from a couple of different questions)
Palin - More focus on education, need flexibility in NCLB, profession of teaching, working with special needs
Bidin - NCLB not funded properly

VP Power
Palin - Flexibility of VP office in congress etc. (Very dangerous expansion of past policy in my opinion.)
Bidin - Cheney violated article 1 of constitution. Very dangerous. (I agree entirely.)

Own weaknesses
Palin - Did not answer at all. (Amusingly she drew attention to her own record, but refuses to let Bidin use McCian.)
Bidin - Faced question straight on.

Unfortunately, I have to stop now. My laptop battery is about to die. I may add some extra comments latter.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably heard some mention of these things over the last couple of weeks, but had absolutely no idea what the heck they were. If so, I strongly recommend reading the article below. It provides a good overview of them in a way that I actually feel like I (somewhat) understand the issues.

The $55 trillion question
The financial crisis has put a spotlight on the obscure world of credit default swaps - which trade in a vast, unregulated market that most people haven’t heard of and even fewer understand. Will this be the next disaster?
By Nicholas Varchaver, senior editor and Katie Benner, writer-reporter, CNN Money
Last Updated: September 30, 2008: 12:28 PM ET

If you’ve been following the news this week, I’m sure you’ve heard about how the US economy is in desperate straights and that we desperately need to bail out Wall Street. Do I believe that the US economy is about to collapse? Not really. Do I think we face a serious recession and possibly even a depression? Yes. But remember folks, they happen periodically. It sucks to be one, but we will get through it and recover.

Let’s consider the reason for the economic problems we’re now facing. The price of real estate has gotten completely out of sync with its actual value and people’s ability to pay. About 10 years ago, prices started going up exponentially versus the fairly linear increases they’d followed for the last hundreds of years. Given this, it was really only a matter of time before a reset had to happen. Well, now is that time. The price of real estate has fallen dramatically and probably will keep falling for a while yet. Even the current prices are still too high. They haven’t fallen enough to get back to where they should be yet.

Before you start panicking too much folks, remember this is a good thing for most of us! Now, if you bought a home in the last ten years or so, you’re screwed. Sorry. For the rest of us though, I’m frankly looking forward to the day when I can actually afford to buy a home in Fairfield County.

However, the problem our economy is facing is a little broader than that. The brilliant folks on Wall Street decided that since real estate and mortgages were risky they were going to spread the risk around (diversify) as much as possible. (Note: By itself, that isn’t actually a bad idea.) The problem came when everyone decided that since *they* weren’t exposed to any risk, why should they be careful about who the loaned money to or how much they loaned? After all, *they* would still get their money back right? Well, once everyone started doing this, the quality of the average mortgage went *way* down and the average amount went up - which of course just helped the price explosion described above. End result, we have a lot of low quality debt (mortgages, CDOs, etc..) spread all over the US and world financial system.

Well, people finally realized that no one has any idea how much this crappy debt is actually worth. (Answer: Probably not much.) As such, no one is willing to buy it. Since a lot of businesses depended on being able to buy and sell assets to keep cash flow up, they found themselves in a bad situation. With a lot of assets they can’t sell, even if those assets were actually worth something, they can’t stay in business. This is what happened to a lot of the major investment banks which were (in)famous for their high leveraged business models.

Frankly, I wish we could just let them all hang. They got themselves into this; they should suffer the consequences. The problem with that is that they drug the rest of us in too.

On the lending side of things, since what were perfectly stable businesses are failing left and right, no one wants to loan anyone else money since there is a chance they might not get it back. End result, no one can borrow money and even more businesses go “boom”. The big worry at this point is that the bad debt is so widely held and that there is so much of it, that we could see a cascade effect well outside of the financial industry. When banks are in trouble - like now - they tend not to want to loan anyone money. End result, recession or possibly even a depression.

Now, let’s not kid ourselves, what I’ve described above could be bad. *Really bad.* As in, a lot of people loose jobs bad. (For the record, I work in the finance industry. As such, I’m definitely not ignoring this aspect.) However, in all honesty I think the $700 BILLION - nearly as much as Iraq & Afghanistan combined* - bailout of Wall Street would be worse in the long run. Bailing them out once does nothing to address the fundamental problems and frankly just encourages them to do it again. If we’re going to fix this, we need to fix the root causes.

If we absolutely must bail them out, let’s give them a loan instead. One with 10% interest a year, and first right of repayment. (In other words, let’s make a profit and minimize our – the taxpayers’ – risk.) After that though, let’s go after the fundamental causes of the crisis so this doesn’t happen again.

* This used to read “more than Iraq & Afghanistan combined”. I got this statement from someone else - don’t remember who unfortunately - and it turns out to be not quite accurate anymore. According to the Government Accountability Office, we’d spent $635.9 billion on the “War on Terror” as of December 2007. However, if you include the spending this year to Sept 15, the total jumps to $807 billion. Updated: 9-26-08

I learned today that the Prairie Flame has stopped publication for good. The Flame was a newspaper for the GLBT community in downstate Illinois that ran for more than 12 years. Beyond news coverage, the Flame also included a insert that listed area resources and organizations. (I still have several copies scattered around.) This listing provided the majority of the resources that are now tracked by the Champaign County LGBTQA Resource Guide website I still maintain.

While it might not have been the best of papers - honestly I usually got my news elsewhere - it was a good central source for things happening in the GLBT community in downstate. The Flame was somewhat of an area institution; one that I at least will miss.

Putting out the flame
After 11 years of publishing a newspaper for the gay community, Buff Carmichael calls it quits
SEPTEMBER 11, 2008
BY DUSTY RHODES, Illinois Times

Since the invasion of Iraq six years ago, the treatment of Iraqi gays has steadily diminished. Under Hussein, gay men were largely ignored. While they didn’t have many rights, they also weren’t hunted down and killed as is happening today. With the religious extremism that has been brought forth by the civil war in Iraq, Iraqi gay men are being hunted by all sides. Now that the actual fighting has died down, more and more Iraqi gay men are facing violence, rape, and death.

Disturbingly, this trend is getting very little attention internationally. Over the last couple of years, I’ve seen three articles - two of them within the last month - on gays in Iraq. (See links below) There has been no action taken by international forces, and the United States barely seems to have noticed. Our government and troops do nothing, and our gay political groups are so caught up in domestic concerns that they haven’t even raised the issue.

Thankfully, there is some evidence that this might be changing somewhat. There is a group in London (Iraqi LGBT) - primarily of Iraqi ex-pats - which is organizing an underground railroad to get some Iraqi gay men out of the country. The issue is finally getting mainstream press coverage with both a CNN and Newsweek article in the last month.

Despite this, there is still a lot more than needs to be done. I strongly suggest you read the articles linked below and think about the issue. Talk about it with your friends. Better yet, talk about it with your congresspeople. And possibly most importantly, if you’re involved with a gay political group (HRC, NGLTF, NCLR, Lambda Legal, GLAAD, etc..) bring it up with them. We have no excuse as a country, as the LGBT community, or as individuals to this issue any longer.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Do Kill
Nobody wants to talk about gays in Iraq, much less who is killing them.
By Lennox Samuels
Newsweek Web Exclusive

Gays in Iraq terrorized by threats, rape, murder
By Frederik Pleitgen, Mohammed Tawfeeq and Wayne Drash
CNN

Iraq struggles to stop persecution of gays
Monday, April 16, 2007
Deb Price, Detroit News
(This article has apparently been taken down. The link is dead and I can’t find reference to the article on their site.)

I’m sure most of you hate phone menus as much as I do. Hell, I recently moved my brokerage account away from E*Trade primarily because their phone system (and thus customer service) was an absolute disaster. Well, I just ran across a product which could change all that. *

Fonolo essentially allows you to call a company and skip the whole damn phone tree to get right to the person you want. Honestly, if it weren’t for the privacy concerns, I’d be jumping up and down and begging to sign up for the beta. This sounds like it could save hours of frustration.

Unfortunately, there is one big catch for me: all of your calls are routed through Fonolo’s servers and recorded. Do I really want them recording my call to my credit card issuer? Or bank? The ramifications of them having that data is beyond scary. I don’t know what there privacy policy is, but honestly it doesn’t really matter. How long until they get bought out? What happens to all that - potentially very personal - information then?

* I first saw mention of Fonolo in Seth Godin’s blog.

Pa. court upholds gay-rally ruling
Published: Jul 25, 2008
By MICHAEL YODER, Intelligencer Journal

While obviously I’d rather it wasn’t this particular law that was used to set the precedent*, overall this is a positive outcome for anyone who has any interest in limited, understandable government. Essentially, the legislature used a completely unrelated bill to lump unpopular changes into something that legislatures couldn’t vote against. This happens all the time at both the state and federal levels and is one of the things that drives my nuts about congressional politics.

*As it happens, I tend to feel hate crimes laws are used *way* too broadly. Overall, they do more good than harm though.

Wednesday’s ruling, initiated by a lawsuit involving Manheim Township resident Mark Diener, found that the Pennsylvania Legislature’s altering of a 2002 crop-destruction bill into an amendment to the “ethnic intimidation” law violated Article III of the state’s constitution.

Rather than make a separate post for each of these, I’m stringing together a couple of interesting news articles and making one big post out of them.

Judge OKs adult trial for teen suspect
Attorney sought juvenile court for fatal shooting case
By Raul Hernandez, Ventura County Start
Friday, July 25, 2008

The judge responsible for the trail of the young boy who shot a (gay) classmate in California a few months back has decided that he must face an adult court, not juvenile court. Excuse me but the kid is 14! If he’s not a juvenile, who the heck is?

I thought I’d mentioned this before, but I can’t find the reference if I did.

Bush signs sweeping AIDS bill
Landmark measure repeals ban on HIV-positive immigrants and visitors
By LOU CHIBBARO JR, Washington Blade | Jul 30, 3:00 PM

OK, some mostly good news this time. The long standing ban against people with HIV traveling to the United States has been repealed. The congressional mandate was reversed, but there is still one more step to see it totally gone. The Department of Health and Human Services must change their policy, and unfortunately that is unlike to happen as long as we have Bush in office.

Assembly’s Gay Rites Backers Reap Benefits
Donations Pour In for Republicans
By JACOB GERSHMAN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | August 7, 2008

Nice to see that some Republicans can vote in support of gay marriage and keep there seats. Maybe my party isn’t total hopeless after all…

OK, more articles to come, but I need a break from typing.

Not that I have anyone to drive there with… (I’m taking applications for that position if anyone’s interested. -_- )

I doubt this is really news to anyone given how much press coverage it got, but given the significance I figured I’d go ahead and post it anyways. For the first time ever, out-of-state same-sex couples can get married in Massachusetts.

Mass. lawmakers OK all gay marriages
Advocate News
Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Thought I’d go ahead and share this article from UIUC’s ACES News. According to a study done by an assistant professor there - Ramona Faith Oswald - legal recognition of same sex relationships is most often sought by parents and people of religious faith. While not exactly a surprise, it sure contradicts the messaging of the religious right.

In the interest of full disclosure, Oswald is an acquaintance of mine whom I’ve worked with on various community initiatives including the Champaign County LGBTQA Resource Guide website which I still maintain.

Belief in God, Parenthood Prompt Gay Partners to Make Commitment
Published: Jul. 30, 2008
Source: Ramona Faith Oswald, (217) 333-2547, roswald@uiuc.edu

URBANA - Which gay and lesbian couples are more likely to legalize their relationship and hold a commitment ceremony? Those with children and strong religious beliefs, says a new University of Illinois study.

“Opponents of relationship recognition for same-sex couples often say that we have to protect children, or that same-sex relationships are against God. But this study suggests that lesbians and gay men who seek relationship recognition may be acting to protect their children and enact their own religious beliefs,” said Ramona Faith Oswald, a U of I associate professor of family studies.

…