Brian and Numerian have added some very nice new additions to our blogroll, check them out here:

Brian Downing's Picks:

Al Jezeera, Asia Times, Night Watch, Emirates Journal, Soldiers for the Truth , The War Report, Iraq Casualties and Global Security

Numerian's choices:

Mother Jones, Tom Dispatch, Der Spiegel, Big Picture, Calculated Risk, Bonddad, House Bubble and Prudent Bear

And in the future you can find them midway down the right-hand column under the 'timely' divider.

I have been very busy lately and have not had much time to post to the Newswire. I am in the process of moving right now and will be tied up for at least another week. :( If you see a story that interests you or would interest other members please post it to the Newswire. Please remember to post opinions, column pieces and blog posts in your diary.

THANKS!

I need some tech help. Someone is spoofing agonist.org email addresses and spamming everyone and their mother. If you know how to prevent this kind of behavior from the server level access please shoot me an email. I need help.

Could this be one of those moments when the middle class and poor people in this country awaken to the reality of their economic distress? It will be if people really listen to what Barack Obama had to say on this subject rather than digest only the snippets of quotes that the opposition are ranting about.

From Hillary Clinton to John McCain to a variety of newscasters and pundits, the attack on Obama has focused on his elitism and lack of sympathy for the average American. The focus is entirely on these two sentences Obama said during a fund-raiser in San Francisco:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

http://agonist.org/sean_paul_kelley/20080328/site_update#comment-153159

http://agonist.org/sean_paul_kelley/20080328/site_update#comment-153214

Is there anything the Republican Party loathes more than FDR and the New Deal? How many times have people like Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist vowed to dismantle the regulations, entitlement programs, and safety nets created by the New Deal? Time and again we’ve seen assaults on all aspects of FDR’s legacy, including a Social Security “reform” effort in 2005 that might have succeeded if George Bush hadn’t been hobbled by the Iraq War.

Last month the Republicans had a great victory in their effort to undo the New Deal, by eliminating completely any distinction between commercial banks and investment banks, while at the same time giving investment banks unfettered access to the public treasury with none of the responsibilities or burdens placed on commercial banks. All of this was accomplished in the same way as 9/11 allowed the administration to claim unheralded executive powers – by using an “emergency” to justify a power grab perpetrated with no reference to you the taxpayer, or your representatives in Congress.

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There is a good chance regular blogging will resume tomorrow! wOOt!

(originally posted Friday March 28 at 1:45 pm)

A new server has been procured. The old one is fried. The databases are overworked and fried as well. I don't know what the ETA on this will be but maybe, if the gods of cyberspace are kind to us at the end of the weekend we'll have reliable functionality. If you can help with the project please email me. Now is the time. We need all the help we can get. But we are closer to a resolution now than we were earlier this week. Sorry for the mess. Believe me, it hasn't contributed to my mental health either.

Update to the Update!: Jay has successfully moved The Agonist to the new server. There are still a few glitches, so if you find any, and are able to log in and post, please tell us about them here. ~ qB

O Hillary! Bold Hillary! Your courage so inspiring!
On Tuzla’s deathly airport field you braved those snipers firing.
The bullets sprayed about your feet, yet you went on undaunted;
While all around you ran in fear, your fearlessness you flaunted!

(Except there were no snipers there, no bullets to evade;
An eight year old had welcomed you with flowers she displayed.
This wasn’t quite the threat you claim, no reason for distress.
The only thing you had to dodge were questions from the press.)

That armored plane that flew you in with death-defying action -
It cork-screwed into Tuzla field, creating a distraction!

Needless to say there have been some extremely unplesant site issues the last several days. At this point I am not sure what the resolution is, nor when there will be one. But I am trying to come up with a solution. If anyone has any extensive drupal/site hosting experience and are interested in helping shoot me an email. I'm all ears at this point. seanpaul-at-agonist.org

THE AGONIST

What Did Socks Know and When Did He Know It?
An in-depth investigative report by ABC News continues to show disturbing evidence that Socks, the White House cat during Bill Clinton's presidency may, like Hillary Clinton, also have been present in the White House when the former Chief Executive was having sex with intern Monica Lewinsky.... "Socks may have ducked Ken Starr, but he won’t escape the bulldog reporting of ABC News," snarled Ross, with obvious disdain for the black and white tabby.

3/21/2008

http://blogreport.salon.com/

http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0-rc2

Drupal 6 RC2 released

News and announcements · Drupal 6.x

Gábor Hojtsy - January 10, 2008 - 23:03

Release candidate

We are proud to present to you the second release candidate of Drupal 6.0. Although there are still a few known issues that we are working on fixing for you, we are confident that our code is stable enough for wider testing by the community. Since the first release candidate, we have fixed various issues including the security fixes that come with Drupal 5.6 and others involving caching filtered content, menu item inheritance, missing breadcrumbs, better error reporting in the installer and updates, some translatability issues and lots of code style cleanups, and other small fixes. The most notable usability improvement since Drupal 6.0 RC1 is that the files directory is now automatically created in sites/default.

In the list of problems central bankers worry about, the very worst is a systemic crisis. Systemic risk occurs when the failure of one financial institution brings about the failure of another, and it arises from the complex network of bank-to-bank trades that exist in a variety of products. Most central bankers go through their careers without even witnessing a systemic crisis; Ben Bernanke has just started his career right in the middle of one.

Make no mistake: this Bear Stearns failure is the very definition of a systemic crisis. Bear Stearns is a major financier for hedge funds; it runs one of Wall Street’s largest back offices for processing trades; it has transactions on its books with everybody big in the derivatives business. If Bear Stearns collapses, there isn’t a bank in the world that won’t be counting their losses.

I have several friends and family who support Hillary Clinton for president, and since I support Obama, conversations have been getting a bit testy lately. Still, I’ve managed to glean some insight into their thinking and the emotions they’ve invested in this nomination race. You can learn a lot as well from reading blogs and comments from Hillary fans, though unfortunately these discussions on both sides have increasingly degenerated into vituperative.

There are three important claims being made by Hillary supporters: she is better able to stand up to Republican attacks, it is time for a woman to ascend to the Oval Office, and the Clinton approach to running the party has been successful and should be maintained. How do these arguments stand up to the challenge from Barack Obama?

One aspect of The Agonist and The Agonist community I have always tried to foster is civility and mutual respect. These are two of the three foundational ideas of this site. (The other is an optimistic skepticism.) If I can't take the time to listen to you and your ideas how can I expect anyone to listen to mine? If I don't have the courage to admit I am wrong--which seems to happen frequently--then how can I ever expect the same from anyone else?

Why do I bring this up? Well, some people and some threads and some discussions have turned decidedly negative, nasty and personal lately. This is unacceptable. Please stop. In the 6+ years The Agonist has been around we've only banned three people (it might be a few more, but not more than half a dozen) and I don't want to add to the list. I don't like banning people and I do not intend to ban people, no matter how much I disagree with their ideas. And that's the key: I may disagree with what you believe--but it is how you say it that will get you banned. The only other thing that will get you banned is arguing ideology in bad faith. That's a huge no-no. So, please folks, simmer down. I know the silly season is still with us, but chill. I value the contribution everyone makes here and will not let this place turn into another internet free for all. Please respect each other, and most importantly each other's beliefs.

Remember, our job here is to disturb the comforted and comfort the disturbed. It's not to alienate, insult or 'out' people for faults perceived or real.

The financial losses that are being announced almost daily are starting to blur. What sense should we make of the $11.1 billion write-down that AIG, the giant insurance company, took on its investment portfolio? Is this stupefyingly large, or just very large? A lot of the loss related to subprime mortgage securities and credit default swaps, and AIG said more losses are to be expected this year. Will these be much bigger? Since AIG isn’t saying, we have to guess.

Which means we have to pay attention to the estimates of losses for the financial industry as a whole that are starting to be published. This past week the Swiss bank UBS said it estimated that total global financial industry losses from the credit crisis will be around $600 billion. That sounds gargantuan, but who is included in the definition of the global financial industry, and how much of total industry capital is at stake? It is time, therefore, to put these losses into context and see if the financial industry is being hurt, crippled, or mortally wounded by these losses.

I'm not a big pop-culture fan, as you are all aware. But I am always interested in the Oscars--I like good acting--I'm still pretty much in awe of Daniel Day-Lewis in "There Will Be Blood." So, chat it up, boo the winners and cheer the losers, or something like that, but play nice.

It is my great pleasure to announce four new writers here at The Agonist.

First, Bob Geiger, known for his excellent coverage of the Senate and his wonderful Saturday comics collection will be our new Senate correspondent. Bob will cover all manner of issues regarding the Senate, from parliamentary chicanery to specific bills and Senate elections. Bob took a long hiatus from blogging and we are very happy to have him here.

Second, Cliff Schecter, known for his acerbic wit on MSNBC and other mainstream television channels and his excellent and often hilarious work at Brave New Films will blog once or twice a week here and we'll hope to be hosting his blog here at Agonist central soon as well, as we're working out a few kinks as I type. Cliff will cover all manner of issues, many of the media oriented.

Third, Alex Thurston of The Seminal will write a twice weekly foreign affairs column--Alex is currently a student in the Master's Program of Arab Studies at Georgetown University. He graduated from Northwestern University in 2005 with a BA in Religion and spent the winter of 05-06 working at various jobs around Chicago. In 2006-2007, he lived in Senegal as part of the Fulbright exchange program and studied Muslim youth movements in the capital city, Dakar. His interests (other than politics and religion) include hip hop and literature.

Finally, Hannes Artens, whom many of you already know, will be writing a weekly column from across the pond on the current view of America and the world abroad.

Please give all of them a very warm Agonist welcome. I am very excited to have their participation, thoughts and ideas here at The Agonist.

Please visit our advertisers because they help pay the bills around here, dig?

When Stephen Kazmierczak stepped from behind the curtain on the stage of Cole Hall at Northern Illinois University, he was wearing all black clothes and a black ski mask to hide his face. Now what was the ski mask for? Surely not to hide his identity, since he must have known that within 24 hours of his death that afternoon, hundreds of millions of people around the world would be familiar with his name and his face.

Probably he was trying to present to his victims an image of terror or evil, much like we’ve all seen in the movies or television shows that depict the bad guys when they go about shooting people down indiscriminately. Whatever his reasons, the masked Stephen Kazmierczak had one thing in common with the rest of us as we ponder over these massacres- we all wear a mask as well in refusing to look at these episodes for what they truly reveal.

"Ironically, the NIE may have made war with Iran more likely," Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men, says in this exclusive interview for The Agonist

American corporate media may not believe it as they throw primary and caucus results at us in a daily staccato, but the world keeps spinning. As important as the question, who's going to be the next American president, certainly is, there are other issues that require our constant attention and us not letting our guard down. With the publication of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran last December, the media has declared Iran no longer an issue. The military option is off the table for the foreseeable future. Matter closed.

“I wanted it to be a surprise for you.”

So said Jérȏme Kerviel to the senior management of French bank Societe Generale when they asked him what he expected to do with a hidden €1.4 billion ($2.1 billion) trading profit at the end of last year.

Not for nothing was Kerviel chosen for the “nicest trader award” last year by the back office at Societe Generale. Kerviel is going down in financial history not only as the person who engineered the largest trading loss ever (€4.9 billion), but as the humblest rogue trader yet. Even French financial authorities are impressed – they dropped fraud charges against him when they discovered he did not benefit from his activity by one cent.

Bank of America announced this morning that virtually all of its quarterly profit was wiped out by write-offs of Collateralized Debt Obligations and related mortgage securities. The bank set aside reserves for further losses in its consumer mortgage and credit card portfolio, in line with large increases in defaults and delayed payments in the fourth quarter of last year.

Several weeks ago the bank had alerted markets to the charge-offs, but the amount written down in the CDO portfolio of $5.28 billion was $2.0 billion more than anticipated. At that time, CEO and Chairman Kenneth Lewis said "There's been a change in social attitudes toward default .... We're seeing people who are current on their credit cards but are defaulting on their mortgages....I'm astonished that people would walk away from their homes."