Over all, the nation lost 54,000 jobs in August, the agency said, as state and local governments, many of them grappling with severe budget deficits, cut 1o,000 jobs last month. Another 114,000 temporary Census positions also came to an end. In all, governments cut 121,000 jobs last month.
The unemployment rate rose to 9.6 percent from 9.5 percent in July.
It sure would be nice if the geniuses in Washington would do something to stimulate the economy and put a dent in unemployment.
Former President Jimmy Carter left North Korea on Friday with Aijalon Mahli Gomes, an American who was sentenced to eight years of hard labor for illegally entering the country, the Carter Center said. Mr. Gomes was granted amnesty by the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, the Carter Center said in an e-mail. [...]
Mr. Carter had been visiting Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, on a private humanitarian mission to win the release of Mr. Gomes, who was sentenced in April to eight years in a North Korean prison and fined $700,000 for entering the country illegally.
Carter – whose actual accomplishments include brokering this deal with the North Koreans and creating a lasting peace between the Israelis and Egyptians – is not a failure or a monster, regardless of the rightwing allegations to the contrary. Just recently, a conservative website named him the worst figure in American history, ahead of terrorists like Timothy McVeigh and assassins like John Wilkes Booth.
P.S. I’ve documented before just how prescient he was as President in the 1970s. We’re still paying the price for ignoring his wise words.
In one of the broadest assaults on Iraq’s security forces, insurgents unleashed a wave of roadside mines and a more than a dozen car bombs across Iraq on Wednesday, killing dozens, toppling a police station in the capital and sowing confusion among the soldiers and police who responded.
Keep this in mind when Senator McCain campaigns for a new ”victory” over Iran.
The majority of Americans oppose construction of the Islamic community center near the former World Trade Center. While they acknowledge its right to exist, they would prefer it not to. They consider it callous to build an Islamic site near the scene of a crime perpetrated in the name of Islam.
Their opposition has been dismissed as Islamophobic, but that label only applies to a prejudicial few that have seized the megaphone. Most Park51 critics do not harbor antipathy toward the Islamic faith and intend no insult to its practitioners. To lump these Americans into a single category is to engage in the same reductionist logic that equates all Muslims with jihadis.
Regarding those who oppose the ‘Ground Zero Mosque,’ I am less alarmed by their Islamophobia than I am by their cowardice. Jarred by 9/11, they are quick to disavow values of religious freedom and cultural tolerance – values which were repeatedly identified as the very targets of the attackers. We already erred when we repaid their violence with greater violence. Let’s not err again. Let’s be brave in the embrace of a free society.
I say: Move the mosque. Put it on the ground floor of the Freedom Tower, and raise a flag. One star. One crescent.
[...] it’s not at Ground Zero. The site in question is two blocks north of the former World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan; an existing mosque is just a few hundred feet more distant from the site of the collapsed towers. Second, while the planned building would indeed house a place of worship, it is designed to be more of a community center along the lines of a YMCA. Plans include a fitness center, swimming pool, basketball court, bookstore, performing arts center and food court. Kebabs do not threaten our way of life.
Nevermind the people building the center aren’t affiliated with Al Qaeda and they are, in fact, enemies:
The Cordoba Initiative, which is headed by an imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf, is an enemy of al Qaeda, no less than Rudolph Giuliani and the Anti-Defamation League are enemies of al Qaeda. Bin Laden would sooner dispatch a truck bomb to destroy the Cordoba Initiative’s proposed community center than he would attack the ADL, for the simple reason that Osama’s most dire enemies are Muslims. This is quantitatively true, of course — al Qaeda and its ideological affiliates have murdered thousands of Muslims — but it is ideologically true as well: al Qaeda’s goal is the purification of Islam (that is to say, its extreme understanding of Islam) and apostates pose more of a threat to Bin Laden’s understanding of Islam than do infidels.
Mosques in small communities in Tennessee, California and Wisconsin — far from the emotionally loaded Ground Zero site — are facing protests from community members who contend that the Muslim houses of worship serve as training grounds for jihadists.
What we have here is a clear attempt to blame and punish all Muslims for the acts of a deranged few who attacked us on 9/11. More disturbing is that a majority of Americans agree with the bigots’ logic, constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion be damned. Apparently, the subject of 9/11 still has the power to suspend rational thought; a comforting thought, I’m sure, for the forces of intolerance.
Computer security researchers are raising alarms about vulnerabilities in some of the Web’s most secure corners: the banking, e-commerce and other sites that use encryption to communicate with their users.
Those sites, which are typically identified by a closed lock displayed somewhere in the Web browser, rely on a third-party organization to issue a certificate that guarantees to a user’s Web browser that the sites are authentic. [...]
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, more than 650 organizations can issue certificates that will be accepted by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox, the two most popular Web browsers. Some of these organizations are in countries like Russia and China, which are suspected of engaging in widespread surveillance of their citizens.
I love the implication that Russia and China are evil surveillance states unlike America. Of course it’s not true. We’re quite an accomplishedsurveillance state.
The UK’s public inquiry into the Iraq war (the “Chilcot Inquiry“) has featured testimony from major figures at the time of the invasion and has further strengthened criticism of the war on multiple fronts. Testimony affirms that pre-war intelligence did not paint Saddam Hussein as a threat, that the coalition had decided to wage war before weapons inspections were completed, that non-military options were not seriously pursued and that, in the opinion of many, the war was illegal.
A selection of notable quotes from the inquiry:
“I am of the firm view that it was an illegal war, and that was the firm view of most international lawyers.” – Hans Blix, former United Nations chief arms inspector.
“When I kept reading them [intelligence reports], I kept saying to myself, ‘Is this intelligence?’ It was not very substantiated but clearly was robust.” – Lord John Prescott, former deputy prime minister.
“The real problem, which I did draw several times to the attention of London, was that the contingency military timetable had been decided before the UN inspectors went in under Hans Blix … you had to short-circuit the inspection process by finding the notorious smoking gun … and we – the Americans, the British – have never really recovered from that, because, of course, there was no smoking gun.” – Sir Christopher Meyer, UK ambassador to the US (1997-2003).
“In my opinion, that use of force had not been authorised by the (United Nations) Security Council, and had no other basis in international law.” – Sir Michael Wood, senior legal adviser at the Foreign Office in 2003.
After the housing bubble burst and we were plunged into recession, the federal government jumped in to immediately re-inflate the bubble. There is plenty of reason to think this was a necessary move. Too much of our economy was tied up in developing residential real estate to switch so suddenly. But at this point we need to seriously consider whether enticing people to own homes does more long-term harm than good.
Not owning is nice. You can move whenever you want. If something breaks at 10 pm at night, you don’t have to frantically work to fix it- you call someone and it is their problem. If you change your job, relocating is easy. If you just get tired of your current location and want a change of pace, it is easy to move. You aren’t locked into a job, a mortgage, and a location. It’s nice knowing that if you want to move, you just need to get two u-hauls (one for your possessions, one to haul your cat) and you can beat a hasty retreat.
I’d add that increased mobility helps more than the person moving. It helps the entire economy when people can work where their skills will best be put to use. Think of how many people, especially now, are stuck in a particular area just because they don’t want to sell their house for a huge loss.
“The right to marry has been historically and remains the right to choose a spouse and, with mutual consent, join together and form a household. Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage during eras of race and gender inequality, but such restrictions were never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage. Today, gender is not relevant to the state in determining spouses’ obligations to each other and to their dependents. Relative gender composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and obligations of marriage under California law. Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals.” – Federal District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker smacking down California’s odious Proposition 8, a ban on same-sex marriage
