links for 2008-07-11

• Regulatory restructuring - FRB: Testimony-- Bernanke
• A compromise -- or a cave in -- on offshore drilling? - Andrew Leonard
• The Edge of the American West - Unfit for the presidency
• Infrastructure spending - CBO Director’s Blog
• Bernanke: Too Early to Talk Second Stimulus - Real Time Economics
• How the housing bust burned investors in the S&P 500. - Daniel Gross
• Capitalism's Reality Check - E. J. Dionne Jr.
• The Onion has no future(s) - Undercover Economist
• McCain’s Eligibility to Be President Is Disputed by Professor - NYTimes.com
• Is McCain a "Natural Born Citizen"? - Discourse.net
• F.C.C. Chairman Favors Penalty on Comcast - NYTimes.com
• EPA Won't Act on Emissions This Year - washingtonpost.com
• USDA Rule Change May Lead To Crops on Conserved Land - washingtonpost
• The FCC's Compromiser in Chief - washingtonpost.com
• Senate Housing Bill Moves Toward Passage - washingtonpost.com
• Promises, promises - Economist.com

Comments

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/nyregion/11rangel.html?hp&pagewanted=print

July 11, 2008

Rangel Rents Apartments at Bargain Rates
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

While aggressive evictions are reducing the number of rent-stabilized apartments in New York, Representative Charles B. Rangel is enjoying four of them, including three adjacent units on the 16th floor overlooking Upper Manhattan in a building owned by one of New York's premier real estate developers.

Mr. Rangel, the powerful Democrat who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, uses his fourth apartment, six floors below, as a campaign office, despite state and city regulations that require rent-stabilized apartments to be used as a primary residence....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/opinion/11fri4.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

July 11, 2008

Summer's Night
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

The last couple of nights I've stood at the edge of the pasture watching the fireflies. They rise from the grass, flickering higher and higher until one of them turns into the blinking lights of a jet flying eastward far above the horizon. I can feel, rather than see, the bats working around the house and in the coves between the trees, feeding on insects that are invisible but fully audible to them.

What the insects are noticing — the bats, too — is beyond me. Our perceptions overlap without ever converging in the night. All the entangled lives on this farm seem to run on separate tracks, except where they collide as predators and prey or companions and caretakers. Push this thought far enough, and nature seems to fray, to come apart into a disunity that is gathered up only by our human perceptions. And yet that gathering up is just our own kind of solipsism. I don't know that the horses have ever made a general proposition about nature, but then they don't know that I've made one either.

The best part of this season is that long twilight moment when the swallows are making their last excursions, just before the bats and the fireflies begin. They arc out of the barnyard pasture and fold their wings back near the peak of the house, coasting and diving. Compared to the swallows, the early bats — fluttering between the trees — look, at first, like origami contraptions capable only of struggling flight. Compared to the bats, it seems improbable that a firefly can fly.

The overgrown edges of the garden darken into impenetrability. All the light is starting to fall out of the sky, and yet I can still see the bright spots of ripening color on the cherry tree at the back of the garden. I pick a couple of those cherries every day and eat them to see if they're ripe. So far, I am wincing. And yet every bird on the place, except for the insectivores, carries a secret knowledge of the ripeness of cherries. I will know when the cherries are ready by their absence.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/opinion/11fri3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

July 11, 2008

A Pointless Departure

Just why John Howard was denied reappointment as head of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is a mystery that deserves to be cleared up. But whatever the reasons for it, the timing of his departure — in the waning months of the Bush administration — could hardly have been worse. Programs often slip badly as an administration winds down, and we fear that without Dr. Howard's leadership, the agency's exemplary work on behalf of ground zero workers will stall.

Dr. Howard's six-year term as director of the institute, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention within the Department of Health and Human Services, expires on Monday. He had asked to be reappointed, but just before the long July Fourth weekend Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the disease control centers, let him know that she was beginning a search for a new director.

Dr. Howard has gained particular renown over the past two years for coordinating and championing health programs for workers who were sickened at ground zero, including screening, monitoring and treatment.

Both the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the Chamber of Commerce urged his reappointment, at least on an interim basis. So did the American Society of Safety Engineers and the American Industrial Hygiene Association, which called him "the most respected leader in NIOSH's history." ...

[anne]

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2008/07/u_11.html

July 11, 2008

"A U.S. coalition force air strike on Sunday killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, in the eastern province of Nangarhar, an Afghan official said on Friday." *

* http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ISL238847.htm

-- As'ad AbuKhalil

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Clean-Air.html?hp&pagewanted=print

July 11, 2008

In Big Setback, Court Rejects Clean Air Rules
By ASSOCIATED PRESS

A federal appeals court decision effectively delays further action on reducing smog and soot-producing emissions until the next administration takes office.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/world/europe/12czech.html?hp&pagewanted=print

July 12, 2008

Czechs See Oil Flow Fall and Suspect Russian Ire on Missile System

[Oh well....]

[anne]

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/10/headlines#4

July 10, 2008

Rice: Iran Test Proves Need for Missile System
By Amy Goodman

The initial missile test had come hours after the United States and Czech Republic signed a long-awaited agreement to station part of a planned US missile system on Czech soil.

In Bulgaria, visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the tests prove the missile system is justified.

"But in terms of the missile test, I see it as evidence that the missile threat is not an imaginary one and that those who say that there is no Iranian missile threat against which we should be building missile defenses perhaps ought to talk to the Iranians about their claims, even about the distance and the range of the missiles that they test-fired."

The Bush administration says the missile system would protect Europe from Iranian missiles, but it's widely seen as a first-strike threat against Iran.

[anne]

"Czechs See Oil Flow Fall and Suspect Russian Ire on Missile System"

Think so???

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/world/europe/09shield.html?hp&pagewanted=print

July 9, 2008

U.S. and Czechs Sign Accord on Missile Shield
By JUDY DEMPSEY and DAN BILEFSKY

BERLIN — The United States and the Czech Republic signed a landmark accord on Tuesday to allow the Pentagon to deploy part of its widely debated antiballistic missile shield on territory once occupied by Soviet troops.

The accord, the first of its kind to be reached with a Central or East European country, was signed in Prague by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Czech counterpart, Karel Schwarzenberg, despite strong opposition from Russia. It also needs to be ratified by Czech lawmakers, many of whom oppose it.

Russia warned on Tuesday that the accord could lead to a military response, which the Kremlin had previously threatened but never specified.

President Dmitri A. Medvedev and his predecessor, Vladimir V. Putin, who is now the Russian prime minister, have told the United States that the Kremlin sees a missile shield in this part of Europe as a threat to Russian security. Mr. Putin has said it could even lead to a new cold war.

But American and Czech officials said the system's radar component, to be stationed south of Prague, would defend the NATO members in Europe and the United States against long-range weapons from the Middle East, particularly Iran.

"Ballistic missile proliferation is not an imaginary threat," Ms. Rice said Tuesday after meeting with the Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek....