You can get better commentary elsewhere on this, but this district was a big deal because it was the [Republican] Speaker of the House's district, because he won by a bunch in 2006, and because the practically broke NRCC blew much of what little money they had on it.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street banks are facing a "systemic margin call" that may deplete banks of $325 billion of capital due to deteriorating subprime U.S. mortgages, JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N: Quote, Profile, Research), said in a report late on Friday.
JPMorgan, which sent a default notice to Thornburg Mortgage Inc. (TMA.N: Quote, Profile, Research) after the lender missed a $28 million margin call, said more default notices and margin calls were likely. The Carlyle Group's mortgage fund also failed to meet $37 million in margin calls this week.
"A systemic credit crunch is underway, driven primarily by bank writedowns for subprime mortgages," according to the report co-authored by analyst Christopher Flanagan. "We would characterize this situation as a systemic margin call."
But former Republican colleague Dan Cronin said the presidential candidate's campaign of bold change doesn't square with his past.
"There were no bold solutions; there were no creative approaches; there were no efforts to stand up to the establishment," said Cronin, a member of the Illinois General Assembly since 1990.
Cronin says he still respects Obama and his political skills.
I suppose we all find reason to quibble when the national news comes to town and tries to make sense of the place. I just learned that the rest of the state, including Pittsburgh, is very blue collar, but Philadelphia is not.
The city of Philadelphia is a very blue collar place. Sure we have the usual chunk of lawyers, health professionals, academics, and other higher end middle class professionals. But they're concentrated in a relatively small part of the city, mostly, though not exclusively, in Center City and University City. The rest of the city - areas containing the other 80%+ of the population or so - is highly blue collar. And I don't just mean in the "what kind of job they do" sense, I mean in basic class sensibility and culture.
The suburbs, which in some ways dominate the area, are a different story of course.
New York: In addition to writing here that women are "dim," at the Independent Women's Forum you've written that Hurricane Katrina might have been "the best thing" to happen to New Orleans, which is full of "whiners ... chiseling us taxpayers" out of money. Is that supposed to be satire too? Your sense of humor sure does seem hateful.
washingtonpost.com: What Really Happened After Hurricane Katrina (Independnet Women's Forum, Oct. 11, 2005)
Charlotte Allen: I said Katrina was the best thing to happen to New Orleans because it finally opportunity to a huge number of New Orleans residents living in passive dependency on welfare to get out of New Orleans and change their lives for the better. Thousands of them did exactly that--which is why there hasn't exactly been a huge flood of those former residents flocking back to live in passive dependency and do just that. New Orleans itself now has a chance to change into a more self-reliant city. As for the "whiners...chiseling taxpayers out of money," I was referring specifically to the large number of fraudulent claims for Katrina relief--well documented in news stories.
Relatively light posting over the weekend I think. I read a lot of internets, and there's a lot of stupid on the internets. Sometimes it makes the brain hurt.
IMHO, several large financial institutions are probably, absent pretending various financial assets they own are worth more than they really are, below reserve requirements.
Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new jobs figures for February. The unemployment rate decreased to 4.8 percent, below the averages for the past three decades, but nonfarm payroll employment decreased by 63,000 jobs. Our economy has added about 860,000 jobs over the last 12 months – an average of 72,000 jobs per month – and more than 8.1 million since August 2003.
72,000 per month is only about half of what is needed to keep up with increases in the working age population.
I agree with Chris that a Philly machine which supports Clinton (if) won't change the fact that Obama will certainly win here, but it could potentially impact vote totals in an area where Obama would need as many as he can get.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Thornburg Mortgage Inc on Friday said its survival is at stake because it is unable to meet $610 million of margin calls.
The company also said it will restate 2007 results and take a $427.8 million charge as of Dec 31 for its holdings of adjustable-rate mortgages.
Thornburg said falling mortgage prices together with liquidity imperiled by a surge of margin calls from its own lenders "have raised substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern."
It said the margin calls "significantly exceeded" its available liquidity. Some analysts have said the company might need to file for bankruptcy protection.
The wanker Pomfret could redeem himself by hiring Katha Pollitt or Dahlia Lithwick or any number of other women to write for their pages on a regular balance. It isn't mere tokenism to suggest more women should be hired when the columnist gender balance is so out of whack. Obviously there are systematic problems in large part due to the apparent tenure system for columnists which ensures that we will be subjected to Richard Cohen and David Broder as long as they live.
Someone who writes about issues from Pollitt's perspective is basically entirely missing from any prominent newspaper real estate, and Lithwick is an excellent writer who already works for the Washington Post borg (slate). Other possibilities exist, of course.
Bill's in town, about 7 blocks from me as I type this. I highly doubt Obama ever imagined his courtesy endorsement of Chaka Fattah in the mayoral race would end up being such an important misstep.
...adding, that again this is a case where editors are at fault. I understand that they give opinion columnists pretty wide latitude, but their job is to produce and deliver a good product, not farcical gibberish which insults the intelligence of their readers.
Not that anyone listens to me, but if the person who becomes the nominee fails to win the general election then he/she will become a reviled figure in Democratic politics.
It's rather funny watching a debate on CNBC about executive compensation, which as is typically the case is between someone screaming "MAGIC MARKET FAIRY MAKE PONY" and someone trying to explain that, no, it's a bit more complicated than that.
Top executive pay is set by insiders who have stacked the deck in their favor while doing everything they can do to insulate themselves from interference from those pesky shareholders, otherwise known as the owners. Any talk of reforming corporate governance is about making the magic market fairy work better, not worse, by aligning the interests of the top executives with the interests of the shareholders. Whether or not those interests are properly aligned is the question, not whether meddling regulators want to kill the magic market fairy.
A far more important question is this: Why did The Post publish this nonsense? I can't imagine a great newspaper airing comparable trash talk about any other group. "Asians Really Do Just Copy." "No Wonder Africa's Such a Mess: It's Full of Black People!" Misogyny is the last acceptable prejudice, and nowhere more so than in our nation's clueless and overwhelmingly white-male-controlled media. I can just picture the edit meeting: This time, let's get a woman to say women are dumb and silly! If readers raise too big a ruckus, Outlook editor John Pomfret can say it was all "tongue in cheek." Women are dingbats! Get it? Ha. Ha. Ha.
Here's a thought. Maybe there's another thing women can do besides fluff up their husbands' pillows: Fill more important jobs at The Washington Post. We should be half the assigning editors, half the writers, and half the regular columnists too (current roster of op-ed columnists: 16 men, two women). We've got those superior verbal skills, remember? Drastically increasing the presence of women isn't a foolproof recipe for gender fairness -- Allen is far from alone in her dislike of her sex -- but I have to believe a gender-balanced paper would reflect a broader view of women than The Post does at present.
A male editor with a lot of women colleagues on his level might think twice before proposing a sweeping denunciation, humorous or not, of "women." Ideally he would have come to respect women as equals from working with them -- but if he were just afraid of being seen as a total caveman, that would be okay too. And maybe this kind of editor would have flagged as tired cliches references to Oprah and Celine Dion; would have looked up the studies Allen claims prove women have the I.Q. of a bowl of cereal and found they don't say anything like that; would have wondered if more women bake doggy treats than subscribe to Scientific American or run marathons, and how does the treat-baker come to stand for all women?
And then, after all this, and seeing that Allen's piece still didn't ring even vaguely-kinda-sorta true, our imaginary editor would have asked a question. "You know what I think of this article?" a good editor would have said. "I think it's really stupid."
U.S. employers cut payrolls for a second straight month during February, slashing 63,000 jobs for the biggest monthly job decline in nearly five years as the labor market weakened steadily, a government report on Friday showed.
The Labor Department said last month's cut in jobs followed an upwardly revised loss of 22,000 jobs in January instead of 17,000 reported a month ago. In addition, it said that only 41,000 jobs were created in December, half the 82,000 originally reported.
The back-to-back January and February job losses were the first consecutive monthly declines since May and June of 2003.
Why not ask your favorite candidates to start campaigning against the Republicans who are destroying our country instead of lobbing poison pills at each other?
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