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Yglesias

This Time It’s (Sort Of) Different

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 17, 2011 at 6:16 pm

Something that I think really does separate today’s high valuations for tech companies from what we saw in the late 1990s is that a lot of the key firms don’t actually seem all that exuberant. Consider Apple’s giant cash stockpile:

You see something similar in the sluggishness with which firms are deciding to launch IPOs. Tech company managers don’t seem to believe that they’re in desperate need of capital (from outside investors or from retained earnings) that they intend to invest in expansions. Firms are always trying to grow, of course, but they’re just not chomping at the bit to find more money and put it to work. Facebook, Apple, etc. only have so many ideas and trying to implement those ideas only costs so much.

Yglesias

What Could Go Wrong?

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 17, 2011 at 4:30 pm

Via John Quiggin and John Emerson meet the new Treasurer of the World Bank:

After leaving Barclays in 1999, Antoncic joined Lehman Brothers as Global Head of Risk Policy and subsequently Global Head of Market Risk Management; from 2002-2007, she served as Chief Risk Officer. In 2007, she was moved to an externally focused role as Global Head of Financial Markets Policy Relations. After the Lehman bankruptcy, Antoncic agreed to stay on for a year as Managing Director and Senior Advisor at the Lehman Estate to help maximize the value to Lehman creditors.

Her boss is Robert Zoellick who of course went from Goldman Sachs to become a member of the legendarily effective George W Bush foreign policy team. I have some disagreements with the policy analysis of Jeff Faux’s The Global Class War but the basic theme is pretty compelling.

NEWS FLASH

BREAKING: U.K. Fraud Watchdog Opens News International Probe | Britain’s Channel 4 News is reporting that the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO), the agency charged with investigating and prosecuting large and complex fraud cases, has begun a preliminary investigation into News International, the parent company of News Corp’s UK newspapers.  The probe comes after Labor MP Tom Watson wrote a letter to the SFO, in which he called News Corps alleged payments to police a “gross misuse of shareholders’ money.” This latest revelation in the ongoing scandal comes just hours after former News International executive Rebekah Brooks was arrested in London.

Media

CNN Ignores Piers Morgan’s Connection To News Corp. Scandal

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Jul 17, 2011 at 1:45 pm

Ex-News of the World Editors Piers Morgan, Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson (Brooks and Coulson have been arrested)

The ongoing News Corp. hacking scandal has given competitors a likely long-sought chance to tear into Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, with CNN leading the way. According to a Media Matters report, CNN reported on the scandal 107 times over the same period of time MSNBC and Fox News reported on it 71 and 30 times, respectively. But while the Time Warner news network may smell blood, some may be emanating from their own studios.

Piers Morgan, the British journalist and talk show host who took over for CNN’s venerable Larry King earlier this year, is a former editor of the now-defunct News of the World, the tabloid at the center of the hacking scandal. Moreover, Morgan has been implicated in a separate celebrity phone hacking scandal while he was editor of the U.K’s Daily Mirror.

But so far, CNN has failed to report any of this. A ThinkProgress search covering the last 30 days of several media monitoring services and CNN’s own website, show the network has not so much as mentioned Morgan’s connection to the failed News Corp. tabloid, nor the separate Mirror allegation.

A CNN spokesperson confirmed the lack of coverage to Ad Week last week, “saying that the network hasn’t covered the matter because Morgan has not been officially called to testify in England.”

Morgan himself did address the issue on Monday, telling a CBS talk show that neither he nor his former publication have broken any laws.

The allegations are especially troubling given this passage from Morgan’s 2005 book, The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade:

Apparently if you don’t change the standard security code that every phone comes with, then anyone can call your number and, if you don’t answer, tap in the standard four digit code to hear all your messages. I’ll change mine just in case, but it makes me wonder how many public figures and celebrities are aware of this little trick.

As Ad Week notes, “Morgan has been sounding a fairly sympathetic note about Murdoch.” In the CBS interview, he said, “I’m not going to join the Murdoch bashing. I’ve always been a big admirer of his. He gave me my first break in journalism. He made me editor of [News of the World] when I was 28 years old.”

Update

This afternoon on CNN’s Reliable Source, Howie Kurtz briefly noted Morgan’s connection to News Corp. Kurtz said that the media should “be careful about some of these allegations” because Piers Morgan has “absolutely denied” knowing about the illegal conduct. Pressed by one of his guests if that was “an official company denial,” Kurtz said he’d be happy to speak with Morgan about it.

LGBT

Giuliani: ‘The Republican Party Would Be Well Advised To Get The Heck Out Of People’s Bedrooms’

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Jul 17, 2011 at 12:45 pm

When New York legalized marriage equality, conservatives decried the law, with Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York calling it a form of government tyranny. But former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has some advice for his party: He suggested Republicans should stop worrying about what happens in people’s bedrooms and instead focus on the party’s economic roots. In an interview this morning with CNN’s Candy Crowley, Giuliani said the issue of marriage equality should be left up to the states.

Giuliani, who has supported civil unions, said he still believes marriage should be between one man and one woman, but can “live with” the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York. Watch it:

I think it’s wrong, but there are other things that I think are wrong that get decided by democratic vote. … I see more harm, however, by dwelling so much on this subject of gays and lesbians and whether it’s right or wrong in politics.

After New York approved the measure, Giuliani said he was glad the “burden of discrimination” had been lifted for gays, but he reportedly dodged calls from a gay couple he had once promised to marry. At the same time, polls show that more and more Americans support marriage equality.

But when Giuliani ran for president in 2008, he even backed away from his strong support for civil unions to appeal to conservative GOP voters. So as long as even support for civil unions is a deal breaker for most Iowa Republican caucus-goers, it is unlikely many GOP presidential candidates will take Giuliani’s advice.

Climate Progress

What if the CO2 Ceiling Debate Were Like the Debt Ceiling Debate

By Joe Romm on Jul 17, 2011 at 12:42 pm

The national debt isn’t the greatest short-term problem we face.  That is spurring jobs and economic growth.

And the debt certainly isn’t close to the greatest long-term problem we face.  That would obviously be unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases, which threaten human civilization with multiple simultaneous catastrophes — from endless superstorms to permanent DustBowls.  And yes, we could solve the first by addressing the second — but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

I can understand why the Tea-Party-driven GOP has made the national debt its focus.  Conservatives are using the debt debate as a stalking horse for their disdain of government to gut as many federal programs as possible, from clean energy to Medicare to EPA oversight.  Since those  programs are popular, the best strategy is for the GOP to attack them under the guise of their concern over some other issue.

As an aside, I’m not certain “conservatives” is the right word for them anymore, since they don’t actually want to conserve anything.  A better term would be “anarchists.”  If they cared about the debt more than their rigid self-destructive anti-tax ideology, they’d obviously be open to the unbelievable $4 trillion deficit-reduction deal that Obama put on the table and keeps offering every friggin’ day.

It’s mostly a mystery why the president has thrown the full weight of his bully pulpit and political muscle behind something that isn’t the biggest short-or long-term problem we face.  Yes, he has boxed the GOP into a corner, exposing their hypocritically extremist position for all to see — but for what gain?   He has bought into and reinforced the GOP narrative that debt and spending concerns reign supreme, which will undermine short-term and long-term efforts to create jobs or promote clean energy or reduce oil dependence or cut carbon pollution.

But what’s going on in Washington DC right now does provide an interesting window into the question, “What if the CO2 Ceiling Debate Were Like the Debt Ceiling Debate.”  Obviously, that is purely a counterfactual for the foreseeable future.  But by 2025, give or take 5 years, most everybody inside and outside of DC will realize that those pesky climate scientists were right all along.  Our concern over greenhouse gas emissions then will exceed our concern over the debt now to an unimaginable degree — indeed by more than our concern over the debt currently exceeds our concern over emissions.

In this post, I’ll look at the counterfactual.  After the debt ceiling debate is “resolved,” I’ll do a post on lessons learned.

What would be different if CO2 Ceiling Debate Were Like the Debt Ceiling Debate?

Read more

NEWS FLASH

Obama To Nominate Former Ohio Attorney General To Lead Consumer Protection Bureau | The Columbus Dispatch is reporting that President Obama will nominate former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, officially passing over Professor Elizabeth Warren. Cordray is currently the CFPB’s director of enforcement. He was at the forefront of the foreclosure fraud investigation last year, before losing his bid for reelection.

Politics

Herman Cain: Americans Have The Right To Ban Mosques

By Tanya Somanader on Jul 17, 2011 at 11:45 am

To rise above the myriad of GOP presidential candidates, pizza mogul Herman Cain is standing firmly on his anti-Muslim platform. Taking advantage of the Islamophobic atmosphere, Cain consistently vilifies American Muslims and Islam, even declaring that he would not consider hiring a Muslim to serve in his cabinet. Last week, Cain waded into mosque controversy in Murfreesboro, TN, declaring the Muslim community’s plan to build an Islamic center “an infringement and an abuse of our freedom of religion” as it “is not an innocent mosque.” To Cain, the center is a definitive example of what he sees is the infiltration of Sharia Law.

On Fox News Sunday today, host Chris Wallace pursued Cain’s reasoning behind his rabid opposition to the Tennessee center. Cain explained that while the Constitution guarantees a separation of church and state, the Islamic faith “combines church and state. They’re using the church part of our First Amendment to infuse their morals in that community.” Noting his constant invocation of the Constitution which guarantees the freedom of religion, Wallace asked Cain whether any American community has a right to ban a mosque. Cain replied, “Yes, they have the right to do that”:

WALLACE: But couldn’t any community then say they don’t want a mosque in our community?

CAIN: They could say that. Chris, lets go back to the fundamental issue that the people are basically saying they’re objecting to. They’re objecting to the fact Islam is both a religion and a set of laws, Sharia law. That’s the difference between any one of our other traditional religions where it’s just about religious purposes. The people in the community know best, and I happen to side with the people in Murfreesboro.

WALLACE: You’re saying any community, if they want to ban a mosque?

CAIN: Yes. They have a right to do that. That’s not discriminating based upon religion.

Watch it:

The element in the Murfreesboro community that Cain is siding with has made their feelings about Islam abundantly clear. Last year, community members scrawled “not welcome” on the signs at the center site and torched the construction equipment. Murfreesboro’s state Sen. Bill Ketron (R) sponsored a bill that would make it a felony to practice Sharia law, “which includes lessons found in the Quran, the holy book of Islam, and which can inform how Muslims live their everyday lives, including prayer rituals.”

The fact that Cain is championing right-wing bigotry and rejecting a basic tenet of the Constitution to do so betrays the very patriotism he so often invokes.

NEWS FLASH

Ex-News Corp. Exec Rebekah Brooks Arrested | This morning, British police arrested Rebekah Brooks, the executive at the center of the News Corp. hacking scandal, just days after she resigned in disgrace as CEO of the company’s News International group. Former editor Andy Coulson has already been arrested. Meanwhile, the U.K. Telegraph reports that the News of the World tabloid, which Brooks edited during much of the alleged hacking, hacked into the voicemail of actor Jude Law while he was in the U.S., which could open News Corp. to further American prosecution.

Update

The head of Scotland Yard, Sir Paul Stephenson, the UK’s top police official, resigned today amid growing allegations of inappropriate relationships between police officials and News International employees, as well as ongoing questions about the ineffectiveness of previous investigations into phone hacking.   

Update

The Guardian is reporting that Rebekah Brooks has been bailed, following 12 hours of questioning by the Metropolitan Police Service.

 

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Jul 17, 2011 at 10:35 am

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