One of my heroes is gone!
Just talkin with Q about it last nite.
Damn!
Grew up watching the ultimate gunfighter--next to Paladin of course! ha
At five years of age I was watching Gunsmoke and Superman!
Oh I weep!
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
One of my heroes is gone!
Just talkin with Q about it last nite.
Damn!
Grew up watching the ultimate gunfighter--next to Paladin of course! ha
At five years of age I was watching Gunsmoke and Superman!
Oh I weep!
In 1982, the Voting Rights Act, with its emphasis on Southern states, was amended to encourage the creation of awkwardly named “majority-minority” districts in order to give black voters the strength of a bloc. I believed that drawing such districts was a progressive political tactic, a benign form of affirmative action that would usher more black members into a Congress that had admitted only a handful.
The tactic worked. In 1980, there were only 18 blacks in the U.S. House of Representatives. Now, there are 44, many of them elected from districts drawn to meet the mandates of the Voting Rights Act.
Unfortunately — like so many measures designed to provide redress for historic wrongs — those racially gerrymandered districts also come with a significant downside: They discourage moderation. Politicians seeking office in majority-black or –brown districts found that they could indulge in crude racial gamesmanship and left-wing histrionics.
This fire near Alpine, AZ in the White Mountains was maybe 700+ acres two days ago. The combination of tinder-dry fuels and high winds have caused it to grow to over 106,000 acres by today. The spotting (embers aloft to produce other new fires) is three miles.
This just on the heels of NOAA stating that the Southwest was helped immeasurably by recent rains. They forgot that climate change means increased winds, perhaps.
Fires almost always dampen down at night; this one GREW 60,000 acres last night, and is running downhill, which is rare. It's in a very steep area, hard to defend the houses, though all the towns threatened have been evacuated. I've never heard of a fire like this.
Might be a long wildland fire season.
A new Japanese solar power device can generate twice the electricity of current models thanks to moving mirrors that follow the sun throughout the day, according to its developers.
Smart Solar International, a Tokyo start-up that also has an office in California, will start producing the system in Japan in August, hoping it will be adopted in tsunami-hit areas along the northern Pacific coast.
Sample sales are set to begin in October, with overseas sales targeting especially Asia and the Middle East set for 2014 or earlier.
The device features a row of aluminum mirror bars that can slowly rotate as the sun moves across the sky and reflect its light back onto a central tube that is packed with high-performance, multi-layered solar cells.
Its inventors say the system requires far less silicon -- the most expensive component, which is imported mostly from China at the moment -- than the conventional larger flat photovoltaic cell panels.
The tube has a system to prevent overheating, which reduces the efficiency of power generation, and the excess heat can be used to heat water.
"You can get both electricity and heat from the same device," said Takashi Tomita, a former Sharp Corp. executive who heads the spin-off from the University of Tokyo's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology.
States across the West are bracing for major flooding in the coming weeks once a record mountain snowpack starts melting and sending water gushing into rivers, streams and low-lying communities. The catalyst will be warmer temperatures forecast for the next week that could set off a rapid thaw.
Randy Julander, a supervisor with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service, says flooding this year could be worse than anyone has ever seen. Julander said in a typical year the weather warms gradually, allowing snow in the mountains to melt slowly and ease into rivers and streams over time. That's not the case this year after a cool, rainy spring.
"It's all just sitting there, sitting there, sitting there. Everyone knows it's going to come down, it's just when and how quick that we're all waiting for," he said. "The bull is basically sitting in the chute and the gates are already open. He's just not coming out to play yet, but when he does I anticipate he's really going to be ticked off and bucking hard."
At Grand Coulee Dam, gigantic cascades of water are being released to make room for spring snowmelt that is expected to fill the reservoir. A constant roar emanates from the structure as surging water churns the Columbia River below the dam into a white froth.
The dam is 500 feet tall, a mile across, and one of the largest concrete structures on Earth. It is the centerpiece of a network of dams built across the Pacific Northwest during the New Deal era that essentially act as a giant plumbing system for the region — and these days the pipes are overflowing.
The dam is releasing so much water that millions of fish have been put in jeopardy. The heavy flows through dam spillways capture dangerous levels of nitrogen from the air, and the gas bubbles give fish the equivalent of the bends. A fish farm near the Grand Coulee Dam says an estimated 100,000 fish are dying every day, and has gone to court to slow down the flows.
Meet Roy Olmstead and Charles Katz—one was a Prohibition era bootlegger, the other a '60s gambler. Neither did anything earthshaking with their lives, but history remembers them both because their arrests, based on warrantless telephone taps, reached the United States Supreme Court.
In the two cases that resulted, the Supremes took starkly different perspectives on whether the men's constitutional rights had been violated by wiretaps without a warrant.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated," says the Fourth Amendment. But as telephone wires invaded the 20th century, judges had to constantly rethink what that sentence meant. In doing so, the justices paved the way for modern wiretap law and for the controversies over warrantless wiretapping that would become a feature of the "War on Terror."
The Great Stagnation runs through three centuries' worth of what Cowen calls the "low-hanging fruit" of economic growth: free land, technological breakthroughs, and smart kids waiting to be educated. For developed economies, he argues, none of these remains to be plucked. Yet America, Europe, and Japan have built political and social institutions on the assumption of endless growth. Cowen summarizes the financial crisis in eight words: "We thought we were richer than we were."
It's not that he disagrees with any of the better-known explanations for the crisis—easy credit, flawed ratings—it's that he sees a more fundamental problem, one that can't be fixed with regulation, bailouts, or tax cuts. Cowen thinks that now that America has used up the frontier, educated all of the farm kids, and built a couple of cars for every family, we might be done growing for awhile. The Great Stagnation is a short work, simply written. It avoids any but the most basic discussion of economics, yet also brushes lightly over all of modern history; behind simplicity in style and argument lies a lifetime of intensely productive reading.
...
Cowen is still best known for the blog he shares with Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution.
...
Then the financial crisis happened. "For something so fundamental to have gone wrong," he says, "my intuition and the evidence suggest that there's something wrong with the real economy as well." Maybe the two were related, he thought: What if the financial system took on so much debt because most of us assumed that growth was eternal? Cowen says he has no grand plans when he begins to write, just what he refers to as myopia. What looks strategic from the outside is just Cowen refusing to let something go.
In 2004 a reader of his blog suggested to him in an e-mail that he might be autistic. Offended at first, he applied himself to understanding the term, then decided he has what he calls an "autistic cognitive style," then wrote a book about it, Create Your Own Economy. (Cowen never sought a professional diagnosis.) He treats autism as he does the drug company cheerleaders, with neither pity nor celebration. It's not that he denies that autism exists, rather he points out that there is some joy in obsession. He describes people with autism as "infovores" who are attracted to information—the minutiae of train schedules. Or books. He mourns the coming end of big-box bookstores and the enchantment he felt circling the new release table. He goes to the public library twice a week, chasing after serendipity. He has no algorithm for finding a book. If he is intrigued, he buys. "When economists look at what other people call pathologies," he says, "they see reason, they see specialization, they see intent. They see a lot of pleasure."
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A high-level international commission declared the global "war on drugs" a failure and urged nations to consider legalizing cannabis and other drugs to undermine organized crime and protect their citizens' health.
The Global Commission on Drug Policy called for a new approach to reducing drug abuse to replace the current strategy of strictly criminalizing drugs and incarcerating drug users while battling criminal cartels that control the drug trade.
"The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world," said the report issued by the commission on Thursday.
The study urges "experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs," adding: "This recommendation applies especially to cannabis, but we also encourage other experiments in decriminalization and legal regulation."
There are 250 million users of illicit drugs worldwide, with less than a 10th of them classified as dependent, and millions are involved in cultivation, production and distribution, according to U.N. estimates quoted in the report.
The full report is available here
By Lee C. Bollinger, Foreignpolicy.com, June 1, 2011
.....In February, more than 1,000 people stormed an Indonesian court protesting what they believed was too lenient a sentence for a Christian found guilty of blasphemy. Last summer, a professor in Kerala, India, accused of blasphemy and suspended from teaching for distributing an exam question with an allegedly derogatory reference to the Prophet Mohammed was attacked with an ax on his way home from church. The list goes on and on in countries stretching from Europe to Southeast Asia. More than 70 recent cases of violence resulting from blasphemy laws have been documented by the organization Human Rights First.
For years now, laws that criminalize statements impugning religion (commonly referred to as "defamation of religion" or "blasphemy" laws) implicitly have condoned violence against those who depart from a country's dominant sectarian views. These government sanctions have contributed to the preservation of intolerant cultures antithetical to open debate and democracy. It is therefore of great significance to the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa that U.S. efforts within the U.N. Human Rights Council recently have succeeded in putting the council on record as repudiating defamation-of-religion laws....
By Simon Johnson, Economix blog @ nytimes.com, June 2, 2011
The Times' summary:
The French government would like the I.M.F. to help keep its electorate in the dark about banking problems, an economist writes.
Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is the co-author of “13 Bankers.”
By Edward Wyatt and Ben Protess, New York Times, June 1/2, 2011
...as banking regulators are rewriting the rules for the mortgage market, unusual alliances have sprung up in opposition to tighter lending standards. Advocacy groups like the N.A.A.C.P. and the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights organization, on the one hand, and the American Bankers Association on the other, are joining together to fight rules they say could make home loans less affordable for minority and working-class Americans.
The growing alliance between civil-rights organizations and banking lobbyists could extend beyond the current round of financial rule-making. If Congress turns its focus to restructuring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for example, the same groups could voice similar concerns over anything that restricts the availability of credit for first-time home buyers....
.By Lester R. Brown, New York Times Guest Op-Ed, June 1/2, 2011
...As global food prices rise and exporters reduce shipments of commodities, countries that rely on imported grain are panicking. Affluent countries like Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China and India have descended on fertile plains across the African continent, acquiring huge tracts of land to produce wheat, rice and corn for consumption back home.
Some of these land acquisitions are enormous. South Korea, which imports 70 percent of its grain, has acquired 1.7 million acres in Sudan to grow wheat — an area twice the size of Rhode Island. In Ethiopia, a Saudi firm has leased 25,000 acres to grow rice, with the option of expanding. India has leased several hundred thousand acres there to grow corn, rice and other crops. And in countries like Congo and Zambia, China is acquiring land for biofuel production.
These land grabs shrink the food supply in famine-prone African nations and anger local farmers, who see their governments selling their ancestral lands to foreigners. They also pose a grave threat to Africa’s newest democracy: Egypt....
By Stephanie Condon, Political Hotsheet @ CBS News, June 1, 2011
House Republicans are interested in admonishing the Obama administration for its handling of military operations in Libya -- but they're not interested in going so far as stopping U.S. participation in the war.
Republican leadership today postponed consideration of a resolution from liberal Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, which would require President Obama to remove armed forces from Libya.
Seeking to pass a resolution that expresses unhappiness with Mr. Obama's unilateral actions in Libya -- without calling for the removal of troops -- Republicans could bring an alternative bill to the floor Friday, CBS News Senior Political Producer Jill Jackson reports. A GOP leadership aide told Jackson House Republicans will hold special conference on Thursday to discuss their options -- including the consideration of Kucinich's resolution....
By Ian Johnson, New York Review of Books Blog, June 1, 2011
....I’ve been in China long enough to know the futility of nostalgia for old cities, but I was still shocked when I recently made a trip back for the first time in ten years. Datong is now booming, thanks to the region’s rich coal reserves, which have created a class of coal barons as wealthy and crass as any character on the TV show “Dallas.” As with most Chinese cities, Datong is in the grips of rampant real estate speculation, with poor people evicted from their homes in the old city, which is being torn down for new developments. (This is a topic I explore in the context of recent books on the destruction of Beijing in new piece for the NYR.)....
What’s surprising is how all this happened....
By John Markoff and David Barboza, New York Times, June 1/2, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO — Google said Wednesday that some users of Gmail, its e-mail service, had been the targets of a clandestine campaign originating in China that was aimed at stealing passwords and monitoring e-mail accounts.
In a blog post, the company said that the campaign appeared to originate from the city of Jinan, China, and that the attackers had hijacked the personal Gmail accounts of senior government officials in the United States, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries, military personnel and journalists....
A "campaign promise" is not exactly an oxymoron, but of all the pledges a person can make—wedding vow, blood oath, playground pinkie swear—it's the least dependable. Promises made with certainty a dozen times a day on the stump rarely survive their collision with the complications of actual governing. Ronald Reagan promised to slash the federal budget deficit. George W. Bush promised not to get involved in nation-building abroad. Barack Obama promised to close Guantanamo in his first year in office. They all sounded pretty good at the time.
Recent American politics has had one remarkable exception to the rule: the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. Administered by the Washington-based Americans for Tax Reform and created by the organization's founder, Grover Norquist, the pledge binds its takers to oppose "any and all efforts" to increase marginal income tax rates and to protect tax deductions and credits. Two hundred thirty-three of the 240 House Republicans have signed it, as have 40 of the 47 Republican senators. Two House Democrats and one Senate Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, are signatories, as well as 1,252 state legislators who signed a less specific pledge. All of which would be meaningless without theomertà-like fidelity with which pledge takers stick to their vows once in office. Any time a proposal is floated to increase taxes in any way—not just income taxes or trimming tax credits, but capital-gains taxes and even excise taxes on gasoline or tobacco—it's a safe bet that Norquist's army will line up against it.
....
This moment is a triumph for the 54-year-old Norquist, too. For decades he's worked Congress and cable news studios to promote his single issue, promoting those who sign his pledge and punishing those who even consider breaking it. "He's a little bit like the old Roman emperor, turning the thumbs up and thumbs down," says Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser and Treasury official during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations. "He has an enormous amount of power, more than he's ever had before."
Yet even as it demonstrates Norquist's power, the budget crisis threatens to undermine him. In recent weeks, Norquist and his organization have engaged in a very public dispute with Dr. Tom A. Coburn (R-Okla.), perhaps the most uncompromising spending hawk in the U.S. Senate, over the senator's willingness to entertain tax revenue increases—not rate hikes, but the elimination of certain deductions and tax credits—as part of the so-called Gang of Six deficit deal. Coburn and GOP colleagues Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Mike Crapo of Idaho have been negotiating with Senate Democrats on a potential compromise, and they have argued that the yawning budget gap is impossible to close with spending cuts alone. To Norquist, entertaining the idea of a tax increase at the very moment when the deficit is forcing Democrats to consider deep spending cuts is snatching defeat from the jaws of political victory. Who wins the argument will determine whether the current deficit debate is the apotheosis of Norquist and his pledge or the moment their influence begins to wane.
Barely a day goes by it seems when someone from Stephen Harper's government is not touting the benefits of the Alberta tar sands.
But when it came to counting up the carbon emissions produced by the tar sands - big and growing bigger - a strange amnesia seems to have taken hold.
The Canadian government admitted this week that it deliberately left out data indicating a 20% rise in emissions from the Alberta tar sands when it submitted its annual inventory to the United Nations.
The deliberate exclusion does not amount to an attempt to deceive the UN about Canada's total emissions. Emissions from the tar sands were incorporated in the overall tally in the report. But it does suggest that the government is anxious to obscure the source of its fastest-growing source of climate pollution: the Alberta tar sands.
Greenhouse gases from the tar sands grew by 21% in the last year reported, despite the economic receission. Even more troubling, the tar sands is becoming even more carbon intensive, with emissions per barrel of oil rising 14.5% in 2009. And overall production is set to triple by 2020, according to some projections.
So that's an increasingly significant share of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions - 6.5% now and rising.
"It is not as if they were left out of the total, but no matter where you looked in the report you couldn't find out what sector the emissions were from," said Clare Demerse, director of climate change at the Pembina Institute, an environmental think tank.
Environment Canada told reporters it was just fulfilling UNFCC reporting requirements.
When in the late 1990s it was recognized that world oil production was likely to start declining early in the twenty-first century, petroleum geologists and other industry observers started talking and writing about the economic damage this event would cause. Serious economic consequences were a virtual certainty because, since the beginning of the industrial age, economic growth had required increasing quantities of fossil fuels. During most of the twentieth century economic growth increased the demand for oil, which had come to serve as our primary transportation fuel, the source of energy for many production processes, and the raw material for an ever-increasing range of industrial products. Unless satisfactory substitutes could be found quickly, economic growth was likely to stop. And without alternatives, economic decline—if not a collapse—was likely.
This chapter explores the relationship—as it is understood thus far—between the peaking of oil production, which started around 2005, and the current global recession, which officially started in late 2007. In the long run, global warming may turn out to be of more significance than the peaking of fossil-fuel supplies. However, it is clear that the peaking of global oil production has already had economic consequences, which will become increasingly serious as time goes on, and that the global economic recession is due at least partially to the lack of significant growth in world oil supplies since 2005.
...
It seems reasonable to conclude the following concerning the peaking of world oil production and economic recession:
1. Although oil shortages and higher prices would have eventually caused major economic troubles, overextension of credit and overleveraging by financial institutions started the economic troubles a year or two earlier than was expected.
2. The substantial increase in the price of oil during the last eight or nine years, coupled with the 2008 oil price spike, certainly made a United States/ European Union recession global and much worse.
3. Global oil production has probably reached as high as it ever will. Any increases beyond 86 million to 87 million bpd are likely to be insignificant.
4. The global reduction in the demand for oil caused by falling economic activity and high oil prices has delayed significant declines in world oil production by two to three years.
5. The decline in oil industry investment caused by the current recession and low oil prices in the winter of 2008–2009 will lead to an even steeper decline in oil production than would have been the case.
6. Any increase in the demand for oil caused by improving economic conditions will cause much higher prices, which in turn will choke off the economic upturn.
7. It is unlikely that there will ever be an economic recovery in the conventional sense; the economic downturn is likely to continue in one form or another for many years, perhaps overlapping the economic calamities wrought by global warming.
ACLU tells agency police can't forbid taking pictures
Christopher Fussell likes to take pictures of trains and buses. The 29-year-old Oregonian has shot photos and video of transit systems all over the United States.
It wasn't until he came to Baltimore, he said Tuesday, that he was detained for committing photography.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland put the Maryland Transit Administration on notice Tuesday that it intends to file suit over the conduct of transit police in ordering Fussell and another photographer to stop taking pictures. The group warned that unless the agency meets a series of conditions by Sept. 1, it will take the MTA to court — where it expects to win.
"Photography is expressive activity that is protected by the First Amendment," said ACLU staff attorney David Rocah. "If you are legally present, you have a right to take photographs."
Rocah said the ACLU raised the right to take photographs in 2006 after an officer ordered one of its staff members to stop filming at a station. He said the ACLU chose then to try to resolve the issue amicably — a decision the attorney now calls an error the group will not repeat.
"Our time for friendly discussion is long since past," Rocha said. "We tried that for five years to apparently zero effect."
By David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2011
Acting Solicitor Gen. Neal Katyal, in an extraordinary admission of misconduct, took to task one of his predecessors for hiding evidence and deceiving the Supreme Court in two of the major cases in its history: the World War II rulings that upheld the detention of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans.
Katyal said Tuesday that Charles Fahy, an appointee of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, deliberately hid from the court a report from the Office of Naval Intelligence that concluded the Japanese Americans on the West Coast did not pose a military threat. The report indicated there was no evidence Japanese Americans were disloyal, were acting as spies or were signaling enemy submarines, as some at the time had suggested.....
Note: I know: its a week old; but I missed it last week, thought others might have, too.
By Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Cairo, Babylon and Beyond blog @ Los Angeles Times, May 31, 20
A senior Egyptian general told CNN Tuesday that officials performed "virginity checks" on women arrested during the uprising that led to former President Hosni Mubarak's ouster, the first time the authorities have admitted they performed such tests during the revolution....
....and he defended them.
"The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general told CNN. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and [drugs]."
The general said the virginity checks were conducted to prevent the women from claiming they had been raped in custody....
Spain's construction crisis squashed Emilio Blanco's third-division football career. The 26-year-old athlete once earned €2,000 a month playing for city-run teams in southern Spain – all sponsored by construction companies. But in 2008, when the country's housing bubble burst, Mr Blanco's livelihood dried up, too. After working for months without pay, he returned to his parents' home and joined the ranks of Spain's 4.9 million unemployed.
It sounds like the start of a sad but common story, but for many young Spaniards such as Mr Blanco, life on the dole is not that bad. He lived at home for a year before moving in with his girlfriend, but it wasn't embarrassing. All his friends with jobs still slept in their childhood bedrooms, too. And his mother washed his clothes and paid for his meals and entertainment. No awkward questions asked. "It was like living on my own," he said. "I could do whatever I wanted."
More than 45 per cent of young Spaniards are out of work – the worst unemployment rate in the European Union – but until recently, they have not complained out loud about it.
There are sensible solutions to USPS's business and accounting problems. If it collapses it will be because of politics. pure and simple. Note the last paragraph -- contemporary GOP tactics explained.
On Mar. 2, Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe warned Congress that his agency would default on $5.5 billion of health-care costs set aside for its future retirees scheduled for payment on Sept. 30 unless the government comes to the rescue. "At the end of the year, we are out of cash," Donahoe said. He noted that the unusual requirement was enacted five years ago by Congress before mail started to disappear.
This should be a moment for the country to ask some basic questions about its mail delivery system. Does it make sense for the postal service to charge the same amount to take a letter to Alaska that it does to carry it three city blocks? Should the USPS operate the world's largest network of post offices when 80 percent of them lose money? And is there a way for the country to have a mail system that addresses the needs of consumers who use the Internet to correspond?
The Capitol Hill debate is primarily about money. The USPS and its employee unions are lobbying for the least painful remedy: They want the agency to be relieved of its requirement to build a health-care trust fund for its future retirees. They are supported by junk mailers, greeting card manufacturers, and magazine publishers whose businesses are, in some cases, subsidized by the post office's generously low mailing prices. Never mind that their benefactor loses money on some of their products, most notably magazines and some junk mail.
Democrats receive the vast majority of the contributions made by postal workers' unions, according to campaign finance records, so they tend to be sympathetic. President Barack Obama inserted a proposal in his 2012 budget to absolve the USPS of $4 billion of its retiree health-care liabilities in 2011. This would enable it to slog through another year without extraordinary changes. Meanwhile, Senator Thomas Carper (D-Del.) introduced a bill on May 17 that would relieve the USPS of its prefunding headaches. "If we do nothing, we face a future without the valuable services that the postal service provides," Carper cautioned in a statement the same day. The bill would give the postal service access to as much as $75 billion it claims to have overpaid the federal retirement system. Naturally, the USPS and its unions are pushing for this because it would swiftly erase the agency's red ink. Others in Washington dispute the postal service's claim and call this wishful thinking at a time when there is such concern about the rising deficit. They also add that the bill would do nothing to address the larger issues afflicting the USPS.
House Republicans are less charitable. They oppose anything that could be construed as a bailout. They are pushing instead for the USPS to make deep budget cuts. Even so, budget hawks sound nervous. In a March hearing, the often provocative U.S. Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said two post offices could be closed in every congressional district. He added with a laugh: "Let's hope there's not one—or three—in mine." (A spokesman for Issa says that the congressman was trying to "introduce a bit of levity" into the proceeding and is fully in favor of shuttering postal facilities.)
The irony of the political stalemate is that it may be much simpler to fix the USPS than more intractably troubled federal programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Indeed, many other countries have figured out profitable ways to run a postal service. The U.S. could learn a lot from them. Yet hardly anybody is talking about this, except for Herr.
[...[
"I really believe that the USPS is going to get to a point where, regardless of what it does with the prefunding [of retiree health care], it is going to implode," says R. Richard Geddes, an associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University. "It is either going to default on those obligations to its retirees or we are going to have to give it a direct bailout from the United States taxpayers."
The implosion could happen this year because of the stalemate in D.C. Maybe that's what it will take for Americans to get a modern mail service. Even Donahoe, who advocates something less, sounds as if he would welcome it because there's no other way out. "Some people say if you crash the system," he says, "then people will pay attention to you."
The 40-year-old's body was found by local residents in a canal in the Sarai Alamgir area of Mandi Baha Uddin, some 150km (93 miles) south-east of the capital. His car was found about 10km (six miles) away....Mr Hasan of Human Rights Watch said Shahzad had recently complained about being threatened by the intelligence arm of the Pakistan military, the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI).
"He visited our office and informed us that the ISI had threatened him. He told us that if anything happened to him, we should inform the media about the situation and threats," he told the AFP news agency. "We can form an opinion after the investigation and a court verdict, but... in the past, the ISI has been involved in similar incidents."
Mr Hasan also said he had been told by some Pakistani government officials that they believed Shahzad was in ISI custody....Shahzad, who had a wife and three children, worked for the Italian news agency Adnkronos International (AKI) and was Pakistan bureau chief for Asia Times Online.
Human rights groups recently called Pakistan the most dangerous place in the world for journalists to operate, saying they were under threat from Islamist militants but also Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies.