Ian Welsh

All the diplomatic chatter on the Georgian/Russian war from the West has been Kabuki. Georgia's part of Russia's sphere of influence, and Russia will do what it wants with it. This is part of the price of a couple of decades of policy towards Russia. There is no love in Russian political circles for the US, and very little for the EU.

Commodity prices are negative to the real economy, not just because they increase prices, but because of how inflation fear really works -- not so much of inflation per se, but of the Fed's reaction to inflation. If commodities are going up too much, inflation will probably follow. Then the Fed has to raise interest rates, with the intention of crushing the economy into the dirt in order to reduce demand therefore reducing inflation. So if inflation looks bad, get out of stocks and into commodities, thus making it worse. If inflation looks better, then suddenly stocks look better.

There is no real understanding without empathy. Empathy arises from imagination. And it is simply the ability to pull yourself out of yourself. You can put yourself inside other people, but you can as easily imagine yourself inside a system or an object and feel what that is like.

Georgia's a client state of Russia's, even if they refuse to act like one. Russia can slap them around any time it feels like it, and there's very little they can do about it, because not only are they militarily weaker, but they need energy that only Russia can supply and have nothing that Russia must have in return.

One and all, whether they were those who broke Hamdan by threatening to rape his wife and kill his family, they are complicit in that. One and all, whether they tortured anyone, they are complicit in torture. They are the men who made George Bush's America.

The polls are closed and we're waiting for the first results in Tennessee's 9th Congressional district. This may have been the nastiest, most racist primary in the country. Adding to the fun is that Emily's List had endorsed Tinker, who then went on to accuse Cohen, a Jew, of being associated with the KKK and being against prayer in schools.

It's a hard hard life being Richard "Richie Rich"Syron, CEO of Freddie Mac since 2003. Seems having to create profits for investors AND serve the public by boosting the housing market has just been ripping him apart. Truly, I feel for him. Truly. I too would be ripped apart by the uncertainty of whether or not to make myself filthy rich by engaging in risky behavior so I could drive up stock prices and thus justify multi-million dollar bonuses, or whether I should be prudent and pass on on some of that filthy lucre.

So yeah, here's the sad thing. Paris's energy plan, probably put in the can before Obama compromised, is essentially Obama's post-compromise plan. No real difference. Here's the truth, given the stupidity required of presidential candidates and presidents once they got into power, I suspect she'd be a better Pres than John McCain.

Obama issued a written statement warmly welcoming a proposal sent to Senate leaders Friday by 10 senators -- five from each party. Their proposal seeks to break the impasse over offshore oil development and is expected to be examined more closely in September after Congress returns from its summer recess.

Back in November, I wrote a brief article describing how I expected the financial meltdown underway to continue, and how I expected it to impact the real economy. In March, I updated the article, looked at how many had come true and added 5 more predictions. It's been 5 months since our last update and 10 months since the original set of predictions, let's see how we're doing.