What's Wrong with John McCain

• Phil Gramm (McCain’s economic guru)

• Where have I seen that before? Ah:

  His chief economic adviser is former Senator Phil Gramm, a fervent advocate of financial deregulation. In fact, I’d argue that aside from Alan Greenspan, nobody did as much as Mr. Gramm to make this crisis possible.

• Regulating Wall Street
• Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL), who also endorsed McCain, “said he’d give McCain an ‘incomplete’ for saying that it’s ‘not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly whether they’re big banks or small borrowers.’”
• McCain supports the Federal Reserve's decision to extend a $30 billion line of credit to facilitate the acquisition of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan Chase. Asked if the Federal Reserve had acted improperly in doing so, McCain reportedly asserted, "It's a close call, but I don't think so."

Islam overtakes Catholicism in number of adherents

From IHT:

Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican's 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world's population and Catholics 17.4 percent.

"For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us," Formenti told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, saying the data referred to 2006.

He said that if all Christian groups were considered, including Orthodox, Anglicans and Protestants, Christians made up 33 percent of the world's population, or about two billion people. The Vatican recently put the number of Catholics in the world at 1.13 billion. It did not provide a figure for Muslims, generally estimated to be around 1.3 billion.

Update: This is my 200th post!! hurray!! :)

Great American Hypocrites

Glenn Greenwald's new book is titled 'Great American Hypocrites'. He wrote a post today detailing how similar John McCain's foreign policy is to George Bush's. At the end of the post he blurted out this paragraph, which I think maybe a summarizing his new book. Here it is:

We must stop supporting autocracies, as we pursue hegemonic policies that make us increasingly dependent upon Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan. Democracy is the linchpin of peace, yet our enemies are Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian hardliners supported by large portions of those countries' populations. We should continue to interfere in Middle East countries (thus ensuring increased anti-Americanism) and simultaneously spread democracy (thus ensuring the election of anti-American political leaders). We must rein in government spending while pursuing hegemonic policies that we can't remotely afford to pay for, etc. etc.

Metro Atlanta 2nd in growth nationwide

From AJC:

Metro Atlanta continues to grow with no end in sight, ranking No. 2 in the nation for total population growth of metropolitan areas in the past year.
:
In the past seven years, however, the Atlanta region added a little more than a million people — more than any other region in the country. The metro area's population is now 5,278,904.
:
Census projections show Georgia could gain about 4 million people by the year 2030.

Image Src CNN

Clinton using Republican tactics on Obama?

Few bloggers seem to suggest that. Here are a couple:

Atrios:

Remember back in junior high, when you had that friend that the bullies picked on all the time? And you defended that friend, who really never did all that much for you, which led to you getting your ass kicked a few times yourself? And then you got to high school and your friend joined up with the bullies? It's kind of like that.

...just make it stop.

David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo:

Top Clinton donors write letter chastising House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her statements about superdelegates.

On stoking the Wright controversy:

Josh Marshall at TPM:

As you know, earlier today Hillary Clinton tried to stoke the Jeremiah Wright controversy by telling an editorial board meeting in Pittsburgh that Jeremiah Wright "would not have been my pastor" and then going on to note that she had denounced Don Imus in contrast to Obama's allegedly more tolerant attitude toward hate speech.

Even the conservative Byron York @ The Corner seem to be in shock with the meeting of Hillary Clinton and Richard Mellon Scaife.

she is seen talking to none other than Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of the paper and the man who once said that the death of Vincent Foster was the "Rosetta stone" of the Bill Clinton administration.

And these are all from just today's posts.

Shoban Babu passes away

Andhra's beloved actor of the yesteryear is no more!

From TOI:

Veteran Telugu actor Shobhan Babu died here on Thursday morning after a cardiac arrest. He was 71 and is survived by three daughters and a son. He has acted in over 100 films.

Born in Andhra Pradesh, Shobhan Babu began his acting career in the 1960s. After retiring from films in the late 1990s, he had settled down in Chennai with his family.

From Wiki a little background:

Sobhan Babu (January 14, 1937 – March 20, 2008), popularly known as Shoban Babu, was a Tollywood film actor.

Born as Uppu Sobhana Chalapathi Rao to a middle-class family, Sobhan went on to become a romantic icon and was the top Tollywood hero for two decades. He made his film debut with Daivabalam directed by Vasanthkumar Reddy, but his first film to hit the screens was Bhakta Sabari.

Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union'

A very good speech/argument by Obama trying to put doubts about his denunciation of Rev.Wright and other race issues.

You Tube - Hi Def

Now, you no longer have to watch the youtube videos in their grainy quality. They are re-encoding their videos to higher quality.

From Google Operating System:

YouTube has formally announced that it started to re-encode its videos in higher quality. "You may have noticed that we're now giving you the option of watching some YouTube videos in higher quality. We're making these streams available on certain videos, based upon the source file uploaded to us, and over time you'll find a greater percentage of the library is available to view in higher quality."

Two weeks ago, we learned about a trick that triggers the higher quality videos, if they're available: append &fmt=18 or &fmt=6 to a YouTube URL. Now you can choose the higher quality as a default option by going to your YouTube account settings and changing the video playback quality to "I have a fast connection. Always play higher-quality video when it's available."

Recession is Here or may be Depression

From Boston Globe:

The United States has already slipped into a deep recession that could be the most serious since World War II, said Martin Feldstein, president of the Cambridge group that is considered the official word on economic cycles.

"The situation is bad, it's getting worse, and the risks are that the situation could be very bad," Feldstein said in a speech yesterday at a financial industry conference in Boca Raton, Fla.

Alan Greenspan writes in the Financial Times via Huff Post:

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the second world war. It will end eventually when home prices stabilise and with them the value of equity in homes supporting troubled mortgage securities.

And from the The Agonist:

This Depression could last somewhat over a year, or be much more prolonged if the Fed keeps too many firms on life support. The Japanese did that in the 1990s during their bout with deflation, and it took at least ten years before the economy started to grow again.

Sadly, the only debate left for the United States, and the global economy for that matter, is how long and how deep this Depression will be.