Category: News

Via Prison Planet.com » Commentary

The Economic Collapse
May 27, 2010

Today there is a great awakening going on across the United States and all around the world.  Tens of millions of people are becoming aware of the growing tyranny of the global financial elite.  Yet millions of those same people willingly enslave themselves to those very same financial powers.  So how is this happening?  It is called debt.  The financial powers of the world use it to enslave individuals, corporations and governments.  For thousands of years humanity has been taught the proverb that ”the borrower is the servant of the lender”, and yet today hundreds of millions of people around the globe willingly have run out and have made themselves servants of the money powers.  You see, when you borrow money from a financial institution, you not only have to pay that money back, but you also have to pay a significant amount of interest.  In fact, often the interest ends up being much more than the principal of the loan.  Thus the borrower ends up devoting a great deal of his or her labor to earning money for the lender.  Certainly there are times when it is necessary to borrow money.  But what Americans have been doing over the last 30 years goes far beyond “necessary” borrowing.  In fact, the massive debt binge of the last three decades has been nothing short of a huge percentage of the American population entering into willing financial enslavement.

Do you think that is an exaggeration?  Just consider the chart below.  The word “insanity” does not even begin to describe the growth of household credit in the United States over the last 30 years….

So why is debt so bad?

Well, there are a lot of reasons.  Debt strips you of your freedom and slowly drains you of your wealth.  It puts the fruits of your labor into the pockets of others.

Getting others enslaved by debt is how the most powerful financial institutions in the world got so dominant.  It is one of the most profitable ways of making money ever invented.

What many people don’t realize is just how much interest they end up paying on some of their debts.

For example, if you go to mortgagecalculator.org, you can calculate the amount of interest that you will pay over the life of your home mortgage.  According to that calculator, someone with a $250,000 mortgage at an interest rate of 6.5% over 30 years will end up paying over $300,000 in interest before it is all paid off.    

So when those 30 years are over, you have bought a house for yourself and you have also bought a house for the bankers.

But there are many forms of credit that are far worse than mortgage debt.

So what are they?

Just look in your wallet.

Do you have a credit card in there?

If so, and if you carry a balance each month, then you are “feeding the monster” and you have financially enslaved yourself.

But you are far from alone.

According to the United States Census Bureau, there are approximately 1.5 billion credit cards in use in the United States.

In fact, 78 percent of American households had at least one credit card at the end of 2008.

So it is a rare person who does not have at least one credit card.

But not only do the vast majority of us have credit cards, we are using them at unprecedented rates.

At the end of 2008, the total credit card debt piled up by American consumers was more than 972 billion dollars.  That is an amount that is greater than the GDP of the world’s 122 poorest nations combined.

So why is credit card debt bad?

Well, because it can drain your wealth faster than almost any other method ever created.

For example, according to the credit card repayment calculator, if you owe $6000 on a credit card with a 20 percent interest rate and only pay the minimum payment each time, it will take you 54 years to pay off that credit card.

During those 54 years you will pay $26,168 in interest rate charges in addition to the $6000 in principal that you are required to pay back.

That is before you include any fees or penalties you might accumulate along the way.

Are you starting to get the picture?

Do you really want to repay over $30,000 for a $6,000 purchase?

Of course not.

So what should you do?

Stop feeding the monster.

They are getting insanely wealthy off of your financial enslavement.

It is time to get out of debt.

One of the most common financial questions that people ask today is what they should do with their money.

Well, the answer to that question is a lot more obvious than people may think.

After purchasing all of the food and supplies that are needed for the hard times that are coming, people need to get out of debt.

There are very, very few investments that will add to your wealth faster than debt is draining it.

So don’t let your money sit there and earn a couple of percentage points if you are carrying any debt that you can easily pay off.

Paying off debt will reduce your living expenses and will give you much more flexibility.  It will also put you in a much better position to weather the very difficult financial times that are coming.

When you get into more debt, you are playing the game that the Federal Reserve, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs want you to play.  There are always going to be financial predators that are ready to drain your wealth.

But you don’t have to play that game.  Work to get yourself free.  You will be glad that you did.

Via Prison Planet.com » World News

Tania Branigan
London Guardian
May 27, 2010

South Korea fired artillery and dropped bombs in military exercises off the west coast of the divided peninsula today, with tensions running high in the area.

The drills aim to help the military detect incursions by the North’s submarines after a team of international investigators said a North Korean torpedo sank a South Korean warship in March.

The navy said 10 vessels, including a destroyer, fired guns and launched anti-submarine bombs south of the capital, Seoul, in a one-day exercise.

The exercises were conducted far from the disputed sea border with North Korea in the Yellow Sea, Yonhap news agency reported, citing military officials.

Pyongyang, which denies any involvement in the sinking of the Cheonan, had earlier said such military exercises would drive the tense situation to the brink of war, although it has often issued such warnings before such drills.

Full article here

Outgo those age old books, pencils and paper we’ve used before to sketch and take notes. Make way for greener technology, the Boogie Board LCD Writing Tablet. Using this tablet, according to the company’s website, by just a few people can save around 3 million trees. Using a telescopic stylus, you can draw, sketch and doodle to your heart’s content on the pressure sensitive LCD writing screen. The screen measures around 8.8 x 5.6 inch, and to erase the data on-screen, all you need to do is touch a button. So that kicks out the use of erasers too.

And yes, the little tablet needs no recharging too! Using a sealed 3v watch battery that never needs replacing, the Boogie Board will remain a reusable writing, drawing and sketching surface for as long as you need. You can buy one of these from iMPROV Electronics, Amazon.com and Brookstone for just $35.

Source

Digital photo frame manufacturer Pandigital has announced its entry into the world of the e-reader with the 7-inch full color Novel. The multi-touch Android-based reader features a gigabyte of internal memory, is powered by an ARM Mobile processor and has two reading modes. Users will also benefit from the company’s partnership with Barnes & Noble, giving access to over a million titles as well as services such as the book-lending LendMe technology…
Continue Reading Pandigital 7-inch color e-reader gets B&N eBookstore integration

Tags: Digital Photo Frame,
E-reader,
Multi-touch,
Multimedia

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Via Prison Planet.com » Commentary

James Delingpole
London Telegraph
May 27, 2010

“Can’t you find something else to talk about?” someone (a nice, sympathetic person, not one of my house herd of festering libtard trolls) commented below one of my previous blogs.

So let me explain, briefly, why I rarely can – with reference to the ludicrous story which was given the front page of today’s Times (formerly a newspaper of some note).

The story, enthusiastically headlined EU SETS TOUGHEST TARGETS TO FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING goes like this:

Europe will introduce a surprise new plan today to combat global warming, committing Britain and the rest of the EU to the most ambitious targets in the world. The plan proposes a massive increase in the target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in this decade.

The European Commission is determined to press ahead with the cuts despite the financial turmoil gripping the bloc, even though it would require Britain and other EU member states to impose far tougher financial penalties on their industries than are being considered by other large economies.

The plan, to cut emissions by 30 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020, would cost the EU an extra £33 billion a year by 2020, according to a draft of the Commission’s communication leaked to The Times.

The existing target of a 20 per cent cut is already due to cost £48 billion. The Commission will argue that the lower target has become much easier to meet because of the recession, which resulted in the EU’s emissions falling more than 10 per cent last year as thousands of factories closed or cut production. Emissions last year were already 14 per cent below 1990 levels.

Full article here

Location-based services are very popular right now, and, even as all the focus is on Foursquare and its competitors like Gowalla, Google’s Latitude service is actually a serious contender. With three million users, it’s the most popular location-based service out there and those users are now getting an interesting new feature. With … (read more)

It might be a marriage made on the farm .. with data centers being located in rural areas that have lots of farms using manure to power data centers is a way to be green

"Data centers need a lot of energy. Dairy farms create a lot of methane. … HP Labs has done the math to show that one could be used to support the other."

" … data centers … increasingly being located near existing power generation or cooling resources. … untapped source of energy, however, is the methane generated by manure on farms around the world."

" … HP … paper shows how a farm of 10,000 dairy cows could … power a typical modern data center and still support other needs on the farm."

" … turning data centers from being energy hogs into energy neutral facilities … goal … see if we can take the data center completely off the grid."

Via:  Hewlett Packard  LINK

Just like a child who’s just received a $100 bill from his grandma and is finding ways to blow it away, the city of Olympia had a few extra dollars, around $650,000 to spend. So, they brought 48 solar powered parking pay stations. These were installed around the city and were ready to use. But just when Olympia was about to pull away the plastic coverings from these high-tech meters, the city council voted 4-3 not to use them! And so, high-tech green technology stays unused in the city of Olympia, leaving the people guessing as to why these meters were installed, when parking in the city is free.

Now tax payers are sure going to feel around their pockets soon and realize their money has been wasted on a useless though green and high-tech technology. So, the council will go to vote yet again, this time hoping that a vote is passed in favor of these solar-powered parking meters.

Source

Continuing our reports from Tokyo Make Meeting 2010, here’s a fascinating group of bicycle hobbyists who brought some very creative bike designs to the show. The Tasuke I group were set up in the far corner of the exhibition hall, where they happily brought interested onlookers out the back exit for demonstrations. ..
Continue Reading Tasuke I hobbyists aim to develop next generation cycles

Tags: Bicycle,
Bike,
Bikes,
Japan,
Make Magazine,
Pedal,
Recumbent

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Facebook has caved to pressure from users and privacy advocates and overhauled its privacy settings. The site and its social networking brethren have come under increasing fire from users, privacy advocates and lawmakers, so in an attempt to address such concerns Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, says the site will introduce simpler and more powerful controls for sharing personal information…
Continue Reading Facebook caves to pressure and tightens privacy controls

Tags: Facebook,
Privacy,
social networking

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You buy a printer. Hook it on to your computer. Print out the stuff you need and empty out the cartridge. Where does the empty cartridge go after you dispose it away? To the e-waste dump at your city’s landfill! So, the Northern Territory Government came up with a way to recycle these cartridges, turning them into bicycle parks! The Simpsons Gap bike path, a popular tourist spot in Central Australia, has been upgraded with the use of recycled printer cartridges by the Northern Territory Government.

Around $130,000 was spent on the project, with the Territory Government ever willing to lend a hand in pushing forward technology. The path was tested by Environment Minister Karl Hampton, who appreciates the use of recycled plastics in parks, supporting the Territory Government’s environment reforms and initiatives.

Source

In today’s news-you-wish-you-didn’t-know, there’s a vicious rumor circulating that Carrie Bradshaw has swapped her MacBook for a HP netbook (albeit one designed by fashion designer Vivienne Tam). Gasp! Phone the girls! We have a MAJOR situation on our hands! More »










HewlettPackard – Vivienne Tam – Netbook – HP 3000 – Design

Nicholas Felton should already be well-known for the avid infosthetics reader. He is a graphic designer from New York and probably best known for his unique personal annual reports, but is also co-founder of daytum.com, a dedicated website for tracking and communicating life-logging data, while having produced an impressive body of freelance information design work in his portfolio.

When he was announced as one of the speakers for the See #5 conference in Wiesbaden, I immediately thought of trying to get a hold of him for an interview. Unfortunately, a selfish volcano made a face-to-face meeting impossible, so the following interview was conducted via e-mail. How does Nicholas typically work? What is the role of aesthetics in his work? And is *he* the cause of all those terrible junk charts some people are so passionately mad about?

Your annual reports have many facets. One thing that makes them particularly interesting to me is that they encompass components of research, design and art. Do you think in terms of these categories? How would you classify your reports yourself?

While I don’t frame the report in those exact terms, they are all a part of the process. Research and design are core parts of the equation, while the art world provides inspiration. I’m influenced by artists who elevate every-day objects and events to prominence through their meticulous processes, like Sophie Calle, Candy Jernigan and Mark Dion.

Can you tell us a bit about your design process? Do you do much by hand, or mostly graphic programs, or do you code as well? What is a typical workflow?

Typically, I like to start by determining the simplest way to communicate the data I’ve been given. Things get complicated very quickly, so there’s no use in starting with a complex base visualization layer if it needs to have numerous labels or additional dimensions of data applied.

I was drawing manually in Illustrator at this time last year, but I have started to dabble in Processing (the language developed by Casey Reas and Ben Fry) to help speed my work. Over the past few months I’ve developed a little arsenal of graphing tools to help automate my process. With considerable assistance, I’ve been able to build geocoding, geoplotting and several other graphing applications that quickly allow me see the shape of the data I’m working with. I can then take the PDF output and style it with either Adobe Illustrator or InDesign.

I usually present only one direction to a client, when it’s starting to take shape. The way I work allows the structure of the data to determine the composition of the execution, so sketches are rarely indicative of the final outcome.

Obviously, visual aesthetics plays a big role in your work. Sometimes, aesthetics can help in transporting a story, but in other case it might overshadow the data. Do you find it difficult to deal with this tension? What do you do to resolve it?

I like to think that my aesthetic choices are always made in service of the data and the story. All the reductions in typographic and chromatic palette are intended to place contrasts in the most effective locations. In my personal projects there are times where I like to push an aesthetic idea further than I would for a client, but I believe that the data relationships still shine through.

We have seen a boom of illustrative infographics over the last few months and years. I think – at least from a visual design point of view – your reports were a major influence for graphics like for instance “Unboxing the iPad“. Not all of them are great, which leads some people to critique them quite strongly or even make parodies of this style of infographics. Are you sorry for what you have (co-)caused?

I hope that I’m not entirely to blame for this, but yes, it’s becoming a problem. When I entered the field, I was operating against a tendency towards too much information and not enough insight. Visualizations for complexity’s sake. Now the needle seems to be tipping in the other direction towards visualizations that are unrooted in any data whatsoever. The larger issue for me is that none of these projects endeavor to answer a question or provide insight.

People used to write diaries to keep track of their lives, and reflect. How does your work relate to this practice?

I believe that it’s a piece of that world. My mother has kept a diary for at least the last 50 years, so perhaps there’s a piece of that in me. I’m also transfixed by the passports of my father that contain another 50 years of extensive travels in a more structured form. I’ve experimented with travelogues, and other extrapolations of my activities into books or websites. For me, the difference is that I’ve approached my everyday activities as a source of content for driving design projects, while the bulk of diaries are intended for personal consumption.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg says “the age of privacy is over“. Do you support this particular view?

I think it would be more accurate to say that the age of the illusion of privacy is over. Your activities have long been transparent to credit card, mobile phone operators and others… now we have been given the tools to reveal this information socially (intentionally or unintentionally).

I might add, that while I reveal an incredible amount about my habits in my reports, the information is edited, and activities are rarely more date specific than the year in which they occurred. For me this provides an acceptable degree of privacy and remove that is downright reserved in the age of tweeting that you’re at the local bar.

Are there things you would never publish in your reports?

Definitely. I avoid sexual and scatological reporting, and find most monetary reporting offputting.

As far as you can judge – has logging and analysing your life made you change your habits? If so, to the better or to the worse?

In some areas it has. Keeping track of my running helps keep me connected to that activity and gives me goals and a way to measure my progress. In other areas, it hasn’t had as much of an impact. When I’ve tried to keep track of my reading in an effort to increase my consumption of books, I found that it didn’t have an impact. How much I read is determined by how often I find books that engage me. Ultimately, my life tracking is more about recording and preserving my activities than in changing my behavior.

Do you think in 20 years, everybody will keep track of their (mostly auto-generated) personal Feltron report? Will doctors first review your habit and life statistics before they treat you?

Absolutely, I think that most of the things I track today will be ambiently available to anyone who’s interested in 5, 10 or 20 years. With flexible hardware like the iPhone, better battery life, pervasive sensors and id chips, background processes and participatory corporations that realize the value of giving their customers access to the data they create – we’ll be most of the way there.

Thanks, Nicholas!

This post was written by Moritz Stefaner, a researcher and freelance practitioner on the crossroads of design and information visualization. Occasionally, he blogs at well-formed-data.net.

Article Tags: Christopher C. Horner, ClimateGate, Headline Story, NASA

FOIA response long overdue

The man battling NASA for access to potential “Climategate” e-mails says the agency is still withholding documents and that NASA may be trying to stall long enough to avoid hurting an upcoming Senate debate on global warming.

Nearly three years after his first Freedom of Information Act request, Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he will file a lawsuit Thursday to force NASA to turn over documents the agency has promised but has never delivered.

Mr. Horner said he expects the documents, primarily e-mails from scientists involved with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), will be yet another blow to the science behind global warming, which has come under fire in recent months after e-mails from a leading British research unit indicated scientists had manipulated some data.

“What we’ve got is the third leg of the stool here, which is the U.S.-led, NASA-run effort to defend what proved to be indefensible, and that was a manufactured record of aberrant warming,” Mr. Horner said. “We assume that we will also see through these e-mails, as we’ve seen through others, organized efforts to subvert transparency laws like FOIA.”

He said with a global warming debate looming in the Senate, NASA may be trying to avoid having embarrassing documents come out at this time, but eventually the e-mails will be released.

“They know time is our friend,” said Mr. Horner, author of “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America.”

Source: washingtontimes.com

Read in full with comments »   

The attorney general beats McMahon by 25 percentage points, according to the Quinnipiac University poll. That’s a drop from the 33 point lead that Blumenthal held over the former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO in the March Q poll, but still a significant lead.

McMahon has already spent at least $15 million on the race, and has run a series of television ads touting her business experience. But the poll found that 39 percent of voters have an unfavorable opinion of her. That’s an increase over the 26 percent unfavorable rating she received in the March poll.

TomDispatch has an article asking “Will the Obama Administration Allow Shell Oil to Do to Arctic Waters What BP Did to the Gulf?” – BPing the Arctic ?.

Unfortunately, as you’ve already guessed, I’m not here just to tell you about the glories — and extremity — of the Alaskan Arctic, which happens to be the most biologically diverse quadrant of the entire circumpolar north. I’m writing this piece because of the oil, because under all that life and beauty in the melting Arctic there’s something our industrial civilization wants, something oil companies have had their eyes on for a long time now.

If you’ve been following the increasing ecological devastation unfolding before our collective eyes in the Gulf of Mexico since BP’s rented Deepwater Horizon exploratory drilling rig went up in flames (and then under the waves), then you should know about — and protest — Shell Oil’s plan to begin exploratory oil drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas this summer.

On March 31st, standing in front of an F-18 “Green Hornet” fighter jet and a large American flag at Andrews Air Force Base, President Obama announced a new energy proposal, which would open up vast expanses of America’s coastlines, including the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, to oil and gas development. Then, on May 13th, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed a victory to Shell Oil. It rejected the claims of a group of environmental organizations and Native Inupiat communities that had sued Shell and the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) to stop exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic seas.

Fortunately, Shell still needs air quality permits from the Environmental Protection Agency as well as final authorization from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar before the company can send its 514-foot drilling ship, Frontier Discoverer, north this summer to drill three exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea and two in the Beaufort Sea. Given what should by now be obvious to all about the dangers of such deep-water drilling, even in far less extreme climates, let’s hope they don’t get either the permits or the authorization.

On May 14th, I called Robert Thompson, the current board chair of Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL). “I’m very stressed right now,” he told me. “We’ve been watching the development of BP’s oil spill in the Gulf on television. We’re praying for the animals and people there. We don’t want Shell to be drilling in our Arctic waters this summer.”

As it happened, I was there when, in August 2006, Shell’s first small ship arrived in the Beaufort Sea. Robert’s wife Jane caught it in her binoculars from her living-room window and I photographed it as it was scoping out the sea bottom in a near-shore area just outside Kaktovik. Its job was to prepare the way for a larger seismic ship due later that month.

Since then, Robert has been asking one simple question: If there were a Gulf-like disaster, could spilled oil in the Arctic Ocean actually be cleaned up?

He’s asked it in numerous venues — at Shell’s Annual General Meeting in The Hague in 2008, for instance, and at the Arctic Frontiers Conference in Tromsø, Norway, that same year. At Tromsø, Larry Persily — then associate director of the Washington office of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, and since December 2009, the federal natural gas pipeline coordinator in the Obama administration — gave a 20-minute talk on the role oil revenue plays in Alaska’s economy.

During the question-and-answer period afterwards, Robert typically asked: “Can oil be cleaned up in the Arctic Ocean? And if you can’t answer yes, or if it can’t be cleaned up, why are you involved in leasing this land? And I’d also like to know if there are any studies on oil toxicity in the Arctic Ocean, and how long will it take for oil there to break down to where it’s not harmful to our marine environment?”

Persily responded: “I think everyone agrees that there is no good way to clean up oil from a spill in broken sea ice. I have not read anyone disagreeing with that statement, so you’re correct on that. As far as why the federal government and the state government want to lease offshore, I’m not prepared to answer that. They’re not my leases, to be real honest with everyone.”

A month after that conference, Shell paid an unprecedented $2.1 billion to the MMS for oil leases in the Chukchi Sea. In October and December 2009, MMS approved Shell’s plan to drill five exploratory wells. In the permit it issued, the MMS concluded that a large spill was “too remote and speculative an occurrence” to warrant analysis, even though the agency acknowledged that such a spill could have devastating consequences in the Arctic Ocean’s icy waters and could be difficult to clean up.

It would be an irony of sorts if the only thing that stood between the Obama administration and an Arctic disaster-in-the-making was BP’s present catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

Behind in the polls and behind in fundraising, former Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy challenged Greenwich cable TV entrepreneur Ned Lamont to 17 debates Wednesday as they launch into the primary season.

Malloy, who faces Lamont on August 10 in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, wants “a different kind of campaign” with debates in all 17 cities and towns that have a daily newspaper.

Malloy wants to have many debates, saying there was only one debate in his unsuccessful 2006 campaign for governor in the Democratic primary – a prime-time, televised debate at the Garde Arts Center in New London.

“One,” Malloy said emphatically when asked by a veteran Capitol political reporter Wednesday how many debates he had in 2006 with New Haven Mayor John DeStefano. “That was the New London one. There were some joint appearances, but not many. I don’t think there were joint appearances after the convention.”

But the archives of The Hartford Courant show that there were at least a dozen debates in 2006 on television, radio, and in front of live audiences around the state. The contests included taped debates that aired on “Beyond The Headlines” on Channel 61 and WFSB-TV, Channel 3. The debate at the Garde theatre was held on July 18 – two months after Malloy’s convention victory. Longtime reporter Mark Davis of Channel 8 held a debate on the morning of the convention, and the two candidates appeared live on WPLR morning radio show and on the Stan Simpson radio show at the time. They also appearance in East Hampton, which was memorable because former Gov. William A. O’Neill was in attendance.

Other debates were not televised live, including the first post-convention debate on June 8, 2006 at Rockville High School in Vernon against DeStefano, who later won the primary. Malloy was happy to see the number of newspaper and television reporters at that debate.

“We have more press at this debate than we had at any of the eight or nine debates in the three weeks, four weeks leading up to the convention,” Malloy said that day in June 2006 in Rockville.

Malloy won the Democratic nomination for the second time at the state party’s convention Saturday, but he has remained behind Lamont in the past three Quinnipiac University polls over the past several months. Another poll is scheduled to be released Thursday morning.

In the proposed debates, Malloy said he and Lamont can “test one another’s intellects, test one another’s conceptions of governance, test one another’s experience, and the applicability of that experience to a state in crisis.”

Malloy unveiled the idea to the Capitol press corps on Wednesday morning without having asked Lamont about it. He said he would be calling Lamont in about two hours to ask him personally.

The Lamont campaign said that U.S. John McCain offered the same proposal during the 2008 presidential campaign, but the difference was that McCain called the Obama campaign in advance before going public.

“Ned and Dan have appeared together more than 20 times already this year, and they’ll do so again before the primary,” said Justine Sessions, a spokeswoman for Lamont. “But even after 20 joint appearances, we still haven’t heard Dan offer a single idea for how to create jobs.  If he wants to try a “different kind of campaign”, that’s where he should start.”

Malloy told reporters that if he called Lamont in advance and Lamont had said no, then Malloy would be holding a press conference criticizing Lamont about not debating.

Roy Occhiogrosso, a political strategist for Malloy, said the Lamont campaign’s response was unclear.

“Is that a yes or a no?” he asked.

Debates have a long history in Connecticut. In a series of debates that are remembered among the most contentious, then-U.S. Sen. Lowell P. Weicker, Jr. and Democratic challenger Toby Moffett traveled around the state for six debates – in the six Congressional districts at the time – in clashes in 1982 that were often broadcast live on public television.

In the general election in 2006, Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell had two debates against DeStefano.

The Hartford Courant’s Jon Lender reports that Malloy made references Wednesday to the famous Lincoln – Douglas debates that have been studied for more than a century in the history books.

“Now I couldn’t have come up with this concept this idea without thinking perhaps of the greatest series of debates in our nation’s history,” Malloy said. “As you know, Lincoln debated Douglas, stood toe to toe for seven debates across the state of Illinois. … Those debates lasted a minimum of three hours. One of them, I am told, went as long as eight hours.  They started with a 60-minute opening statement, followed by a 90-minute opening by the other, followed by a 30-minute rebuttal by the first candidate. Now, I know some people’s attention spans are not as long as they were in 1857, but I also know that people are yearning for information. People want to be informed.”

Malloy continued, “People want to feel that they’re part of  the process. I know that this is a ground breaking concept, and some of you might even dismiss it. There’s no preconceived ground rules. I think what we should do is reach out to the Connecticut Daily Newspaper Association and the Connecticut Broadcasters Association, and to other organizations, and bring them in to get this job done.”

Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.)

By all accounts, Sen. Kay Hagan’s (D-N.C.) amendment to Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) financial regulatory reform bill was an excellent one. The first-term senator had a long-standing reputation in her home state for fighting payday lending, the $42 billion a year industry that offers easy-to-get short-term loans in exchange for hefty fees and annualized percentage rates of interest in the triple digits, as high as 650 percent in some states.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Hagan’s amendment — the Payday Lending Limitation Act of 2010, cosponsored by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) — capped the number of times a customer could get a payday loan to six per year. It also required payday lenders to offer borrowers extended repayment plans, letting them pay back their loans in smaller installments over longer periods of time. Payday loans are advertised as emergency stop-gap measures to help customers with sudden expenses. But the average payday loan rolls over between eight and 12 times. And more than 60 percent of payday loans go to borrowers that use them 12 times or more per year.

To illustrate how bad payday loans sometimes got, Hagan told the story of one of her constituents, Sandra Harris from Wilmington. “She had a job at Head Start and always paid her bills on time,” Hagan said on the Senate floor. “When her husband lost his job, Sandra got a $200 payday loan to pay the couple’s car insurance. When she went to repay the loan, she was told she could renew. Sandra ultimately found herself indebted to six different payday lenders, and paid some $8,000 in fees.”

Hagan’s amendment, without banning the financial service, would have stopped the industry’s worst practices — but also its most lucrative practices. Payday lenders make 90 percent of their business from repeat users. If payday loans were capped at six per customer per year, payday lenders could see their business fall by a third or half. Thus, the industry lobbied hard against Hagan’s proposal, as it had done against financial reform in both houses all year — spending $6.1 million on lobbying in 2009, more than double what it did in 2008.

The lobbying effort employed everyone from the grassroots — individual customers — to the highest-powered lawyers. David Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times reported that as Hagan’s amendment came up for a vote in Congress last week, one payday lender instructed his employees, “After a customer repays their loan, the customer then asks for a new loan. TELL YOUR CUSTOMER THAT YOU CAN’T LOAN TO THEM BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT HAS PUT US OUT OF BUSINESS. That will get their attention. Then ask them to write letters or call their senator/congressman.” A flurry of letters written at check cashers or payday loan shops showed up in Congress.

On May 20, Hagan’s amendment came up in the Senate. Durbin stood up in support, calling payday lenders the “bottom feeders” of the financial industry. Then, as Dodd moved to proceed, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) — who in 2009 received more campaign donations from payday lenders than any other Senator — blocked unanimous consent to vote on the popular provision. (Shelby’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) It died on the floor.

Hagan’s was the last of many such payday-lender-specific provisions to come up in the regulatory reform process. And it was the last to fail. There are no interest-rate or rollover caps in the Senate bill. And there are none in the House either.

Durbin argued for capping the maximum annualized percentage rate of interest a payday lender could charge at 36 percent, for instance, a measure supported by the Center for Responsible Lending and other consumer groups. It never made it into the bill, nor did Rep. Jackie Speier’s (D-Calif.) version in the House. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) — who has in the past advocated effectively banning payday lending — sponsored the Payday Loan Act of 2009, a series of reforms attached to the House bill. Consumer reform groups blasted the measures, which capped annualized percentage rates of interest at 391 percent. But even those very modest reforms did not make it in. And the most notable payday lender victory might have come from the work of Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who reportedly lobbied for and won a loosening of the Consumer Financial Protection agency’s oversight over small payday lenders.

One might think this would have consumer advocates incensed about the House and Senate bills’ ability to stop the worst practices in the payday lending industry. But, in fact, they argue that payday lenders spent millions to win numerous battles before ultimately losing the war.

Why? Payday lenders in both bills still come entirely under the rule-making authority and oversight of the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which consumer advocates are confident will consider tamping down on annualized percentage rates of interest and establishing rollover limits. There has been considerable confusion over the Senate’s payday lending language and possible loopholes. It ensures the Consumer Financial Protection Agency has oversight and rule-making authority over all payday lenders, with the CFPA enforcing rules against bigger lenders and the Federal Trade Commission enforcing rules against smaller lenders, Kirstin Brost of the Senate Banking Committee said. And the House language, simply having the CFPA have total authority over all payday businesses, as supported by the White House and Treasury, is likely to win out.

“In the end, it doesn’t matter much that Congress didn’t specifically regulate payday lenders,” Ed Mierzwinski, the consumer program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group explains. “For the payday lenders to call the defeat of the Hagan a win for them is a Pyrrhic victory — because both both the House and Senate bills include a strong new consumer financial protection agency and it will regulate them.”

And Kathleen Day, the spokesperson for the Center for Responsible Lending, which worked with Senators on crafting payday lending restrictions and has fought a longtime and vocal fight against the businesses, concurs. “The [CFPA] will be able to enact strong consumer protections that would apply to payday lenders. As long as those protections are in there, that’s the name of the game,” she says. “There’s going to be people that say they want to be specific, they want to have specific provisions in this law about payday lending. But the great thing about having this agency is that it will have broad overview to write fair laws and to make sure laws are fair.

“Of course, we’d love to have a 36 percent [annualized percentage rate of interest] cap. But that’s unlikely. And sometimes regulations can be too specific. We are confident [the CFPA] will be able to react to the market in a flexible, consumer-focused way.”

Indeed, behind the scenes, payday lenders — much like auto dealers who make car loans — fought hardest for an exemption from CFPA authority. That battle, they spent millions to lose. And it means that consumers might win down the road.

This leaked photo is the first official pic of the new Volkswagen Passat, according to AutoBild magazine who hasn’t revealed the source of the photo, though. If what we’re looking at is, in fact a photo and not a rendering or drawing, we can see the new Volkswagen front-end on display in what is clearly a Phaeton-inspired design.

Although rumours are that the new Passat could be presented at the 2010 Paris Motor Show, it has been earmarked as a 2012 model. We reported that a new 2.0 BiTDI engine would debut, and we could also see the more powerful V6, 3.6-litre engine with 300 hp appear. In the future, a possible BlueMotion hybrid model could appear.

Generally speaking, the new Volkswagen Passat won’t be lacking in technology. A seven-speed DSG gearbox and AWD options should be part of the package, along with Dynamic Light Assist, Lane Departure Warning, self-parking system and even a wiperless windscreen.

Source | Autobild via WCF