THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† Can Cafferty, CNN: Chinese: The International Herald Tribune is disturbed by “an increasingly zealous nationalism among Chinese youth … seen in counter-demonstrations organized by Chinese student associations in the United States against supporters of a free Tibet” and correctly notes “[t]here is a crucial distinction between a healthy, constructive nationalism and the pathological variety that Hitler sought to inject into the Berlin Olympics of 1936.” Perhaps this distinction is not lost on Chinese leaders, after all - or they have hired a savvier PR firm. The Washington Post reports:
After weeks of expressing outrage at Western protests over Tibet and the Olympics, officials here have begun tempering their rhetoric in recent days and telling Chinese people to be "rational" about their response.
In state media, Chinese officials had called the protests in the United States and Europe “vile” and “blasphemy.” On Tuesday, however, the state-run China Daily said Chinese “should be ready for criticism.”
“As the country becomes the locomotive of the world economy and plays a bigger part in global affairs, it draws more attention from the rest of the world,” the paper said in an editorial.
It remains to be seen what effect the world’s attention will have on China’s policies with respect to Tibetan “splittists,” but Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency reports that the government has reversed itself and agreed to meet with representatives of the Dalai Lama, whom they accused of being behind the violent protests in Lhasa. And let us not forget China’s undermining of peacekeeping efforts in Darfur - selling arms to Sudan, for instance.
Meanwhile, with the help of six lawyers Liang Shubing, a beautician in NYC and Li Lilan, a primary school teacher in Beijing have filed a lawsuit suit against CNN for $1.3 billion - $1 per person in China - over Jack Cafferty’s remarks that allegedly insulted the Chinese people. CNN’s projected 2007 revenue is $1.024 billion, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s “The State Of The News Media 2008” report.
† Katie Couric Kills (second item): Katie Couric’s rumored departure from the “CBS Evening News” is generating tons more buzz than the program ever did since she took the anchor spot. The newscast just “recorded the worst five-night run in its history last week,” attracting “an average of only 5.4 million viewers for the week,” reports The New York Times. “That number was down from about 5.6 million the week before and 6 million two weeks ago. CBS had two million fewer viewers than ABC News (7.5 million) and almost three million fewer than NBC (8.2 million).
† Sub-Par Solution For Sub-Prime Loans: Part II: Contrarian columnist John Stossel notes that The New York Times “has used the term ‘subprime crisis’ at least 11 times. Not in opinion columns - in news stories.” It’s not just the media that’s in full Chicken Little mode: “John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all think that the government should bail out homeowners who can't pay their mortgages. When they say the government should do this, they mean the taxpayers, including those who are paying their mortgages. They also think the government should regulate the lending and investment industries further.” Against this backdrop, Nassau County (NY) Justice Daniel R. Palmieri declined to halt a foreclosure sale in the matter Alliance v. Dobkin, reports New York Law Journal.Though he was “not without sympathy” for plaintiff Jo-Anne Dobkin, Palmieri ruled that she “should not have accepted" two loans totaling $418,540 from Alliance Mortgage Banking Corp.” and the “lender should not have offered” the loans, but “absent the violation of some statute or other relevant legal principle the law does not permit judges to simply ignore payment obligations voluntarily taken on by mortgagors, even if it should have been evident to both lender and borrower that the loan was likely beyond the borrower's ability to repay.”
† Why Middle Class Americans Can’t Afford Health Insurance: Part II: The lede of this New York Times article about UnitedHealth Group’s dismal 1Q results says it all: “It is never a good thing if many of your customers can no longer afford what you are selling.” The company’s CEO admitted that, “fewer employers - particularly small businesses - were offering health coverage to their workers, and that when they did, fewer employees were choosing to enroll.” Consequently, the company expects lowered profits in 2008. Health insurer WellPoint also warned of poor 1Q earnings. Sheryl Skolnick, a health care analyst for CRT Capital Holdings in Stamford, CT, tells The Times that too many insurers have priced their policies beyond the reach of too many people and are fighting amongst each other over a shrinking pool of customers.
† The Keystone Kops Are Enforcing U.S. Immigration Laws: Hear that giant sucking sound? It’s $20 million tax dollars disappearing into the black hole of government waste. Two months after Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff green-lighted The Boeing Co.’s prototype “virtual fence” comprised of nine electronic surveillance towers lining a 28-mile stretch of border southwest of Tucson – dubbed Project 28 - the Government Accountability Office recommended that Boeing go back to the drawing board, because field testing showed that it “did not fully meet user needs,” reports The Associated Press:
A glaring shortcoming of the project was the time lag between the electronic detection of movement along the border and the transmission of a camera image to agents patrolling the area, the GAO reported. …
Agents began using the virtual fence last December, and the towers have resulted in more than 3,000 apprehensions since, said Greg Giddens, executive director of the SBI program office in Washington.
But that's just a fraction of the several hundred illegal immigrants believed to cross the border daily near southwest of Tucson.
Boeing was awarded an $860 million contract to provide the technology, physical fences and vehicle barriers.
The Border Patrol was not consulted in the design of the prototype.
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