Your Breakfast Read, Sunday Edition

Fratricide within the GOP in NY-23? Health-care reform? Financial reform? What the White House looks like for Halloween? Screw it all. There are other News that are at least as much interesting. Let’s check’em shall we?

Around The Nation

I thought I was the only one who found it rather strange that the Obama would agree to The Obamas’ Marriage. It looks like I wasn’t the only one.

Barack and Michelle Obama: Mr&Mrs show irks voters

With difficult state elections and a crucial military decision looming, President Barack Obama sat down with his wife Michelle last month to give an in-depth magazine interview about a subject that has hitherto not ranked highly on the White House political agenda — the state of the first couple’s marriage.
(…)
Obama went on to insist that his marriage was “separate and apart from a lot of the silliness of Washington”. He then proceeded to discuss his romantic ups and downs in startling detail with a reporter from The New York Times Magazine.

Publication of that unusually candid interview highlighted an intriguing contradiction that has begun to haunt the Obama White House. The president’s family has become one of his most valuable political assets. Yet the attempts by the Obamas to shield their private lives from scrutiny are increasingly being subverted — by the Obamas themselves.

When the interview appeared on the paper’s website ahead of publication today, it prompted a flood of reader reactions from “They are a beautiful couple” and “exceptional role models” to “Why should I care about their marriage?” and “This stuff is none of my business”.

There were also several expressions of concern, echoed privately by Democratic strategists, that the openness of the Obamas about what Michelle described as the “bumps” in their relationship, may help turn a historic presidency into a soap opera.

There is new generation of Moonies waiting around the corner?
New moons are rising

To many observers, Moon’s activities – including accusations of cult-like practices, his imprisonment for tax evasion, the prayer vigils for a Watergate-afflicted president Richard Nixon, his support for right-wing death squads in Central America, the strange spectacle of mass weddings, the church’s close ties to the Bush family and legions of stories about de-programs trying to reclaim Moonified souls – may seem so 20th century.

The Unification Church has been a religious, business and political enterprise and there are a number of routes it could take to the future: It could grow like The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), it could remain controversial similar to the path of the Church of Scientology or it could try to become just another church among many – in other words, more mainstream.

While the Moon organization has been prepping for transition to younger leaders for quite some time, Frederick Clarkson, a journalist who has written widely about the church, including in his 1997 book, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, told Inter Press Service (IPS) that “even with the passing from the scene of the man many believe to be the messiah, the more things change, the more they stay the same”.

Another horrible side effect of inequality.
Women At Arms: A Combat Role, and Anguish, Too

Never before has this country seen so many women paralyzed by the psychological scars of combat. As of June 2008, 19,084 female veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan had received diagnoses of mental disorders from the Department of Veterans Affairs, including 8,454 women with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress — and this number does not include troops still enlisted, or those who have never used the V.A. system.

Their mental anguish, from mortar attacks, the deaths of friends, or traumas that are harder to categorize, is a result of a historic shift.
(…)
[Y]et, experts and veterans say, the circumstances of military life and the way women are received when they return home have created differences in how they cope. A man, for instance, may come home and drink to oblivion with his war buddies while a woman — often after having been the only woman in her unit — is more likely to suffer alone.

At least one sick twisted murdering f@#& is off the street.
Suspected serial killer arrested in Ohio, after six bodies discovered in house

A suspected serial killer has been arrested in America after six bodies were discovered hidden in and around his house.

Anthony Sowell, 50, was arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, after police received a tip-off about his whereabouts. Sowell had become the subject of a major manhunt after the gruesome discovery of half a dozen corpses at his house in a poor neighbourhood that has struggled with crime and drug problems. Police had set up an emergency response centre and celebrated when news broke that he had been picked up.

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Economy Watch

Maybe Matt Taibbi was on to something. Goldman Sachs is really making it easy for him.
How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers that it also was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting. Now, a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose those secret bets may have violated securities laws.

Oh noes! Stop the press! “Socialism” seems to be working. Somebody alert Right-wingers.
The 2009 Recovery: Made in Washington

The three most striking figures in the G.D.P. report were that consumer spending on durable goods, such as cars and refrigerators, rose at an annualized rate of 22.3 per cent; residential investment (spending on housing) rose at an annualized rate of 23.4 per cent; and exports of goods made in the United States rose at an annualized rate of 21.4 per cent. All of these things can be traced directly to official efforts to stimulate the economy.

Say what?
Big winner on economic stimulus and jobs is … Puerto Rico?

Not having a voting member of Congress doesn’t seem to have hurt Puerto Rico in its quest for jobs and economic recovery.

In the middle of a four-year-long recession, the self-governing US territory has managed to add 17,000 new jobs for a grand total of over 4,000 per million residents, putting the Puerto Rico third behind Washington and Montana in jobs created by the federal stimulus bill, according to a Monitor analysis of new stimulus figures released by the White House.

Joe Stiglitz saya me missed a great opportunity to act when we had the banks by the nuts.
Stiglitz Says U.S. Is Paying for Failure to Nationalize Banks

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said the world’s biggest economy is suffering because of the U.S. government’s failure to nationalize banks during the financial crisis.

“It we had done the right thing, we would be able to have more influence over the banks,” Stiglitz told reporters at an economic conference in Shanghai yesterday. “They would be lending and the economy would be stronger.”

Good question.
Why haven’t any Wall Street tycoons been sent to the slammer?

More than a year into the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, millions of Americans have seen their home values and retirement savings plunge and their jobs evaporate.

What they haven’t seen are any Wall Street tycoons forced to swap their multi-million dollar jobs and custom-made suits for dishwashing and prison stripes.

Message to Dems: Nobody really cares about the deficit if the the economy is perceived by the people as terrible.
Democrats Push for Plan to Cut Deficit

Faced with anxiety in financial markets about the huge federal deficit and the potential for it to become an electoral liability for Democrats, the White House and Congressional leaders are weighing options for narrowing the gap, including a bipartisan commission that could force tax increases and spending cuts.

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Around The World

WTF is this all about?
Did President Clinton meet N. Korea’s Kim Jong-il or his look-alike?

The North Korean leader may be using look-alikes to hide his poor health. One analyst says that when President Clinton visited in August, he met with an actor, not Kim Jong-il.

Transparent Election Is Not Possible, Says Rival to Karzai

Abdullah Abdullah, the chief rival to President Hamid Karzai, announced on Sunday that he would withdraw from the Nov. 7 Afghan runoff election, effectively handing a new term to Mr. Karzai but potentially damaging the government’s credibility.

Can she still pull it of?
Israel putting forth ‘unprecedented’ concessions, Clinton says

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had offered “unprecedented” concessions on West Bank settlement construction in an effort to restart peace talks, a departure from the administration’s earlier criticism of Israel and a possible signal of impatience with the refusal of Palestinian leaders to join negotiations.

At the start of a day of diplomacy that stretched from Abu Dhabi to Jerusalem, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas rejected Israel’s latest offer, relayed by Clinton, to curb most West Bank construction.

What life is like where this Conflucian now lives.
The new Berlin

Once it was a city split by a wall. Now, a return visitor discovers, it’s a splendid capital busy restoring its past and building its future.

Some of these are really hard to watch.
Photo Gallery: The Decade’s Most Powerful Images

HAVE A BLISSFUL SUNDAY!!!

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