At the end of April Starbucks passed out hundreds of the cards near the BART station on the corner. Down-and-outers as well as businessmen in suits took advantage of the promotion, and many went back for free refills throughout the day.
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the '60s are impossible to escape. They will define the 2008 presidential election, just as they have defined American politics, and American culture, for the past 40 years.In 1968 the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the riots in Chicago, and the war in Vietnam rent the culture. It seemed everyone was angry; whichever side one took, the other side didn’t listen, didn’t comprehend, and in fact was evil and hypocritical, using violence to further its ends. To those of us who were teenagers then, 1968 provoked some of the strongest emotions we have ever felt. Hillary Clinton isn’t the controlled super-woman that her supporters believe that she is, so after the requisite mea culpa she should be given a pass on this one.
friends of the [Clintons] say that former President Bill Clinton, for one, has begun privately contemplating a different outcome for [Hillary]: As Senator Barack Obama’s running mate.Instant analysis on CBS 5 this morning:
If Barack Obama had given a speech on bowling, it might well have been brilliant and inspiring. But instead he actually tried bowling and threw a gutter ball. The contrast between talking and doing could not have been better illustrated.
“No woman with Obama’s résumé could run,” said Dee Dee Myers, the first woman to be White House press secretary, under Bill Clinton, and the author of “Why Women Should Rule the World.” “No woman could have gotten out of the gate.”The four L's on how to get to the top of the heap in the Democratic party: liberal, loquacity, looks, lawyer. No experience necessary. [Afterthought - May 21: forgot to add fifth L, LOTSA LOOT!] © 2008 Stephen Yuen
Women are still held to a double-standard, and they tend to buy into it themselves.
They do not have what Debbie Walsh, the director of the Rutgers center, says she used to call the John Edwards phenomenon and now calls the Barack Obama phenomenon: having never held elective office, they run for Senate, then before finishing a first term decide they should be president.
In January, California regulators said they planned to seek fines potentially exceeding $1 billion against UnitedHealth for alleged mishandling of claims and data at PacifiCare, including "unfair" pre-existing condition denials and a "meltdown in its claims paying process."$1 billion isn’t what it used to be, but that’s gotta hurt. © 2008 Stephen Yuen
Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.I’m sure that very few happy conservatives or liberals would count their ability to “rationalize social and economic inequalities” as the key to their happiness. How narrowly Marxist is this view of the world! What about having family and friends to love and be loved in return? What about the joy of learning? What about having worthwhile work which makes one want to get up in the morning?
Massachusetts legislators, demonstrating a growing resentment against the wealth of elite universities in tight economic times, are studying a plan to levy a 2.5% annual tax on the portion of college endowments that exceed $1 billion.Elite universities have no one but themselves to blame. Too many academics preach a philosophy that extreme private wealth is evil and that it should be transferred to a government that will re-distribute it in the name of societal justice. At $840 million per year even Harvard will feel pain. As someone once said, the chickens have come home to roost. © 2008 Stephen Yuen
The effort takes aim at one of the primary economic engines of the state, which is home to nine universities with endowments that surpass the $1 billion level, led by Harvard University's $35 billion cache, the nation's largest. [snip]
Supporters said the proposal would raise $1.4 billion a year. Based on the most recent size of Harvard's endowment, the university would have to shell out more than $840 million annually.
Blue--Exxon, Green--Intel, Yellow--Dow, Red--Bank of America.
In March we faced more than a mere dip in the business cycle; there was a full-blown crisis of confidence in which large international institutions refused to take each others’ IOUs. The Federal Reserve ladled out liquidity by lending on and guaranteeing assets that the private sector refused to accept, and the immediate crisis was averted. The world was awash in dollars (although it doesn’t seem that way to individuals with foreclosed homes) that chased a fixed amount of goods, and the price of oil and other commodities exploded. Of the three stocks (none of which I own or short) on the chart, Exxon is the top performer, Intel is slightly higher than one year ago, and Bank of America is 25% lower. All well and good with the history, but where do we go from here?Storing euros over 1 year would have exceeded the return on Exxon.
If oil prices come down, the rest of the economy will benefit. A strengthening economy and higher U.S. interest rates should also reverse the fortunes of the dollar, although no one expects 1:1 parity with the euro any time soon. So I would direct investment monies into non-energy, non-financial U.S. stocks, especially those with an export book. Bonne chance!A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush is handling his job as president…One person who views President Bush favorably is historian Paul Johnson.
"Bush's approval rating, which stands at 28 percent in our new poll, remains better than the all-time lows set by Harry Truman and Richard Nixon [22 percent and 24 percent, respectively], but even those two presidents never got a disapproval rating in the 70s," [CNN polling director Keating] Holland said.
After September 11th, he buckled down quickly to this unprecedented attack on America, determined that such a treacherous outrage should never occur again. Nor has it. It is worth inquiring why. There is no doubt that attacking the American homeland remains the prime objective of Muslim fundamentalist leaders. Yet they have not done so. One reason for this is the success of Mr. Bush's team in learning the lessons of Sept. 11 and building a security system of impressive strength and sensitivity.Future Paul Johnsons will assess whether this president’s unpopularity was deserved. But, as we wrote over two years ago , we don't have to wait to make this declaration: Mr. Bush is the most consequential president since Ronald Reagan. © 2008 Stephen Yuen
Equally, if not more important, is the way in which Mr. Bush--partly by accident but mainly by design--has switched the war's theater of operations to the death-dealers' territory. The number of Muslim fanatics who have been killed by the Allies in their operations or who have killed each other in Sunni-Shia clashes must be reckoned in the hundreds of thousands. We must remember that every extremist killed in the suburbs of Basra or Baghdad or in the hills around Kabul or Kandahar means scores, perhaps hundreds, of Western civilian lives saved.