Mad Money:

A Broke America Can't Afford Wars, Tax Cuts

Credit has dried up. The stock market is disintegrating. Unless someone pours money into capital markets, everyone agrees, we could wind up like people in Baghdad, fondly remembering the day five years ago when they pushed the handle and their toilets still flushed. Only one "someone" has enough cash to fix the problem: the U.S. government.

The Bush Administration and Congressional Democrats want taxpayers to pay $700 billion to bail out failing banks. Progressives would prefer to bail out homeowners facing the imminent foreclosure of their homes, as well as those in danger of being foreclosed upon during 2009, at a cost of $1.3 trillion.

Never mind which approach is better. Where will the government find the money?

There are two elephants in the room: war and Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. We can't afford either. Yet, to abuse the animal metaphor, everyone acts like they're sacred cows.

When you think about it, it's sheer madness. The city marshal is at the door, brandishing a shotgun, ready to evict you and your family for nonpayment of rent. But while your kids are screaming in terror, you're at the computer, wasting thousands on online gambling. You could pay off your landlord instead. You could make the marshal go away. All you have to do is stop. But you keep on keeping on. Click, click. More money squandered.

What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell is wrong with us?

In 2007 the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the final cost of our biggest national compulsion, the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, could total $2.4 trillion, or $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country. That's twice as much as the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf Wars combined. It's also two-thirds the cost of World War II. Yet no one--not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the media, not even the left--insists that we get out.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, I've studied World War II. World War II was a worthwhile war, one that freed millions from tyranny and set the stage for the U.S. to dominate he global economy and become the wealthiest nation in history. Iraq and Afghanistan? They're no World War II. As wars go, they're not as worthwhile as the invasion of Grenada.

"The CBO estimates assume that 75,000 troops will remain in both countries through 2017, including roughly 50,000 in Iraq," reported USA Today. If anything, that's a low-ball estimate. More than a half century after the fighting ceased, we still have 37,000 troops in one tiny country, South Korea. And both McCain and Obama promise to send more troops to Afghanistan. That means more taxpayer money.

Nearly two out of three Americans think invading Iraq--where the lion's share of war funding is being spent--was a mistake. The Afghan resistance is kicking our butts. Both wars have been a complete, total waste of money, effort and lives. As surely as the sun will rise in the east, we will lose both. At a total cost of at least $2.4 trillion. Ridiculous.

$2.4 trillion is nearly twice the $1.3 trillion it would take to save every home in danger of foreclosure. That would keep many banks afloat, and act as the biggest economic stimulus in history. Can anyone sane tell us why we shouldn't bring our troops back home? Can anyone justify wasting $2.4 trillion at a time when the U.S. economy is staring into the abyss of total collapse?

The other national obsession is the tax cuts Bush pushed through in 2001 and 2003. "The surplus is not the government's money," Bush said at the time, apparently unaware that the economy was already in a recession. "The surplus is the people's money." Remember surpluses? Such a Clintonian word. Anyway, Democrats in Congress--still in full-on wuss mode following 9/11--went along with Bush's tax cuts. But, bless their wimpy little heads, they did manage to extract a concession: In 2011, tax rates would revert to what they'd been in 2001.

Believe a Republican once, shame on you. Believe a Republican twice, what were you thinking? Now so-called conservatives are complaining that "the largest tax increase in history" will occur in 2011 if Bush's tax cuts are allowed to expire.

Making the Bush tax cuts permanent would codify the most regressive tax change in history. "After-tax income would increase by more than six percent for households in the top one percent of the nation's income distribution, two percent for households in the middle 60 percent, and only 0.3 percent for households in the bottom 20 percent," found a Brookings Institution study.

Making the rich richer will cost the Treasury an arm, a leg, and the better part of a torso.

"Combined with a minimal but necessary fix to the government's Alternative Minimum Tax, making the tax cuts permanent would reduce federal revenues by almost $1.8 trillion over 10 years--and that's in addition to the $1.7 trillion of revenue losses already locked into law."

$1.8 trillion. Again, allow me to remind you: $1.3 trillion is the amount we need to stave off imminent financial catastrophe.

That sound you hear is the door breaking down. The marshal is coming down the hall. Get off the computer. Fix the problem. Get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Let the tax cuts expire.

Now a syndicated columnist and editorial cartoonist, Ted Rall was a trader at Bear, Stearns & Co. and a loan officer at the Industrial Bank of Japan during the 1980s. Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.

Bring back Keynes

The best way out of the economic crisis is to cut interest rates, create jobs and raise incomes!

o Ann Pettifor
o The Guardian,
o Tuesday September 30 2008

Anglo-American finance ministers and central bankers, like little Dutch boys, try desperately to plug leaks in the bursting dyke that is the international financial system. In the US, treasury secretary Hank Paulson hoped for $700bn to plug the gaping hole in Wall Street's banks. In the UK, the government is not just plugging holes, but setting aside competition rules to encourage the monopolisation of finance. Alistair Darling suspended competition rules to allow the Lloyds Bank takeover of HBOS because of the crisis. This is like suspending the law during hurricanes. The demise of another independent bank, Bradford & Bingley, and the transfer of its savings business to Santander, will increasingly monopolise finance.

Will these plugs and private-sector fixes work? No, because

• they are not system-wide fixes and
• they are based on the same flawed economic policies that spurred this crisis in the first place.
  

Some of these policies, attributable to Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, are already discredited. Contempt for government is no longer acceptable. Using fiscal policies to bail out banks is now sanctioned by all political parties. To refuse to use fiscal policies to bail out taxpayers who lose pensions, homes and jobs, will make political parties unelectable.

But there are other orthodox economic policies that remain intact and are as yet unchallenged by any political party. The most damaging is orthodox monetary policy. This is based on the assumption that money is a commodity, and that its "price" - the rate of interest - must be set by supply and demand for money in private markets for capital - just as the price of oil is set by supply and demand for oil.

This is a nonsense. We do not dig capital out of the ground, nor does it grow on trees. Money is man-made. Interest rates are a social construct. And as such, unlike oil or soya beans, "there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital", as Keynes argued in the General Theory. Because there is no reason for the scarcity of capital, there is no reason for the price of capital to be high.

And yet the private finance sector has succeeded in creating a shortage of capital, the credit crunch, and - at the height of a debt crisis - ratchets its price ever upwards. The rate for private inter-bank loans (Libor) continues to move upwards as the crisis worsens.

The private finance sector also requires that central banks maintain official, or base rates at current levels by adhering to a policy esoterically named "inflation targeting". In fact these high rates, by making debts unpayable, lead to rapid de-leveraging of debts (think bank failures) and assets (think property price falls) and are dangerously deflationary.

Flawed monetary policies are turning a crisis into a catastrophe. They must be challenged. Keynes's cool, rational voice on monetary theory and monetary policy must once again be heeded. Central banks must once again take control over all rates - short and long, safe and risky.

But a system-wide fix would go further. It would challenge the orthodoxy that unemployment helps keep wages low and is a good thing; and that wage rises are always inflationary. It is this orthodoxy that has caused wages and other forms of compensation to fall as a share of GDP in all OECD countries over the past three decades. This fall in compensation has forced people to supplement incomes by borrowing more.

Creating jobs and raising incomes as a share of GDP is vital if we want people to repay debts, salvage banks and return to the high street. If we fail to adopt such system-wide fixes, and if we persist with economic orthodoxy, then look forward to a prolonged period of global economic failure.

Nancy Pelosi's "Partisan" Speech

Madam Speaker, when was the last time someone asked you for $700 billion? It is a number that is staggering, but tells us only the costs of the Bush Administration's failed economic policies -- policies built on budgetary recklessness, on an anything goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision, and no discipline in the system.

Democrats believe in the free market, which can and does create jobs, wealth, and capital, but left to its own devices it has created chaos.

That chaos is the dismal picture painted by Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke a week and a half ago in the Capitol. As they pointed out, we confront a crisis of historic magnitude that has the ability to do serious injury not simply to our economy, but to the American people: not just to Wall Street, but to everyday Americans on Main Street.

It is our responsibility today, to help avert that catastrophic outcome. Let us be clear: This is a crisis caused on Wall Street. But it is a crisis that reaches to Main Street in every city and town of the United States.

It is a crisis that freezes credit, causes families to lose their homes, cripples small businesses, and makes it harder to find jobs.

It is a crisis that never had to happen.

It is now the duty of every Member of this body to recognize that the failure to act responsibly, with full protections for the American taxpayer, would compound the damage already done to the financial security of millions of American families.

Over the past several days, we have worked with our Republican colleagues to fashion an alternative to the original plan of the Bush Administration.

I must recognize the outstanding leadership provided by Chairman Barney Frank, whose enormous intellectual and strategic abilities have never before been so urgently needed, or so widely admired.

I also want to recognize Rahm Emanuel, who combined his deep knowledge of financial institutions with his pragmatic policy experience, to resolve key disagreements.

Secretary Paulson deserves credit for working day and night to help reach an agreement and for his flexibility in negotiating changes to his original proposal.

Democrats insisted that legislation responding to this crisis must protect the American people and Main Street from the meltdown on Wall Street.

The American people did not decide to dangerously weaken our regulatory and oversight policies. They did not make unwise and risky financial deals. They did not jeopardize the economic security of the nation. And they must not pay the cost of this emergency recovery and stabilization bill.

So we insisted that this bill contain several key provisions:

This legislation must contain independent and ongoing oversight to ensure that the recovery program is managed with full transparency and strict accountability.

The legislation must do everything possible to allow as many people to stay in their homes rather than face foreclosure.

The corporate CEOs whose companies will benefit from the public's participation in this recovery must not benefit by exorbitant salaries and golden parachute retirement bonuses.

Our message to Wall Street is this: the party is over. The era of golden parachutes for high-flying Wall Street operators is over. No longer will the U.S. taxpayer bailout the recklessness of Wall Street.

The taxpayers who bear the risk in this recovery must share in the upside as the economy recovers.

And should this program not pay for itself, the financial institutions that benefited, not the taxpayers, must bear responsibility for making up the difference.

These were the Democratic demands to safeguard the American taxpayer, to help the economy recover, and to impose tough accountability as a central component of this recovery effort.

This legislation is not the end of congressional activity on this crisis. Over the course of the next few weeks, we will continue to hold investigative and oversight hearings to find out how the crisis developed, where mistakes were made, and how the recovery must be managed to protect the middle class and the American taxpayer.

With passage of this legislation today, we can begin the difficult job of turning our economy around, of helping those who depend on a growing economy and stable financial institutions for a secure retirement, for the education of their children, for jobs and small business credit.

Today we must act for those Americans, for Main Street, and we must act now, with the bipartisan spirit of cooperation which allowed us to fashion this legislation.

This not enough. We are also working to restore our nation's economic strength by passing a new economic recovery stimulus package -- a robust, job creating bill -- that will help Americans struggling with high prices, get our economy back on track, and renew the American Dream.

Today, we will act to avert this crisis, but informed by our experience of the past eight years with the failed economic leadership that has left us left capable of meeting the challenges of the future. We choose a different path. In the new year, with a new Congress and a new president, we will break free with a failed past and take America in a New Direction to a better future.

41 Things You Have To Believe To Be A Republican Today

1. Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you’re a conservative radio host. Then it’s an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.
2. The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.
3. Government should relax regulation of Big Business and Big Money but crack down on individuals who use marijuana to relieve the pain of illness.
4. “Standing Tall for America” means firing your workers and moving their jobs to India.
5. A woman can’t be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multinational corporations can make decisions affecting all humankind without regulation.
6. Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.
7. The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches while slashing veterans’ benefits and combat pay.
8. Group sex and drug use are degenerate sins unless you someday run for governor of California as a Republican.
9. If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won’t have sex.
10. A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our longtime allies, then demand their cooperation and money.
11. HMOs and insurance companies have the interest of the public at heart.
12. Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.
13. Global warming and tobacco’s link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.
14. Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush’s daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a “we can’t find Bin Laden” diversion.
15. A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is a solid defense policy.
16. Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.
17. The public has a right to know about Hillary’s cattle trades, but George Bush’s driving record is none of our business.
18. You support states’ rights, which means Attorney General John Ashcroft can tell states what local voter initiatives they have a right to adopt.
19. What Bill Clinton did in the s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the s is irrelevant.
20. Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist; but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.
21. Be like Dick Cheney, who recently called the new Miss America unpatriotic - For wishing for world peace.
22. Be like Tom Delay [The Hammer!] - Doesn’t he look like a big, fat Adolf Hitler without the mustache?
23. With great power comes great responsibility — unless you’re Republican.
24. Republicans believe that if you enjoy sex, you are doing it wrong.
25. American justice should be blind, but Republicans prefer her deaf and mute.
26. Republicans believe that politics is only dirty if you do it right.
27. Republicans love deficits like Clinton loves sex.
28. The voter always wins — unless Republicans have their way.
29. The only time Republicans talk to blacks is when they challenge them at the polls.
30. Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals, Hillary Clinton and IMMIGRANTS.
31. Lou Dobbs is a saint!
32. Immigrants are contaminating America with Leprosy.
33. There is an urgent need to keep the ‘Cradle of the Confederacy‘ safe from leprosy, pedophiles, Spanish and rampant godlessness.
34. Bilingualism is killing America. Kill the INVADERS! — Tom Tancredo
35. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity of Fox News are the most FAIR & BALANCED newscasters in the world.
36. Miami a ‘Third World country‘ — Tom Tancredo
37. Ann Coulter is the reincarnation of Mother Teresa. She is also a Tadpole.
38. You have to be “cockamamie” like Newt Gingrich: In a glimpse of what his candidacy might look like, he said he would shut down public schools that aren’t performing and offer a $ billion reward for the first private company that successfully completes a Mars mission — Reported by the AP
39. Sen. Barack Obama is a dangerous “Madrassa” trained Terrorist, his real name is “Obama Osama,” according to Rush Limbaugh — The drug addicted radio talk show host most Republicans listen to.
40. Draft-Dodging makes you a tougher patriot. and it is “Godly” to do anything and everything to get elected — this includes cross-dressing to appeal to liberal New York of Flip-Flop like a Yo-Yo regarding a woman’s right to abortion.
41. Finally, you ought to be like Ronald Reagan, the president of “sunny optimism

What Bush Got Right? Newsweek's Bait n' Switch

You can't tell a cover story by its cover!
Fareed Zakaria writes:

.... A broad shift in America's approach to the world is justified and overdue. Bush's basic conception of a "global War on Terror," to take but the most obvious example, has been poorly thought-through, badly implemented, and has produced many unintended costs that will linger for years if not decades.

.... The foreign policies that aroused the greatest anger and opposition were mostly pursued in Bush's first term: the invasion of Iraq, the rejection of treaties, diplomacy and multilateralism.

.... Change has not extended to all areas, and in many places it's been too little, too late. But that there has been a shift to the center in many crucial areas of foreign policy is simply undeniable.

Zakaria offers rubric of a dozen points for his report card.

• World Bank appointments:Bush followed his first appointment of the under-qualified Paul Wolfowitz, "an arch neoconservative with little background in economics" with Robert Zoellick.
• Policy point man/woman: poster child Dick Cheney has been replaced by pragmatists Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, Stephen Hadley and Hank Paulson..
• Iraq: with too few troops; without support of neighboring Arab states or ; dismantled Iraq's Army; bureaucracy and state-owned factories, arrests tens of thousands of Iraqis, mistreated and tortured some of them, use of overwhelming military force against all perceived threats.
• Afghanistan: American attention, energy, troops and resources were wrongly diverted from Afghanistan to Iraq-is devastating and hard to dispute.
• On North Korea: Within months of entering the Oval Office, Bush publicly repudiated his secretary of State, Colin Powell, for even suggesting that the administration would continue Bill Clinton's efforts to negotiate with Kim Jong Il.
• On Iran, Forget the muttering of various proponents of military action, periodically leaked to newspapers.. The general thrust of Bush administration policies has now evolved into the correct one.
• The same could be said for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Bush began his term in office vowing that he would not involve himself in Clinton-style efforts at peacemaking. His administration adopted a hands-off approach, allowing resentments to build and conditions to worsen.
• Lebanon: It gave free rein to irresponsible policies from all parties, encouraging, for example, a thoughtless and ill-planned Israeli attack on Lebanon that ended up weakening Israel, devastating Lebanon and empowering Hizbullah.
• Global HIV projects, treating AIDS patients, billions more than Clinton did
• Darfur: admittedly a tough nut to crack. Bush has totally fucked up Somalia, but he had the consent of Euopean members of the Security Council on this one.
• China: Changed from Clinton theme of "strategic partnership" to competitor and back again when , a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft collided with a Chinese fighter plane four months into his administration. Now Bush is present at the opening of the Chinese Olympics and blind to China's role in Burma, Darfur, and Tibet.
• India: Bush broke the deadlock by accepting, in large measure, that India would have to be treated as an exception and be brought into the nuclear nonproliferation regime as a nuclear power, not a renegade.

Zakaria's conclusions:

All this is not meant as a defense of George W. Bush. The administration made monumental errors in its first few years, ones that have cost the United States enormously. The shift in impressions about America's intentions across important sections of the globe, the sense in much of the Islamic world that America is anti-Muslim, the vast and counterproductive apparatus of homeland security-visa restrictions, arrests and interrogations-are lasting legacies of the Bush administration. Its dysfunction and incompetence have left a trail of misery in countries like Iraq and Lebanon, which have been destabilized for decades. The embrace of torture and other extralegal methods has violated America's noblest traditions and provided little in return.

. . . . . Bush 43 has surely been the most fiscally irresponsible president in American history, taking surpluses that equaled 2.5 percent of GDP and turning them into deficits that are 3 percent. This is a $4 trillion hit on the country's balance sheet. On the central issue of energy policy-the greatest economic challenge and opportunity of our times-Bush has been utterly obstructionist, recycling the self-serving arguments of industry lobbyists. On the whole, Bush's record remains one of failure and missed opportunities....

A sorry tale....

Are Political Blogs Predictive?

Published by Kevin J. Dooley in Managing Technology

2008 will be remembered for the classic battles between Obama and Clinton and McCain and Obama, but political wonks will also note the historical nature of this presidential campaign because of the profound impact that the Internet and social media have had on the dynamics of the race.

From Barack Obama's grassroots fundraising to Ron Paul's "Revolution," bloggers have advocated and vetted candidates in a public manner not seen in any previous campaigns. Involvement in social media allows voters to influence and be influenced.

A reasonable question is: Are political blogs predictive? Specifically, do blogs process and spread information more rapidly than mainstream media (MSM)? Is the blogosphere a "first mover" or "early adopter"? Do blogs create buzz around something that would otherwise go unreported by MSM? In other words, are they a "buzz creator"?

Blogs and nascent stories

From the perspective of the consumer world, we have numerous examples where the blogosphere, or the Internet in general, kept a story alive until MSM could get around to reporting it.

Perhaps the most famous example involved the Intel Pentium chip flaw. When small computational errors were found in the chip and made public in discussion board forums, Intel (and MSM) ignored it. But because of the compounding concern about the flaw, other industry discussion boards and magazines began to pick up the story, until eventually the story broke in the mainstream. It is interesting to note that many execs at Intel, including supposedly Andy Grove himself, were not aware of the issue until it hit MSM.

In these cases, blogs have the potential to give a worthy story legs and sustenance until it "matures," and is ready for diffusion in MSM.

The second situation is one where bloggers take a more active role in actually uncovering news and making it public. The Dan Rather-Bush draft story is an example where bloggers quickly vetted and rejected Rather's story as untrue, and the backlash from the embarrassing event led to the "death" of the Dan Rather brand.

Another example is the August 2006 banning of Coca-Cola and Pepsi by two Indian states after the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi said it found pesticide residues in product samples that were 24 times above the limits set by the Bureau of Indian Standards.

Most people in the U.S. heard about the ban on August 10 by reading their local newspapers. The story had hit large U.S. MSMs (USA Today, BBC, ABC) two days earlier. The New York Times led the second-wave of MSM with an August 7 report. A first wave of MSM coverage had passed by ignored around August 3, with reports from BBC, Reuters, and the Toronto Sun.

But the Indian blogosphere had been discussing this as early as mid-June. Blogs such as World Prout Assembly and Mission and Justice were carrying information a month before the court ruled against Coke and Pepsi. Finally, if you had been tracking Indian blogs all year long, you would have known that Indian citizens in certain towns were furious with Coke for "stealing" the water from their aquifers, and that trouble was brewing as early as March 2006.

So in the consumer world at least, bloggers can break news, keep news alive until the bulk of MSM gets around to paying attention, and help news spread faster than it otherwise would. How have political bloggers acted as disseminators and creators of news? In my experiences of managing and blogging about Wonkosphere, a web site which tracks the candidate's buzz using patented natural language processing technology, I have noticed the following about the political blogs we track.

Blogs and the political process

First, political blogs are important to the political process because they surface more news and opinion, and disseminate it more rapidly, than MSM. This can be both a threat and an opportunity. Second, campaigns use the political blogosphere as a laboratory to test the stickiness of the candidate's messages, about themselves and the opponents. Finally, MSM looks to the political blogosphere as an "early adopter," and thus the political blogs, by paying attention to certain things and ignoring others, drive a part of MSM's agenda.

In order to understand the role of bloggers as early adopters, I turn to the work of Everett Rogers and his classic book "Diffusion of Innovations", which is the bible concerning how both tangible innovations (like a product) and intangible innovations (like an idea) diffuse in a society.

He identified that there are different "types" of people per when they adopt: first the innovators adopt the new entity, then early adopters, followed by the early majority, late majority, and finally laggards. In Rogers' theory, early adopters are the most important group in terms of the likelihood of broad diffusion, as they take the bold ideas from the innovators and mold them for adoption by the pragmatic early majority.

In a political context, Roger's model implies that political ideology is first adopted, or not, by political bloggers who act as both innovators and early adopters. In turn the rest of the voting public reads and is influenced by bloggers’ opinions, thus bloggers become a secondary communication medium for the candidates, either supplementing or competing against the candidate’s own communications.

Will bloggers vote in the same way that the general populace does? According to Roger's theory, the answer would be yes. As people at the front-end of the adoption curve, bloggers have to "adopt" before the general populace does.

Not all bloggers adopt the same idea -- as ideological leaders, their views are going to tend to be more intense and diverse, and more ideological and less pragmatic. Nevertheless, bloggers in the aggregate will tend to move ahead of the curve and thus be predictive. Indeed, statistical analysis of the Wonkosphere Primary Campaign data indicated that changes in buzz share in both the conservative and liberal blogospheres were predictive of changes in voter polls two weeks later.

Imagine a funnel of political ideas. At the front-end of the funnel, many ideas exist in an ideological soup. The campaigns first use bloggers as innovators, listening to their feedback to hone their messages and frames, and then other bloggers in turn act as early adopters and help select and shape those ideological innovations in such a way that they are attractive to the early majority, i.e. the primary voter.

Supplements rather than substitutes

Finally, how are political blogs the same or different from MSM? Through Wonkosphere, we have noticed that political blogs are consumed in much the same manner as mainstream media is, which indicates that readers treat political blogs not as separate from, but rather as part of, mainstream media. Wonkosphere traffic is greatest on Monday, and tends to peak before breakfast, lunch and dinner, i.e. when people are cruising on the net to end a portion of their work day. Blogs act as newspapers for most.

Second, very few blogs break stories. From our data, the vast majority of bloggers still rely on mainstream media for the content they comment on. In fact, a blogger is just as likely to cite mainstream media as they are another blogger. Thus, bloggers are primarily amplifiers rather than sources of news.

Third, the popularity of political blogs tends to follow a Pareto (power) law, meaning that there are a few blogs that have hundreds of thousands of readers while most blogs only have a handful of readers. This means that the influence of blogs is distributed in the same way, leading to the development of elite blogs (MyDD, Townhall), in the same way we have elite mainstream media sources (New York Times, Newsweek).

Put together, these patterns imply that political blogs are acting as supplements to mainstream media, rather than substitutes for it. Their impact on the system is to increase volatility: blogs make most news spread faster, but sometimes they slow it down. Blogs spread fact, opinion, truth, and slander more rapidly -- it is not biased in that regard. Only a few blogs influence opinion most of the time, but any single blog has the potential to impact everyone. That’s why this year’s race is particularly exciting—will something break in the blogs that ends up being the tipping point?

-- Kevin Dooley, a professor of supply chain management in the W. P. Carey School of Business, is a world-known expert in the application of complexity science to organizations. He has co-authored two patents concerning Centering Resonance Analysis, a novel form of network text analysis, and is Chief Executive Officer of Crawdad Technologies, LLC. Crawdad provides text mining software and services for applications in marketing and academic research.

The Russo-Georgia Conflict - Who's trying to start Cold War II?

Patrick J. Buchanan Asks Why Joe Biden isn't conducting public hearings to find out who caused this U.S. humiliation.

Truman refused to use force to break Stalin's Berlin blockade. Ike refused to intervene when the Butcher of Budapest drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. LBJ sat impotent as Leonid Brezhnev's tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Jimmy Carter's response to Brezhnev's invasion of Afghanistan was to boycott the Moscow Olympics. When Brezhnev ordered his Warsaw satraps to crush Solidarity and shot down a South Korean airliner killing scores of U.S. citizens, including a congressman, Reagan did – nothing.

These presidents were not cowards. They simply would not go to war when no vital U.S. interest was at risk to justify a war. Yet, had George W. Bush prevailed and were Georgia in NATO, U.S. Marines could be fighting Russian troops over whose flag should fly over a province of 70,000 South Ossetians who prefer Russians to Georgians.

The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of the old Leningrad.

Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far.

And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought our friendship?

.....The swift and decisive action of Putin's army in running the Georgian forces out of South Ossetia in 24 hours after Saakashvili began his barrage and invasion suggests Putin knew exactly what Saakashvili was up to and dropped the hammer on him.

What did we know? Did we know Georgia was about to walk into Putin's trap? Did we not see the Russians lying in wait north of the border? Did we give Saakashvili a green light?

.....The war in Georgia has exposed the dangerous overextension of U.S. power. There is no way America can fight a war with Russia in the Caucasus with our army tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor should we. Hence, it is demented to be offering, as John McCain and Barack Obama are, NATO membership to Tbilisi.

The United States must decide whether it wants a partner in a flawed Russia or a second Cold War. For if we want another Cold War, we are, by cutting Russia out of the oil of the Caspian and pushing NATO into her face, going about it exactly the right way.

Vladimir Putin is no Stalin. He is a nationalist determined, as ruler of a proud and powerful country, to assert his nation's primacy in its own sphere, just as U.S. presidents from James Monroe to Bush have done on our side of the Atlantic.

.....Who rules Abkhazia and South Ossetia is none of our business. And after this madcap adventure of Saakashvili, why not let the people of these provinces decide their own future in plebiscites conducted by the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe?

As for Saakashvili, he's probably toast in Tbilisi after this stunt. Let the neocons find him an endowed chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

I have to ask: We partitioned Ex-Yugoslavia? Why not Ex-Georgia?

World Net Daily