Day: June 5, 2008

Gays Could Be Big Business

A California Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday clears the way for gay marriage ceremonies that could bring a business windfall to San Francisco and other cities starting this month.

“The economic impacts will be huge,” said David Paisley, a senior projects manager at Community Marketing Inc.

Estimates suggest that gay weddings will pump $684 million into the California economy in three years, said Lee Badgett, research director of the Institute on Sexual Orientation, Law & Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“I think you’re going to see tens of thousands of couples and their families descend on San Francisco,” Mayor Gavin Newsom said. “People are looking at this as an opportunity to come and support their families, their partners and also the city’s economy.

Strategies for wooing the market include a “Marriage For All” campaign to coincide with the Gay Pride Parade, which will fill city streets with more than 1 million spectators in late June.

Headlines have already caused a spike in traffic at Gayweddings.com, which helps users find gay-friendly vendors and resources, said company president Kathryn Hamm. In May, traffic on its vendor’s page was up 38 percent over last year.

Joie de Vivre, a boutique hotel company with 37 facilities in California, is planning honeymoon packages that will appeal to gay clients.

Chasing this opportunity capitalizes on two trends — destination weddings and gay tourism, a lucrative market because same-sex couples often share two paychecks without children, leaving more disposable income for travel and luxury, Paisley said.

Another reason to push the marketing now is that gay marriage may not be legal for long. In November, California voters will decide whether to amend the state constitution to limit marriage to unions between a man and a woman.

US Fed To End Rate Cuts

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, indicated Tuesday that the Fed would hold interest rates steady in the face of mounting inflation and the depreciation of the US dollar. He departed from tradition, whereby the head of the US central bank refrains from making public comments on currency questions, deferring to the treasury secretary, to say that “in collaboration with our colleagues at Treasury, we continue to carefully monitor developments in foreign exchange markets.”

He went on to say that dollar weakness had “contributed to the unwelcome rise in import prices and consumer price inflation,” and declared that the Fed would be “attentive to the implications of changes in the value of the dollar for inflation and inflation expectations.” Bernanke added that the Fed would “formulate policy to guard against risks to both parts of our dual mandate, including the risk of an erosion in longer-term inflation expectations.”

That policy, aimed above all at averting a major bank collapse and financial panic, came to a head with the Fed’s moves last March to prevent Bear Stearns from filing for bankruptcy protection and to forestall other Wall Street failures by allowing major investment banks to borrow directly from the Fed—a move unprecedented since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The Fed’s policy of bailing out Wall Street contributed to the downward pressure on the dollar and an explosive run-up in the price of oil and other basic commodities.

Bernanke somewhat obliquely referred to the recessionary implications of his dollar-boosting, anti-inflationary shift by noting that “the demand for US exports arising from strong global growth has been an important offset to the factors restraining domestic demand, including housing and tight credit.” The growth of US exports has largely been the consequence of the cheaper dollar, which lowers the relative cost of exports and increases the cost of imports into the US.

A central concern of the Fed and of financial markets is to preempt what are referred to as “inflationary expectations.” This is largely a euphemism for wage increases. The job-cutting impact of recession will be used to undermine workers’ demands for wage hikes to offset rising prices.

According to statistics released Wednesday, the cost per unit of labor in the US rose at an annualized rate of 2.2 percent in the first quarter of 2008, a figure significantly lower than the current inflation rate of about 4 percent. In real terms, wages in the US are falling at a rate of almost 2 percent a year.

The Billion Dollar Election

If Barack Obama looked like a campaign fund-raising champ before this week, just wait.

Now that he has captured the Democratic presidential nomination to face Republican John McCain in the November election, the Illinois senator will try to lay claim not only to many former Hillary Clinton donors, but also Democrats who have been undecided until now.

The result is likely to be another sharp spike in political donations, amid a political race already smashing fundraising records, campaign finance experts said.

“We’re easily going to have the first billion-dollar presidential race,” said Richard Parker, lecturer in public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Obama had raised $265.4 million from all sources through the end of April, according to the latest analysis of Federal Election Commission records by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan, campaign finance watchdog.

New York Sen. Clinton’s total take over the same period was $214.9 million, while Arizona Sen. McCain’s was $96.7 million.

I was thinking about the cash in this season.  All this money spent to get a $500,000 a year job, but of course it comes with a buttload of power.  But is it worth the cost?  I mean would you spend a million dollars to get a $50,000 a year job?  It is really time to make this a process that anyone can enter, niot just those little rich twits that are not looking to improve the country, but rather just a meal for their egos.

Al-Qaeda In Iraq

It should be clear by now, but apparently it isn’t: al-Qaeda is an idea, a way of thinking. Al-Qaeda thinks the world is divided between believers and nonbelievers, and the believers are divinely obliged to destroy the nonbelievers. It is a simple idea that has attracted tens of thousands of Muslims, but it is neither a political prescription nor the makings of an army. The Sunni Arabs who drifted into Iraq after the invasion and the Iraqis who embraced al-Qaeda were never an organization. They were never an army. They were never the main enemy. They numbered, what, a couple of thousand? They nearly triggered a civil war, but even that they failed to accomplish.

The success we’re seeing today in Iraq has nothing to do with rooting out terrorist cells. What we’re seeing instead is a shriveling of grassroots support, Sunni Muslims turning against al-Qaeda and its messianic, dualistic way of looking at the world. It hasn’t gone unnoticed in the Middle East that al-Qaeda has killed more Muslims than nonbelievers. Or that al-Qaeda has failed to take an inch of ground in the name of Islam. With this kind of record how could the Iraqis not turn against al-Qaeda?

None of this, of course, is to take away from the turnaround in Iraq. Last month we saw the fewest American casualties since the invasion in 2003. Basra, Sadr City, and Mosul are coming back under Baghdad’s control. Many Iraqis feel safe enough to move back into their houses. And none of it should take away from General Petraeus; our troops, who are bleeding and dying to hold together a country vital to American interests; or the Iraqis, who have backed away from civil war. So why should we now mischaracterize the enemy?

The tendency will be to leave it at the lie: We fought and beat al-Qaeda in Iraq. But it’s a lie we’ll pay for later. By mischaracterizing the enemy in Iraq, we mischaracterize the enemy in Pakistan. Whether the car bomb that destroyed the Danish embassy in Pakistan on Monday was the work of an actual member of al-Qaeda or not does not matter – what does is that al-Qaeda’s way of thinking is not defeated.

The Iraq Secret Deal

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq’s position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.

The timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on the verge of victory in Iraq – a victory that he says Mr Obama would throw away by a premature military withdrawal.

Mr Bush is determined to force the Iraqi government to sign the so-called “strategic alliance” without modifications, by the end of next month. But it is already being condemned by the Iranians and many Arabs as a continuing American attempt to dominate the region. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and usually moderate Iranian leader, said yesterday that such a deal would create “a permanent occupation”. He added: “The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans.”

The US is adamantly against the new security agreement being put to a referendum in Iraq, suspecting that it would be voted down. The influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his followers to demonstrate every Friday against the impending agreement on the grounds that it compromises Iraqi independence.

The Iraqi government wants to delay the actual signing of the agreement but the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney has been trying to force it through. The US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, has spent weeks trying to secure the accord.

The signature of a security agreement, and a parallel deal providing a legal basis for keeping US troops in Iraq, is unlikely to be accepted by most Iraqis. But the Kurds, who make up a fifth of the population, will probably favour a continuing American presence, as will Sunni Arab political leaders who want US forces to dilute the power of the Shia. The Sunni Arab community, which has broadly supported a guerrilla war against US occupation, is likely to be split.

Will Clinton Suspend And Endorse?

All day Wednesday, the day after the last two campaigns, pundits from the media were out in force speculating just what Clinton will do.  There were more opinions than hairs on ones head, but all that speculation will be at an end this coming weekend.

The New York senator will end her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination late this week, according to a senior campaign aide and a top fundraiser who said they could not talk on the record because they were not authorized to comment on the plan.

Clinton’s campaign issued a less-than-definitive statement saying she would host an event here Saturday “to thank her supporters and express her support for Sen. Obama and party unity.” The campaign said the event was moved from Friday to Saturday to allow more people to attend.

While some in the party urged patience in allowing Clinton time to accept defeat, others said it was time to move on. Top Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said in a pointed statement that “Democrats must now turn our full attention to the general election.”

Even some Clinton supporters made clear that they were hoping for closure. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., a home-state stalwart for Clinton, said it was “confusing” that she hadn’t endorsed Obama. “There’s only one candidate out there,” he said on MSNBC. “The time has come.”

I have been asking for a month or more, just what does Clinton want out of this situation.  There has been anger here about her Michigan and Florida outcome, but as of yet NO one has an opinion on what she wants for her support.