• Economist: Global Public Debt Clock
  The Economist has a cool graphic display of public debt. Just put your cursor on a country and you can see how much public debt the country has, the per capita debt, the % of GDP that is debt, etc. FYI, the US public debt per capita is $21,973.60. That's bad, but Canada's is $28,347.10, France's is $31,971.90 and Italy's is $41,035.80. On the other hand Zimbabwe is in some sort of parallel universe with $0 per capita debt while their debt as % of GDP is 285.1%.
  (tags: economics)
• Triad Biz Journal: U.S. House votes to end bank-based student lending
  The House voted to stop subsidizing bank-based student lending and shifting the money to the federal direct-loan program and grants to community colleges.
  (tags: education studentloan)
• Fec: The Lie Machine
  Fec provided this outtake from Rolling Stone: "The campaign to mobilize the town-hall mobs began with a script written by the right’s foremost fearmongerer, Frank Lutz…

  Lutz writes: 'Takeovers are like coups – they both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom…

  'It is essential that ‘deny’ and ‘denial’ enter the conservative lexicon immediately,' he writes, 'because it is at the core of what scares Americans most about a government takeover of health care.'”

  (tags: healthcare government politics)

• The Real Banker Boondoggle
  Don't be distracted by the compensation kerfluffle for the bankers; the real juice is in their equity holdings which were preserved by the big bailout. h/t to Lex for the link.
  (tags: banks economics government)

• Blankenhorn: Blogging for Money
  "When blogging first began, several years before I got into it, there was a feeling that individuals would be able to use blogging to build their own little businesses. This proved true in only a very few instances. The most successful blogs now are group efforts — sometimes the group is quite large — and the need for professional management (on the technical and ad sides) means that I am, effectively, what I was 25 years ago, a freelance, an independent contractor, a typist for hire."
  (tags: blogs blogbusiness blog media mediaincome)

• Google Just Showed Amazon How to Save the Content Biz " blog maverick
  Mark Cuban: "I thought it was a good idea for media conglomerates to package all their digital assets into subscription offers. Its a far better idea for a marketer like Amazon to package cross company offerings into bigger and better packages."
  (tags: media)
• The Bank Implode-o-Meter: Wells Fargo’s Commercial Portfolio is a ticking time bomb
  "In order to sort through the disaster that is Wells Fargo’s (quote: WFC) commercial loan portfolio, the bank has hired help from outside experts to pour over the books… and they are shocked with what they are seeing. Not only do the bank’s outstanding commercial loans collectively exceed the property values to which they are attached, but derivative trades leftover from its acquisition of Wachovia are creating another set of problems for the already beleaguered San Francisco-based megabank.

  Wachovia, which Wells purchased last fall as it teetered on the brink of collapse, was so desperate to increase revenue in the last few years of its existence that it underwrote loans with extremely shoddy standards and paid traders to take them off their books."

  h/t to Ed Cone for the link

  (tags: banks economy)

• Lex: Reinforcements
  Lex has been writing about the efforts of Florida's US Rep. Alan Grayson to get an audit of the Federal Reserve done, and soon. Apparently Rep. Grayson now has a Senate counterpart in Delaware's Sen. Ted Kaufman. Lex pulls a quote from an interview with Grayson in which he's asked what the Fed's been up to:

  "Congressman Grayson: They are performing a truly remarkable, surreptitious transfer of wealth from public to private hands. They are taking their ability to print money and shore up failed banks. They are simply stuffing money into the pockets of private interests."

  (tags: economics government)

• Triad Biz Journal: Winston-Salem home sales down 20%
  "There were 445 sales of existing single-family homes in the Winston-Salem area, compared with 558 in August 2008, according to data compiled from the Triad Multiple Listing Service and released by the Winston-Salem Regional Association of Realtors."
  (tags: realestate winston-salem)

• Lex: Can we PLEASE let the smart people run things for a while?
  Lex posts about an item concerning a film on Darwin that can't find a US distributor because the subject would be too divisive for US audiences. Huh? Here's the scariest part to me: "US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution." Can that 39% figure possibly be right? I'm hoping it really is the result of a loaded question like, "Do you believe that Darwin or God was right?" Somehow I doubt it, though.
  (tags: science culture)

• Triad Biz Journal: GSO home sales drop in August
  "Greensboro home sales in August, at 490, were down 21.7 percent compared to August 2008, when 626 homes were sold, according to data released by the Greensboro Regional Realtors Association. The August total also was down about 4.3 percent from July, when 512 existing homes were sold."
  (tags: realestate greensboro)

• Wal-Mart and McDonald's gift cards used as a lure for syphilis testing
  According to this article health officials here in Forsyth County, NC are using Wal-Mart and McDonald's gift cards to "bribe" people to submit to syphilis tests. If I'm a brand marketer at either company I'm not sure I'd be happy with this news.
  (tags: healthcare health)

• Fear was no excuse to condone torture
  From an opinion piece in the Miami Herald written by two former Marines (Charles C. Krulak was commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999. Joseph P. Hoar was commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994): "We have seen how ill-conceived policies that ignored military law on the treatment of enemy prisoners hindered our ability to defeat al Qaeda. We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. And yet Cheney and others who orchestrated America's disastrous trip to “the dark side'' continue to assert — against all evidence — that torture “worked'' and that our country is better off for having gone there."
  (tags: war government)
• Michelle Malkin and the anatomy of the 2 million protester lie | Media …
  How an official crowd estimate of 70,000 for the conservatives' march on Washington turned into a reported 2 million on some media outlets. Keep in mind that rally/protest numbers in DC are ALWAYS disputed and the holder of the rally always questions the estimate of the whoever's in charge. For that reason the National Park Service stopped providing estimates for the number of people on the National Mall during events, and you'll notice that the 70,000 estimate came from the DC Fire Department. Still, 70k to 2m is a little outrageous.
  (tags: government politics)
• AVC: Speaking My Mind
  Fred Wilson nails writes about his right to speak his mind on his own blog: "I am not an expert in everything I write about. But that is not going to stop me from speaking my mind about things other than venture capital and web startups. It might annoy or piss some people off. It could even hurt our business because those people are less likely to do business with me or our firm.

  But I've made the decision to put myself out there, speak my mind publicly, and say what I think. And I am going to continue to do it."

  What he said.

  (tags: blog blogs)

• Upcoming Plastic Bottle Ban Has Some Counties Moving
  "State officials are educating public and private solid waste management facilities to separate the banned items from the waste stream before those items arrive at a disposal facility. If necessary, enforcement of the disposal bans will be applied primarily at disposal facilities such as landfills and transfer stations by the N.C. Division of Waste Management. The law does allow for accidental or occasional disposal of small amounts of banned materials. However, starting a recycling program for the banned materials is the simplest and easiest way to ensure compliance."
  (tags: environment recycling northcarolina)

Behold what happens when you’re late getting home from work and you need to get to your soccer coaching gig. The girls and other coaches got a good laugh out of it.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

• Bloomberg: Stiglitz Says Banking Problems Are Now Bigger Than Pre-Lehman
  Oh, happy days: “'In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.'”

  h/t to Ed Cone for the link

  (tags: banks economics)

• Daily Mail: A million march to US Capitol to protest against 'Obama the socialist'
  Daily Mail online article talks about the number of marchers in Washington over the weekend. It's always entertaining to see the debate about the count of protesters in DC. The Park Service used to get beat up on it every time (remember the Million Man March?) and so they stopped doing estimates at all. Whether it was tens of thousands or a million, it was still a lot. If you watch the video at the bottom of the page you'll see a woman carrying a real classy poster: "Bury Obamacare with Kennedy". Way to elevate the debate there.
  (tags: healthcare government)

• Life in Forsyth: BUDGE, v.intr. To alter a position or attitude.
  (tags: ping.fm)

The new Winston-Salem Journal with the smaller format on top of the old, larger Journal.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

• Google Reader
  (tags: ping.fm)
• People of Walmart: a collection of all the creatures that grace us with their presence at Walmart, America's favorite store.
  (tags: ping.fm)