No real surprising news on the piso actually... but:
One thing that has me stumped is why the dollar is gaining while the pound and yen have weakened severely in the past few weeks. My belief had always been that a global financial crisis would cause the second and third tier currencies to collapse as the big currency players moved toward more historically stable first tier currencies. That obviously hasn't been the case: The financial bailout seems to be a boon for the dollar, but two of the other big currencies have lost ground big time. The Thai Baht is unbelievably holding steady against the dollar; that's just simply "WTF?" territory.
Looks like I've got some studying to do to figure out what's causing these counterintuitive ups and downs. If you've got a helpful link, stick it in the comments section.
5 comments:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=6099188&page=1
Just a journalist stating the obvious.
Hmm... A totally crap commentary by Michael Malone. It's 5 pages. The first 2 pages are mainly about how there has always been media bias throughout history. Of course there are only 2 actual-but-shitty examples of media bias that Malone considers noteworthy: The war in Lebanon 3 years ago, and Dan Rather's "font" error 4 years ago, both of which were examples of media bias with a "leftward lean".
Apparently Malone does not think noteworthy all of more substantial examples of media bias in recent history, such as when the media gave no scrutiny to the claims for taking us to war in Iraq given by the White House (Colin Powell and his mobile laboratories?), or how the media has given almost no coverage of the Constitutional abuses stemming from Guantanamo (Jose Padilla, Supreme Court Judgements, suspension of habeus corpus?), et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Unlike Dan Rather's believing that a bogus military health report from the 1960's was real when it was fake, those particular media failures I mentioned actually have led to real consequences: Namely the mess that the United States is in today. But the author doesn't mention those rather historically important and memorable examples of media bias. Why? Probably because those are examples of media bias with a "rightward lean". Barely one paragraph into the nitty gritty of this article, and it is already quite obvious that this guy is a douche. Either that, or he is engaging in the cunning use of media bias to illustrate media bias in an article about media bias. No: Probably just a douche.
So anyway, we finally get to Malone's laundry list of complaints he has against the press coverage of Barack Obama and Joe Biden when we reach page 3. Rather anticlimactic, I'm afraid: Lessee... We've got "entire years" missing in Obama's life apparently, but no explanation of what Malone is referring to. I assume this is about the time when Obama was studying at Columbia, since I've heard that mentioned before once or twice. Far right wackos are trying to say Obama was in a terrorist organization or something during those years. Malone apparently has never been to college, especially an ivy league college: If you want to graduate at the top of your class from Columbia, you don't go out on secret nightly terrorist operations... you stay in your room studying until 2 a.m. every day. But, if Malone is such a fine and dandy journalist, he could get off his ass and find out himself if it really puts a bee in his bonnet.
Then Malone demands that somebody interview (find, actually) the guy who sold Obama drugs several times (assuming Obama didn't just bum off his friends) on a street corner in Harlem in the early 1980s. What's the drug dealer going to say once you find him? That Obama used to go through $1,000 of coke per day for his entire time at Columbia? Yeah... there's a good information source for your journalistic credibility: A drug dealer with impossible-to-identify credentials, who can dish 25-year-old dirt of questionable and unprovable veracity on a Presidential Candidate. Is Malone retarded as well as a douche?
As for Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko, obviously Malone missed the 46,464 news rticles mentioning Ayers, and the 4,420 news articles mentioning Rezko that have been written so far... particularly those articles that covered Ayers and Rezko and concluded, "Gee. We've looked at all the interactions between Barack Obama and these people. Here is all the information we found out. As you can see, it's not that interesting or noteworthy." Perhaps other journalists haven't bothered to go back and look around for the 46,465th time because it would be a waste.
And as for why nobody has interviewed Ayers and Rezko, I'll bet that they don't want to be interviewed. After all, they are America's own Osama Bin Ladens and, well, the most-hated people in the country tend to be a little camera shy.
As for phony voter registrations, that has been debunked and debunked and debunked. Malone claims to be a journalist, but doesn't he watch the news? Aren't the 19,551 news articles that mention ACORN enough shut this guy up? If Malone wants to complain about voter-related news coverage, perhaps he should start complaining that the mainstream media isn't sufficiently covering all of the efforts to purge voter roles around the country less than 90 days before an election, breaking federal law? I'm guessing that he doesn't mention that because the media not covering that particular news item is yet another example of "rightward lean" bias. Again: Douche.
Malone claims that Senetaor Biden's "gaffes" are being covered up and ignored? Google news currently lists 4,627 news articles that contain both words "Biden" and "gaffe". For a journalist, Malone sure is a shitty fact checker. More likely, 4,627 articles on the subject just aren't enough to please this guy. Again: Douche.
Then we come to Joe the Plumber. Ah... karma is a bitch isn't it Malone? He probably doesn't remember Graeme Frost from a year ago. He was the 12-year-old boy who was asked by congressional Democrats to give a little talk on the radio about how CHIP medical assistance helped him and his family when he was near death. The Republican arm of the media didn't waste any time crawling up his little rectum to see what they could find... even posting this boy's home address online so that crazy people could stop by his house and ask the poor kid questions. Malone could probably have mentioned Terri Schiavo and her husband Michael, and his awful experience with the press as well, but well you know: Malone can't mention that "rightward lean". Douche.
Anyway, getting back to Joe The Plumber: He was one of the main subjects of one of the most-watched television broadcasts in years. Blame John McCain if you want to blame anybody for Joe getting all of that attention: McCain was either lacking the common sense to call up Joe and ask him if it was okay to turn him into a national catchphrase, or he did call, and Joe the Plumber was willing to be that catchphrase, and therefore (to quote Malone from the article) apparently was willing to be in "the big leagues" and if Joe "wants to suit up and take the field" he had "better be ready to play".
Anyway, to sum it up, those little assinine complaints from Michael Malone took up less than one page of his 5 page article. For the last 2 pages, Malone just waxes philosophical about media bias, newspaper editors, and then kind of peters out... sort of being out of things to say but still typing words. Four pages of filler surrounding one page of Malone's Republican whining points that the press (and their 46,000 articles) haven't written enough bad things about Barack Obama... passed off as an article on media bias.
All in all, a very good example of Republican doucebaggery trying to be passed off as un-biased commentary. Is the subject of media bias that Malone was pretending to write about real? Is there real media bias? Of course. But, the fact is that Malone didn't use a single common-sense example of media bias (like those I mentioned), and instead relied on Republican sophistry and patently bullshit accusations of "not enough media coverage" of the Democratic candidates' campaign and private lives in an attempt prove his point.
Regarding the original post: do you notice that with the Piso so high against the dollar that your dollars (after conversion to pisos) go much further OR has the inflation of goods in PI negated any gains in the exchange rate?
My income varies on how much work I do. Also recently, my work load has been curtailed by my company and made more difficult. Therefore, with my income fluctuating much more than the value of the piso, it's hard sometimes to notice.
thanks!
Post a Comment