Credit Card Rates Hit Highest Level in 9 Years

Finances

By Dow Jones Newswires-Wall Street Journal
Posted Aug. 23 at 6:22 a.m.


Interest rates continue to tumble for the U.S. Treasury, companies and home buyers alike. But for a large portion of 381 million U.S. credit-card accounts, borrowing rates have been moving only one way: up.

And average rates are likely to climb further soon. New credit-card rules that took effect Sunday limit banks’ ability to charge penalty fees. They come on top of rule changes earlier this year restricting issuers’ ability to adjust rates on the fly. Issuers responded by pushing card rates to their highest level in nine years.

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The Atlantic Magazine : With Friends Like These…

Atlantic Magazine Douchebaggery, So Called Liberal Media

BE SURE TO CHECK OUT THE LIBERAL COMMENTS

AS IF….

Breitbart Writer Kevin Pezzi's MySpace Harem

Andrew Breitbart, Right Wing Dirty Tricks

MMFA

August 05, 2010 2:31 pm ET

Simon Maloy

If you haven’t yet become acquainted with Kevin Pezzi, the racist doctor/sex “expert”/robot chef builder who now writes for Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, you’d be well served to click over to Media Matters‘ profile and explore the many bizarre and disturbing facets of Pezzi’s background. The man is quite clearly a huckster, and basically everything he does is aimed at selling copies of his e-books, which deal largely with sex. To that end, he’s apparently created at least six fake MySpace profiles of women — most of them featuring badly photoshopped stock images of models with large breasts — claiming to be enthralled with Dr. Pezzi and his sex books.

Let’s run them down in alphabetical order:

“Annie“: Claiming to be from New York, “Annie” devotes most of her bio to gushing about “‘Love & Lust in the ER’ by ER doc Kevin Pezzi.” She encourages people to visit Pezzi’s website and download the book: “If you don’t read it, I’ll assume that you are lazy or don’t like such stories — bad news for you, because I’m a nurse.”

If “Annie’s” face seems a little… off, that’s because it’s been crudely photoshopped onto a stock image of a model:

Massive Operation In Play To Game The Digg Site

Broadcatching

Oleoleolson
August 5, 2010

Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered

digg-logo-heart-lg1

A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.

“The more liberal stories that were buried the better chance conservative stories have to get to the front page. I’ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives.”
-phoenixtx (aka vrayz)

Digg.com is the powerhouse of social media websites. It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site. It reached one million users in 2007 and likely has more than tripled that by this point. Digg generates around 25 million page views per month, over one third of the page views of the NY Times. Front page stories regularly overwhelm and temporarily shut down websites in a process called the “Digg Effect.”

The concept behind the site is simple. Submitted webpages (news, videos, or images) can be voted up (digging) or down (burying) by each user, sort of a democracy in the internet model. If an article gets enough diggs, it leaves the upcoming section and reaches the front page where most users spend their time, and can generate thousands of page views.

This model also made it very susceptible to external gaming whereby users from certain groups attempt to push their viewpoint or articles to the front page to give them traction. This was evident with the daily spamming of the upcoming Political section with white supremacist material from the British National Party (articles which rarely reached the front page). The inverse of this effect is more devastating however. Bury brigades could effectively remove stories from the upcoming sections by collectively burying them.

One bury brigade in particular is a conservative group that has become so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours, regardless of subject material. Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group. When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page, so by doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in essence: censoring content). This group is known as the Digg “Patriots”.

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San Francisco remembers Jerry Garcia

Broadcatching

jaceypaul

ALLVOICES


All around the world, Jerry Garcia has been remembered as one of the most talented musicians.

“Days Between” is much more than just a title of a Grateful Dead song for the people of San Francisco. The days between August 1 and August 9 marked the memories of Jerry Garcia, the luminous guitarist of all time.

The famous musician and songwriter, Jerry Garcia is memorized by the people of San Francisco every year on these days, as Aug 1, 1942, marks his birthday and Aug 9, 1995, marks his death.

The iconic musician Jerry Garcia died of heart attack and left ineradicable impressions on the lives of many.

The year 2010 marks the 15th death anniversary of the legendary Jerry Garcia. His fans continue to honor Jerry Garcia in diverse ways. Whether by naming a park amphitheater after him or by naming an ice cream after him, his fans continue to pay tribute to Jerry Garcia.

The Washington Post Shocks/Scares D.C. With Real Reporting

National Security

Monday, July 19, 2010; 1:53 AM

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.


The investigation’s other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

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Inmates Say They Witnessed Man's Death When Jailers Restrained, Shocked Him Repeatedly

Wonderful World of Tasers

Marvin Booker just wanted to get his shoes.

But deputies at the new Denver jail told him to stop. When Booker, who was being processed on a charge of possession of drug paraphernalia, didn’t obey, he was held down, hit with electric shocks and then placed facedown in a holding cell, according to two inmates who watched it unfold.

Booker never got up. He was pronounced dead later that morning.

“I’ve never seen anything happen like that before in my life,” said John Yedo, 54, who was being processed on a charge of destruction of property and said he witnessed the scene. “What I saw is not what you’d expect to see in America.”

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The Runaway General

Broadcatching, McCrystal

ROLLING STONE

RS 1108/1109 /On newsstands Friday, June 25.

By Michael Hastings

Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House


By Michael Hastings
 ‘How’d I get screwed into going to this dinner?” demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

It’s a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He’s in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States.

Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany’s president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

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The Spill, The Scandal and the President

BP Oil Spill

June 24, 2010.

On May 27th, more than a month into the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, Barack Obama strode to the podium in the East Room of the White House. For weeks, the administration had been insisting that BP alone was to blame for the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf – and the ongoing failure to stop the massive leak. “They have the technical expertise to plug the hole,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had said only six days earlier. “It is their responsibility.” The president, Gibbs added, lacked the authority to play anything more than a supervisory role – a curious line of argument from an administration that has reserved the right to assassinate American citizens abroad and has nationalized much of the auto industry. “If BP is not accomplishing the task, can you just federalize it?” a reporter asked. “No,” Gibbs replied.

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TRANSCRIPT:: Dylan Ratigan is Mad as Hell and He's Not Going To Take It Anymore

Broadcatching

TRANSCRIPT: Monday July 12, 2010

Good monday afternoon to you. america today, we need jobs more than anything else. for the millions of americans already out of work, a bad situation continues to get worse. two million people have seen their unemployment benefits dry up as a result of a five-week impasse in washington.

That bill comes up for another vote this week, but that’s little comfort to all the people who have gone more than a month without any income. and those going through that are the poorest and the weakest in our country. meanwhile, 700,000 census workers about to join the unemployed when they’re no longer needed by the end of the summer. guess where there are jobs, wall street. the financial sector that led us into the worst recession since the great depression is hiring again.

They were the least affected industry through the entire final crisis. at the same time manufacturing jobs down 14%, construction down more than one-fifth, a whopping 22%. at what point will the american media, the american politicians and ultimately the american people get out of the denial of why there are no jobs in the country. connect the dots.

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