Black Tea Monday's Satan Sandwich News from WXYZ

Sunday night, Gotta Laff over at Political Carnival called yesterday Black Tea Monday in anticipation of the the stock market tanking yet again. Today proved her right: Going DOWn: Dow closes at -632. That's the big picture view. I'll let WXYZ show how it looked here in metro Detroit, beginning with their coverage of President Obama's address.




President Obama address the downgrade of the United States from AAA to AA+.

Before the President addressed the country, WXYZ began its coverage of how people reacted. Here are the clips, arranged from the top to the bottom of the income scale.

Good news on the Woodward Light Rail line

The aftermath of the Satan Sandwich is still going on, but it's not the only thing happening. Here's some good news from WXYZ.




The city of Detroit is hoping the M1 rail project will spur development in the city.

Detroit City Council President Pugh makes a cameo in this story from the Detroit Free Press as well.

Detroit City Council President Charles Pugh expressed concern that Mayor Dave Bing's administration has been heavy-handed with wealthy private investors and civic and philanthropic groups that have pledged $100 million in seed money for the Woodward project.

"My concern is that they're going to walk away because they don't feel like they're being heard," Pugh said after the meeting. "I want to make sure that doesn't happen."

Pugh said Bing and the region's elected officials need to meet to sort out the rail plans.

That's what the representative of the Obama Adminstration said as well.

Metro Detroit leaders need to settle differences over funding and managing regional transit, the Obama administration's transit chief told a gathering of civic and business leaders Monday.

Acknowledging the region's chronic inability to cooperate on public transportation, Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff sounded an optimistic tone, saying other cities have overcome similar obstacles to building regional transit.

Rogoff said President Barack Obama is committed to helping Detroit reinvent itself, in part through the $550-million Woodward Light Rail line between downtown and 8 Mile, envisioned as the first leg of a regional transit system.

It looks like that might actually be happening, as the municipalities in my neck of the woods, the suburbs along Woodward in southeast Oakland County, are interested in extending the Woodward Light Rail Line all the way up to downtown Birmingham. The Detroit Free Press reports.

Southern Oakland County communities are looking for a game changer to spur redevelopment.

And they are looking to Detroit.

The idea: expand the Motor City's planned light rail line north to encourage redevelopment along Woodward into the suburbs. The move, they say, could create better transit for the 120,000 residents of cities from Ferndale to Birmingham and generate wider regional support for modernized rail and bus transit to boost metro Detroit's economy.

The group, under the auspices of Royal Oak-based economic and community development group Woodward Avenue Action Association, is preparing to apply for a federal grant of perhaps $2.5 million for a study of expanded transit options in six Oakland cities: Ferndale, Royal Oak, Huntington Woods, Pleasant Ridge, Berkley and Birmingham.

I think this is a great idea, not only as an advocate of public transportation in general, but as a potential user. If this extention goes through and I am still living in one of these six cities, which I plan on doing until I retire, I'll be able to walk to the route and catch a train that could take me anywhere along Woodward I'm likely to want to go. YAY!

Even better, this project might finally start the integration of the local bus transit systems, which badly need coordination. That might lead to better coordination between Detroit and its suburbs, particularly those in Oakland County. The conflict among local governments has been an ongoing stumbling block for solving the region's sustainable development needs, as shown by this paragraph.

The region's political leaders have yet to agree on how to manage a regional transit network that could involve merging the Detroit Department of Transportation and suburban SMART bus systems. Nor have they determined how to pay to build and operate a system that would almost certainly require a regional tax subsidy. Most major U.S. metropolitan areas levy such a tax.

One of the worst offenders has been Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson. It looks like he's getting on board with this idea as well.

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson said he would support expanded transit if voters are willing to pay to subsidize the system through a regional tax.

"My question all along has been: How much is it going to cost, and who's going to pay for it?" Patterson said. "If it comes, it will come with the will of the people."

In this conflict between sustainability and austerity, it looks like the will of the people in Detroit and its near Oakland County suburbs is starting to come down on the side of sustainability. I'll be leading the cheering for this welcome development.

WOOD-TV reacts to the Satan Sandwich from Grand Rapids

WXYZ has had its turn; now it's time for WOOD-TV to weigh in.



Rick Albin explains the recent Stock Market chaos.

Rick's take on things didn't impress the commenters on YouTube.

jamesarongray:

yeah right everyone is soley concerned about europe lol nice spin guys.?

Me:

Exactly. It isn't only the progressives who think the debt ceiling deal is a Satan Sandwich, it's also the markets and the ratings agencies. No one really likes it.

Too bad, as this was otherwise a good report.

Let's see how they fared with the S&P downgrade.



Rep. Huizenga on the Credit Rating Downgrade

The anchor isn't spinning this as a result of foreign influences, but Huizenga sure is. He's trying to direct the attention as far away from the Satan Sandwich as he can. He'd better; he voted for it.

As for the commenters, they aren't impressed with either side. See for yourself; there are 46 comments! You can thank localtvusa.com, mirrored at YouTubes' blog for that.

So, what does WOOD-TV say it means for the average citizen?

More local reaction to Friday's fallout from the Satan Sandwich

WXYZ on the stock market's jitters and the downgrading of U.S. debt.






U.S. loses AAA credit rating

My wife listened to the guest and thought he was an idiot. No, he's just a shill.

At least there was a silver lining in all this--lower gas prices.



Gas prices falling

Enjoy your Satan Sandwich, everyone!

Weekly Roundup for July 31st through August 6th, 2011

This past week was probably the second busiest week for this blog so far. It surpassed last week in all categories, as I posted 16 entries, a record, readers left ten comments, and the blog received 1006 page views, only the second time that has happened. In contrast, the previous week saw 12 entries, five comments, and 783 page views. This week is off to a good start already, as two people have already left comments. You all keep reading and commenting, and I'll keep posting.




Sunday was the last day of NaBloPoMo's July Swim theme, but the only real "Swim" post that day was Weekly Roundup for July 24th through 30th, 2011 in which I recapped all of the previous week's Swim posts. It turned out that the big theme of the rest of the week wasn't the August NaBloPoMo theme, Fiction, but a continuing breaking news story, the Debt Ceiling Hostage Crisis, the resolution of which became the Satan Sandwich.

Keith Olbermann is mad as Hell and won't take it anymore

Countdown with Keith Olbermann 08-01-2011 5 - Special Comment - Our Broken System

Silly Sustainability Saturday: Just Links edition

No commentary tonight, just links.

From Think Progress Green.

Donald Trump Opposes Offshore Wind Farm, Says It Will Ruin View From His Golf Course

BBC’s ‘Top Gear’ Ran Down Electric Car To Push Right-Wing Agenda

#KeystoneXL #Astroturf: Tar Sands Supporters Now Polluting Twitter

I've seen this before. From Gawker: Most of Newt Gingrich’s Twitter Followers Are Fake

Fox And Friends: Spongebob Squarepants Is ‘Pushing A Global Warming Agenda’




Chesapeake Charlie, The Fracking Beagle

From Grist.

Barbie Dream House has solar panels, low-flow toilets, four stories, giraffe

Michele Bachmann seriously believes in a lightbulb conspiracy

Let them eat dandelions

Happy reading!

Fiction vs. Fact for the Tea Party Patriots

I'm going to take advantage of this month's NaBloPoMo theme to talk a little smack about the Tea Party Patriots, the closest analog in the Tea Party Movement to Coffee Party USA. However, I won't be alone. Take it away Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones!

The Washington media was buzzing Wednesday after the leaders of the Tea Party Patriots came to town and announced that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) deserved a primary challenge, along with any other Republican who voted to raise the debt ceiling. Mark Meckler, a national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, told the Daily Beast that Boehner's deficit plan was "an embarrassment." At a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, Meckler declared Boehner's numbers "fake" and "phantom."

It was an interesting choice of words, since they might also describe the number of tea partiers Meckler and his co-coordinator, Jenny Beth Martin, claim to represent. In the news coverage, Tea Party Patriots has been consistently identified has having at least 3,500 local chapters, making it one of the largest tea party organizations in the country. But many of those chapters are, to use Meckler's term, phantom, which raises the question of whether the GOP House leadership should really be paying quite so much attention to the noise coming from the tea party leaders working the media circuit right now.

That would have been good advice, considering that listening to it resulted in a stock market crash and S&P downgrading the U.S. credit rating.

Last fall, the Washington Post’s Amy Gardner tried to verify the TPP’s numbers. She attempted to run down every one of its local chapters. Out of the 2,300 chapters TPP then claimed to have, Gardner could only identify 1,400; of those, she was only able to make contact with 647. Most had fewer than 50 members, and some consisted of a single person. That's a fraction of the 15 million people TPP's leaders often claim to represent when they're on the Hill demanding that Republicans refuse to increase the debt ceiling. Which raises the question of why, exactly, Republicans are taking them so seriously.

About the most generous hard number one could use for the membership of the Tea Party Patriots would be the 831,887 accounts who "like" their page on Facebook. Even that would be overly generous, as those accounts could include both legitimate fan pages of other organizations and fan pages of public figures that are separate from the public figures' personal pages, as well as users' sockpuppets they create to be their own neighbors on Farmville. Even taken at face value, that number would overstate their support, as a lot of those people are "slacktivists" who are perfectly happy to read, like, and share the posts on Facebook, but don't contribute any money or even show up at rallies. A better source of the organization's strength would be the number of people on their email list. Good luck getting that out of them short of inducing them to brag about it. Mind you, with this group, that might be easier than one might think.

There are other reasons to question the wisdom of Republicans taking economic advice from national leaders of the Tea Party Patriots and other top tea partiers in the news this week. Consider the fact that before riding the tea party movement to national fame, Meckler was a high-ranking distributor for Herbalife, a company considered by many consumer groups and regulatory agencies to be a pyramid scheme. After that, he got into "affiliate marketing," an industry responsible for all of those "tiny belly" ads haunting the Internet that the FTC says are a scam. His colleague, Jenny Beth Martin, also doesn't have a great track financial record. In 2007, she and husband lost their house and ended up owing the IRS more than $500,000 in back taxes.

I posted this paragraph in a comment to Fiscally Irresponsible at Hysterical Raisins, introducing it with "the financial rot extends down to the grass roots" and concluding it with "As I wrote, rotten down to the grass roots." At the time, I hadn't read the article at the last link in the paragraph. I should have; things are worse than I thought!

Now S&P thinks it's a Satan Sandwich

Earlier today, I abstracted the last three Satan Sandwich entries and posted the result as It's been a wild couple of days on the_recession on LiveJournal. It looks like I spoke too soon when I wrote that headline.

Reuters: United States loses AAA credit rating from S&P
By Walter Brandimarte
NEW YORK | Fri Aug 5, 2011 9:53pm EDT

The United States lost its top-notch AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's on Friday in an unprecedented reversal of fortune for the world's largest economy.

S&P cut the long-term U.S. credit rating by one notch to AA-plus on concerns about the government's budget deficits and rising debt burden. The move is likely to raise borrowing costs eventually for the American government, companies and consumers.

"The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics," S&P said in a statement.

The decision follows a fierce political battle in Congress over cutting spending and raising taxes to reduce the government's debt burden and allow its statutory borrowing limit to be raised.

The odd thing about this downgrade is that the markets weren't calling for it.

WXYZ has local reaction to yesterday's and today's stock plunge

The financial markets think it's a Satan Sandwich, too gave the national and global perspective. Now for how it looked from metro Detroit.

First, the lowlights of yesterday's stock action.



Stock market tumble

Then, how metro Detroiters, well, mostly the well off folks in Bloomfield Hills, reacted to the loss of value in their investments, particularly their IRAs.



Main Street reacts to stock market tumble

Despite all the bad news, GM had some good news to report.



General Motors is reporting good earnings for the 2nd quarter.

That was yesterday. Now for today.