Politics

More Whackos and Weird Stuff

Kind of Odd
So, if the head of a major criminal investigation closes the case and then ends up very mysteriously dead, wouldn't that ring alarm bells for you?

A city police chief who led an investigation into charges that Britain cooperated with secret CIA flights to transport terrorism suspects without formal proceedings has been found dead, his deputy said Tuesday.


Manchester Chief Constable Michael Todd, 50, was found dead in Snowdonia, about 240 miles northwest of London, Deputy Chief Constable Dave Whatton said. He had been missing since going out for a walk Monday during his day off.

Whatton said the body, which was found Tuesday afternoon, had not yet been formally identified but he believed it was Todd.

...

The association gave him the task of looking into accusations that Britain allowed the CIA to use the country's airports to fly terrorism suspects to other countries without any extradition hearings, a clandestine procedure known as "extraordinary rendition."

Todd's investigation concluded last June that there was no evidence to back the claim. Last month, however, Britain admitted one of its remote outposts in the Indian Ocean had twice been used by the United States as a refueling stop for the secret transfer of two terrorism suspects.

The guy was either inept, corrupt or incredibly gullible, as everyone and their brother knew we'd used British airspace for these torture flights.

So I wonder what happened here. A guy wanders off, ends up dead in some godforsaken backwater far from home... was he being offed because he didn't do a good enough coverup? By some angry victim of torture upset about the whitewash? To shut him up?

Or did he honestly wander off to die?

Sources: Raw Story

Planes, Trains and.. Err, Just Planes Actually
So McCain has another lobbyist scandal brewing on the back burner.

European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. and Northop Grumman Corp. were awarded a $35 billion Pentagon contract last month to build new Air Force tankers, instead of Boeing Co., and the Seattle-based company is formally challenging the agreement.

Boeing's complaint asks the Government Accountability Office to make sure the EADS contract is fair. McCain pushed for EADS to get the contract, and his campaign employs three former EADS lobbyists, although there is no specific evidence of impropriety, according to ABC.

"Mr. Clean has a bunch of lobbyists that work for a company that won that contract," House Democratic Caucus chairman Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., told the network. "Some people claim the way the specs were written, it was all but certain that the company that his campaign lobbyists worked for couldn't but get that contract."

From everything I read, Boeing's claims about their plane being better are nonsense, and the better project really did win out here.

Still, that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with why McCain would get involved; from the Iseman thing, we know his relationships with lobbyists are very cozy indeed.

Source: Raw Story

Stifle that Free Speech!
So Congress isn't too keen on letting people discuss how the credit companies have ruined their lives.

What if you held a hearing, but the people who were most directly affected by the proposals were barred from speaking? That's what happened yesterday.

The Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions of the House Committee on Financial Services held hearings on credit cards. Congresswoman Maloney (D-NY) has sponsored a bill with 82 coauthors that would outlaw some of the worst credit card tricks and traps. The card issuers were there in full force--complete with an army of lobbyists to pack the audience. The professors--Katie Porter, Adam Levitin, Larry Ausubel and I--were there to try to give the other side.

Our panel was supposed to be the second panel. The first panel was four regular people who wanted to give first-hand information about their experiences with their credit cards. While the reps from Cap One, Chase and Bank of America went on for hours about their customer friendly policies and how much value they provided free to consumers, the people who had different stories were never allowed to utter a single word.

The people who had been invited to testify had flown in from around the country with their credit card bills in hand, only to learn that they couldn't talk unless they would sign a waiver that would permit the credit card companies to make public anything they wanted to tell about their financial records, their credit histories, their purchases, and so on. The Republicans and Democrats had worked out a deal "to be fair to the credit card lenders." These people couldn't say anything unless they were willing to let the credit card companies strip them naked in public.

So that's where it stood when Congressman Bachus (R-AL) roared into the hearing about three and a half hours after the hearing started. It seems that someone in the press had made some critical statement about the deal, and he was furious. He kept talking about how it wasn't fair that someone could say something and there wouldn't be any way for the credit card companies to say whether it was true or not. Fair is fair, he kept insisting.

Of course, as the article later notes, the credit card companies didn't have to provide any of THEIR data/dirty laundry to testify about their supposed 'facts'.

Funny how that double standard works.

Source: TPM Cafe

Oh, Dana...
Dana Peroxide on why she's not qualified to do her job. Direct quote:

Some of the terms I just don’t know, I haven’t grown up knowing. The type of missiles that are out there: patriots and scuds and cruise missiles and tomahawk missiles. And I think that men just by osmosis understand all of these things, and they’re things that I really have to work at — to know the difference between a carrier and a destroyer, and what it means when one of those is being launched to a certain area.

It isn't osmosis, Dana, it's having functional grey matter and being able to read.

Lots of us have to do it for our work. You should give it a try.

Source: Think Progress

Polling Data
So there've been some polls conducted of Iraqis on the eve of the fifth anniversary of our catastrophic invasion.

Geez. It's been that long? I remember being in class during the invasion. Now I feel old.

LONDON (AFP) - More than two-thirds of Iraqis believe US-led coalition forces should leave, according to a poll conducted for British television ahead of the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion.

The ORB/Channel 4 News survey suggested that 70 percent thought multinational forces should withdraw.

Yet some 40 percent of the 4,000 people surveyed said they wanted the United States to play a bigger role in rebuilding Iraq and 36 percent wanted more British involvement.

So they hate us, but like our money.

Good to know. But why so glum about the occupation?

A quarter of those surveyed said they had lost a family member to murder. In Baghdad, that figure rose to nearly half (45 percent).

Some 81 percent had suffered power cuts and 43 percent had experienced drinking water shortages. In the last month, more than a quarter (28 percent) had been short of food.

Oh, that's why.

Still, oddly, they're largely optimistic about the future, with 45% claiming to be satisfied with the pace of change.

I just can't fathom that kind of optimism.

Source: Raw Story

Bill Kristol, Are You Ever Right?
Jon Stewart as always has this guy pegged.

In his New York Times column today, Bill Kristol asserted that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) “was in fact in the pews” when pastor Jeremiah Wright blamed the “arrogance” of the “United States of White America” for much of the world’s suffering. As Marc Ambinder pointed out, this claim was false; Obama was on his way to campaign in Miami. Kristol has now printed a (misspelled) correction in the online version of his column:

"In this column, I cite a report that Sen. Obama had attended services at Trinity Church on July 22, 2007. The Obama camapaign [sic] has provided information showing that Sen. Obama did not attend Trinity that day. I regret the error."

This is the second time that Kristol has had to issue a correction to his NYT column since it began in early January.

The first correction was a misattributed quote; this is far worse, a complete fabrication based on no evidence whatsoever, which Keith Olbermann thinks he got from Newsmax, some right wing loony 'news' site.

The Times really needs to can him for this.

Source: Think Progress

Advertising Hook
So there's a Senatorial candidate, Steve Novick, who is playing up some slightly unusual things about himself in his advertising.

For one thing, he's very short (4'9"). For another, he's missing his left hand, and has a hook prosthesis.

So the man is selling a custom beer as a fundraising tool... "Left Hook Lager".

Seriously.

Source: Steve Novick for Senate (Left Hook Lager)

Trickery On Our Side
For a change, Harry Reid is using parliamentary tricks in our favor.

Long story short, he's arranged it such that the Republicans can't stop a vote on the no-telecom-immunity version of the already egregious warrant-free wiretap bill.

They'll have to filibuster the actual thing.

Or Reid can cave to them again, I guess. He's rather unreliable.

Source: Daily Kos

Wall Street
So Wall Street is more or less in full panic mode now, brought low by their own stupidity and greed.

Big surprise.

Pushed to the brink of collapse by the mortgage crisis, Bear Stearns Cos. agreed -- after prodding by the federal government -- to be sold to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. for the fire-sale price of $2 a share in stock, or about $236 million.

Bear Stearns had a stock-market value of about $3.5 billion as of Friday -- and was worth $20 billion in January 2007. But the crisis of confidence that swept the firm and fueled a customer exodus in recent days left Bear Stearns with a horrible choice: sell the firm -- at any price -- to a big bank willing to assume its trading obligations or file for bankruptcy.

"At the end of the day, what Bear Stearns was looking at was either taking $2 a share or going bust," said one person involved in the negotiations. "Those were the only options."

Of course, with a Republican in the White House, the taxpayers have to foot the bill.

To help facilitate the deal, the Federal Reserve is taking the extraordinary step of providing as much as $30 billion in financing for Bear Stearns's less-liquid assets, such as mortgage securities that the firm has been unable to sell, in what is believed to be the largest Fed advance on record to a single company. Fed officials wouldn't describe the exact financing terms or assets involved. But if those assets decline in value, the Fed would bear any loss, not J.P. Morgan.

Oh goodie! We're screwed! J.P. Morgan just got a 30 billion dollar check for imaginary mortgage properties!

Simultaneously with the announcement of Bear Stearns's sale, the Fed took the extraordinary measure of allowing securities firms to borrow from the central bank under terms normally reserved for regulated banks. People close to Bear Stearns were bitter about the move, saying that had the Fed acted earlier, the firm could potentially have survived by borrowing directly from the Fed and using its troubled securities as collateral.

The deal already is prompting howls of protest from Bear Stearns shareholders, since the New York company last week indicated that its book value was still close to its reported level of about $84 share at the end of the fiscal year. "Why is this better for shareholders of Bear Stearns than a Chapter 11 filing?" one Bear shareholder asked J.P. Morgan executives in a conference call last night.

A third of Bear-Stearns stock is held by its employees, who got royally shafted here. If they weren't in turn royally shafting the American, hell, Global public, I'd feel sorry for them.

Late yesterday, some Bear Stearns employees and shareholders were grumbling about the deal. If the feeling is widespread it could emerge as a potential obstacle to the completion of the deal because Bear Stearns employees own about a third of the company's shares.

"I've got to think we can get more in a liquidation, I'm not selling my shares, this price is dramatically less than the book value Alan Schwartz told us the company is worth," said a midlevel Bear Stearns executive. "The building is worth $8 a share."

Waaaah, we got caught in our own trap!

There is this little bit of hilarity; Bear Stearns has apparently long had a lazy overseer at the helm, who spends more time on card games than keeping his company afloat.

James Cayne, Bear Stearns's chairman, who had been participating in a bridge tournament when the crisis unfolded, returned to New York on Saturday and participated in the negotiations, said one person familiar with the discussions.

HAHAHAHAHA

Priceless.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Where Else Have I Heard of J.P. Morgan Lately?
Oh yeah, a whistleblower leaked documents detailing a scheme of theirs to help the ultra-rich evade insider trading laws!

A confidential memo obtained by Wikileaks shows that not only has the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission created an insider trading loophole big enough to drive a truck through, but that Wall Street is taking full advantage of it, establishing 'how-to' programs and even client service divisions to help well-heeled clients circumvent insider trading regulations.

Most of us think of insider trading as illegal. It allows those with inside knowledge to tilt the playing field, with the small investors invariably losing to the privileged few. Unfortunately for the small investor, the big boys get to play by different rules, and it has all been made legal, thanks to the SEC.

In 2000 the SEC promulgated Rule 10b5-1. The new Rule was designed to address the confusion caused by a series of court decisions that had left investors uncertain about what constitutes insider trading. Rule 10b5-1 was designed to "clarify" what constitutes illegal insider trading.

But top Wall Street houses were not to be deterred from advantaging their big clients at the expense of their small ones. Wall Street firms like JP Morgan found loopholes in Rule 10b5-1 that allowed them to continue trading on inside information "legally." Indeed, JP Morgan has gone so far as to set up an entire 'selling program' within its Securities division to help their clients profit from the loophole.

This is a scheme that only seems clever to douchebags who hate playing fair.

Here's how it works:

1. An insider client transfers all or a portion of their company stock into a JP Morgan Securities Inc. brokerage account.

2. The insider then develops, in conjunction with the 10b5-1 team, a 'phased, pre-planned sales program to be executed at either market or

specified prices'.

3. Depending on the information available to the insider (but not the public), the insider can decide whether to execute the sale or not.

See, they didn't say 'SELL', they said 'EXECUTE'.

That makes all the difference.

Riiight.

Source: Wikileaks

Some News You Can Use

Well, probably not.

Why Let the Courts Settle Anything?
So a couple who are suing a kid and his dad for negligence resulting in (supposedly) some pretty severe injuries are being harassed endlessly by the kid's supporters. The article makes it sound like a flash mob thing.

People in America love to hate lawsuits; they love to hate the rule of law period, actually. Look at the 24 torture porn obsession.

The basic story is this. The kid and his dad were out skiing. The dad let the kid go on ahead. He wasn't careful and struck another skiier. This is where the stories diverge. The kid and his dad claim that the other skiier was not hurt. The man hit says he was knocked down hard enough tear his rotator cuff and break his clavicle. He's suing for the medical costs, about 35,000 dollars.

There's no huge punitive damage attached, no millions of dollars for a ruined suit. This is a simple negligence case. Under Colorado law, where the injury was sustained, anyone can be held liable of any age for skiing accidents. My guess though is that they had to name the kid to get at the dad's deep pockets.

Now, assuming he actually was injured in this way, shouldn't the man have the right to compensation for his injuries? All he wants is the medical costs. Shouldn't a parent properly supervise their kid?

Still, the story is 'Kid gets sued by big evil man', and that's how it plays. Yeesh. Even this paper gets in on the act with their headline.

Source: Rocky Mountain News

Nifty Poster Department
I also need to get the movie attached to this. It'd probably be neat at Atomic Age.

Source: Random Blogger Thingummy

Free Music
Legal too.

Source: Internet Archive

Collapse of More Markets
The credit problems from the housing market is leading to a sharp downturn in commercial construction as well, which should put us nicely into a recession.

Thanks El Presidente!

Source: Calculated Risk

Merry Christmas, Retailers
Holiday season revenue is far below what the big chain stores had hoped. Rising costs of food and fuel are cited as reasons, but the worthless dollar can't help either.

You win again, El Presidente!

Source: Firedoglake

Saturday Evening News

Some of my Opera tabs have been open for a week. It's time to read the backlog and clear it out.

So Much for Being Liberators
Iraq under Saddam was more or less the best Arab country to live in, if you were a woman. You had rights, could go out in the street on your own, be a professional, own property, etc. You didn't have 'democracy', but what that really means, especially in modern Iraq, isn't so much a system of rights as murderous anarchy.

The big trend in women's rights in Iraq today? Their families burning them to death.

Great job on the liberation there, El Presidente.

Source: The Guardian

Mortgaging the Future, No Pun Intended
A large recap sort of article on the Bush administration and the price we'll all be paying for the next half-century or so on their financial mismanagement.

Basically they indict him for wasting a 2 trillion dollar surplus, the War in Iraq, the soaring cost of oil due to insecurity in oil producing regions, the glut of worthless spending to his cronies, and the like. It's nothing really new, but a nice summary.

Source: Vanity Fair

Sixty Minutes of Toes
60 Minutes may be doing a big expose on former Governor Spiegelman, who basically got put in prison for being a Democrat. Supposedly he was bribed, but the same guy who did the bribery also claimed to bribe a bunch of republicans, who were never investigated or indicted, and then was given a very lenient sentence for testifying against the Governor, then released early under very suspicious circumstances, and so forth, while the judge has obstructed his appeals and put endless delays in front of his attorneys.

All in all, a very fishy situation.

Source: Tuscaloosa News Blog

Bush Labor Regulation Board Rules Unions Aren't Business-Related
See, businesses can now screen out any emails that relate to unions from company work servers. They can of course continue to browbeat their own employees with anti-union propaganda, like they have at every single job I've ever held.

Sigh.

Source: Raw Story

That's it for now. I need some sleep.

Business News of the Day

Like the Wall Street Journal, only not for complete tools.

Ruh-Roh, Tax-Fraud
No, I don't know why Scooby Doo is saying that. I just had it pop up in my head.

In the actual story, it seems Fed-Ex has been cheating on its taxes for the drivers it uses in its Ground service, while simultaneously cheating said drivers out of benefits they're supposed to get. The IRS has taken a dim view of this, and fined them 319 million dollars for 2002 alone, in back taxes and penalties. They're facing similar audits for 2004, 2005 and 2006; why not 2003, I have no idea.

They could be looking at a billion dollars in IRS penalties alone by the time this is over. The Teamsters have been trying to unionize the Ground drivers and see this as a major victory.

Source: Reuters

Circuit Shi... Nah, That Pun is Too Easy
So the executives who ran Circuit City into the ground and made it lose 75% of its share price in a year have gotten big fat 'retention' bonuses in time for Christmas. This is the end result of their disastrous plan to fire all their senior employees and hire cheaper salespeople to replace them.

Great job, guys. Not that the ruling class is ever held accountable for anything.

Source: The American Prospect

The Business of, Err, Supercars
Just a comparison of the former Knight Rider KITT and the new one from oh-so-serious journalists at Popular Mechanics. Kind of boring and stupid, except to note that the new KITT lacks grappling hooks, flamethrowers or oil slicks.

No grappling hook!? An outrage good sirs.

Also, the car is being designed by the idiot who did the Batmobile in Batman and Robin.

Designer Harald Belker, who has created the Batmobile for Batman and Robin and a next-gen space shuttle for Armageddon, came onboard to give the new KITT. a unique look. "The goal was to make it look more aggressive without being hokey or garish," Belker says. "Maintaining as much of the original beauty of the Shelby as possible was important—and not just because of the Ford connection. It had to be simple yet believable as a superhero."

Yeah, like he knows anything about avoiding garish designs.

Source: Popular Mechanics

Monday Clear Out the Tabs News

Opera, Opera, sing to me... sing of news...

Lost World, Giant Rat
Another expedition into Indonesia's virtually unexplored jungle, another series of bizarre and adorable animals.

In particular, in the picture slideshow, note the pygmy possum and the unnamed, but GIANT rat. It's the size of a cat. A pretty big cat. And completely docile, it seems.

Source: AOL News

Sovereignty is Another 'Quaint' Concept
The U.S. Border Patrol has been firing tear gas and pepper spray into Mexico in response to stone throwing mobs, or just because they feel like it.

Innocent people live in perfectly legal housing in the area. The border people just don't care. They're shelling a sovereign foreign power, and they just. don't. care.

Technically folks, that's a declaration of war on Mexico.

Source: Raw Story

Insert Witty Human Interest Title
A reporter/news anchor with vitiligo, the disease that kills off pigmentation cells in the skin but is otherwise harmless, is telling his story and writing a book. The contrast between the man with and without his work makeup is astonishing, I have to say. I can't even blend a halloween mask in decently.

Nice of him to go public. I can see how a disease like that would be humiliating, and in his line of work it's a real economic issue too. I hope they find out how the disease works, if for no other reason than that it'd be useful science. Kind of curious, an autoimmune, or seemingly so, disease that has such a mild effect.

Source: USA Today

Curses
So they've been making an effort to actually sift through all the archaeologically useful trash the Romans left in their wake in England, of late. In particular, it seems, the Romans had a custom of inscribing a person's name in lead and throwing it in the hot springs at Bath to curse them.

A recent rare find shows that someone did something like that to an Emperor by stamping his face, via a coin printed with his likeness, into some lead.

The Romans were kind of odd.

Source: The Guardian

Maybe This Means the Daily Show Will Return Soon
So various deals are being cut with the WGA to get late night shows back on the air without strikebreaking or scabs. Letterman in particular, as he owns his show, rather than CBS, seems ready to tell his parent network to shove it and agree to the new terms to get back on the air full steam. Leno and Conan are having to settle for skeleton crews.

Still, the networks are obviously starting to lose their bargaining strength.

Source: Firedoglake

Historical Irony Department
While the U.S. considers requiring an internal passport to fly from one American city to another, Eastern Europe moves into the travel paper free EU zone.

It's like bizarro-land when your former communist states are acting so much freer and more open than America, but there you go.

Source: Raw Story

Human Strain of the Endless War Against Eastasia
A story in the Army Times about the toll new tactics in particular are taking on already exhausted units in Iraq, and how one 'rebelled' by following mental health advice and medicating themselves out of a murderous frenzy.

The article is noteworthy to my mind for three things. One: The military continues to ignore its own mental health professionals, dealing with post-trauamtic stress as cowardice. Two: a unit that had lost, in rapid succession, something like a quarter of its men to attacks and suicide, is still expected to serve in active duty. Three: the insurgents in Iraq have already adapted to our new heavier personnel vehicles by using massive under-the-road bombs (500 lbs of explosives) that flip the vehicles on their backs like turtles, where they burn with everyone trapped inside.

Fourth-generational war, folks. There's no way known to win one. Welcome to the 21st century, where your billion dollar bombers and heavy armor don't mean jack.

Source: The Army Times

News News Who's Got the News

Around the world and almost up to date.

Department of Lenient Sentencing
An English creationist on vacation stabbed a Scotsman who believed in evolution rather than the bible after getting drunk. For some inexplicable reason he was only convicted of manslaughter, and then judge gave him a light sentence.

It's being billed as 'Creationist stabs Evolutionist'. As if being a rational human being, dealing with the world using facts and logic, makes you a special sub-class.

Geez.

Source: The Australian


No More Farm Tilapia From the Grocery For Me
It turns out China produces 70% of the world's aquaculture, and they apply the same, ahem, lofty standards to their fish safety as they do their toys.

In other words, loaded with poison and heavy metal.

Oh well. It's better to pay a little more than end up with a toxin-fried brain.

Source: The New York Times

Which leads us nicely into..

Department of Monstrous Evil
It seems that twenty years ago in England, a tanker truck poured a water treatment chemical into the wrong tank at a small town's treatment plant. Instead of going into a reservoir to purify water, the highly caustic aluminum substance went right into the tap water. 30,000 people were exposed. Immediate symptoms included, and I swear I am not making this up, skin peeling off, hair bleaching, ulceration of the mouth and lips sealing shut. Residents were told the water, filled with caustic crap, was safe, and that the bad taste could be diluted with a little orange juice.

The result, concludes the hitherto unpublished police account, was "a massive and instant contamination of the water supply."

Worse was to follow. For days, the water authority insisted the water was safe.

Officials took nearly a week to identify the cause of the poisoned water and ten more to reveal it in a tiny advertisement in the local paper.

It wasn't just aluminum, however, and the incompetence of the government compounded itself with further stupidity.

The water was, indeed, deadly. It contained not only aluminium sulphate but other noxious substances, too. As the acidic liquid travelled from the plant into people's homes, it corroded the copper pipes and their soldered joints, made of zinc and lead.

"We were drinking a cocktail of metals and god knows what else," adds Mr Cross angrily.

"We were also advised to boil the water.

"This was even more dangerous advice because it concentrates the contaminants.

"They kept flushing the pipes out for months after the incident.

"This will have stirred up debris in the bends and only have lengthened the amount of time the water was coming through the taps with all sorts of metals in it."

Flash forward to today. Cancer rates are now terribly high, neurological problems abound, and the facts are just coming to light.

Why the coverup? Why the deception when it would only cause further harm?

Because the government, then run by the Conservatives (the Brit equivalent of our own Republican party) was looking to sell off the city water company. Privatization strikes again.

We have also been handed an explosive letter which reveals how officialdom set out to downplay the Camelford disaster and any wrong-doing by the water authority, which was about to be privatised by the Conservative government of the day.

The letter from a water official to Michael Howard, then Minister of State for Water and Planning, states that a police investigation into the poisoning incident was viewed as "very distracting".

It goes on to say that any subsequent prosecution of South West Water would also "be totally unhelpful to privatisation . . . and render the whole of the water industry unattractive to the City".

Stories like these can make a person long to believe in hell. There's no punishment on earth to fit a crime like that.

Source: The Daily Mail

FUD Alert

If only stupidity came with obvious warning signs like rabies.

From the Department of Whoring for Blockbuster

Well, this astounded even me. The single most biased, least informative article I've ever seen on a technology issue. Ever.

And I've read RIAA shills rave about mp3s for a long, long time.

Still, this one takes the cake. Basically, an analyst at some investment firm notes that the Post Office is miffed about hand-sorted envelopes. That led the guy to rate Netflix's stock down, since their current envelope design often gets jammed in the machines and has to be hand sorted.

This in turn led a 'journalist' named Joanne L. Kaufman to write an anti-Netflix screed claiming that they're doomed, dooomed to lose to Blockbuster in the dvd rental wars because the Post Office might charge them more for shipping. Someone out there must not have been asleep at the switch because a Netflix spokesman did get to speak in the article, and notes that a: they've already changed their envelopes about five times since the company started and b: they'd be happy to do it again if it was necessary.

Despite this, err, making the whole thing a non-story, she then appends a paragraph right out of the Blockbuster media kit about how much more convenient Blockbuster is than Netflix:

Mr. Wible said in an interview that Blockbuster was edging in on Netflix: “They’ve got their store content, delivery by mail and downloaded delivery.”

Blockbuster, which has 3.1 million online subscribers and 60 million customers over all, is “offering more convenient access to media than Netflix,” Mr. Wible said. “Netflix either has to spend more on marketing or lower pricing to increase growth,” he added. “So they have these rising costs — including postage increases.”

You know what's missing from this discussion about convenience and trends vis a vis Blockbuster and Netflix?

A discussion perhaps of how well the two companies are actually DOING?

Or what about Netflix's Instant Viewer service, which requires no postage and is so convenient you never leave your couch? Take that, driving to the store.

Let's see what that sort of actual, informative journalism would look like:

According to web analytics firm Compete, by the end of October, Netflix was attracting four times as many unique visitors a month as Blockbuster. Since January of 2005 Netflix web traffic has steadily climbed, while Blockbuster's has dropped off.

Netflix's instant watch feature alone has attracted 450,000 users in the month of November, while Blockbuster struggles to get its direct-download service from Movielink off the ground. Adding to Blockbuster's troubles, Apple is expected to launch a movie rental service via iTunes any day now.

So, err, yeah. Blockbuster sure is winning that war you've got going in your head, Ms. Kaufman. Riiight.

Sources: The Washington Post
Switched.com

(I suppose for absolute full disclosure I should note that I am a Netflix customer, and have in the past been a Blockbuster customer as well. Though I stopped going to Blockbuster when they stopped catering to my needs in any way, instead choosing to fill their stores with ten thousand copies of the latest action movies and romance 'comedies', it wasn't a particularly bitter divorce. My sister on the other hand got forty dollars worth of false late fees stolen from her, twice, so hey, I guess that's a bias too.

My personal impression of the Netflix Instant Viewer feature is that it's whizzy but not really for me. Still, it's there and it works, once you get past the setup aches and pains, so that's something. Perfectly watchable if not nearly DVD quality. I saw the entirety of Jinki: Extend that way and it didn't make my eyes bleed.)