Insurers covering Mazda’s losses wanted to be sure the company wouldn’t resell any cars or parts
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Ah, insurance, how capitalism loves thee! If there were still any question about your magnificent inefficiency and beautifully pointless waste, this ought to put it to rest forever. Thank you, oh brave and stalwart middle-man, thank you!
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Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.
Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation’s Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.
Yes, it’s come to that.
“God is the only one we can turn to at this point,” said Twyman, 59. “Our leaders don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring.”
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Clinton is airing this advertisement in Indiana, bemoaning the closure of a defense contractor Magnequench’s manufacturing plant in Valparaiso (she is also echoing this line in her stump speeches). Looking at the camera, she tells us she’s upset that the 200 jobs that were sent to China, and that “now America’s defense relies on Chinese spare parts.” And then comes the kicker: She tells viewers that “George Bush could have stopped it, but he didn’t.”
Clinton is certainly right that it is a tragedy that 200 American jobs were killed in a corporate deal that also exported sensitive military technology to China. But she forgets to mention that it wasn’t George Bush who was in the key position to stop it - it was Bill Clinton.
Back in 1995, a Chinese consortium, which included two Chinese state-owned companies, made a bid to take over Magnequench. Because the company makes key parts for smart bombs, the takeover had to be approved by the Clinton administration’s Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States. Despite the national security and economic problems with selling off such critical manufacturing capacity to the Chinese - and despite the knowledge that such a deal would likely end in a domestic mass layoff - the Clinton administration approved the deal. This same deal - not surprisingly - paved the way for those 200 Indiana jobs and that sensitive military technology to be shipped to China.
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Hans Reiser took the stand during his murder trial and insisted he didn’t kill his estranged wife when she dropped off their children at his Oakland hills home.
But a jury found otherwise on Monday. At the end of a six-month trial in Oakland, it convicted the computer programmer of first-degree murder in the death of Nina Reiser after concluding that her slaying in 2006 was deliberate and premeditated even though her body was never found.
Y’know what the pivotal evidence in the trial was?
Hans’ diaries. Seems he was really into journaling.
