The Frugal Life

The best Web sites to help you scrimp through the recession.

By Farhad Manjoo

In our not-so-distant time of plenty, the word frugal might have conjured images of hardscrabble folks who've deliberately divorced themselves from modern pursuits. The Amish live frugally; the rest of us may cut back when times get rough, but when the world takes off again, we'll be right there to grab our share. With a historic recession affecting virtually every industry, we are all Amish now, and frugality has become a necessity. In search of tips on austere living, a couple of months ago I stumbled upon Wise Bread, an entertaining two-year-old group blog and user forum whose slogan is "Living large on a small budget." From there, an entire frugal world opened up to me—Frugal Dad, Frugal Village, About.com's Frugal Living blog, and many personal journals documenting lives of cultivated asceticism.

These sites brim with advice ripe for the times: what to do when you suspect you'll soon be laid off, what to do after you've been laid off, and how to spend next to nothing and still have a classy Christmas. (For instance, it's within the bounds of good taste to buy someone a second-hand gift.) But frugality blogs offer more than just a few useful tips—many are on a mission to create a new American money culture, to make scrimping seem not just necessary but normal. "In a country where common sense left the financial world long ago, I felt a calling to remind people of some very basic principles," writes Jason White, whose onetime job in a credit-card call center inspires his work at Frugal Dad. "Spend less than you make; save money for a rainy day; live debt free. I know, I know, earth-shattering ideas here, huh?"

Consumer advice is nothing new online, but the most popular sites have traditionally focused on telling you how to buy stuff cheaply. Behold, for instance, Slickdeals.net, which is flooded with news of sales from around the Web. Sites espousing frugality also push deals, but they do so with advice to remain cautious. A deals site will tell you where to find a high-def TV; a frugality site asks you to consider cutting your cable subscription.

http://www.slate.com/id/2207305/

Cheney biographer: VP’s view of presidential power is ‘more radical’ than Nixon’s.»

By Satyam Khanna

On Sunday, Vice President Cheney made the astounding claim that if the President does anything during wartime to protect the country, it is legal — echoing Richard Nixon. Yesterday, Cheney biographer Barton Gellman told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow that Cheney's claim is actually "more radical" than Nixon's because Cheney said it while serving in office:

It's actually I think more radical than what Nixon said, because Nixon never enunciated that as policy during his administration and neither did his Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department. And this administration, they did. Cheney was asked, doesn't Congress have any say here? He said, Congress can pass statutes, but he said, we don't have to obey them — we don't need no stinkin' statutes.

Watch it:

Gellman also disputed Cheney's claim that members of Congress who were briefed on Bush's illegal surveillance program wholeheartedly endorsed it. "Now, I talked to four people who were in that meeting…and all of them dispute that that's the way it happened," he said.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/23/gellman-cheney-nixon/

Merry Christmas from Israel to Gaza

How to Prepare for a Layoff

Frugal Living

By Erin Huffstetler

Worried a layoff may be in your future? Here are things that you can do to prepare:

Get Organized

You can't assess what a layoff will do to your financial situation, if you don't know what your financial situation is; so, now's the time to find out:

• Organize Your Finances

Start an Emergency Fund

If you've been meaning to set aside three to six months living expenses, but still haven't gotten around to it, now's the time to play catch up. Open a money market account or a high-yield savings account, and get that emergency fund going post haste:

• How to Start an Emergency Fund

Cut Your Spending

Find ways to spend less on necessary purchases and delay all unnecessary purchases until you feel the layoff risk has passed:

• Easy Ways to Save on Household Expenses
• Simple Ways to Slash Your Grocery Bill
• How to Coupon Effectively
• Advanced Couponing Strategies
• Save Money on Haircuts

Create a Bare-Bones Budget

Make a list of your necessary expenses, and total them to determine how much money you really need to survive:

• How to Create a Bare-Bones Budget

http://frugalliving.about.com/od/moneymanagement/tp/How_to_Prepare_for_a_Layoff.htm

Merry Christmas from Turkey to Israel

Saudi court rejects plea to annul 8-year-old girl's marriage to 58-year-old man

A Saudi court has rejected a plea to divorce an eight-year-old girl married off by her father to a man who is 58, saying the case should wait until the girl reaches puberty.

The divorce plea was filed in August by the girl's divorced mother with a court at Unayzah, 220 kilometres (135 miles) north of Riyadh just after the marriage contract was signed by the father and the groom.

"She doesn't know yet that she has been married," the lawyer said then of the girl who was about to begin her fourth year at primary school.

Relatives who did not wish to be named told AFP that the marriage had not yet been consummated, and that the girl continued to live with her mother. They said that the father had set a verbal condition by which the marriage is not consummated for another 10 years, when the girl turns 18.

The father had agreed to marry off his daughter for an advance dowry of 30,000 riyals ($8,000), as he was apparently facing financial problems, they said.

The father was in court and he remained adamant in favour of the marriage, they added.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/3884696/Saudi-court-rejects-plea-to-annul-8-year-old-girls-marriage-to-58-year-old-man.html

We Owe Sarah Palin An Apology

by Matthew Filipowicz

As much as it pains me to admit it, we owe Sarah Palin an apology. And not only Sarah Palin, but, the entire state of Alaska.

It all stems from announcement last week that Sarah Palin's daughter's baby's father's mother had been arrested in Wasilla.

If you haven't been following along, or have misplaced your Palin scorecard, Sherry Johnston is the mother of Levi Johnston. Levi Johnston is the father of Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol's unborn baby.

So, when I heard that Johnson had been arrested at her home as part of an undercover narcotics investigation, I thought what I'm guessing 95% percent of those reading this thought. She was arrested for crystal meth. In fact, I bet she's running a meth lab in her house. All of my friends thought so. In fact, 23/6, Huffington's comedy site, even ran a poll about the likelihood of her house being a meth lab.

Little did we know how wrong we were. It turns out, she wasn't running a meth lab. In fact, it wasn't meth at all. The drug in question was the prescription pain killer Oxycontin.

And what led me to believe that Sherry Johnston was a toothless, drooling meth junkie/ dealer? Prejudice. My own prejudice towards small towns and the goobers that live in small towns.

Sarah Palin actually addressed this prejudice in an interview. Take a look.

Sarah Palin is right. It was wrong of me to automatically assume that it was crystal meth. Of course Alaskans can be addicted to other drugs! And they should be! I mean, what else is there to do in Wasilla other than drugs? And residents of Wasilla should be especially addicted to Oxycontin! I mean, it's known on the street as "Hillbilly Heroin". So, it's marketed right to them.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-filipowicz/we-owe-sarah-palin-an-apo_b_152709.html

Minnesota Supremes Shoot Down Crucial Coleman Lawsuit, Making A Franken Win Nearly Certain

By Eric Kleefeld

Norm Coleman just got a Christmas present from the Minnesota Supreme Court: A giant lump of coal.

In a unanimous decision handed down just now, the state Supremes denied Coleman any relief in a lawsuit he was waging to deal with allegations of double-counted absentee ballots, which his campaign says have given an illegitimate edge to Al Franken. The Coleman campaign was seeking to switch 25 selected precincts back to their Election Night totals, which would undo all of Franken's recount gains in those areas and put Coleman back in the lead.

The court, however, sided with the Franken camp's lawyers in saying that a question like this should be reserved for a post-recount election contest proceeding, as the proper forum to discover evidence -- and which also has a burden of proof that heavily favors the certified winner.

Simply put, Coleman is in very big trouble right now. With Al Franken leading by 47 votes, this lawsuit was Coleman's best shot at coming from behind. And it just failed, making a Franken win nearly a foregone conclusion when this recount finishes up in early January.

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/12/minnesota_supremes_shoot_down.php

Happy New Year from Pink Floyd

Why Al Franken should NOT be riding private planes

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

 

The tragic and suspicious death of Karl Rove's election thief in chief should send a clear message to Al Franken and other key liberals: don't be riding in any small private planes.

Death by air crash now seems to be the favored means of ridding the Rovian right of troublesome characters.

The most recent is Michael Connell, who died Friday night when his private plane crashed near his northern Ohio home. Connell was the information techology whiz kid who helped Rove steal the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, along with a few in between---possibly including the 2002 senatorial campaign in Minnesota that followed the death of Paul Wellstone.

Connell was an expert pilot whose plane crashed in clear weather. He held virtually all the secrets to how George W. Bush was illegally foisted on the American people---and the world---for eight horrifying years. By manipulating computerized results in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 Connell made history. By some accounts, he was about to tell the attorneys in the on-going King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit how he did it. He also approached expressed a willingness to appear under oath before Congress. But now he is dead.

Current cover stories include the possibility that his plane ran out of fuel. But its crash was accompanied by a very large fireball explosion that burned for more than ten minutes. A trooper on the scene immediately identified Connell, but newspaper accounts say his body was charred beyond recognition.

Connell told various sources that he was being threatened by Rove. He canceled at least two previous flights due to mechanical failure. A father of four, his decision to fly from a highly restricted airport in Maryland remains a mystery. Connell reportedly did contract work for security-industrial agencies, like the CIA. Connell also openly acknowledged that he was the first IT contractor to move his servers behind the firewall of the US House of Representatves where he oversaw the websites of the House Judiciary Committee, Intelligence Committee, Ways and Means Committee, and Administrative Committee, arguably the four most powerful committees in the House.

He now joins such critical players as Paul Wellstone, Mel Carnahan, Ron Brown, Mickey Leland, John Tower, John F. Kennedy, Jr., and many more critical public figures who have died in small plane crashes at questionable moments.

In all cases there are non-nefarious potential explanations for their deaths. Conspiracy theories can, indeed, be frivolous.

But so can their out-of-hand dismissal by coincidence theorists.

 

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2008/3322

The Bush Legacy...

The Grinch that Stole America

Welcome to the season of celebrating the United States' true religion: Materialism

By CATHERINE O'SULLIVAN

First of all, happy Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Solstice, Dying of the Corn Festival or whatever it is you celebrate.

Also, a particularly happy time for people gutsy enough not to celebrate anything. It has long been accepted by anthropologists, herpetologists, phlebotomists and other experts that the reason nearly all cultures have some kind of festival this time of year is that, in general, it's terribly depressing. Intervention with lights, gifts and big meals helps some individuals put off suicide for another year.

However, that all is not working so well these days, particularly for those who celebrate Christmas. We can't afford all of the shit our kids want. Many of us can't even afford the mortgage payment. Alas, gone are the days when little kids were happy with an orange and a couple of walnuts stuffed in their stockings--oh, those wonderful smidgeons of vitamin C and digestible protein during this cold, barren season. Make no mistake: Kids would suck on those trifles until they'd worn a hole through the peel. It was the one chance they'd have during the entire year to avert scurvy.

Of course, these days, if kids don't get the newest version of Guitar Hero, they're going to hate you forever. This is not their fault, but our own. The official religion of some countries may be Islam, Hindu, goat-worshipping or whatever, but ours is Materialism, and it may be more dangerous than any religion in the world. People scratch their heads wondering how a load of boneheaded shoppers actually could have trampled a guy to death at Wal-Mart. It's a no-brainer, really--the same principle as pilgrims getting crushed in the rush to Mecca. The only thing those zealous tramplers wanted was to touch the hem of The Messiah's garment. And that day, it was marked down to $8.99.

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Opinion/Content?oid=oid:119998

Old Fat Naked Women for Peace

What Happened to Kwanzaa?

by Joshua Neuman

 

Long before the giant mall usurped the American urban landscape, Hallmark was cheapening our age-old religious traditions and turning nuanced theological messages into platitudinous feel-goodisms to be bought and sold in the marketplace. Out of a singular, sinister force, Hallmark conspired to transform a suffering servant into a jolly present-giver and a fundamentalist victory into a celebration of assimilation. Hallmark was late capitalism's ubiquitous signifier before Starbucks was in operation in Seattle and Disney was in operation in Times Square. "Hallmark moments" elicited mild forms of queasiness, a mix of nostalgia and sentimentality under the guise of the universal.

Perhaps, then, it's a good thing that Kwanzaa has all but vanished from the local greeting card store. But what led to its disappearance? And where did it go? As recently as 1993, Kwanzaa was America's fastest-growing holiday. I recall a chilly December evening of that year when on the campus of Brown University my girlfriend and I took a study break and paid a visit to the campus' Third World Center. We used to go there a lot--mostly when we detected the distinct aroma of free ethnic food. We waded through a throng of students of color to the buffet table, gathered some fried plantains and okra on a tiny paper plate and found some room in the corner to take in the scene. We knew that Kwanzaa honored African heritage, and soon learned that it meant "first fruits" in Swahili. The place was packed and the music was booming--A Tribe Called Quest (of course)--while red, black and green-clad bodies bobbed their heads in sync. That year Ben & Jerry's began making sweet potato ice cream, J.C.Penny offered Kwanzaa products in stores nationwide, local news stations wished their viewers a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Happy Kwanzaa, and Hallmark printed 12 different varieties of Kwanzaa-themed cards.

Fifteen years later, I publish an irreverent Jewish culture magazine called Heeb and immediate circles supply me with more anecdotal information about lower back pain than they do about Kwanzaa observance, but I still can't help but notice not noticing Kwanzaa at the greeting cards store. Certainly people are still celebrating the holiday, but clearly corporate America no longer seeks to capitalize on Kwanzaa the way it once did. At a time when a black man can be elected President, the powers-that-be seem to be saying African-Americans are much more ready embrace the de facto American civic religion, Christianity.

Multiculturalism was supposed to highlight our differences in radical ways, not transform them into different flavors of ice cream. But I worry about how Kwanzaa's disappearance will get understood. In a few years (if not already), Americans will probably remember it the way they remember parachute pants or the Rubik's cube--the irony, that removing Kwanzaa from the aisles of greeting card stores might end up forever enshrining it as a pop cultural relic. Meanwhile, the meanings of Christmas and Hanukkah continue to be contested and questioned as they reside in the marketplace, Whether it's gone because nobody knew how to sell it, or because nobody wanted to buy it, Kwanzaa is now nowhere to be found.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joshua-neuman/what-happened-to-kwanzaa_b_153184.html

 

 

No Reason for the Season

The joy of celebrating a godless Christmas.

By Torie Bosch

Bemoaning the bastardization of the Christmas season is becoming a holiday tradition. In newspaper letters to the editor and in the blogosphere, purists offer chiding reminders that Jesus is "the reason for the season" and that Christmas is supposed to be his birthday party—not a random excuse for shopping and very special sitcom episodes. Adding his voice to the choir this year is megachurch leader and inauguration invocationer Rick Warren, who pleaded in his new book The Purpose of Christmas, "If you'll slow down for a few minutes … and pause to consider the purpose of Christmas, you can receive and enjoy the best Christmas gift you'll ever be given." For Christians, I have no doubt that that's some sound advice. But I don't want to slow down and consider the purpose of Christmas. What I love about the holidays are what Warren and his ilk surely consider distractions: the trees, the lights, Santa, and Muppet specials.

For me, Christmas has always been a secular occasion. I grew up in an unaffiliated household. My mother is Catholic, though she didn't practice for most of my childhood. My father was raised in a devoutly Jewish home, but he always adored Christmas. My grandmother tells, half-fondly and half-sadly, of when he was 6 and asked whether he could become Christian so that Santa Claus would pay him a visit. He eventually stopped practicing Judaism, but his love of Christmas never went away.

When I was a girl, my father would spend hours decorating the tree, the house, and the yard in a manner a bit like that of Christmas Vacation—lots of swearing, lots of tangled lights, and (eventually) lots of genuine pride in the accomplishment. Each year, one of my brothers or I would accompany him to pick out a new nutcracker to add to our family's collection; the jester, Drosselmeyer, and Civil War soldiers might not have been part of the Nativity story, but they meant Christmas to me. We never celebrated Hanukkah, because it never appealed to him: Christmas was the only winter holiday worth the effort, as far as he was concerned. My father passed away when I was young, but my family's holidays remained much the same. We focused on the togetherness and celebrating my father's memory on his favorite holiday. The miracle of Jesus' birth was far from our minds.

http://www.slate.com/id/2207374/

Nice Puppy

Survey: Americans prefer Web over papers to read news

The Internet has surpassed newspapers as the main source for national and international news for Americans, according to a new survey.

Television, however, remains the preferred medium for Americans, according to the survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Seventy percent of the 1,489 people surveyed by Pew said television is their primary source for national and international news.

Forty percent said they get most of their news from the Internet, up from 24 percent in September 2007, and more than the 35 percent who cited newspapers as their main news source.

Only 59 percent of people younger than 30 years old prefer television, Pew said, down from 68 percent in the September 2007 survey.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Survey_Americans_prefer_to_read_news_1224.html

Mandate for Israel

 

By Ted Belman

Over three years ago I came across a new demographic study by AIDRG which argues that for the foreseeable future Jews would outnumber Arabs in Israel, Judea and Samaria by a ratio of 2:1. This fact gave rise to the suggestion that Israel should favour a Jewish One-State Plan. I became an immediate convert and wrote Israel, From the Mediterranean to the Jordan. I made the acquaintance of Mike Wise, Yoram Ettinger and Bennett Zimmerman who were the driving forces behind it.

Over the years the study has been strengthened and the plans for the Jewish state developed. HaTikva was formed with this goal in mind.

Of late I have argued that Gaza shouldn't be conquered until the peace process was aborted and Israel took matters into its own hands. Now is the time.

Mandate for Israel

Israel must now affirm in its entirety the Mandate for Palestine (Land of Israel) as approved unanimously by the League of Nations on July 24, 1922 and by the United States on December 3, 1924. The Mandate for Palestine established the area west of the Jordan River as the national home of the Jewish people. The Mandate guaranteed civil and religious rights to all inhabitants of the land and political rights were granted to preserve the national home of the Jewish people in perpetuity. Israel can now extend its sovereignty and democracy to the entire Judea and Samaria region.

Highlights of the MANDATE for ISRAEL

* Israel affirms the Mandate for Palestine.
* Israel's democracy and law will be extended to the entire Judea and Samaria region.
* Full civil and religious rights will be granted to all inhabitants of Israel.
* All residents of Judea and Samaria will become permanent residents and elect local municipalities.
* All Israeli political parties and elected and appointed officials must affirm Israel as the national home of the Jewish people.
* Citizenship standards will be created including a pledge of allegiance to Israel as the national home of the Jewish people.
* Electoral reform will divide Israel into districts to insure local representation.

Hanukkah

We must rededicate ourselves to national survival, freedom and independence. For too long have we depended on the West to protect us and to advance the peace process, to no avail. We must strike out the Hellenists among us, the doubters and the weak of heart. We must become masters in our own house and advance a peace plan, made in Israel.

The Mandate for Israel is simply a renaming of the Mandate for Palestine and takes its legitimacy from it.

http://www.israpundit.com/2008/?p=6723#more-6723

I'm a war criminal and proud of it