| Gotta love the bump -- to a better grade of service
They worked the system. To unlock the secrets of free or discounted upgrades for planes, hotel rooms, rental cars and cruise cabins, we went to industry experts and frequent travelers. Here are their tips. AIRLINE UPGRADES • Use the upgrade certificates airlines send you for being a frequent flier, or ask friends holding transferable coupons with looming expiration dates if you can take them off their hands. • Though airlines most frequently award their elite passengers upgrades, it never hurts to be the first in line at the gate counter and inquire about a bump in class. (Ask the gate representative, not the check-in agent, who does not control domestic first-class seating assignments.) Alternately, don't be the first to board; hang back in case economy seats are needed and there is extra space in first class -- you just might be offered that elite seat.
Chris Matthews: GOP Candidates Want to Kill Bugs Bunny
Bush shot an endangered bird back in 1994, Matthews played the Bugs Bunny card: “So do Republican voters really believe that using a big gun to kill small varmints really makes someone more qualified to be President of the United States? It all reminds me of Bugs Bunny and good old Elmer Fudd." For viewers who might not get the reference, Matthews showed a clip of Elmer Fudd pointing his gun at Bugs: “Now I got you! You're a dead wabbit!" Matthews then turned to Newsweek's Howard Fineman: “Howard, getting back to Huckabee, he told a reporter that he loved to bag squirrels because he fried 'em up and ate 'em with biscuits and a Coca-Cola. What have we come to! What's with the hardware and the gunplay here?" Fineman cautiously replied, “Uh, limited regional appeal, I would say, on the biscuits.
Market latest: Australia
A US election year should also bring downward pressure. OPEC countries recently called an extraordinary meeting in Vienna to debate targets and decided against lifting supply levels, citing the 10 per cent fall in oil prices. However, they also resisted cutting supplies. A global recession is not in the interest of OPEC countries so they are conducting a fine balancing act to maintain equilibrium. Rain to ease food prices A second positive is recent strong rains throughout Australia. This may rein in soaring food prices. However, this is likely to be short-lived. Grain inventories in the US have hit an all-time low as farmers divert food to bio-fuel production. Almost a third of this year's US grain crop is expected to be used for fuel and the price of grain is now tied to the price of oil – which as we noted may take a short-term breather.
Off the beaten path in Beijing: where the rock stars, artists and ...
If you're planning a trip to Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympics, but you fear you may tire of Olympic fever and flag-waving throngs, don't despair. Beijing has rich offerings when it comes to art, music, groovy boutiques and quiet temples. Most of the capital city's guided tours are about awe and acquisition. Visitors are stunned into submission by the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square, then quickly shuttled to buying sprees at the Pearl Market or Silk Street. The humbling grandeur of those imperial masterpieces is offset by the giddy empowerment of buying quality knockoffs of brands like Gucci, Marc Jacobs and Tiffany for a fraction of the usual cost. Few can resist the temptation. It is usually followed by a belly-busting Peking duck feast. But this kind of Beijing experience is not for everybody, and there are a wealth of unique, low-cost alternatives.
Shared condos losing lustre
Timeshare is not quite the investment that Patricia Uhler had hoped it would be. While companies like Wyndham Worldwide Corp., Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Marriott International Inc. are doing great business around the world selling timeshare, Uhler has not been so fortunate. Finding that she has less time and money for vacations than she expected, and with combined maintenance fees climbing to nearly $1,200 a year, Uhler has sought to sell two weeks of timeshare that she had hoped would be a nice investment in prime resort real estate. .
Born of GOP’s ‘Southern Strategy’
For most of the past four decades, however, national Republicans enjoyed the electoral benefits of their Southern, evangelized base without paying much of a political price. Notice, for example, how well the "Southern strategy" - innovated by Barry Goldwater, adopted by Richard Nixon, perfected by Ronald Reagan and inherited by George W. Bush - worked despite the fact that Republicans didn't nominate a Southern presidential or vice presidential candidate until 2000. (The president's father was a transplanted Yankee.) A party can take its base voters for granted only for so long before there must be an accounting, and that accountability moment seems to have arrived in the past month in the form of Mike Huckabee. Mr. Huckabee is the political phenom of the 2008 cycle.
LIVE from the CNN Rental Car Center!
I've been told that CNN has the best political team on television. (That honor used to go to the Clintons.) So tonight I'm watching CNN. Wolf Blitzer is working the big board, crunching the numbers. Anderson Cooper, meanwhile, is consulting the panel of experts (David Gergen, Jeff Toobin and Gloria Borger, among them) for analysis. The experts sit side-by-side behind laptops, along tables that look more like counters. My snarky friend Jeremy says they look like cashiers at Chipotle. That's a cheap shot. It's obvious that the arrangement is modeled after an airport rental car center. It's a clean look and it's handily hierarchical: The A-team (as in Avis team) includes Gergen, Toobin and Borger. The B-team (as in Budget) tonight includes Paul Begala, Bill Bennett and Carl Bernstein. This is a pretty strong B-team.
These Loans Were Made for Walking: The End of the Subprime Crisis
Paul and Minneapolis alone will spend on this, they could rebuild that bridge that collapsed last summer…and then some. The saddest thing is that nobody has mentioned the only thing that will provide a long term cure…heavy regulation of the banking and real estate industries. Any other alleged solution will only make the problem worse. Banking deregulation caused the savings and loan debacle of the Bush 41 administration. The solution to that was ever increasing bank deregulation, thereby creating the current "crisis" that is far worse than the savings and loan debacle. The next crisis 10 years from now will be even worse than this one unless industry is re-regulated. .
Lemurs' Evolutionary History May Shed Light On Our Own
They also resolved the relationships among species within the remaining four evolutionary lineages, which includes a diverse cast of characters: the sifakas, named for the hissing "shee-fak" sound they make; the sportive lemurs, which are strictly nocturnal; the mouse lemurs, the smallest of all living primates; and the many so-called "true lemurs," including the blue-eyed black lemur (one of only three blue-eyed primates in the world) and the ringtailed lemur, which is often found in zoos. "By throwing this much data at the problem, we have absolutely confirmed, beyond any statistical doubt, that the spectacular array of lemurs all descended from a single ancestral species," said Yoder, noting that lemurs account for about 20 percent of primate species and live on less than one percent of the earth’s surface.
Obama and Progressive Change
Barack Obama's Plan: As a candidate for the United States Senate in 2002, Obama put his political career on the line to oppose going to war in Iraq, and warned of “an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs, and undetermined consequences." Obama has been a consistent, principled and vocal opponent of the war in Iraq. In 2003 and 2004, he spoke out against the war on the campaign trail; In 2005, he called for a phased withdrawal of our troops; In 2006, he called for a timetable to remove our troops, a political solution within Iraq, and aggressive diplomacy with all of Iraq's neighbors; In January 2007, he introduced legislation in the Senate to remove all of our combat troops from Iraq by March 2008. In September 2007, he laid out a detailed plan for how he will end the war as president.
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