Under the headline Poor real estate decisions, not bad coffee, hurt Starbucks, the IHT analyzes the recent decline in fortunes of the ubiquitous coffee retailer.

Though the flagging economy and soaring gas prices are responsible for at least some of Starbucks's woes, interviews with commercial real estate brokers nationwide who work with the chain suggest another aspect of the story. These people say that the company was so determined to meet its growth promises to Wall Street that it relaxed its standards for selecting new store locations.

In some cases, brokers say, Starbucks misjudged the risks of putting stores close to each other, leading to the decline in same-store sales that the company started reporting for the first time in its history this year.

Or maybe the world didn't really need eight Starbucks within one block of Grand Central Station, who knows?

Happy Independence Day, everyone. Today is the last Fourth that will be blighted by George Bush in the White House; and while the country may be crumbling all around us, the passage of another day that brings us closer to the end of this disastrous reign is itself worth celebrating.

But meanwhile, where are we in this imperfect union of ours? There's a war going on, obviously, one we were lied into by traitors who will probably go unpunished. Our constitutional rights, already a tenuous proposition if you happen to be black, or poor, or gay, or something other than Christian, are being further eroded by a criminal executive and its cowering occasional adversaries in the legislative branch.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

On the other hand, coming out of this nightmare, Democrats have done something many people never expected to see in their, our lifetimes: nominated a black man for the Presidency, a freshman Senator whose soaring rhetoric has propelled a new generation into politics. His chief rival? A woman. His likely opponent in November? A man who was tortured and who has a brown adopted child. There's even something new in America, a vibrant Progressive Movement that has written change on its banners, challenging the Tories of either party.

Rumors are flying hot and heavy that Barack Obama will make his acceptance speech on the last night of the Democratic convention not at the Pepsi Center, which can seat 21,000, but at Invesco Field (formerly "Mile High Stadium).

That's the home of the Denver Broncos, and seats 75,000!

What better way to end a convention? Of course, that begs the question -- from where do they drop the balloons? On the other hand, it may be for the best after the balloon disaster at the 2004 convention in Boston (I'll never forget watching CNN and hearing somebody off-camera yelling, "where's the f***ing balloons!").

Per the Advance, flag-burning amendment afficionado and rumored Iraq War waffler Michael McMahon has raised half a million clams in his pursuit of the seat of retiring Congressman Vito 'Family Values' Fossella.

The McMahon campaign touted the deluge of donor dollars as proof that the term-limited councilman has the support to win the congressional seat, although the campaign won't officially file papers with the Federal Election Commission until the July 15 deadline.

McMahon's opponent for the Democratic nomination, Brooklyn lawyer Stephen Harrison, admitted that his campaign has raised far less -- about $150,000, according to his best estimate.[...]

"If dollars could vote, he wins," said Harrison. "But they don't. It's a classic grassroots campaign against a machine campaign, and we'll see what happens."

It'll be interesting to see what McMahon's money looks like come July 15th. My guess would be that his filing will include a large number of $5,000 PAC checks and $2,300 maxed-out bigshot donors. Meanwhile, of course, Harrison's rather more meager filing speaks to that perennial challenge to New York Progressives, who often enough treat raising money as an afterthought. Some of us, and I'm not saying Steve is one of them, really seem to think elections are won merely by the blazing rightness of our ideas. Over here in the real world, that's unfortunately not the way it works.

It is to weep.

I guess this is a sign that the right wing is abandoning all hope of attracting the Jewish vote. Their racism has alienated the black and Hispanic vote they have claimed to be wooing. Now, by showing their willingness to exploit anti-Semitic stereotypes, Fox News shows the right wing has given up on Jewish voters.

So recently the New York Times reported that Fox News is seeing its ratings plunge. Of course this is fact based on commonly used data.

Fox News, always unwilling to accept unpleasant facts, decided to vilify the reporters who wrote the story. Cause you see, Fox News can't face the fact that their audience is shrinking fast, so they have to blame someone else. But what is really revealing is how they choose to do it. They altered photos of the journalists who reported on the Fox News ratings plunge. In particular, they altered the image of Jacques Steinberg into a grotesque caricature of Jewish stereotypes. From Media Matters:

From Norm Siegel's website:

NORMAN TO HOST ANNUAL JULY 4th CELEBRATION IN CENTRAL PARK

NYS Senators Bill Perkins and Eric Adams, Reverend Billy, the Granny Peace Brigade and Grandmothers Against the War to join in public reading of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights at 12 Noon, Strawberry Fields, Central Park.

Come join Norman and friends for this annual July 4th celebration of the anniversary of US Independence and the birth of our civil rights and civil liberties. In addition to the actual text of these historic documents, Norman invites everyone to add their comments and observations to the mix. In years past, this has provided a spirited and memorable way to kick-off the July 4th festivities. Come join us and start your Fourth of July with Norman, Eric Adams, Bill Perkins, the incomparable Reverend Billy, New York’s famous peace-loving grannies and your New York neighbors.

If you had ventured, say, at New Year's, to entertain the possibility that in 2008, Eliot Spitzer would resign in disgrace after being caught in a hooker sting, that Joe Bruno would be retiring, and that Hillary Clinton would not be this year's Democratic nominee, you would have been dismissed as mildly eccentric even by blood relatives. But here we are, and now, you can add one more improbable occurrence to this year of the unexpected: Tom Golisano is going to spend literally millions of dollars to shake things up in this state by targeting incumbent legislators.

That's potentially an earthquake.

The New York Sun (a rightwing fishwrapper characterized by bad writing, a rightwing editorial slant they don't even the decency to try to hide, but one redeeming virtue, their stubborn opposition to Speaker Shelly Silver) today speculates that among Golisano's targets may be Silver himself.

Mr. Golisano, a three-time gubernatorial contender who is forming a PAC to spread his wealth to candidates across the state who pledge their support for his movement against Albany's establishment, is considering bankrolling an effort to topple Mr. Silver, the longest-serving Democratic speaker in state history.

The possibility that one of New York's wealthiest residents, a sharp-tongued, politically unpredictable businessman who has a history of saturating the state airwaves with his self-financed political ads, may target Mr. Silver has provoked some concern within the speaker's political operation, according to a knowledgeable source.

There's even a rumor that Golisano may be looking at Marty Connor's seat, where the incumbent is facing a spirited challenge from newcomer Daniel Squadron. Having had a conversation about upstate economic development with Squadron myself, I'd suggest it might be worthwhile for Golisano to have the same.

Glass houses, meet stones: republican Senator Ted Stevens, notorious for referring to the internet as 'a series of tubes' and for being so ostentatiously corrupt that he managed to attract the attention of even the rabidly politicized Bush Justice Department, came out swinging today, referring to Senator Charles Schumer as stupid.

Yes, of course there's video.

Stevens is being challenged by former Anchorage mayor Mark Begich. Show the man some love and help raise the tone in the Senate, here.

CQ Politics, the blog of the Congressional Quarterly, cites republican dysfunction and the larger environment, hostile as it is to the party of George Bush, in upgrading the NY-13 race from No Clear Favorite to Democrat Favored.

This big rating jump means there is still enough of a Republican base in New York City’s sole GOP-held House district to enable the party to bounce back if it can find a new candidate to rally around — but that the Democrats now look increasingly likely to take a seat that looked like a long shot when the campaign year began.

Already reeling from the political demise of one-time rising star Fossella, the GOP effort fell into chaos when Frank Powers — the former Wall Street executive who party officials had tapped to run in Fossella’s stead — died suddenly of a heart attack on June 22. Republican officials from the New York City boroughs of Staten Island, which makes up three-quarters of the district’s population, and Brooklyn, which makes up the rest, have thus far failed to agree on their next fill-in candidate.

I suspect that that's somewhat prematurely optimistic, because the GOP will agree on a candidate at some point. But there's probably never been a better year to free the district from its unnatural representation by the same people who twice nominated George Bush. Of course, the Democratic primary in that district now becomes even more important. And on that note, I'd merely mention that flag-burning amendments to the Constitution are wrong, really wrong, and more wrong.

So here we are at the tail end of the disastrous Bush era - 201 days and 14 hours left at this writing - and can start doing damage assessments. Take the economy. Our currency has lost half its value, our government debt has roughly doubled, we have lost millions of manufacturing jobs and replaced them with lower-paying jobs in the service sector, our infrastructure is crumbling, and most importantly, due to a burst asset bubble created by lax regulation in the housing industry that in turn produced a credit bubble, our economy is going to either stay stagnant or contract outright. As The New York Times points out today, this state of affairs is likely to persist until the Fall of 2009. In short, we are fucked.

You'll be hearing apologies for this from conservatives with all the frequency you heard them from Soviet-era apparatchiks, of course. One virtue of being an ideologue is that you're never wrong, no matter how crushing the weight of facts that might indicate otherwise.

So, as some parts of the country are in recession and others lurch into outright depression - Michigan, Ohio and Indiana along with most of the rust belt, for example - it's time to take a sobering look at what the medium-term future may hold for the City of New York.