Month: July 2011

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!!

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Well, after a lull, the past two weeks have been pretty active, with 7 banks closed.

It still looks better than last year, but it ain’t good by a long shot.

Here are this week’s, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

  1. One Georgia Bank, Atlanta, GA
  2. High Trust Bank, Stockbridge, GA
  3. First Peoples Bank, Port St. Lucie FL
  4. Summit Bank, Prescott, AZ

Full FDIC list

And here is the credit union closing:

  1. Vensure Federal Credit Union, Mesa, AZ

Full NCUA list

So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

Two More Heads Roll at Newscorp

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Rebckah Brooks and Les Hinton are the last to to exit:

Two key lieutenants in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire resigned Friday as a widening scandal involving illegal phone hacking by Murdoch’s British newspaper journalists continued to engulf his company.

Leslie “Les” Hinton, head of Dow Jones & Co., the division of Murdoch’s News Corp. that owns the Wall Street Journal, resigned late in the day, providing a bookend to the morning resignation of Rebekah Brooks, the executive in charge of the company’s British newspaper unit.

Hinton, who had been in Murdoch’s employ for more than 50 years, and Brooks are key figures in the still-unfolding scandal. Hinton oversaw News Corp.’s British newspapers when one of its papers, the News of the World, began to pry into the phone accounts of hundreds of British celebrities, politicians and ordinary citizens. Brooks was editor of the News of the World at the time and succeeded Hinton as chief of the British unit, News International.

Murdoch, and his family are out at Newscorp, they just don’t know it yet.

Basically what is going on is, to paraphrase Norman Schwarzkopf, is that, “First we’re going to cut it off, and then we’re going to kill it.”

We are seeing the systematic removal their support structure, and they will be removed from the running of the media conglomerate.

Yiddish It’s Not for Blithering Idiots…

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So not a Yid!

It is pronounced “Hoot” (same vowel sound as book) “Spah”.

It’s not pronounced chute-spa!

I don’t expect her to get the guttural “h”, she is, after all a gentile, a Minnesotan, and a Lutheran,* so she has at best limited experience in that consonant, but seriously, don’t speak Yiddish unless you understand Yiddish.

I’d call her a schmuck, but a schmuck has a head.

*Specifically, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), which is arguably the most antisemitic and anti-Catholic Lutheran sect in the united states.

Jobless Thursday on Friday

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Well, initial claims for unemployment fell to 405,000, but it’s still above 400,000, well above where we need to have it to see a meaningful job growth (generally about 375K is where you start seeing job growth).

The 4-week moving average, as well as emergency claims fell, though the regular continuing claims rose.

The problem here is three things:

  1. Jobs
  2. Jobs
  3. Jobs

But unfortunately the people who are supposed to be fixing this are determined to spend their time making it worse by cutting the deficit in the near term.

Not a Good Day for Murdoch

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A Bit of Fry and Laurie have Murdoch pegged

First, he and his son try to blow off a summons to testify before Parliament, only to back down when threatened with jail time:

A threat of imprisonment by parliament forced Rupert Murdoch and his son James to perform a volte face and agree to give evidence next week to a Commons committee investigating why News International executives provided false information to MPs.

Hours after the parliamentary authorities delivered a summons by hand to the two Murdochs, News International announced that father and son would accept an invitation to appear before the Commons culture select committee next Tuesday.

Additionally, the FBI has initiated an investigation of potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act as possibly hacking the phones of 911 victim’s families.

It couldn’t be happening to a more deserving group of people.

Oh, Right, There Were Elections Last Night

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And the real Democrats won the primaries in the recall election against the ‘Phant’s false candidates:

Six fake Democratic candidates put up by the Republican Party to buy time for Republican state senators subject to recalls accomplished that job Tuesday, but none of them did the unexpected and knocked off a real Democrat.

Candidates backed by the Democratic Party won all six Senate primary elections, all but one of them by substantial amounts. They’ll all go on to face the Republican incumbents on Aug. 9, in an attempt by Democrats to regain control of the state Senate and put the brakes on Gov. Scott Walker’s agenda.

The full up recall vote should be interesting.

Also, Janice Hahn defeated a teabagger in the special election for the special election in California’s 36th Congressional District:

In a hard-fought special congressional election marked by sharp divisions in ideology and even sharper personal attacks, Democrat Janice Hahn defeated underdog Republican Craig Huey on Tuesday.

Unofficial election night returns showed Hahn won 54.6% to 45.4%.

Hahn opened with an early lead and held on to it throughout the night. Before even half the ballots were tallied, congratulatory messages began pouring into Hahn’s election night party at a San Pedro waterfront restaurant, and one of the would-be successors to her Los Angeles City Council seat declared himself a candidate.

Turnout was just more than 23% but still higher than in the May 17 primary, when less than 13.8% of voters cast ballots to put Hahn and Huey in first and second place, respectively, in a 16-candidate field.

Democrats hold an 18-point registration edge in California’s largely coastal 36th Congressional District, based in the South Bay. Jane Harman, a Venice Democrat, gave up the seat in February to run a Washington think tank.

I would note here that though Hahn won, it was a pretty piss poor showing in this district. 

I think it might have something to do with the fact that Americans are sick and tired of the idea of electing the “scion of a political family”. 

George W. Bush might have something to do with that.

Murdoch Drops BSkyB Bid

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With almost every member in Parliament, of all the parties, chomping at the bit to pass a law to ban his bid to take over the UK’s biggest satellite network, he has announced that he will withdraw the bid:

Rupert Murdoch withdrew his bid for broadcaster BSkyB on Wednesday, as outrage over alleged crimes at his newspapers galvanized a rare united front in parliament against a man long used to being courted by Britain’s political elite.

The Australian-born billionaire’s U.S.-based News Corp, thwarted in a key move to expand its media empire in television, said it would keep its 39 percent of the highly profitable pay-TV network, but left investors guessing over whether it might try again to buy up the rest, or even sell up.

The withdrawal removes the most pressing political conflict the company faced. But a police probe and new public inquiries into the scandal and into media regulation as a whole may keep an unflattering spotlight on it and weaken the influence the 80-year-old media magnate has enjoyed in Britain for decades.

I think that this is a tactical move.  He’s holding onto his 30% stake in BSkyB, so if everything is back to business as usual in 9 months, I expect him to go for another bite at the apple.

I’m kind of hoping that  things won’t be back to “business as usual” in 9 months.

Bernanke is Scared

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He just explicitly left the door open for another round of quantitative easing, or some similarly extreme measure:

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, gave a subdued account of the economy’s health Wednesday and said that the Fed was prepared to expand its economic aid campaign once again, if necessary, though such a step was not imminent.

Less than a month has passed since Mr. Bernanke said at a press conference that the central bank intended to stand back and take the measure of the nation’s sluggish recovery. Wednesday’s remarks amounted to acknowledgment that so far, the news has been almost uniformly bad.

“I think we have to keep all the options on the table,” Mr. Bernanke said in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee. “We don’t know where the economy is going to go.”

This is about as close as you will ever hear a central banker get to saying that, “This scares the sh%$ out of me.”

But of Course, It’s Florida…

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Attourneys in the Florida Attorney General’s office were forced to resign with no notice or any opportunity to communicate what they had found:

A lead foreclosure fraud investigator for the state said she and a colleague were forced to resign from the Florida attorney general’s office, unexpectedly ending their nearly yearlong pursuit to hold law firms and banks accountable.

Former Assistant Attorney General Theresa Edwards and colleague June Clarkson had been investigating the state’s so-called “foreclosure mills,” uncovering evidence of legal malpractice that also implicated banks and loan serv­icers.

Despite positive performance evaluations, Edwards said the two were told during a meeting with their supervisor in late May to give up their jobs voluntarily or be let go. Edwards said no reason was given for the move.

“It all happened very abruptly,” said Edwards, who had worked in the attorney general’s office for about three years.

The foreclosure investigations were launched under former Attorney General Bill McCollum, but Edwards said she sensed changes were coming under Gov. Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“I think they wanted to put people in there that were more in line with their thinking,” Edwards said.

Bondi’s press secretary said Tuesday that foreclosure investigations are still open and are being personally led or supervised by Division Director Richard Lawson.

Yeah sure. Rick Scott is determined to get to the bottom of rich lawyers cheating ordinary people.

The Stupidest F%$#ing Guy on the Planet*

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It’s Leon Panetta, who has decided to repeat the lies of Bush and His Evil Minions™:

The joke got a round of appreciative laughs, but his comments Monday about al-Qaeda and the Iraq war raised eyebrows.

“The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked,” he told troops at Camp Victory, the largest U.S. military outpost in Baghdad. “And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings — got killed because of al-Qaeda. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that.”

His statement echoed comments made by Bush and his administration, which tried to tie then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. But it put Panetta at odds with Obama, the 9/11 Commission and other independent experts, who have said that al-Qaeda lacked a presence in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Pressed by reporters to elaborate, Panetta said: “I wasn’t saying, you know, the invasion — or going into the issues or the justification of that. It was more the fact that we really had to deal with al-Qaeda here; they developed a presence here and that tied in.” His aides then intervened and shooed the press corps away.

This mother f%$#er is secretary of Defense? He was head of the CIA? And he still thinks that Saddam Hussein was behind 911?

Un-dirtyword-believable!

*Yes, he takes the title from this guy, the reigning champion.

OK, So I’ve Been Watching Keith, and Rachel and Ed…

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And they all covered the revelation that Michelle Bachmann’s husband, psychologist Marcus Bachmann, has been taking Medicaid money, and then, in violation of regulations, has been performing “repairative therapy,” better known as pray away the gay.

I understand how this might get coverage, it is after all, an interesting juxtaposition of the husband of an anti-Medicaid Congresswoman, and his use of unapproved, and actively harmful, therapy driven by nothing but an ignorant and fundamentalist reading of the bible.

That’s not the part that surprised me. 

The part that surprised me was all of them made a comment to the effect of, “He seems to know an awful lot about gay sex.”

I’ve heard the tapes of him, and he does seem to “mince” a bit, but it seems to me that the “nudge, nudge, wink, wink,” from the hosts bit is a bit much.

Or maybe they have heard whispers that I haven’t.

Obama says debt impass could stop social security checks

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Talk about a Shot Across the Bow

I really don’t think that he had it in him, but Obama just fired one f%$# of a shot across the Republicans bow on the debt ceiling:

It was a striking thing today to see the President of the United States say that he cannot guarantee the 27 million Social Security checks that are due to be mailed on August 3rd.

August 3rd is the day after the U.S. government will default on its debts if Democrats and Republicans do not agree to increase the nation’s borrowing limit. Both sides say they won’t raise the limit without a deal to massively cut the federal deficit. A U.S. default could shake the world economy. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Time is growing short.

CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley met the president this morning at the White House on another day of deadlock. The question is whether a deal to cut the federal deficit will include tax increases as Democrats insist or rely only on budget cuts as Republicans demand. The Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner started the day with a vow that the house will not raise taxes – period.

You know, I really did not expect him to pull out that one.

His normal course of action is to negotiate with himself, and bring a knife to a gun fight, but he just pulled out an AN602 Tsar Bomba.

I really did not think that he had it in him.

What’s more it appears between this threat, and the fact that raising taxes by a penny will enrage the base, has Senate minority leader coming up with a Blackadderesque* cunning plan to obscure the fact that he feels compelled to capitulate:

Desperate to get out of the political box they helped to create, Senate Republicans are actively pursuing a new plan under which the debt ceiling would grow in three increments over the remainder of this Congress unless lawmakers approve a veto-proof resolution of disapproval.

In effect lawmakers would be surrendering the very power of approval that the GOP has used to force the debt crisis now. But by taking the disapproval route, Republicans can shift the onus more onto the White House and Democrats since a two-thirds majority would be needed to stop any increase that President Barack Obama requests.

“It gives the president 100 percent of the responsibility for increasing the debt limit if he chooses not to have any spending reductions,” Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Republican Conference chairman, told reporters Tuesday.

This is the about the lamest example of “declaring victory and beating a retreat” that I have heard in a long time ………… OK, it’s the lamest example by a Republican. I think that we get this sort of sh%$ from Democrats, and in particularly the Obama administration, on an almost weekly basis.

And then we have John Boehner doing his best 13 year old throwing a tantrum:

Burned by the fact that their prescription for reducing the deficit and increasing the national borrowing limit either can’t pass in Congress or doesn’t cut spending enough to warrant, in their minds, a significant debt ceiling hike, House Republicans returned to the Capitol Tuesday to ratchet up their demands, and shirk responsibility for avoiding default.

“Where’s the President’s plan?” asked House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) at a press stakeout after a GOP caucus meeting. “When’s he going to lay his cards on the table? This debt limit increase is his problem.”

This is a massive departure for Boehner and the GOP, who before the debt limit brinksmanship became central to U.S. politics, regularly acknowledged that raising the debt limit was his, and Congress’, imperative. Today, he and other caucus leaders answered President Obama’s demand that the GOP figure out a way to raise the debt limit through 2012 by offering to toss non-starter Republican wish-list items back into the negotiating mix.

This is certainly a welcome event.

If we see more of this, then I will see it as evidence of a learning curve, but for right now, absent any sort of a pattern, I will put it down to dumb luck.

Still, it’s better to be lucky than it is to be smart in the short term.

*Only his writing is a lot worse than the show, and Rowan Atkinson (Blackadder) has a lot more personal appeal.†
†Hell, Tony Robinson (Blackadder’s dogsbody, Baldrick) has more personal appeal than Mitch McConnell.

The Newscorp Scandal is Exploding

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It’s not just News of the World it’s the Times of London, specifically the Sunday Times, which hacked personal records of Gordon Brown, including financial records, legal records, and the medical records of his child with Cystic Fibrosis:

Journalists from across News International repeatedly targeted the former prime minister Gordon Brown, attempting to access his voicemail and obtaining information from his bank account and legal file as well as his family’s medical records.

There is also evidence that a private investigator used a serving police officer to trawl the police national computer for information about him. That investigator also targeted another Labour MP who was the subject of hostile inquiries by the News of the World, but it is not confirmed whether News International was specifically involved in trawling police computers for information on Brown.

Separately, Brown’s tax paperwork was taken from his accountant’s office apparently by hacking into the firm’s computer. This was passed to another newspaper.

Additionally, we now have a retired New York City Police officer who has, “alleged he was contacted by News of the World journalists who said they would pay him to retrieve the private phone records of the dead.”

Much of Murdoch’s power comes from the fear that he inspires in authorities, and now that seems to be falling away, and the next few weeks should get very interesting.

They Should Worry

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It appears that senior Senate Democrats are worried that Obama’s eagerness to gut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is threatening to squander their advantage on those issues:

Top Democrats in charge of keeping the Senate in Dem hands and maintaining the political health of the party — DSCC chair Patty Murray and messaging chief Chuck Schumer — have privately expressed frustration that deep Medicare cuts risk squandering the major political advantage Democrats have built up on the issue, people familiar with internal discussions say.

Senators Murray and Schumer, along with other Dems like Debbie Stabenow and Mark Begich, have warned against deep cuts in recent leadership meetings, a source familiar with the meetings says, another sign of the unrest that the possibility of serious entitlements cuts is creating among Congressional Democrats.

“We shouldn’t be giving away our advantage on Medicare,” said a source familiar with Murray’s thinking, in characterizing her objections in private meetings. “We should be very careful about giving away the biggest advantage we’ve had as Democrats in some time.”

This, by the way, is why the Democrats won’t retake the house, and will lose the Senate, in 2012.

Because it’s increasingly Obama finds the concept doing anything that might benefit the party as distasteful and gauche.

I Call This Sanity

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The fact that the Obama administration has suspended military aid to Pakistan is a sign that a bit of common sense has emerged in American foreign policy:

The U.S. is withholding about $800 million in military aid to Pakistan over actions by the nuclear- armed country since the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, said White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley.

“They’ve taken some steps that have given us reason to pause on some of the aid which we’re giving to the military, and we’re trying to work through that,” Daley said yesterday on ABC’s “This Week” program. “Until we get through these difficulties, we’ll hold back some of the money that the American taxpayers have committed to give.”

The problem is that most of the Pakistani state security apparatus, and truth be told, most of the Pakistani body politic has defined itself in terms of a Ragnarok with India, which, given that they are both now nuclear powers, is completely insane.

Once you understand this, it means that any arrangements with Pakistan are the temporary result of a temporary confluence of interests.

No,

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But I’d click through if it said “Ann Coulter in jail”:

Yes, this is yet another add served up by Google™ Adsense™ and no, I am not including a link.

Well better a fraction of a cent to my pocket than in theirs.

Still, I’d love to find someone who does a better job of serving ads that you know, actually aren’t completely ludicrous when juxtaposed with my reader(s).

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Please note: once again, that I do not vet, nor do I endorse any ad that appears on my site, and I reserve the right to mock both the ads that appear on my site, as well as the advertisers.

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