Not much to watch, and Maddow was interviewing some ‘Phant, so I was flipping and AMC was showing Kill Bill.
After all the hand wringing I read over the violence, I find it stylish and quite watchable.
Month: July 2011
A Non-Wisconsin Wingnut Recalled
In this case, it’s the wingnut Arizona state Senate president, Russell Pearce, one of the main architects of the radical right wing agenda in that state:
A citizens’ group that opposes the Arizona senate president because of his stance on illegal immigration and other issues has collected enough signatures to force a recall election for him, officials said on Friday.
Republican state Senator Russell Pearce rose to national attention as the chief architect of the state’s tough anti-immigration law that was signed into law last year, but has been blocked by the courts.
Maricopa County elections officials certified the group Citizens for a Better Arizona has collected over 10,300 signatures in their effort to force a recall election for Pearce, said Yvonne Reed, a county elections spokeswoman.
The group only was required to collect 7,756 valid signatures under state law, Reed said.
Barring any successful legal challenges, officials said the recall election for Pearce, who represents Mesa, Arizona, could be called for November or March.
I think that this is actually a long shot, unlike other states, there is no separate ballot for the recall and the election, just a new election, and if no serious Republican runs against him, it’s unlikely that a Democrat, even a ConservaDem, would prevail, but it’s nice to put the fear of the electorate into this ratf%$#’s heart.
Australia Intends to Institute a Carbon Tax
Well, this is a good policy, at least until 2015, when they turn the whole idea over to the Vampire Squid* and its ilk:
The Australian government has unveiled plans to impose a tax on carbon emissions for the worst polluters.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard said carbon dioxide emissions would be taxed at A$23 ($25; £15) per tonne from 2012.
The country’s biggest economic reform in a generation will cover some 500 companies. In 2015, a market-based trading scheme will be introduced.
(emphasis mine)
Once the market based trading scheme is implemented, we can expect to see the investment banks come up with all sorts of opaque trading schemes (Carbon Default Swaps anyone?) that will serve primarily as a means to extract fees and other rents from the process, and then we will see another orgy of fraud and speculation bring the market down.
Of course, this won’t happen immediately, particularly since there would be floor and ceiling prices for the first few years, but it will happen, and money that is extracted from the public will go to private speculators rather than the public good.
*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.
The Incredible Shrinking Speaker
John Boehner has decided to drop any attempt at a grand bargain with Obama, because he could get no one, not even the Majority Whip or Majority Leader, his closest lieutenants in the house, to agree to close a few tax loopholes in order to have Obama cut the Democrats throats with Social Security and Medicare cuts:
House Speaker John A. Boehner abandoned efforts Saturday night to cut a far-reaching debt-reduction deal, telling President Obama that a more modest package offers the only politically realistic path to avoiding a default on the mounting national debt.
On the eve of a critical White House summit on the debt issue, Boehner (R-Ohio) told Obama that their plan to “go big,” in the speaker’s words, and forge a compromise that would save more than $4 trillion over the next decade, was crumbling under Obama’s insistence on significant new tax revenue.
“Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes,” Boehner said in a statement released less than 24 hours before the White House meeting was scheduled to begin. “I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure, based on the cuts identified in the Biden-led negotiations, that still meets our call for spending reforms and cuts greater than the amount of any debt limit increase.”
Boehner’s decision leaves negotiators reexamining a less-ambitious framework — aimed at saving roughly $2.4 trillion over the next decade — that had been under discussion between Vice President Biden and a bipartisan group of lawmakers. But that framework is hardly complete; the group broke up last month when Republicans walked out over the tax issue.
The sweeping deal Obama and Boehner had been discussing would have required both parties to take a bold leap into the political abyss. Democrats were demanding more than $800 billion in new tax revenue, causing heartburn among the hard-line fiscal conservatives who dominate the House Republican caucus. Republicans, meanwhile, were demanding sharp cuts to Medicare and Social Security, popular safety net programs that congressional Democrats have vowed to protect.
There is only one way that I can see this debt limit thing, which is an artifact of what Obama wanted in December, turning out well, and that is by generating an export led recovery, and no small amount of inflation, if the dollar drops by 30+%.
That being said, while there House Speakers who have been profoundly weak, Tom Foley comes to mind, as does Tip O’Neill from 1981-83, I have never seen such a profoundly impotent speaker as Boehner.
It’s stunning.
Unsurprising News of the Day
It turns out that academic economists are not interested in their profession adopting a code of ethics:
The world’s largest association of economists is considering ethics guidelines after outrage about undisclosed conflicts of interest, but only a handful of its 18,000 members have bothered to offer any input.
The American Economic Association earlier this year charged a five-person panel with looking into ethics and economics — in part a response to the 2010 documentary “Inside Job” that vilified a number of big-name economists for arguing in favor of deregulation while on Wall Street’s payroll.
The film also notably skewered former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin, who wrote a glowing paper about Iceland’s financial system in 2006 — for which he was paid by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce. Two years later, the country’s financial system collapsed.
The panel, chaired by Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Solow, asked for input from the broader membership, with an end of June deadline, but so far, Solow said, he has received at most a dozen responses.
They then follow with a quote from some pissant by the name of David Card, an Econ prof at UC Berkeley, suggesting that it’s not necessary, because they don’t make that much.
But as Yves Smith wryly observes, “Last I checked, economists are much better paid than other social scientists, and lesser paid professions, like nurses and teachers, have codes of ethics.”
This is a Righteous Rant
While I don’t agree with Riverdaughter’s suggestion that Hillary Clinton should primary Obama in 2012, Hillary is a spent force in presidential politics, but her basic thesis, that Mr. Hopey Changey is a “weak Republican in disguise,”, is one that I have maintained since October 21, 2007 (see the full story of what informed my opinion here).
I have to agree with Kevin Drum, this stuff ain’t eleventy dimensional chess. He declined to extend the debt limit, and as a result now proposes gutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, because that is what he really wants.
In any case read Riverdaughter.
When Liberal Policies Save Money
Philadelphia, PA effectively decriminalized possession of small quantities of marijuana and saved big bucks in the process:
Just over a year ago, the powers that be in Philadelphia effectively decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana by offering offenders the chance to enroll in a three-hour class that would expunge the offense from their records. Not only did this give Philadelphia police more time and energy to focus on more serious crimes, it has also saved the city a pretty sizable Ziploc bag of green stuff.
“We were spending thousands of dollars for when someone possessed $10 or $15 worth of weed,” District Attorney Seth Williams tells the Philadelphia Daily News. “It just didn’t make any sense.”
Under the program, being caught with up to 30 grams of marijuana is no longer a misdemeanor but a summary offense. By simply paying $200 to attend the three-hour class on the ills of drug use and abuse, the arrestee’s record is wiped clean of the offense.
Before this change, offenders faced up to $500 in fines and possible, though unlikely jail time. If the suspect fought the charges, this meant expenses for the city — prosecutors, judges, lab tests, public defenders, etc. By all but decriminalizing pot, Williams estimates that the city has saved $2 million in the last 12 months.
Additionally, police tell the News that there has been no noticeable impact on the quality of life in Philadelphia since the program went into effect.
No big surprise.
When the DA notes that, “The current way most U.S. authorities treat drug possession is shortsighted,” he ain’t kidding.
If I were a governor, this would be the first place that I would balance the budget.
Which Murdoch Is Going to Jail
Because it has been discovered that Newscorp systematically wiped its email archives of everything relating to their phone hacking activities, which pretty much had to had the assent of James, and probably Rupert, Murdoch:
Police are investigating evidence that a News International executive may have deleted millions of emails from an internal archive in an apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard’s inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal.
The archive is believed to have reached back to January 2005, revealing daily contact between News of the World editors, reporters and outsiders, including private investigators. The messages are potentially highly valuable both for the police and for the numerous public figures who are suing News International (NI).
According to legal sources close to the police inquiry, a senior executive is believed to have deleted “massive quantities” of the archive on two separate occasions, leaving only a fraction to be disclosed. One of the alleged deletions is said to have been made at the end of January, just as Scotland Yard was launching Operation Weeting, its new inquiry into the affair. The allegation directly contradicts NI claims that it is co-operating fully with police in order to expose its history of illegal newsgathering.
The alleged deletion of emails will be of particular interest to the media regulator Ofcom, which said it had asked to be “kept abreast” of developments in the Met’s hacking investigation, so it can assess whether News Corp would pass the “fit and proper” test that all owners of UK television channels have to meet.
So now we have a fairly clear case of obstruction of justice and most, if not all, of the information that was deleted is still likely squirreled away in the system where it can be found with a extensive investigation.
I cannot imagine that this did not go on without the explicit approval of one of the Murdochs.
Job Report Sucks Need about 175K to keep up rate climbes to 9.2%
Yesterday’s news, that unemployment claims remain stubbornly high was not great news, but the the monthly non-farm payroll report was horrific, with just 18,000 jobs created. about 1/3 of , and May’s number was adjusted downward from about 50,000 to 25,000.
Additionally the unemployment number (U3) rose to 9.2%, and the more inclusive U6 rose by 1% to 16.4.
This was about ⅓ of the forecast, and to provide some perspective Canada, with a population only a tenth of ours, created 22,000 jobs, and in order to accommodate natural growth in the workforce, you probably need 175,000 jobs a month to be created.
What is going on here is that we are on the trailing end of the stimulus, so even without the current mania in Washington, DC to cut government spending, we would be seeing contraction government spending, which, unsurprisingly results in contraction.
Until we goose the economy with sufficient government spending, and establish policies that encourage banks and businesses to part with their cash reserves, we won’t see much improvement.
Considering Obama’s mania for austerity and the confidence fairy, I’m beginning to think that the only way we get a recovery is if something like the debt limit triggers a precipitous fall in the US dollar, which would then create an export driven recovery.
We are completely f%$#ed.
It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!!
It’s been a busy week, with closings of both bank and credit unions this week, 3 banks, one credit union, which is the most action we’ve seen since mid May.
And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.
- First Chicago Bank & Trust, Chicago, IL
- Colorado Capital Bank,Castle Rock, CO
- Signature Bank, Windsor, CO
And here are the credit union closings:
- Borinquen Federal Credit Union, Philadelphia, PA
So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):
It’s better than last year but still plenty ugly.
Wisc ‘Phants Try to Redistrict Ahead of Recall
Now here’s a surprise.
Facing the possibility of the control of the Senate flipping back to the Democrats with the recall elections, the Republicans are calling a special session to get it done before the August elections/:
Republican leaders released their plan Friday to redraw districts for the Legislature, setting up possible votes on them over the next two weeks and more controversy at the Capitol.
A quick vote would allow GOP lawmakers to approve the maps before recall elections are held this summer that could shift control of the Senate from Republicans to Democrats. That would let Republicans lock down advantages at the ballot box for the next 10 years by drawing maps in their favor.
Democrats in the Legislature won’t necessarily have a say in what the maps look like. But a lawsuit has already been filed, meaning a federal court could still weigh in on the process.
A hearing on the new maps is scheduled for Wednesday, and the Legislature could act on it as early as July 19 in extraordinary session.
Somehow, I don’t think that they are particularly sanguine regarding their chances during the recall elections.
The interesting thing here is that redistricting is supposed to be a sort of bottom up activity in Wisconsin, with local authorities drawing up wards before the legislature draws districts, but they are rushing the process.
I’d love to see their internal polling data, because they are so scared that they are willing to allow a vote on emergency unemployment benefits too.
When I Called Him the Manchurian Democrat, I Had No Idea…
Nancy Pelosi heard that Barack Obama was looking at gutting cutting social security, and it sounds like her response was to call him out:
After a contentious White House meeting with President Obama and other Congressional leaders, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) returned to the Capitol and drew an important red line: Members of her caucus won’t vote for a grand bargain to raise the debt limit and reduce future deficits if the final deal includes cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits — and that means it probably won’t pass.
“You [asked], ‘could the changes compromise the vote?'” Pelosi said at a Thursday afternoon briefing near the House chamber. “I said yes.”
It’s widely believed that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) will need Democratic votes to raise the debt limit. Democratic leaders, including House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) have offered to help him out — but not on Boehner’s terms alone. Pelosi has her own terms.
“We have been very clear Democrats are not supporting — House Democrats are not supporting any cuts in benefits for Social Security or Medicare,” she said.
I think that her calling him a bitch, which is what she did, might have something to do with the fact that he gave no advanced warning of his decision to Congressional Democrats:
Multiple senior House Democratic aides tell TPM that caucus members were caught off guard by news stories about President Obama’s push for deeper deficit and spending reductions — and particularly about the White House’s willingness to cut Social Security as part of a grand bargain to raise the debt limit.
At a private caucus meeting Thursday morning, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told her members that if Obama’s serious about putting Social Security on the chopping block, he’d left her in the dark about it. And after an at-times-contentious meeting about how open Dems should be to significant entitlement cuts, leaders departed to the White House to read Obama the riot act.
And just to ensure that the day is a complete mess for Barry, his proposal to kill the New Deal and give it to the bankers was just enthusiastically endorsed by the craziest motherf%$#er in Congress, Allen West:
Reports that President Obama could discuss with Republicans the idea of cuts to Social Security and Medicare is picking up praise from a source that doesn’t usually have anything good to say about the President: Rep. Allen West (R-FL).
In fact, this is coming from a man whose military career ended after a torture-related incident, who has called Obama a “low-level socialist agitator”, and who has said that Medicare will destroy America: “I gotta tell you something: if you support Medicare the way it is now, you can kiss the United States of America goodbye.”
Seriously, when you look at how this is handled has me wondering if the production staff who created Gigli are running the White House staff.
It’s not only bad policy, it’s criminally stupid politics.
At some point, you have to start wondering if this crap is just stupid, or it’s what he really wants.
Rupert Murdoch Craps His Pants
H/t Calculated Risk for the vid which puts everything in context nicely
In response to revalations that his one of Newscorp’s paper, News of the World, had hacked voice mails of dead soldiers’ families and a missing girl (later found to be murdered), Rupert Murdoch has decided to shutter the 168 year old tabloid:
Beset by a widening phone-hacking scandal, media mogul Rupert Murdoch pulled the plug Thursday on his News of the World, Britain’s best-selling weekly tabloid newspaper, which will shut down after publishing Sunday’s issue.
In a surprise announcement to the paper’s staff, James Murdoch, a top executive of the tabloid’s parent company and son of Rupert Murdoch, said the July 10 paper “will be the last issue of the News of the World.”
The feisty, hugely profitable paper, which has been continuously published for 168 years, “has a proud history of fighting crime, exposing wrong-doing and regularly setting the news agenda for the nation,” James Murdoch said. But those attributes “have been sullied by behavior that was wrong,” he said. “Indeed, if recent allegations are true, it was inhuman and has no place in our company. The News of the World is in the business of holding others to account. But it failed when it came to itself.”
Referring to the phone-hacking scandal, the younger Murdoch, deputy chief operating officer of his father’s News Corp., said the newspaper “failed to get to the bottom of repeated wrongdoing that occurred without conscience or legitimate purpose.” He added, “Wrongdoers turned a good newsroom bad and this was not fully understood or adequately pursued.” He pledged that “those who acted wrongly will have to face the consequences.”
BTW, it’s not just 1 dead girl, it appears that they hacked the phones of parents of some other missing girls.
People have already been arrested, specifically Andy Coulson, former editor in chief of News of the World, and former communications director for British Prime Minister David Cameron, as well as Clive Goodman, their former royal editor, who has been arrested on this matter before.
Additionally, it appears that this scandal has queered the deal that Murdoch had to buy satellite TV provider BSkyB, for the near term at least.
Pass the Popcorn
That being said I don’t think that it’s the business repercussions that have Murdoch running scared, it’s the possibility that he finds it likely that he, son James, could shortly be working in the prison laundry next to Conrad Black.
Heh.
Appellate Court Reinstates Injunction Against “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”
This is a good thing, since it appears that the Obama, in another example of moral cowardice, is slow walking this process. What I like is the fact that they use the Obama DoJ’s words against them:
The government must stop enforcing the law that prohibits openly gay men, lesbians and bisexuals from serving in the military, a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday.
A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a two-page order against the policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell” in a case brought by the group Log Cabin Republicans.
…
Judges Alex Kozinski, Kim McLane Wardlaw and Richard A. Paez stated in their order that “circumstances and balance of hardships had changed” since their initial ruling: the Obama administration had informed the court that repeal of the policy was “well under way,” and in a filing in another case on July 1, the Department of Justice took the position that discrimination based on sexual orientation should be subjected to tough scrutiny. The government, the judges wrote, “can no longer satisfy the demanding standard for issuance of a stay.”
The fact that the most conflicted Republicans in the nation are more proactive in pushing basic civil rights than the Obama administration.
When Ron Paul Sounds Sane…..
We are living in strange times, and he just suggested that the Federal Reserve destroy the $1.6 trillion in Treasury notes that it bought as a part of quantitative easing program:
Representative Ron Paul has hit upon a remarkably creative way to deal with the impasse over the debt ceiling: have the Federal Reserve Board destroy the $1.6 trillion in government bonds it now holds. While at first blush this idea may seem crazy, on more careful thought it is actually a very reasonable way to deal with the crisis. Furthermore, it provides a way to have lasting savings to the budget.
The basic story is that the Fed has bought roughly $1.6 trillion in government bonds through its various quantitative easing programs over the last two and a half years. This money is part of the $14.3 trillion debt that is subject to the debt ceiling. However, the Fed is an agency of the government. Its assets are in fact assets of the government. Each year, the Fed refunds the interest earned on its assets in excess of the money needed to cover its operating expenses. Last year the Fed refunded almost $80 billion to the Treasury. In this sense, the bonds held by the Fed are literally money that the government owes to itself.
Unlike the debt held by Social Security, the debt held by the Fed is not tied to any specific obligations. The bonds held by the Fed are assets of the Fed. It has no obligations that it must use these assets to meet. There is no one who loses their retirement income if the Fed doesn’t have its bonds. In fact, there is no direct loss of income to anyone associated with the Fed’s destruction of its bonds. This means that if Congress told the Fed to burn the bonds, it would in effect just be destroying a liability that the government had to itself, but it would still reduce the debt subject to the debt ceiling by $1.6 trillion. This would buy the country considerable breathing room before the debt ceiling had to be raised again. President Obama and the Republican congressional leadership could have close to two years to talk about potential spending cuts or tax increases. Maybe they could even talk a little about jobs.
In addition, there’s a second reason why Representative Paul’s plan is such a good idea. As it stands now, the Fed plans to sell off its bond holdings over the next few years. This means that the interest paid on these bonds would go to banks, corporations, pension funds, and individual investors who purchase them from the Fed. In this case, the interest payments would be a burden to the Treasury since the Fed would no longer be collecting (and refunding) the interest.
This would be a change in plan for the Fed, the intent was to sell those bonds at a later date to soak up currency, but the same thing can be done by raising reserve requirements.
Needless to say, this won’t happen. It makes too much sense.
H/t Naked Capitalism.
He Doesn’t Care About Policy, He Wants a “Legacy”
And he knows that “only Nixon could go to China,” so Obama wants to be the President who gut social security:
President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.
At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for Thursday morning, Obama plans to argue that a rare consensus has emerged about the size and scope of the nation’s budget problems and that policymakers should seize the moment to take dramatic action.
As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal. The move marks a major shift for the White House and could present a direct challenge to Democratic lawmakers who have vowed to protect health and retirement benefits from the assault on government spending.
“Obviously, there will be some Democrats who don’t believe we need to do entitlement reform. But there seems to be some hunger to do something of some significance,” said a Democratic official familiar with the administration’s thinking. “These moments come along at most once a decade. And it would be a real mistake if we let it pass us by.”
(Emphasis mine)
Barack Obama is the Manchurian Democrat.
There is no formulation of right or wrong, there is no formulation of good policy, there is simply a “to do” list, where what is actually done does not matter.
Steny Hoyer tells Boehner to Go Cheney Himself
Hoyer just said that Boehner won’t get the votes for raising the debt limit from his teabagger freshman, so he needs Democratic votes, and he won’t get any without a tax increase:
“I’ve told Mr. Boehner that I will help,” Hoyer said. “Now I’m not going to help on some draconian do it my way or the highway vote, but we Democrats are prepared to co-operate in order to assure that the creditworthiness of the United States is not put at risk and to move towards a fiscally responsible path…everything needs to be on the table, and when I say everything I mean everything…. Revenues need to be a significant part of it.”
…………
The Democrats’ vote-counter in the House of Representatives says the GOP will need his help to raise the national debt limit — but they won’t get it if they don’t put everything on the table, including tax revenues.
“Speaker Boehner needed Democratic votes to pass keeping government running, even at minimal levels,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told reporters at his weekly Capitol briefing, in response to a question from TPM. “So my presumption is [Senator] Schumer is right.”
That’s more balls than I expected from Hoyer, who seems to spend most of his time sabotaging the efforts of real Democrats.
The Clown Show that Keeps on Giving…
Pass the Popcorn
The Republican Presidential Primaries.
Case in point, David Duke, former Klansman and Nazi, is looking at throwing his hat in the ring:
Add to the growing list of candidates considering a bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 America’s most famous white-power advocate: David Duke.
A former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, member of the Louisiana House of Representatives and Republican executive-committee chairman in his district until 2000, Duke has a significant following online. His videos go viral. This month, he’s launching a tour of 25 states to explore how much support he can garner for a potential presidential bid. He hasn’t considered running for serious office since the early ’90s, when he won nearly 40 percent of the vote in his bid for Louisiana governor. But like many “white civil rights advocates,” as he describes himself to The Daily Beast, 2012 is already shaping up to be a pivotal year.
I have no idea what Jon Stewart will do with this, but his writing staff has to be high-fiving each other, because David Duke just covered a dozen of their boat payments.
Even though Geithner has denied the rumors that he would be leaving, this hasn’t stopped unnamed sources for floating the names of potential replacements , and this scares the hell out of me:
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner would like to leave the Obama administration this fall if economic conditions are stronger and the debt ceiling debate is resolved in a timely manner, according to a person familiar with his thinking.
Possible replacements to be President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, according to a senior administration official, include Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, and Roger Altman, a prominent investment banker and former deputy Treasury secretary.
So, the front runners are two investment bankers, one of whom co-chaired the cat food commission and launched a full frontal assault on social security, with the hope of delivering that pot of money to Wall Street.
But if you think that the front runners are scary, just look at the B-team:
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, is considered a strong dark-horse candidate.Dimon has said he is not interested in public office but many on Wall Street believe he would accept the job if asked by Obama. But the White House will have to decide whether Dimon, who leads the most successful bank in the U.S., is too closely aligned with Wall Street.
Jamie F%$#ing Diamond. The man who whines because he doesn’t think that overpaid, incompetent, corrupt, immoral, and very very rich rat f%$#s are having their asses kissed enough?
Is there any limit to the extremes to which Barack Obama and His Clueless Minions™ will go to put their tongues up the anuses of the banksters who have wrecked our economy?
It appears not.
Shoot me now!
The Casey Anthony Case
I’ve not followed it. My only thought about it is to make sure that, as much as possible, my children were not exposed to that damn circus.
I think that I largely succeeded.