Year: 2011

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!? Rudy Giuliani Seizes the Moral High Ground?!?!

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No, this is not a joke. Rudolph Giuliani really said the right thing, and there will very likely be a not inconsiderable political cost, because the right thing has very little intersection with the Republican party:

Rudy Giuliani, always a critic of his party’s social agenda, urged Republicans to “move on” from social issues after New York State’s recent approval of gay marriage.

“I think that marriage should be between a man and woman, but I think that the Republican Party would be well advised to get the heck out of people’s bedrooms and let these things get decided by states,” said the former New York mayor, who’s considering another bid for the Republican presidential nomination, in an interview aired Sunday.

Giuliani said that he thinks the New York vote was “wrong,” but “there are other things that I think are wrong that get decided by democratic vote.”

The libertarian streak of the Republican party, he added, should want to avoid “getting involved in people’s sexual lives.”

We live in strange times.

Quote of the Day

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Courtesy of George Packer:

Weber’s terms perfectly capture the toxic dynamic between the President, who takes responsibility as an end in itself, and the Republicans in Congress, who are destructively consumed with their own dogma. Neither side can be said to possess what Weber calls a “leader’s personality.” Responsibility without conviction is weak, but it is sane. Conviction without responsibility, in the current incarnation of the Republican Party, is raving mad.

Word.

I Think That He Needs to Get a Younger Girlfriend………*

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Click for full size


Baltimore is a strange place

So, I was driving home from shopping with my family, and come up on a motorcyclist who has a decidedly atypical companion on the back of the bike:  a skeleton, complete with wig and helmet.

I asked Sharon† to snap some pictures of this, and here they are.

As you can see, he saw our interest, and my wife snapping pictures, and posed a bit for us.

It added a bit of the surreal to this day.

*I cannot claim credit for this bon mot. It was coined by my daughter, Natalie.
†Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Can We Please Primary the Bastard Now?

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So it appears that Barack Obama is removing Elizabeth Warren as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

President Barack Obama has chosen a candidate other than Elizabeth Warren as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a person briefed on the matter.

The president’s choice is a person who already works at the consumer agency, the person said yesterday. Obama may make the nomination as soon as next week, another person briefed on the administration’s plans said.

The people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process isn’t public, didn’t name Obama’s choice.

Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor, was appointed last fall by Obama to set up the consumer bureau until a director was named. Warren previously was head of the congressional watchdog panel overseeing the bank bailout.

And here is the kicker:

Raj Date, a top deputy to Warren at the consumer bureau, was on a short list of candidates to become director ………

………He was senior vice president for corporate strategy and development at Capital One and a managing director in the financial institutions group at Deutsche Bank. During the debate over Dodd-Frank, Date headed the Cambridge Winter Center for Financial Institutions Policy, a research group he founded.

So he’s replacing Elizabeth Warren with a f%$#ing banker.

But in classic fashion, he’s floating out a payoff for her to keep her mouth shut until after the 2012 election, the Democratic nomination for Senate, where she would run against Scott Brown:

Elizabeth Warren’s calendar sure looks like the schedule of a woman considering a Senate bid, or at least someone being courted by power players in Massachusetts and the Senate Democrats’ campaign operation in Washington.

In recent weeks, Warren has met in person or spoke on the phone with Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, David Axelrod, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Massachusetts Democratic Reps. Barney Frank, Stephen Lynch and John Tierney. The phone call with Murray took place in early June, Roll Call has learned. Warren attended a community banking event with Tierney in the Bay State and dined with Schumer, a former DSCC chairman and an aggressive recruiter who remains involved in DSCC activities.

Warren’s May calendar, the most recently available public schedule, shows the Schumer dinner along with the other meetings and discussions.

Given that Warren is leading the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CFPB business could, of course, have been the lone agenda item during these meetings. But for a woman some national Democrats and liberal activists are hoping will take on Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown (R) — a prime target in 2012 — her calendar alludes that she has at least been examining the possibility of a run.

So he’s putting her up to run against Scott Brown, which is a win-win for Obama.

Basically, she’s about the only person who appears to have a possibility to beat him right now, though it’s a tough row to hoe, because Brown is the consummate politician, and she isn’t.

If she wins, it’s easier to hold onto the Senate, and she gets buried as a low seniority Senator, where the old boys’ network keeps her far away from any meaningful banking regulation

If she loses, then no one could have won, and he keeps her inconvenient truths out of the press until his reelection.

With the Space Shuttle Program Ending

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Let me be contrarian, and say good riddance to bad rubbish.

I worked on the HRS (Radiator for the International Space Station) and among its specifications was a minimum stowed size which was large enough to rule out any other launcher.

It was one of the many lame ass attempts by NASA to create a need for the most expensive, least reliable, and least safe launcher that they ever created.

It was flayed in concept, it was flawed in execution, and it was flawed in basic architecture.

He’s Proposing Means Testing Medicare? Is He Nuts?

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One of the reason that Social Security and Medicare are popular are because they both apply to everyone.

When you start trying to exclude people for being too rich, you remove a powerful constituency that supports the programs, and save next to no money, and set the stage for a lower level, until finally the programs are just for the poor, and they are easier to kill.

Well, at his press conference, this is what Barack Obama proposed:

“The fall back position, the third option, and what I consider the least attractive option, is one in which we raise the debt ceiling without making any significant progress on reducing the deficit,” he said.

Obama specifically highlighted the possibility of additional means-testing for Medicare as a way to achieve savings, noting that his proposal would not affect current beneficiaries.

“You can envision a situation where for somebody in my position — me having to pay a little bit more — would be appropriate…and that could make a difference,” Obama said during a Friday press conference.

Will someone please primary the bastard before he destroys the last vestige of the New Deal? Please?

His narcissistic interest in accomplishing big things, even when they are bad big things, is profoundly troubling.

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.