Year: 2011

Great Googly Moogly!

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Click for full size


H/t Wall Street Pit for the graph Pr0n

It’s jobless Thursday, and the numbers are brutal.

It’s back in the 450-485K sweet spot that it hung about for most of last year.

They expected it to fall by about 30K to around 400K, but it rose by 43,000 to 473,000, and the less volatile 4-week moving average rose by 22,250 to 431,250.

Continuing claims rose by 74,000 to 3.73 million, though emergency and extended claims fell by 42,900 to 4.12 million, though in the case of the latter, I do not know how much of this is just the “99ers” exhausting their benefits.

Obama should be running around like his hair is on fire over this report, but he should have been doing that over much of the past year with real unemployment (U-6) staying well over 15%, but because the Banksters are back to paying themselves big bonuses, no one in DC seems to give a damn.

Much more of this, and Sarah Palin will be sworn in as president the day that I make aliyah to Israel.

No, This is Not The Onion…

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John Ashcroft is Blackwater’s Xe’s new ethics chief:

The consortium in charge of restructuring the world’s most infamous private-security firm just added a new chief in charge of keeping the company on the straight and narrow. Yes, John Ashcroft, the former U.S. attorney general, is now an “independent director” of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.

Ashcroft will head Xe’s new “subcommittee on governance,” its backers announced early Wednesday in a statement. The subcommittee is designed to “maximize governance, compliance and accountability” and “promote the highest degrees of ethics and professionalism within the private-security industry.”

In other words, no more shooting civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, no more signing for weapons its guards aren’t authorized to carry in war zones, no more impersonations of cartoon characters to acquire said weaponry, and no more ‘roids and coke on the job.

Ashcroft’s arrival at Xe is yet another clear signal it’s not giving up the quest for lucrative government security contracts now that it’s no longer owned by founder Erik Prince, even as it emphasizes the side of its business that trains law enforcement officers. In September, it won part of a $10 billion State Department contract to protect diplomats, starting with the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem.

 I don’t know which is more revolting, Ashcroft as ethics chief, or the fact that these incompetent corrupt f%$#s still get government contracts.

More of This

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In California, Republicans are refusing to even allow tax increases to be voted on, so Treasurer Bill Lockyer and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg are suggesting that cuts be targeted in Republican districts:

With no agreement in sight on how to close the state’s remaining $15.4 billion deficit, some Democrats are discussing targeting GOP districts with steeper cuts if legislative Republicans will not vote for a solution that includes taxes.

“You don’t want to pay for government, well then, you get less of it,” Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg told reporters Wednesday.

If other options fail, the Sacramento Democrat said he is willing to consider a targeted cuts approach like one laid out by Treasurer Bill Lockyer, who has suggested that an all-cuts state budget should focus on the districts of lawmakers who oppose putting $11 billion in tax extensions before voters.

“When it comes to kids or the vulnerable, I wouldn’t want to make distinctions between who lives in a Democratic district and who lives in a Republican district, but when it comes to sort of basic services, convenience services that affect adults … I have an open mind,” he told reporters after speaking at a Sacramento Press Club luncheon.

What he is referring to here as “convenience services” is (I hope) things like DMV offices, vehicle inspection stations, agricultural extension offices, etc.

Good for him.

One of the reasons that there are so many no taxes ever lunatics out there is because they manage to structure taxation, and benefits, such that other people pay for their services, and this needs to stop.

It Looks Like 6 of 8 ‘Phant Senators Are Up for Recall in Wisconsin

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When one considers that there have been just 4 recall elections in Wisconsin history, this is pretty impressive, there are additionally 3 recall elections against Democratic state senators, but, as anyone who follows Maddow knows, the effort was significantly less grass roots and honest.  (Signatures for shots of booze)

Additionally, there was a special election in a solidly Republican district for the State Assembly, and it flipped to the Democrats for the first time in a rather long time.

The Dems have to win 3 seats to flip the Senate, which is a non-trivial task, but I think that the voters of Wisconsin are feeling a sh%$load of buyers remorse right now.

They Had an Election in the Great White North

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And it was a doozy:

The Conservatives now have an outright majority in Parliament, posting a 24 seat gain to end up with 167 seats, which was not a big surprise, but the rest of the results were a shocker.

The left leaning New Democratic Party (NDP) picked up 66 seats, and now has 102, making it the official opposition for the first time ……… ever, while the Liberals, who have run Canada for most of the past 100 years, lost 43 seats, dropping to 34, and their party leader, the contemptible Iraq war cheerleader Michael Ignatieff, lost his seat.

Even more surprising is that the secessionist Bloc Québécois also lost 43 seats, dropping to just 4 seat, which means that they lost official party status,and their party leader lost his reelection bid too.

Hopefully, this means that the BQ will have to take their time away from genteel ethnic cleansing* to rebuild their party.

Both Lib Leader Michael Ignatieff and BQ Leader Gilles Duceppe resigned their party positions as well.

The Tories did not get anywhere near a majority of the vote, they got less than 40%, but they got them in the right places, and with the NDP surging, largely because the Liberals had been folding like a bunch of broccoli ever since Ignatieff took control, and people choose something, particularly a something which gave them their world class healthcare system, over nothing, they went to the NDP.

The downside is that Conservative leader Stephen Harper, after 2 terms running a minority government, probably feels entitled to do what he really wants, which is tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts in social services, and more prisons and fighter jets.

I fully expect a stealth assault on socialized medicine.

On the bright side (if you are an optimist):

  • The BQ and their nativist bigoted platform were beaten down.
  • The Libs deserved to go down, and the only thing keeping them afloat over the past few years was “the conservatives are scary,” don’t split the vote, but now the NDP can make this argument.
  • Harper is a real honest to God Neocon, and the only thing that has made him look moderate is the fact that he has had minority governments, so hopefully, when the mask is removed, Canadians will recoil from him, and make Mulroney’s drubbing look like a walk in the park.
  • Perhaps the Liberals will learn that folding like overcooked cabbage because an insane right winger said bad things about them.
  • Perhaps the Liberals will learn that appointing an Iraq War supporting moron (Michael Ignatieff) is stupid.
  • Michael Ignatieff is done.
  • Michael Ignatieff is done.
  • Michael Ignatieff is done.

Then again, I am a bit of an optimist.

*It’s why the largest Jewish community in Canada is now in Toronto.

Yet Another Dissection of the bin Laden Killing

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First, it comes out now that bin Laden was not armed and did not use his wife as a human shield, which implies to me that perhaps the reason for his burial at sea was to obscure the powder burns caused when a muzzle of a weapon is pressed against the head.

Second is the question of, “Why Now?,” and I think that this analysis is the one closest accurate: that the House of Saud determined that with unrest through the Arab world, he had become redundant:

Normally I do not speculate on operational matters; to solicit information on secret matters even from very good sources is like telling Pinocchio, “Lie to me.” Some considerations here are obvious, though, even without the usual disinformation. It is hard to conclude otherwise that Bin Laden died this week because people who knew his whereabouts chose this particular moment to inform the US authorities. What has changed? The simple answer is: everything has changed. Instability in the Muslim world has reached a level that makes Bin Laden redundant.

The overthrow of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and the near-overthrow of Yemini President Ali Abdullah Saleh, along with the eruption of instability across the whole of the Arab world, changed al-Qaeda’s position. From Riyadh’s vantage point, Bin Laden was a loose cannon and an annoyance, but no threat to the strategic position of Saudi Arabia.

The royal family preferred to allow some of its more radically-inclined members to provide support to Bin Laden on a covert basis in return for al-Qaeda’s de facto agreement to leave the Arabian Peninsula in peace. As a WikiLeaks cable revealed, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in a secret December 2009 memo, “More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Toiba] and other terrorist groups.”

With the destabilization of Yemen, that sort of modus vivendi became obsolete. As the terse diplomatic announcements of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ April 6 conversation with King Abdullah made clear, the Saudis were deeply concerned about the destabilization of Yemen by al-Qaeda along with Iran.

I think that he’s wrong about one thing: al Qaeda wasn’t done in by some sort of Iranian alliance, these folks are Salafists, and consider Shia to be heretics, but rather they are terrified at the idea that Jihadism is fading as an outlet for desires for reform and democracy in the dominion of the House of Saud, and they are casting about for some other way to maintain their kleptocracy.

If Your Allies are People Who Are Bigots

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And  you engage in neocolonialism masquerading as protecting dark people, in this case, the citizens of Libya, your allies will not support you, because bigots are stupid, so unless you say, “We are bombing Libya to give their oil to our energy conglomerates,” explicitly, they will not support you.

Case in point, Silvio Berlusconi and his racist buddies in the Northern League:

Italy’s belated decision to join the military campaign against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi has brought fresh political woes for Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, with opposition to the bombing threatening to sink his fragile coalition.

Senior figures in the Northern League want an end to Italian air strikes only a week after they began following a personal plea by US President Barack Obama to Mr Berlusconi. Parliament will vote on the Northern League motion to this effect later today.

The xenophobic coalition partner says the bombing will provoke a wave of illegal immigration from Libya to Italy’s southern coast, and is demanding Mr Berlusconi set a date to end the raids. Umberto Bossi, the pugnacious Northern League leader, had threatened to bring down the government if parliament was not allowed to vote on the issue. Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, another Northern League figure, predicted the government would fall if the bombing was not stopped.

Considering his road to power, I find that is one of the most schadenfreude rich stories I’ve heard in a while.

The phrase, “Hoist with his own petard,” comes to mind.

And While They Were Going After bin Laden, They Found Time to Kiss Up To The Banks…

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This awful policy is driven by a desire for campaign donations.

The New York Times has an editorial excoriating the Obama administration for deregulating foreign currency swaps:

A loophole in the law — which the bankers and their friends, including the administration, fought for — allows the Treasury secretary to exempt the instruments. The arguments in favor of exemption, beyond a desire to please the banks, were always unconvincing. They still are. The Treasury Department has asserted that the exempted market is not as risky as other derivatives markets, and therefore does not need full regulation.

That claim has been disputed by research, but even if it were true, it would be a weak argument. For instruments to be relatively safer than the derivatives that blew up in the crisis, necessitating huge bailouts, hardly makes them safe. Worse, dealers could probably find ways to manipulate the exempted transactions so as to hedge and speculate in ways that the law is intended to regulate.

……

The department has also said that because the market works well today, new rules could actually increase instability. That is perhaps the worst argument of all. It validates the antiregulatory ethos that led to the crisis and still threatens to block reform.

The Treasury’s plan will be open for comment for 30 days. Count us opposed.

(emphasis mine)

There can be a fine line between regulatory capture and corruption, and I am not sure on which side this falls.

In a way, this is worse than Bush and His Evil Minions™, because W was (correctly) perceived as a radical, but the actions of “Team Geithner” now firmly entrenched this thinking on both sides of the aisle.

H/t Paul Krugman for the graph pr0n.

You Know That if There is News, Republicans Will Lie About It

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They are now claiming that torture got us Osama bin Laden, but it’s a lie.

The sources in Gitmo gave information after 2006, but they were all tortured before 2005, meaning that the information was obtained through more ethical methods:

From these dates we can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended. That’s either a sign of the rank incompetence of KSM’s interrogators (that is, that they missed the significance of a courier protecting OBL), or a sign he was able to withstand whatever treatment they used with him.

With al-Libi, the connection between whatever torture he experienced and this intelligence is less clear (since he was first detained in 2005), but even with al-Libi, it appears clear he either never revealed the courier’s real name or only did so after he had been in custody for a year, and almost certainly until after he arrived in Gitmo.

Update: Putting the AP’s reporting here together with the DAB, it seems like al-Libi did give up the name, perhaps earlier than reported. But still not waterboarding.

Expect more lies from Republicans on this, because this is what they do.

Your bin Laden Update

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The most interesting bit is the dog that did not bark, one of the red flags that tipped off the CIA was the fact that a rather expensive, on the order of $1 million, but there were no phone lines or internet connectivity.

After the Moonie Washington Times revealed that we were monitoring his satellite phone in the 1990s, we went old school on his communications, using only couriers, and so, when he set up his homestead a mile from the Pakistani military academy (Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?) he was having none of telecommunications thing, and that lack marked him.

On the truly weird side, it turns out that the raid was life tweeted by someone (@ReallyVirtual) who was unaware of the raid, and was just complaining about the helicopters late at night.

There is a bigger picture, but that’s the next post.

Ha Ha!

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Anonymous has apparently penetrated the US Chamber of Commerce, and now released a 1.2 Gigabyte file containing the documents.

It seems to contain files from the Chamber, the American Legal Exchange Council, and the the Mackinac Center.

The last two are right wing front groups.

The ALEC writes legislation to kill unions as well as the poor and the elderly, and the Mackinac Center is yet another of those right wing so-called “think” tanks.

There is a caveat here, one which has been posted at AnonNews:

On April 29th a person using the twitter account “@septscelles”  released a large file to Barrett Brown that purportedly contained secret US Chamber of Commerce documents. This file was later made available via File Dropper as a (strangely truecypted) torrent named “chambersecrets2”.  It is also reported to have been made available in an unencrypted form on the Pirate Bay.

Despite the promise of secrets and leaks, early research has thus far shown that this information is publicly available through a simple Google search. It’s very possible that “@septscelles” is just an attention seeking troll. Despite this, there is a more insidious possibility. We learned from the HB Gary emails that the Chamber of Commerce was advised to “feed the fuel between the feuding groups, [creating] disinformation.” Specific mention was made of “[creating] messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization [and to] submit fake documents and then call out the error…”

The file is very large, and will therefore take some time to fully examine. Nevertheless, we would like to state that this information was provided by an unknown party and may be an attempt to discredit Anonymous through a campaign of misinformation. More information will be coming soon.

So obviously, breaking out the champagne is premature, though perhaps chilling it might not be a bad idea.

You can go through the documents by downloading this torrent.

H/t Hedgehog at the Stellarparthenon BBS.

If You Want a Good Primer on the F-35’s Electrical Power Systems…

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And the problems therein, go read Bill Sweetman’s latest on the latest problem with the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).

Basically, it comes down to using bleeding edge technology, which, when juxtaposed with frantic weight reduction efforts, creates an absolute mess, just as it has with the failed bulkhead, the 360 degree vision system helmet and HUDless cockpit, etc.:

Another observation — relevant to future programs — is that the electrical problems (both this one and the AA-1 incident) have arisen from the use of a new system which, while it may have net advantages, is not core to the aircraft’s capability — you could in theory build a short-takeoff-and-landing stealth fighter without it.

The same goes for another headache area, the wide-field-of-view video helmet and HUD-less cockpit. The lesson may be that any innovations that fall into the nice-to-have rather than mission-essential capability should be low-risk when you incorporate them into the design.

In the larger picture, this is actually the alpha and omega of weapons development.

Too much whiz-bang for too much bucks.

India Shortlists Rafale and Typhoon for MMRCA Shortlist

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Well, I was wrong in my guess that MiG would win this.

But India has narrowed the bid to the French and the British:

The United States lost a hard-fought competition to supply a new generation of fighter jets to India, which has listed two European manufacturers as the finalists for an order estimated to be worth $10 billion.

The decision was a blow for President Obama, who had pushed hard for this and other defense deals during his visit to India in November as part of his agenda to deepen and broaden the United States’ relationship with India. The American ambassador to India, Timothy J. Roemer, who separately announced on Thursday that he would resign from his post for personal reasons, said the United States was “deeply disappointed by this news.”

While political and economic relations between India and the United States have been warming for years, American arms makers have struggled to win big contracts here. After decades of frosty relations during the cold war, which pushed India to rely extensively on the Soviet Union for military hardware, many in the Indian defense establishment are still wary of American intentions and United States military aid to Pakistan, India’s main adversary.

The American bid to build the fighters came from Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Boeing had offered its F/A -18 jets, and Lockheed Martin pitched its F-16 planes. But India instead narrowed the list to the Rafale fighter from Dassault and the Eurofighter Typhoon jet made by a consortium of European companies. Russian and Swedish bids were also turned down.

I’m not sure what the calculus here.

These aircraft are clearly more capable in terms of payload and range than the Rafale (which is the light weight of the bunch) and the F-16, and faster than the F-18 (so is just about everything flying with an afterburner), and likely more reliable than the MiG.

My handicapping of the race? I think that Dassault is desperate for an export sale, and so will be willing to take a hit up front, and when this is juxtaposed with the fact that the IAF already has experience operating the Mirage 2000, I would give it a slight edge.

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!!

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It’s odd, we’ve had alternating weeks of feast and famon.

And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

  1. First National Bank of Central Florida, Winter Park, FL
  2. Cortez Community Bank, Cortez, FL
  3. First Choice Community Bank, Dallas, GA
  4. The Park Avenue Bank, Valdosta, GA
  5. Community Central Bank, Mount Clemens, MI

Full FDIC list

And here are the credit union closings:

  1. Utah Central Credit Union, Salt Lake City, UT

Full NCUA list

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