It’s a new year, so the count restarts, and we have the first bank and credit union failures of the year.
For the banks
And the credit union closing:
Not enough data for the graph yet.
Richard Milhaus Nixon was born on January 9, 1913.
I’m not a deep student of history, but I do believe that he was the worst president from the period 1933 through 1973 1974, and that he was the best president from the period of 1969 through 2013. (Would you like that with extrajudicial drone killings, sir?)
We are led by increasingly small and petty men.
Blah, blah, blah!
So until the pundits are subjected to some scrutiny for their fact free gaffes, leave Jon Stewart alone. </LeaveBritneyAlone>
You can see the video, and I don’t think it’s great. It shows off his not-infrequent forays into “a pox on both their houses” land, but there is a difference between saying, “Not up to his normal standards,” and:
I won’t say that Stewart has the same obligation to be accurate the journalists have—in fact, if he had brought up the coin only to make a lot of silly jokes about whose face would be on it, that would have been okay. (A missed opportunity, but nothing more.) But instead he grossly misled his audience.
At its best the Daily Show is about satirizing the actual reality of American governance in an honest way. Stewart has built up a lot of credibility over the years. A great many people trust him implicitly, believing that while his main objective is to be funny, he also won’t under any circumstances BS them. Yesterday, he betrayed that trust.
Shame on you, Jon Stewart. You’re better than this.
It’s one thing to say, “It’s not his best,” and it’s another to treat it as one of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse.
Ryan Cooper, please get a life.
And They Are So Dumb!
You remember how Dick “Army of Dicks” Armey spilled the beans on how he and the rest of FreedomWorks was basically grifting?
Well, it appears that he confused the conservative Media Research Center, and the liberal Media Matters when he spilled the beans:
There’s been a remarkable amount of drama surrounding Dick Armey’s departure from FreedomWorks, culminating Friday with a stunning report from Media Matters, who interviewed the former House Majority Leader directly. Armey had all kinds of interesting insights to share with the progressive group, including tidbits on pay-for-play agreements with Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and the FreedomWorks’ practice of charging activists to attend free events.
Though many of Armey’s revelations should probably be taken with a grain of salt — the former GOP leader seemed confused about some of the details he shared — there was a larger question that puzzled nearly everyone: why in the world was Dick Armey dishing dirt to Media Matters?
The Daily Caller, a conservative outlet, tracked down the answer.Dick Armey had no idea he was speaking to the left-wing Media Matters organization during an interview last week, he told The Daily Caller Tuesday. Instead, Armey thought he was chatting with the conservative Media Research Center. […]
As for who he thought he was speaking to, Armey asked the Daily Caller, “Who’s the guy with the red beard that always does the show where he points out how biased the press is?” Told he seemed to be referring to the Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell, who does a weekly “Media Mash” segment on Fox News, Armey said, “Yeah, I thought it was Brent Bozell.”
As the saying goes, “ない愚かさはない薬です”.*
If these guys had half a brain, we’d be in trouble. Of course, if they had half a brain. they would not be movement conservatives.
H/t Crooks and Liars.
*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.” Apologies for any inaccuracies in the text, I do not know Japanese.
Let’s just say that I am firmly in the “life sucks zone”.
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The only problem is, the suit is being filed by maybe the biggest douchebag of all time, Hank Greenberg (and his company, Starr International), a man who has not only been proven to be corrupt and a fraud, but who perhaps more than anyone else was responsible for the galactic balance-sheet goat-f%$# that caused AIG’s implosion in the first place. If there is such a person as an innocent AIG shareholder who was harmed by the government’s conduct, it sure as hell isn’t Hank Greenberg.
—Matt Taibbi, on Greenberg’s suit against the US because he did not get well paid enough for running AIG into the ground.
(%$# mine)
FWIW, In an unexpected outbreak of sanity AIG has decided not to join Greenberg’s lawauit.
Still, “Galactic Balance Sheet goat f%$#,” that is good, even by Matt’s high standards.
This is why privacy, and innocent until proved guilty are important.
If your entire life is available to the state security apparatus, they will find something, and so you had better not be inconvenient to said state security apparatus, because they already have the means to destroy you.
You do not want them to be inclined to actually do so.
It is depressing that the truth tellers in our society are cartoonists and comedians.
I am adding cartoonist Zach Weiner to my list of, “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.”
After the idea got shot down by opponents of torture in 2009, Obama is nominating highly vocal torture supporter John Brennan:
President Obama plans to nominate top counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan to lead the CIA, a senior administration official said today.
Brennan, a 25-year veteran of the agency, would take the helm of the CIA in the wake of the resignation of former Army Gen. David Petraeus.
I will be calling my Senators (both Democrats) and asking that both of them to filibuster him. (they won’t, but I am asking)
It is very likely, though it is not certain given the veil of secrecy surrounding this matter that Brennan was an active participant in torture.
The most depressing commentary on this is Glen Greenwald’s observation that there is Obama has succeeded in making opposition to torture a fringe political position:
It is a perfect illustration of the Obama legacy that a person who was untouchable as CIA chief in 2008 because of his support for Bush’s most radical policies is not only Obama’s choice for the same position now, but will encounter very little resistance. Within this change one finds one of the most significant aspects of the Obama presidency: his conversion of what were once highly contentious right-wing policies into harmonious dogma of the DC bipartisan consensus. Then again, given how the CIA operates, one could fairly argue that Brennan’s eagerness to deceive and his long record of supporting radical and unaccountable powers make him the perfect person to run that agency. It seems clear that this is Obama’s calculus.
I can only conclude that Barack Obama, aka the Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever™, is objectively pro torture.
And the morons in Sweden gave him a Nobel Peace Prize.
He is on fire when writing about the nature of the bank bailouts:
………
Through behavior like this, the government has turned the entire financial system into a kind of vast confidence game – a Ponzi-like scam in which the value of just about everything in the system is inflated because of the widespread belief that the government will step in to prevent losses. Clearly, a government that’s already in debt over its eyes for the next million years does not have enough capital on hand to rescue every Citigroup or Regions Bank in the land should they all go bust tomorrow. But the market is behaving as if Daddy will step in to once again pay the rent the next time any or all of these kids sets the couch on fire and skips out on his security deposit. Just like an actual Ponzi scheme, it works only as long as they don’t have to make good on all the promises they’ve made. They’re building an economy based not on real accounting and real numbers, but on belief. And while the signs of growth and recovery in this new faith-based economy may be fake, one aspect of the bailout has been consistently concrete: the broken promises over executive pay.
………
The implications here go far beyond the question of whether Dimon and Co. committed insider trading by buying and selling stock while they had access to material nonpublic information about the bailouts. The broader and more pressing concern is the clear implication that by failing to act, federal regulators have tacitly approved the nondisclosure. Instead of trusting the markets to do the right thing when provided with accurate information, the government has instead channeled Jack Nicholson – and decided that the public just can’t handle the truth.
………
So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we’re essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.
Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.
Seriously, just go read, and then scream at your congresscritters.
John Aravosis wondered how long the boycott of Domino’s Pizza should last beyond Tom Monaghan’s sale of the pizza delivery firm:
The thing is, a lot of people are still ticked at Domino’s for the Monaghan years. I know I am. I still avoid Domino’s when possible, even though I “know” Monaghan is gone. (And most of us didn’t even know about the Romney/Bain connection – they owned the company after Monaghan, though they’re now gone too.)
Like Coors, years after it faced a gay backlash, Domino’s was run by a lot of right-wing jerks during much of its existence, and the company is now trying to figure out how to get rid of some serious baggage. And like Coors, Dominos, Cracker Barrel, Chick-fil-A all give me a bad taste in my mouth, even though the first two have gotten rid of their far-right heritage.
Are liberals being unfair to Domino’s, or Coors or Cracker Barrel? Once bad people sell a company, is it time for us to let bygones be bygones? If Monaghan continues being a jerk, is it time to stop holding Domino’s response for his ongoing actions?
It’s a legitimate question.
I’m not sure how long a boycott for this sort of sh%$ should last, but it should be at least a decade, and probably at least 2.
This is not about being unwilling to let go, it’s about economics: If a boycott goes away as soon as the right wing ratf%$# sells out, then he can sell out for more money.
Any protest must continue for a long enough time to ensure there is no easy/lucrative escape hatch.
Yes, I know that this is in response from a post made over 2 weeks ago, I came across this when I was doing some house cleaning.
This is way too true.
I’m beginning to think that the modern officer corps has more in common with peacocks than they do with the soldiers of yore.
Because he took a crap on my tongue while I slept.
It’s the morning breath from hell.
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At the start of a new Congress, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out teabagger membership cards to the Republican Representatives:
As new members of Congress are sworn in on Thursday, Democrats are looking to brand the incoming Republican class early on. The DCCC is sending out the above “Tea Party membership cards” to the offices of 35 freshman Republicans.
Press releases in their individual districts identify each member as “the newest Tea Party House Republican who will put millionaires ahead of the middle class and dysfunction ahead of progress,” according to DCCC communications director Jesse Ferguson.
This is really what I call “immature College Republican agitprop,” but I still chuckled.
I guess that a lot depends on whose ox is gored.
The US Treasury is now freezing the accounts of cartoonists of mass destruction:
I went to Congo to write a comic book about a terror group — and ended up being labelled a terror supporter myself by the Treasury Department.
The bizarre tale of my graphic novel Army of God, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Congo and Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a window inside a little-known counter-terrorism campaign that captures more than a few innocents in its wide net.
Nearly 12 years since the massive expansion of federal powers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, OFAC’s collateral damage — myself included — is a reminder that defeating terrorists can come at the cost of our freedom.
It began two years ago. In the fall of 2010 I spent a month in the Democratic Republic of Congo reporting on the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal Ugandan rebel group that was chased from its homeland and has spent the last decade hiding out in the forests of eastern Congo. Led by charismatic madman Joseph Kony, the LRA pillages farming villages for supplies, kills or mutilates the adults and enslaves the children.
………
In early December our agent wired [artist Tim] Hamilton his share of the advance, but the money never reached the artist’s account. After a few weeks the agent made some calls. “He was told that the party holding the funds was the federal wire fraud unit which suspected that they were laundering funds for a terrorist organization,” Hamilton says.
On one level, it may seem as if it is not a big deal, but it is.
Basically, this means that they can take everything you have with out any recourse at any time, and if they are wrong, or if they are malicious, it does not matter, because they are above the law, because if anything goes wrong, all they need to do is go, “Yadda, yadda, terrorism.”
We have deliberately created a lawless national security state.
I’m sure there are a few responsible gun owners out there, but the Gun Nuts With Small Penises™ crowd seem determined to show that there is no such thing as a responsible gun owner:
A suburban New York newspaper that ignited a furor by publishing the identities of thousands of residents who hold gun licenses has hired armed security to guard its staff after receiving an intimidating e-mail, a police report said.
Among a “large amount of negative correspondence” that White Plains, New York-based Journal News has received since publishing permit holders’ names was one e-mail in which the sender “wondered what would get in her mail next,” according to a Clarkstown, New York, police report obtained by Reuters on Wednesday.
The editor, Caryn McBride, told police the newspaper hired a private security company whose “employees are armed and will be on site during business hours,” the report said. The guards are protecting the newspaper’s staff and Rockland County offices in West Nyack, New York.
Police told McBride the e-mail did not contain an explicit threat that could compel authorities to take action against the sender. The menacing e-mail was reported to police on December 28.
Let’s see what happens here.
You have an argument over gun control.
The people gun control advocates call gun rights advocates dangerous and crazy.
The gun control advocates respond by threatening the lives of gun control advocates.
QED, gun control advocates are dangerous and crazy.
The very first person goes to jail over CIA torture, and it’s the whistle-blower:
Looking back, John C. Kiriakou admits he should have known better. But when the F.B.I. called him a year ago and invited him to stop by and “help us with a case,” he did not hesitate.
In his years as a C.I.A. operative, after all, Mr. Kiriakou had worked closely with F.B.I. agents overseas. Just months earlier, he had reported to the bureau a recruiting attempt by someone he believed to be an Asian spy.
“Anything for the F.B.I.,” Mr. Kiriakou replied.
Only an hour into what began as a relaxed chat with the two agents — the younger one who traded Pittsburgh Steelers talk with him and the senior investigator with the droopy eye — did he begin to realize just who was the target of their investigation.
Finally, the older agent leaned in close and said, by Mr. Kiriakou’s recollection, “In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that right now we’re executing a search warrant at your house and seizing your electronic devices.”
On Jan. 25, Mr. Kiriakou is scheduled to be sentenced to 30 months in prison as part of a plea deal in which he admitted violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by e-mailing the name of a covert C.I.A. officer to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. The law was passed in 1982, aimed at radical publications that deliberately sought to out undercover agents, exposing their secret work and endangering their lives.
In more than six decades of fraught interaction between the agency and the news media, John Kiriakou is the first current or former C.I.A. officer to be convicted of disclosing classified information to a reporter.
This is about scaring people out of being whistle-blowers.
This is about the “most open administration in history” doing its level best to create a completely secret and unaccountable executive.
This is why I call Barack Obama the worst constitutional law professor ever.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Richard Nixon was the worst president the US had from 1933 to 1973 1974, and the best president the US had from 1969 through 2013.
If that does not make you depressed, then I want whatever it is that you are smoking.
Redskins lost to Seattle.
Sad, but not surprised.
Yesterday, I heard the news that the 271 year old Swiss bank, Weglin, was shut down following a US Department of Justice investigation into their actions supporting tax evasion and money laundering.
It sounded too good to be true, and , as Yves Smith so eloquently points out, it was too good to be true.
The Nickel version is that the bank’s asserts were transferred to another entity, Raiffeisen, and the proceeds likely given to the owners in the weeks power to its being shut down.
Finally, the DoJ is saying NOTHING about whether the got information about the accounts, and the people who used them too avoid taxes.
This its a pretty good tell that they hour no data: If they had, they would be trumpeting it to the heavens, because they would thereby induce people to turn themselves in.
Go read the while thing, including the reader comments.
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155K jobs created in December, basically running in place, and unemployment stayed at 7.8%
In the latest case, we have patent trolls trying to extort money from small businesses for using scanners:
When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.
If he’d paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.
………
“[Hill] was very cordial and very nice,” he told Ars. “He said, if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document—we have a patent that covers that as a process.”
t didn’t seem credible that Hill was demanding money for just using basic office equipment exactly the way it was intended to be used. So Vicinanza clarified:
“So you’re claiming anyone on a network with a scanner owes you a license?” asked Vicinanza. “He said, ‘Yes, that’s correct.’ And at that point, I just lost it.”
The kicker is that the these folks were using newspapers’ “best places to work” lists to send out dunning letters.
Seriously, we need to just stop issuing patents until the system is fixed.
H/t Kevin Drum.
