I missed the 53rd bank failure of the year last week, Community Bank of the Ozarks.
I think that it is highly unlikely that a bank will be closed next week, so it looks to be 53 for the year, which is a pretty good number.
Here is a graph of the FDIC closings.
Less than ⅓ the closings of 2010. Not so bad.
So, the NRA has finally made a statement about how to prevent more gun deaths, at schools, and their solution is lots of people with high powered weapons, and if that gets too expensive, they are suggesting amateur volunteers with guns:
After a weeklong silence, the National Rifle Association announced Friday that it wants to arm security officers at every school in the country, implicating violent video games, the news media and lax law enforcement as being far more to blame for the recent rash of mass shootings than guns.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A. vice president, said at a media event that was interrupted by protesters. One held up a banner saying, “N.R.A. Killing Our Kids.”
The N.R.A.’s plan for countering school shootings, coming a week after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was met with widespread derision from school administrators, law enforcement officials and politicians, with some critics calling it “delusional” and “paranoid.” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, said arming schools would not make them safer.
Even conservative politicians who had voiced support this week for arming more school officers did not rush to embrace the N.R.A.’s plan.
………
Mr. LaPierre said his organization would fund and develop a program called the National Model School Shield Program, to work with schools to arm and train school guards, including retired police officers and volunteers. The gun rights group named Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas who has been a strong supporter, to lead a task force to develop the program.
………
But what the N.R.A. proposed would expand the use of armed officers nationwide and make greater use of not just police officers, but armed volunteers — including retired police officers and reservists — to patrol school grounds. The organization offered no estimates of the cost.
(emphasis mine)
Seriously, you want any Johnny off the street and hang out with MY children? I don’t think so.
Tell you what, how we levy a tax on gun and ammunition sales to cover all this sh%$?
BTW, the Universe is having nothing of Mr. LaPierre’s bullshit. As they were giving their non-press conference (no questions allowed), another mass shooting was happening in Pennsylvania, and it happened despite the presence in the area of peace officers with guns:
The National Rifle Association today held its first press conference since last week’s deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, and the takeaway was clear: We need more guns.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.
He went on to call for an armed police officer to be stationed in “every single school” across America to prevent further mass shootings, as critics tried to point out that armed law enforcement officials might not be the panacea the NRA thinks it is.
But before they could finish their sentence, the counterargument made itself as news broke of a mass shooting event in Pennsylvania with multiple casualties, including state troopers.
According to local reports out of Blair County, at least four people were killed and five more were injured in a shooting spree near Altoona. The gunman is said to be among the dead, and at least two state troopers were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.
WPXI’s Courtney Brennan says she was told by emergency officials that the shooting suspect “was ‘mobile’ at one point and went up and down a rural road and shot victims.”
No additional information is available at this time, but a spokeswoman told the Altoona Mirror it was “a relatively large crime scene.”
Seriously, The Onion needs to shut down and lay off all of its own staff, because they have been trumped by the world we actually have.
How do I know this, because in 1998, Chuck Hagel aggressively gay bashed James Hormel when he was nominated to be ambassador to Luxemberg:
The nation’s largest LGBT rights group on Thursday called “unacceptable” comments former Sen. Chuck Hagel made in 1998 opposing a Clinton administration nominee because he was “openly aggressively gay.”
The 14-year-old comments about Clinton’s nominee to be ambassador to Luxembourg, James Hormel, came to light Thursday as Hagel is a front-runner to be nominated by President Obama for defense secretary in his second term.
Human Rights Campaign spokesman Michael Cole-Schwartz also said, however, that “we do not know … how [Hagel’]s views have evolved over time” and that the group “look[s] forward to hearing from Senator Hagel on these issues should he be nominated.”
The Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, which works to support out LGBT presidential appointees, noted that times have changed since Hormel’s nomination.
This would not be a SecDef who will move aggressively on removing the last vestiges of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” from the military.
His nomination, absent a serious and sincere mea culpa, would be a finger in the eye of the LGBT community, which would give Obama the sort of “Sister Souljah moment” opportunity that he loves so much, which is why I think Hagel will be nominated by Obama.
It appears to me that if you are going to do your level best to be horrible to teachers, and to make their lives a living hell, it’s Probably not a good idea to let them bring firearms to work and to give them military training:
Tennessee has emerged this week as a center of the “the answer is more guns in schools” sentiment following the Newtown, Conn. elementary school shooting.
A member of the Republican-controlled legislature plans during its upcoming session to introduce a bill that would allow the state to pay for secretly armed teachers in classrooms so, the sponsor told TPM, potential shooters don’t know who has a gun and who doesn’t.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) has said the idea will be part of his discussions about how to prevent a shooting like the one in Newtown from happening in the Volunteer State.
This is not quite as stupid as McArdle’s suggestion that we brainwash 6 year old children into gang tackling gun toting maniacs, but it’s pretty f%$#ing close.
I am waiting for The Onion to announce mass layoffs, because they can no longer compete with reality.
As in “Kos” of Daily Kos, who is thoroughly unimpressed with Obama appearing to cede ground on core Democratic Party values:
If President Barack Obama has a flaw, it’s his obviously overwhelming desire to appear reasonable and conciliatory and “work together” to find “compromise” and “get things done”. Bipartisanly. With a sane, reasonable, conciliatory opposition, that approach would make sense. But after four years of getting slammed by Republicans eager to destroy his presidency, Obama still hasn’t learned the lesson. He still thinks he’s going to get rewarded for being the “adult in the room.” Yeah, everything I’ve put inside scare quotes is a joke. A bad, painful joke.
So there’s nothing better than headlines like this one, in the Washington Post, to deliver the lesson to the White House to, well, just quit being the Capitulator In Chief:A rough 24 hours for the White House
You see, Obama had drawn a line in the sand, and then—to no one’s surprise—ended up capitulating on everything he said he’d never capitulate on.
While I think that Kos is entitled, and in fact justified in his disappointment, but I think that he is being naive about what is going on.
Barack Obama is not negotiating with himself, and he is not incompetent, he is getting exactly what he wants.
He is a conservative “Blue Dog in everything but name” Democrat; he is a Reagan revolution “Democrat” who thinks that our social safety net is too generous, and that taxes on the rich will destroy the economy.
Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest solution is usually the best.
You have two alternate theories.
The 1st theory is that Obama is unable to learn and he is a poor negotiator, but he went to Harvard Law, which is arguably one of the best training grounds for negotiation in the country, and was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review, which means that he had to out do the greatest legal minds of his generation.
The 2nd theory is that this is pretty much what Obama wants.
So, which theory seems simpler to you?
The shock treatment liberalization of the USSR and the former Warsaw Pact Nations, led by largely Larry Summers, and looted extensively by Summers protege Andrei Shleifer, resulted in over a million deaths:
As many as one million working-age men died due to the economic shock of mass privatisation policies followed by post-communist countries in the 1990s, according to a new study published in The Lancet.
The Oxford-led study measured the relationship between death rates and the pace and scale of privatisation in 25 countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, dating back to the early 1990s. They found that mass privatisation came at a human cost: with an average surge in the number of deaths of 13 per cent or the equivalent of about one million lives.
The rapid privatisation programme, part of a plan known by economists as ‘shock therapy’, led to a 56 per cent increase in unemployment, which the study says played an important role in explaining why privatisation claimed so many lives. Many employers provided extensive health and social care for their employees, so through privatisation workers experienced the ‘double whammy’ of losing not only their livelihood but also their means of surviving the crisis.
Yes, this is a 3½ year old story, but I just found out about this today, and I thought that I should comment.
Running an economy by, and for the banksters, and the privitization of government assets during the breakup of the USSR and WarPac was an invitation for the finance types to steal as much as they could carry, does more than impoverish people.
It kills people.
If you look at these numbers, and see this, plus the arbitrage in world food markets that had prices (and malnutrition) rising, the dismantling of the Greek healthcare system, etc. it could be argued that the extreme free market policies espoused by the US since at least the Carter administration have killed more people than all the wars over that period.
The refrain of the free market mousketeers out there is not about freedom or free markets, it rather about a kleptocratic and parasitic society whose primary purpose is to impoverish the rest of us to their benefit.
Robert Bork has died at 85.
Between his role in the Saturday Night Massacre, his hypocrisy in opposing most lawsuits and suing the Yale club for his clumsiness, and his almost single handedly emasculating anti-trust enforcement, he has a lot ot answer for.
I’m sure you have heard of the Instagram thing, where they came out with new terms of service which said that they could sell your photographs, and you did not get anything.
It’s a classic Facebook move, but it really does not bother me, because I don’t “get” instagram.
If I want to funky things to photos I snap with my camera phone, I’ll do it on my PC on an old copy of Paint Shop Pro.*
That being said, I really don’t get Facebook either. I appreciate its huge user base, and I signed up so that I could mirror my blog there, boosting eyeballs.
In the process I did reconnect with a bunch of old friends, but again, that’s largely a function of the user base, not the site.
One of the problems is that it appears that every upgrade makes the totality of the experience worse.
The latest innovation is that Facebook will be adding auto start videos to its video feed:
Get ready for video ads in your news feed.
Facebook is set to unveil a new video-ad product in the first half of next year in its largest attempt to date to attract big swaths of ad dollars from TV advertisers, according to several industry executives who have been briefed on the company’s plans over the past few weeks.
………
In what’s sure to be a controversial move, the visual component of the Facebook video ads will start playing automatically — a dynamic known as “autoplay” — according to two of the executives. Facebook is still debating whether to have the audio component of the ads activated automatically as well, one of these people said.
On the desktop version of Facebook, the video ads are expected to grab a user’s attention by expanding out of the news feed into webpage real estate in both the left and right columns — or rails — of the screen. Facebook is also working on a way to ensure that the video ads stand out on the mobile apps as well, though it is unclear how exactly the company will accomplish this.
I guess that they decided that the whole anal probe ad server thing just wasn’t evil enough.
I do not get it. Are already running their server farms on power generated by incinerating harp seal pups, and claiming that it was “green” energy.
Isn’t that evil enough for them?
Damn, he needs to buy a white Persian cat and a bond villain lair, and be done with it.
*BTW, a big f%$# you to the folks Adobe® who bought the makers of the program, JASC, and shut them down a couple of years later, because they did not want the product, a fairly capable and easy to use image editor, they just wanted to shut down a competitor.
And I have to preface this by, “No, this is not The Onion.”
It appears that Quebec police have foiled a massive theft from the Canadian Strategic Maple Syrup Reserves:
It was a culinary whodunit involving a daring heist, a golden bounty, and now, some allegedly sticky-fingered suspects.
Police in Quebec announced the arrest of three men in the theft of 6 million lbs. of maple syrup from a provincial warehouse, a haul estimated at $18-million and enough to smother a Himalayan mountain of waffles and pancakes.
The arrests mark a badly-needed break in a case that circled the globe and pulled in law-enforcement agents operating in two countries and three provinces, all deployed in the retrieval of one of Canada’s most cherished resources.
The theft was discovered in August at a depôt rented by the Quebec Federation of Maple Syrup Producers, in what police believe was an inside job. Some 10,000 barrels of stockpiled syrup, part of the federation’s carefully guarded “International Strategic Reserve,” had gone missing. The Fort Knox-style controls reflect the fact that Quebec dominates the world market in maple syrup and carefully controls the commodity’s price and supply.
(emphasis mine)
Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve? Seriously?
Something is seriously weird here.
Also: If they have a International Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve T-shirt, or a baseball cap, I want one.
In her latest spewing (no direct link, ever) she suggests that we need to train school children to gang rush gunmen:
I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.
Ummm ……… You ignorant Randroid sociopath, you are are unaware of the physical capabilities of a 6 year-old child.
Let me illustrate this with pictures.
This is 8-12 6 year old children:
This is the worst ranked defense in the NFL, the New Orleans Saints:
While I could concede that the Saints (What is with those pink shoes and gloves) might be able to take down an adult armed with a wet noodle, those kids could not take down a llama, or for that matter, the Dali Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet.
Repeating for the benefit of the terminally stupid:
|
Children with llama
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New Orleans Saints:
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Dali Lama
|
And the Dali Lama, and the aforementioned 2 “l” llama, are both more likely to take down a gunman armed with an assault rifle than are the children.
Why does this child or privilege and political patronage have a job?
Because no one involved with the enterprise deserves a penny of money.
Glenn Greenwald rightly calls it a, “CIA hagiography, [and] pernicious propaganda.”
Spencer Ackerman, of Danger Room, admires the torture scenes and how they show moral ambiguity, but this is completely wrong.
You see, in a private letter to members of Congress Leon Panetta stated that torture had no role in locating bin Laden, though in public, he continued to defend the CIA’s torture directorate in public.
There is no ambiguity here. Our torture served no purpose but to satisfy the sadism of certain elements of the state security apparatus, along with people above them in the chain of command. **cough** Dick Cheney **cough**
There is no ambiguity. We did not derive actionable intelligence from torture. All we did was give Dick Cheney an erection.
FWIW,it should that the the European Court of Human Rights has officially declared that the CIA engaged in systematic torture. (See also here)
The fact that Obama and Holder have been complicit in indemnifying, and covering this up makes them more than reprehensible human beings, it makes them war criminals as well.
(on edit)
I am not suggesting that you torrent Bigelow’s other works, though I wouldn’t object to it. I’m not gonna watch any of it.
Yes, the West Virginia Democrat (so-called) who literally shot holes in a copy of Obamacare for his campaign, is calling for meaningful gun control:
A stream of Democrats in Congress including a prominent senator known for his support for the firearms lobby have backed President Barack Obama’s call for stronger gun controls but few Republicans have broken ranks to join them in the wake of the Connecticut school shooting.
Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democratic senator with an “A rating” from the National Rifle Association, marking him out as a strong defender of gun rights, told MSNBC that it was time to move “beyond the rhetoric” on the issue of guns.
“I want to call all our friends in the NRA, sit down and have this discussion,” he said. “Bring them into it. They have to be at the table. We all have to.”
Mr Manchin did not detail what changes he supported; nor so far has Mr Obama, who indicated in his speech at a memorial service in Newtown, Connecticut, on Sunday evening, that he will pursue legislation to try to reduce firearm violence.
Call me a cynic, but I don’t think that his commitment to change will last beyond the first proposal to close the gun show loophole, but it is still kind of a remarkable development.
She really isn’t. Rather, Liza Long is describing the issues involved with raising her son, an extremely intelligent, and very troubled 13 year old., from the mom of a troubled adolescent, but there is a bigger issue that it obliquely address we look at the most prominent mass shootings in the past few years, they seem to be marked by the complete breakdown of the mental health infrastructure in this country.
Starting with Ronald Reagan, we have systematically dismantled our mental health infrastructure, so now we have the the emergency room, jails, and acute inpatient facilities.
For chronic, less severe mental health problems, there is nothing out there, except, “Take 3 pills daily,” or moving to some place with a less antediluvian public health system, like Canada, or Spain, or Portugal, or India(!), or Egypt(!!), or Greece (until a year ago, when Angela Merkel demanded that they adopt the US’s 3rd world health system because Greek pain equals German votes).
North Korea’s satellite is actually in orbit, though it appears to be tumbling out of control:
After 14 years of trying, North Korea has finally joined the countries capable of launching a satellite into orbit. But the success was short-lived. The nation’s space program is also experiencing the bitterness of the failure to keep its spacecraft stable.
North Korea succeeded Dec. 11 on its six attempt to orbit what officials there call an Earth-observation satellite. The U.S. led a group of nations , including Russia and China, that warned North Korea not to proceed with the mission. China has since expressed “regret” over it.
The launch technology can also be used to support the country ‘s ballistic missile program .
A U.S. defense official suggests the satellite is tumbling in its polar orbit. Strategic Command, which tracks orbiting objects, referred questions to the Pentagon. A spokeswoman there said she would not comment on classified intelligence matters.
One observer who tracked the spacecraft with night-vision goggles said it was “flickering” and produced an intermittent trace on a time-exposure photograph, which could suggest tumbling.
What is significant here is not the ballistic missile capability that this shows, because this rocket science isn’t exactly ……… rocket science.
Yes, I know, it technically is rocket science, and from an engineering and technical perspective it is significant, but a ballistic missile aimed at the west coast would need to impart less than ½ the kinetic energy to the payload.
It’s been clear that this has been well within the Kim’s capabilities for years.
What is significant is now that any attempt to prevent testing related to ballistic missiles will now have to clearly show that it is not almost entirely related to weapons.
While there is support in the international community to prevent the development of explicitly military long range rocket capability, the idea that the United States, it’s NATO allies, Russia, China, Israel, etc. should be allowed to hold a hegemony on such a technology will be anathema to most other nations in the world.
This is particularly true because the only nation put at threat by this, though South Korea and Japan are clearly at risk from shorter ranged rockets, is the United States.
One of put cats, Hummus, has gone missing, and we are scouring the neighborhood.
If you see this cat, please contact me.
Posted via mobile.
I don’t just mean the NRA. I just don’t mean the sociopathic Talibaptists who say that it’s because we do not pray to the right God. I mean all of us.
After every shooting we, and I mean all of us, are told by the Gun Nuts With Small Penises™ that it’s not the time to talk about it, and so some dead kids, mall shoppers, etc. are consigned to the memory hole.
Now it’s 28 people, including 20 children at Newtown Elementary School in Connecticut.
BTW, there is a special place in hell for White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who jumbed with both feet on the “we must not talk about it” meme.
BTW, there was a school attack in China today, 22 people attacked, WITH A KNIFE.
There were no deaths.
I understand that the NRA is a bunch of scary people to your average politician. We need to be even scarier.
There is an old story from the heyday of the Soviet Union. As part of their May Day celebrations they were parading their latest weapon systems down the street in front of the Kremlin. There was a long column of their newest tanks, followed by a row of tractors pulling missiles. Behind these weapons were four pick-up trucks carrying older men in business suits waving to the crowds.
Seeing this display, the Communist party boss turned to his defense secretary. He praised the tanks and missiles and then said that he didn’t understand the men in business suits. The defense secretary explained that these men were economists, and “their destructive capacity is incredible.”
H/t Dean Baker
Joe Firestone notes that we are starting to see coverage in the media of the trillion dollar platinum coin:
Did the MSM’s new wave of commentaries on platinum coin seigniorage (PCS) miss the really big story about it? Of course, I think it did, and I’ll continue my review of the MSM commentaries with the efforts of Chris Hayes at MSNBC, substituting as host on the Rachel Maddow show (12/05 at 9:20 PM); and John Carney at CNBC (12/06 at 11:54 AM). This is my second review post on this subject.
Platinum Coin Seigniorage is the idea that the US Treasury can use its right to print coins or arbitrary value, (the Federal Reserve has this power with regard to paper and electronic currency) which can then be used to pay down the debt by depositing at the Federal Reserve.
I think that this is a good thing, and so does Firestone, but he takes issue with a couple of points made by Hayes and Carney.
First, he objects to their characterization that such an action is unlikely to happen. I disagree.
I understand his point, that the legal and economic barriers to doing this are not great, but the psychological and political barriers, particularly for two people as wedded to economic and financial orthodoxy as Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner does make the possibility that this strategy would be implemented to be vanishingly small.
The area where I disagree is his argument that using the coin won’t cause inflation.
While it is clear that if the coins are used exclusively to retire debt held by the Fed will not have much inflationary effect, Federal Reserve held Treasury Bonds are basically an accounting trick.
That being said, if you start retiring other debt, that money has to go somewhere, and if the trillions parked in US government securities need to find another place to park, one could expect these funds to slosh around and this would have an inflationary effect.
My more significant area of disagreement is his assumption that inflation is a bad thing, which is why he argues against the potential inflationary impacts.
I do not think that inflation right now is a bad thing. Given that we have a significant debt overhang, and inflation serves to devalue debt, favoring the debtor over the creditor, I think that inflation is a good thing.
In a very real way, we are in a position very similar to that at the end of the 1800s, when William Jennings Bryan gave his “Cross of Gold” speech.
Seigniorage is today’s free silver, and much like free silver, it is not a likely to be implemented, except as a bargaining strategy.
Not only is Angela Merkel’s hard money policies impoverishing much of the Euro Zone, which might cause the currency zone to break up, but it looks like it’s going to lead to the dissolution of Spain:
The center-right Catalan nationalist bloc CiU and the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) on Wednesday reached an agreement to call for a referendum on independence for Catalonia within two years.
The deal paves the way for Artur Mas to remain premier of the region. The CiU emerged as the biggest party in regional elections held last month but fell short of the absolute majority it was seeking. ERC was the second most voted party. The two sides still have to agree on the budget for next year. The accord on the referendum states that it must be held before the end of 2014 but does not give a specific date.
In a parallel development, the CiU, the ERC and other Catalan parties — with the exception of the local branch of the ruling Popular Party — reached an agreement not to implement the reform of the education system put forward by Education Minister José Ignacio Wert, which restores Castilian Spanish to the same level in the classroom as co-official regional languages such as Basque or Catalan.
The accord says the parties will adhere to the Catalan Education Law, which promotes immersion in the Catalan language. The parties described Wert’s proposals as “unacceptable” as they “prevent linguistic immersion by segregating pupils on the basis of language.”
Seriously, the pain caucus in the Euro Zone (Angela is their most senior member) is laying waste to everything that they touch.
If you can count, and make an educated guess as to how many Republican Congresscritters are batsh%$ insane teabaggers, it’s pretty clear that a greater proportion of Democrats in the House have to vote for a budget/tax proposal.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday escalated her opposition to hiking Medicare’s eligibility age, warning Republican leaders that it’s a non-starter as part of the lame-duck fiscal talks.
“Don’t even think about raising the Medicare age,” she said during her weekly press briefing in the Capitol. “We are not throwing America’s seniors over the cliff to give a tax cut to the wealthiest people in America. We have clarity on that.”
Nancy Pelosi is not trying to convince Boehner or McConnell not to cut entitlements, she’s offering a shot across Obama’s bow.
Even the Teabagger back benchers understand the politics of trying to pass cuts to Social Security and Medicare without any Democratic votes is political suicide, so even if Obama cuts a deal with the Republicans, they cannot afford to vote for it alone.
