There were no failures last week, and I missed the one that happened on the 3rd, but we are definitely seeing a slowdown, which is a good thing
And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.
So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):
That’s me in the red shirt, and the roller coaster, also in red below.
Interestingly enough, I didn’t scream like a little girl.
I was much too busy saying, “Oh sh%$! Oh sh%$! Oh sh%$! Oh sh%$!”
You can click on the images for full sized pictures.
Barack Obama ignored the formal opinions of senior professional legal staff in the Department of Justice on the Libya campaign:
President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.
Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.
But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.
Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.
If there is a defining legacy of the Obama administration, it may be in the formalization of the Nixonian principle that if the President does it, regardless of the settled law, it’s legal.
Perhaps it’s time to dispense with our unique form of government, and move to a parliamentary one, because if there are no constraints on the executive beyond elections, then the political system must be able to force elections at times like this.
Germany held a beauty pageant for cows, and much to my surprise, German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not win:
Forget Germany’s Next Top Model and Heidi Klum. This week, the German gaze was trained on the country’s most beautiful cow. “Krista” became the envy of bovine beauty queens across the land when she won the grand prize at the 2011 German Holstein Show, her second time to take the pageant’s top honor.
Krista successfully defended her 2009 title against a field of much heavier competition than that faced by most other beauty contestants. Of some two million hopeful dairy dames, just over 200 were chosen to lock horns over the grand prize, which comes complete with a trophy and cow-sized sash. Eight finalists strutted their stuff for a panel of jurors in the northern German city of Oldenburg on Thursday night. But it was Krista, described by juror Matthias Zens as “a perfect Holstein,” who won over the jury with her professional demeanor and pleasing physique.
“The udder should be wide and the back high,” said Zens on what makes a winner. With her straight back and strong legs, Krista has risen above the rest of the herd to rake in prizes on the bovine pageant circuit. The black and white bovine beauty has it all: a good figure, great legs and taut skin. As with human beauty contests, sagging is frowned upon. Other coveted traits include bright eyes, alertness and a plumb udder.
It’s different, at most beauty pageants, the contestants do not urinate on the runway.
Meow.
But in either case, the book Go the F%$# to Sleep is a classic.
Anyone who has ever had to put there child to sleep understand this completely
I’m in line for the Fahrenheit roller coaster at Hershey Park.
Straight up, straight down, upside down, and me screaming like a little girl.
Pix may follow.
Posted via mobile.
Two of former Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich’s aides have been indicted on charges of conspiracy to violate Maryland election laws and obstruction of justice relating to robocalls, sent out before polls closed, that suggested that people stay home, because “Governor O’Malley and President Obama have been successful”.
It would be interesting to see what happens if one of them is flipped by prosecutors.
While I don’t think that Bad Hair Bob was involved, he’s really too stupid to be involved in such a plan, I can see his wife, Kendel, giving some sort of assent to the plan.
Which means that it’s an issue that the Republicans will use to scare old people, but Obama and the Congressional Democrats are negotiating draconian cuts in the program, because they have some sort of twisted political suicide pact thing going on:
This would be brutal for the poor, particularly in Republican states, but even in blue ones. Governors are champing at the bit to cut enrollment and increase cost sharing. State budgets are still strained, and Medicaid is among the highest expenditures. Much of Medicaid spending goes to keep poor seniors in nursing homes, so a lot of the cuts would get targeted there. Which means that you can call this the “Force Your Mother-in-Law to Move In With You Act.”Keep in mind that fully half of all the coverage expansions in the Affordable Care Act come from a Medicaid expansion. A removal of MOE [maintenance of effort requirements, which prohibit states from gutting the program] would basically undercut that; even though the federal government would pick up all the costs of the Medicaid expansion, states want to reduce their current level, and so the coverage expansion will just unravel. Or, the feds will put the burden on the states, and the states will just opt out of it. You’re talking about millions and millions of beneficiaries losing their coverage.
Un-dirtyword-believably stupid, particularly when Medicaid is a vehicle for much of the theoretical improvements in coverage under Obama’s precious Affordable Health Care Act.
I’m beginning to think that, notwithstanding his intellect, Obama really is not interested in doing anything beyond checking off boxes on something that resembles a standardized test, whether it makes a difference or not.
Ironically, that is his education policy.
The law legalizing gay marriage in New York has passed the state assembly, but now it now goes to the Senate, where they will pull the football away, in a mirror image of what happened in Maryland.
And if this is true to form, it will be minority Democrats, pressured by homophobic clerics, who will flip and kill the bill.
Initial jobless claims fell, but remained over 400,000, 414 K specifically, with the 4-week moving average remaining flat, with both continuing and emergency claims falling slightly.
It is a little better but the claims numbers are still, in the words of Jimmy McMillan, “Too Damn High.”
Additionally, the Philadelphia Fed’s survey of business outlook fell to a nearly two year row.
But all the very serious people keep saying that “Prosperity is just around the corner.”
The New York Times has discovered that Bush and His Evil Minions™ set the CIA on distinguished professor, and well known blogger, Juan Cole:
A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.
Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.
In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.
It is not clear whether the White House received any damaging material about Professor Cole or whether the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies ever provided any information or spied on him. Mr. Carle said that a memorandum written by his supervisor included derogatory details about Professor Cole, but that it may have been deleted before reaching the White House. Mr. Carle also said he did not know the origins of that information or who at the White House had requested it.
And just in case you are wondering if he is a disgruntled spy who went to the Times, he isn’t. The Times came to him:
Mr. Carle, who retired in 2007, has not previously disclosed his allegations. He did so only after he was approached by The New York Times, which learned of the episode elsewhere. While Mr. Carle, 54, has written a book to be published next month about his role in the interrogation of a terrorism suspect, it does not include his allegations about the White House’s requests concerning the Michigan professor.
My money is on it being someone in Dick Cheney’s office, because it smells like Cheney.
In a significant portion of the United States, life expectancy is falling:
Women in large swaths of the U.S. are dying younger than they were a generation ago, reversing nearly a century of progress in public health and underscoring the rising toll of smoking and record obesity.
Nationwide, life expectancy for American men and women has risen over the last two decades, and some U.S. communities still boast life expectancies as long as any in the world, according to newly released data. But over the last decade, the nation has experienced a widening gap between the most and least healthy places to live. In some parts of the United States, men and women are dying younger on average than their counterparts in nations such as Syria, Panama and Vietnam.
Overall, the United States is falling further behind other industrialized nations, many of which have also made greater strides in cutting child mortality and reducing preventable deaths.
In 737 U.S. counties out of more than 3,000, life expectancies for women declined between 1997 and 2007. For life expectancy to decline in a developed nation is rare. Setbacks on this scale have not been seen in the U.S. since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, according to demographers.
You can find the original article here.
There are some idiots out there who will suggest that it’s because we are too fat*, but the deltas in life expectancy have primarily been through eliminating infant and child mortality, as well as pregnancy related medical issues.
What is going on here is that our medical system is breaking down.
We are undergoing the same collapse of our medical system, albeit more slowly, that occurred towards the end of the USSR, and there was not an outbreak of obesity there.
We have aging and under maintained infrastructure, we are wasting our resources on endless wars and a bloated defense establishment, and we are descending into a morass of corruption and self dealing with no prospect of it being fixed (see Geithner, Tim).
It sounds an awful lot like the declining days of the USSR.
*He says that the same thing happened when we went from hunter-gatherer to farmer, but it misses little facts like:
What really happened is that people could no longer be hunter gatherers because there was not enough land. You need something like 5 square km/year to support a single hunter gatherer, and once population crosses that threshold you move to herding, and eventually to farming, because the alternative is starvation.
life expectancies falling
I guess the rule here, even if you are a Democrat, because they were the ones screaming for him to go, is that unlike Craig, Vitter, Coburn, Ensign, etc., is that it’s not OK if you aren’t a Republican.
The Democrats are such willing hostages to Republican political terrorism that Stockholm Syndrome should be renamed Beltway Democrat syndrome.
The only thing more pathetic is the behavior of the press, which sees fit to treat real scandals from Republicans with decorum, but turns into an (even bigger) freak show when a Democrat does something.
One final note, I would not call Anthony Weiner a dick, because a dick has a head.
This is truly good writing.
She details the machinations that the Obama administration has gone through to avoid making her the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and it ain’t pretty.
Not only does it make justified critiques of the basic policies (the banksters must be protected at all cost), but it details the shortcomings in basic approach that have characterized his first two years in office.
Go read.
If you are in a meeting at work, and you start getting into pirate metaphors, it’s not going to be a good meeting.
But Dennis Kucinich and the other house members who are suing Barack Obama for violating the War Powers Act in Libya are doing the right thing:
Ten House members led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) are filing a complaint in federal court against President Obama for taking military action in Libya without first seeking congressional approval.
Kucinich and Reps. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Howard Coble (R-N.C.), John Duncan (R-Tenn.), Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), John Conyers (D-Mich.) Ron Paul (R-Texas), Michael Capuano (D-Mass.), Tim Johnson (R-Ill.) and Dan Burton (R-Ind.) filed the complaint Wednesday at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
“With regard to the war in Libya, we believe that the law was violated,” Kucinich said in a statement. “We have asked the courts to move to protect the American people from the results of these illegal policies.”
The House members argue that the Obama administration overstepped its constitutional authority by authorizing the use of U.S. military force abroad without first receiving approval from Congress. U.S. forces have been involved in the campaign against Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi for 88 days.
Critics argue that Obama violated the 1973 War Powers Resolution by failing to seek congressional approval for the mission.
It would be interesting to see how the Supreme Court might handle this.
I’ve always felt that the requirement for Senate to declare war implies that there should be a legislative requirement for the approval of war, but these days, no one seems to take this particularly seriously.
I would note that Libya appears to be a particularly cut and dried case though, there is no security threat to the US, and the primary reason that we are involved seems to be that the US Military didn’t want to be left out of the party started by French and British neo-Colonial political calculus.
When he notes that all the crimes committed against him, crimes which were a significant part of the impeachment case that drove Richard M. Nixon from office under threat of impeachment, are now legal:
Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, might take bittersweet satisfaction to know that he was not the last smart president to prolong unjustifiably a senseless, unwinnable war, at great cost in human life. (And his aide Henry Kissinger was not the last American official to win an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.)
He would probably also feel vindicated (and envious) that ALL the crimes he committed against me–which forced his resignation facing impeachment–are now legal.
That includes burglarizing my former psychoanalyst’s office (for material to blackmail me into silence), warrantless wiretapping, using the CIA against an American citizen in the US, and authorizing a White House hit squad to “incapacitate me totally” (on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1971). All the above were to prevent me from exposing guilty secrets of his own administration that went beyond the Pentagon Papers. But under George W. Bush and Barack Obama,with the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendment Act, and (for the hit squad) President Obama’s executive orders. they have all become legal.
There is no further need for present or future presidents to commit obstructions of justice (like Nixon’s bribes to potential witnesses) to conceal such acts. Under the new laws, Nixon would have stayed in office, and the Vietnam War would have continued at least several more years.
Likewise, where Nixon was the first president in history to use the 54-year-old Espionage Act to indict an American (me) for unauthorized disclosures to the American people (it had previously been used, as intended, exclusively against spies), he would be impressed to see that President Obama has now brought five such indictments against leaks, almost twice as many as all previous presidents put together (three).
He could only admire Obama’s boldness in using the same Espionage Act provisions used against me–almost surely unconstitutional used against disclosures to the American press and public in my day, less surely under the current Supreme Court–to indict Thomas Drake, a classic whistleblower who exposed illegality and waste in the NSA. [ED Note: The Drake Case Collapsed, and the government settled on a plea for a no-jail-time misdemeanor]
Drake’s trial begins on June 13, the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers. If Nixon were alive, he might well choose to attend.
While the erosions of civil liberties began under Reagan, and picked up steam under Bush II, it’s clear that that Obama has devoted the power and prestige of his office to further expanding the role of the Presidency and normalizing what are extreme views of executive power.
Obama is like Nixon, without the charm.
Two pieces of economic news today, retail sales fell for the first time in 11 months, and thge National Federation of Independent Business’s survey of small business shows that they intend to reduce hiring.
At the rate that this is going, we will have President Palin in 2013, and I will be making Aliyah to Israel.
Courtesy of Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:
Best way to make Weiner story go away is for new prominent Democrat to tell him to resign each day. Ideally early in each news cycle.
In 1998, the much delayed sequel to the fantastically popular first person shooter Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem Forever, was declared one of the top pieces of vaporware (promised but not delivered software) of all time.
Well, an era has ended because today, Duke Nukem Forever was released:
Even though his game is finally in stores, Duke Nukem will forever be remembered as the very personification of vaporware.
Wired.com created the Vaporware Awards many years ago to honor products that were hyped, promoted and promised but never released. Tech and gaming companies love to throw smoke and mirrors in our faces and make us think that barely begun (or simply imaginary) products are humming along quite smoothly; the Vaporware Awards attempt to cut through the spin.
Duke Nukem Forever was mentioned in our Vaporware Awards 12 times as the developers of the first-person shooter let years upon years go by without shipping the game.
Released Tuesday for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, Duke Nukem Forever doesn’t live up to the years of hype. But simply shipping the unshippable game should be counted as an accomplishment for 2K Games and Gearbox Software, which stepped in last year to get Duke back on track after the collapse of developer 3D Realms.
The reviews are mixed. The gaming press hates it, but at least one person, Bladesmith on the SP BBS, commented that, “Seriously, the reviewers don’t get the joke. This is a throwback AND an homage to the old school 80s Duke.”
As for me, I won’t be getting it. I never played the original, so I think that I would not get the humor.