Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Of Course It’s Rahm

No Comments

I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

The House Hispanic Caucus is blaming Rahm Emanuel for the efforts to completely exclude illegal aliens from the health care system.

While I understand the argument that illegals should not get taxpayer money, to the degree that they participate in the plan, it lowers the cost for the rest of us, so this is literally cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

Rahm Emanuel, and the Obama White House, are shocked (see pic), shocked, to find that there are people accusing them of race baiting on this bill.

Well, it’s not surprising, Emanuel has been demagoguing the immigration issue, with the help of his DINO friend, and clay headed quarterback Heath Shuler for years.

It took a revolt of the House Hispanic Caucus to stop him last time.

Rahm Emanuel’s modus operandi has always been to sh%$ on Democratic core constituencies wherever possible, and this has Rahm’s fingerprints all over it.

What’s more, looking at a time-line of his career, it’s pretty clear that if Rahm wants it, it’s bad for the Democrats.

Wrong!

No Comments

Nancy Pelosi is now saying that any financial transaction tax must be internationally agreed on:

Any tax imposed on financial transactions would have to take effect internationally to keep Wall Street jobs and related business from moving overseas, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday.

“It would have to be an international rule, not just a U.S. rule,” Pelosi said at a news conference. “We couldn’t do it alone, we’d have to do it as an international initiative.”

This is wrong on a number of levels:

  • There is already such a tax in the UK, and it has been there for years, and London’s “The Street” still rivals Wall Street.
  • The US had a tax on stock purchases well into the 1960s, and it did not chase investors over seas.
  • The idea that much of the financial industry would go elsewhere is a bad thing is simply misguided. Above a certain proportion of GDP, it becomes a source of parasitic loss, and detracts from our economic well-being.
  • If we wait for international consensus, it will never happen.

I’m just saying.

Zimbabwe Update

No Comments

The big news is the political fight over a bill to reform the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, which after much conflict, was finally passed by Parliament.

What likely led to this meeting of the minds was evidence that the incompetent and corrupt management of RBZ Director Gideon Gono was driving away potential donors and foreign investors.

That being said, I do not think that the RBZ bill was why China has signed an $8 billion investment deal.

In any case, Gono was last seen attempting to strong-arm banks into lending to expropriated farms, which is not surprising as the ZANU-PF is stepping up its farm seizures for corrupt bureaucrats program.

In any case, the unity government is holding cabinet meetings again, which is a good sign, I guess.

Of more significance is the fact that Botswana President Ian Khama is calling for new elections and explicitly blaming the ZANU-PF for the lack of progress.

It’s nice that someone involved the SADC “Enable Mugabe Program” is pushing back.

Additionally, we are starting to see protests in Europe against the SADC’s support of Mugabe: Zimbabwe Vigil has petitioned the EU to suspend all aid to members of the SADC, which is a start.

More significant, though may be the fact that PM Morgan Tsvangirai is to meet with Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, current chairman of the AU.

This is a positive development for a number of reasons:

  • Gadaffi won’t run like a scared kitten at Mugabe’s accusations of being a “neocolonialist stooge”, because, after all, Ronald Reagan tried to kill him, and he blew up Pan Am flight 103.
  • As head of the AU, he words have a lot of influence.
  • As an oil exporter, his dollars have a lot of influence.
  • Gadaffi is very interested in getting credibility on the world stage, and by taking on Mugabe aggressively, he gets that credibility with almost no risk involved.

So, after massive smuggling, murders by the authorities, and forced labor, the Kimberley Process decides against suspending Zimbabwe’s certification as a being not “conflict diamonds”, despite a
report from their own investigators saying that they should be suspended.

This reveals the Kimberly process a complete and utter joke, and on queue, once the threat of suspension is lifted, the New Reclamation Group Ltd. mining company sweeps in with a contract.

There is a promise by the Zimbabwe government not to export diamonds until measures are in place to prevent abuse, but I don’t trust this very much, if it comes from the Prime Minister’s office, then it means nothing, and if it comes from Mugabe, it’s a flat out lie.

Of note, The Rapaport Group and the RapNet Diamond Trading Network have announced that they are “implementing an immediate trading ban on all diamonds from Zimbabwe due to severe human rights violations in Marange,” and Leber Jeweler Inc. has announced the same.

Meanwhile, outside of the diamond trade, things continue apace, with Mugabe and the ZANU-PF planning to introduce a law which would require that foreign owned companies be majority black owned. Note: not even the majority locally owned, this is determined by the pigmentation of the equity holders.

ZANU-PF has become the party of Apartheid in Zimbabwe.

We also have continued use of the state security apparatus to intimidate the opposition, with the head of the national trade union being arrested on trumped up charges, as well as the increasingly bizarre trial of deputy agriculture minister-designate Roy Bennett.

What do we have on the case of Bennett, we have a judge who made statements at the trial of the chief witness against Bennett that indicate bias. This is important because this witness, Peter Hitschmann, has recanted his testimony and alleged that it was extracted by torture.

We also have the police presenting weapons that were not seized from Bennett’s house as evidence, and that the Defence is has a request to have the police log books on this matter made available to them, and the police, as well as the attorney general, are vociferously fighting this.

The Crazy Will Not End

No Comments

A 52% Of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the election for Barack Obama in 2008.

This is not going to end well. These people are even stronger than the folks who claimed that Ross Perot stole the election for Clinton in 1992.

One needs to understand the difference between the opposition and the enemy, and understand that you cannot negotiate with the former.

Unfortunately, you can count the former in without running out of fingers.

This is a Good Idea

No Comments

Once again, Sheila Bair shows that she, a George W. Bush holdover, is the only one in this administration who gets it.

She is proposing that the FDIC require that the rates paid underwriters and ratings agencies be determined by the performance of the instruments that they handle:

he Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. may force underwriters and raters of asset-backed securities created by banks to be compensated based on the bonds’ performance, an agency official said.

Such a requirement may be part of new rules for bank securitizations that the FDIC staff proposes at an agency board meeting next month, Michael Krimminger, special adviser for policy to FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, said today in a telephone interview.

I’m sure that Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner hates this idea, because it makes his Wall Street peeps responsible for their actions, but that’s how he rolls.

Unfortunately, the scope is limited, because the FDIC’s rules only apply to banks, and not their parent companies, but this is an idea that should be implemented industry wide.

It would cost Wall Street a lot of money, but f$#@ them, they have a lot of our money to begin with.

God Bless the Onion

No Comments

Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be:

…..

“Right there in the preamble, the authors make their priorities clear: ‘one nation under God,'” said Mortensen, attributing to the Constitution a line from the Pledge of Allegiance, which itself did not include any reference to a deity until 1954. “Well, there’s a reason they put that right at the top.”

“Men like Madison and Jefferson were moved by the ideals of Christianity, and wanted the United States to reflect those values as a Christian nation,” continued Mortensen, referring to the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison, considered by many historians to be an atheist, and Thomas Jefferson, an Enlightenment-era thinker who rejected the divinity of Christ and was in France at the time the document was written. “The words on the page speak for themselves.”

…..

Brilliant.

OK, this is Scary

No Comments

Remember yesterday, when I said that 1 in 16 (6.25%) homes was delinquent or in foreclosure?

That number counted only those people who were more than 60 days delinquent, and it counted all homeowners.

If you count all delinquent mortgages, not just 60+ days, and do so as a percentage of the mortgages, not homeowners, then 14.41% of all mortgages were either behind a payment or in foreclosure, the highest number recorded since this statistic started being collected by the Mortgage Bankers’ Association in 1972.

That’s 1 in 7 mortgages.

We are unbelievably screwed.

Economics Update

No Comments
Click for full size


The Number Needs to be Under 400,000
H/t Calculated Risk

The Index of Leading Economic Indicators rose for the 7th straight month, indicating that a recovery is underway, as does the Philadelphia Bank of the Federal Reserve’s survey of manufacturing hitting 16.7, the highest level since June, 2007.

Unemployment though, is not cooperating, with initial unemployment claims unchanged from last week, they are still 505,000, unemployed is still on a pace to increase.

Basically, if it is above 400K, it still sucks, and this applies to the 4 week moving average too, which fell to 514,000, down 6,500

The continuing claims numbers are better, down 39,000 to 5.61 million, but still pretty grim too.

I would note that the continuing claims number does not count people who have moved to extended benefits, and that jumped 119,000 to 4.16 million.

You do the math 39,000 on the up side, 119,000 on the down side, gives us 80,000 of ugly.

In any case, concerns about continued growth, which I think were driven by the lack of improvement in first time claims, has people fleeing to safety again, with yields on 3-month Treasury Bill maturing in January going negative for the first time since December of last year, because people are willing to pay to keep their money safe for the next month or so..

Additionally, we have the Bank of Japan sending out signals that it will be keeping rates low, because it is concerned about deflation.

These concerns have driven oil down and the dollar and yen up.

This is What You Get When You Go For Bipartisanship

No Comments

Not only were there bogus tax cuts in the unemployment extension, in order to pick up a few Republican votes, it now appears that the extended benefits will expire at year’s end, because they were paying attention to the end of the year when they passed this bill just 2 weeks ago.

If the Republicans want to stop a bill like this, one that has a huge majority supporting it, they should be made to express their opposition on the floor. Spending a few months cajoling them is counter productive.

Stewart on Palin

No Comments

When he says:

When you peel back the pretty, shooty layers of the Palin onion, there’s no onion. It’s just a conservative boiler plate mad lib: ‘Freedom is good and taxes are–ooh I need an adjective–how about, I don’t know, silly?’ And the worst part it’s a mad lib delivered as though it were the hard-earned wisdom of a life well lived.

It’s just magical, and it starts at 3:40, though the first part is amusing too.

It’s not as good as Stephen Colbert’s takedown of her (scroll down). But it is very good.

The Senate Healthcare Bill is Out

No Comments

And, no surprise, it is much weaker tea than the house version:

Here is how the merged Senate bill compares to the legislation passed in the House. The merged Senate legislation has lower affordability standards, covers less people, invests less in prevention, does not require all large employers to provide health insurance, and includes a weaker public option. But the bill goes further in controlling health care spending and reducing the deficit.

I still don’t think that we will get a bill that will provide meaningful healthcare reform.

Too many people *cough* Barack Obama *cough* just want something that they can call healthcare reform.

Is Pop Musician Bryan Adams Being Investigated For His Involvement in a Child Prostitution Ring?

No Comments

Of course not. The only crime of Bryan Adams is that he makes crappy music. From a quick look at the Wiki, it appears that he does charity, though I think that his support of PETA is misguided, and so I have no hostility to him, though if one of his song’s comes on, I will change the station.

In perusing his Wiki page, I also discovered that he also does photography, and appears to be pretty good at this, having won some awards.

So, why do I post this? Because Lindsay Beyerstein, aka Majikthise, had a post on the Runners’ World photos of Sarah Palin that ended up in Newsweek, and in her initial post, she named listed the prographer of record as Bryan Adams, when the photographer was actually Brian Adams.

It’s not surprising that she got a complaint from Mr. Adams’ representatives, after all that’s their job, but their threats were over the top:

Maybe Palin didn’t realize that the photographer, Brian Adams, was depicting her this way. If so, he totally fucked her over. But I think she was on board with the concept. If Palin had assailed Runner’s World for making fun of her, I might now take her complaint about Newsweek seriously. She liked the Runner’s World spread, though. She thought it was appropriate. [NB: In an earlier version of this post, I misspelled Brian Adams’ name “Bryan Adams.” Today, I got an email from a firm called Web Sheriff telling me that they’d take legal action if I didn’t apologize to the rock star Bryan Adams and ACI for any injury I might have caused to his reputation. So, I sincerely apologize to Bryan Adams. I wouldn’t want my name associated with these ridiculous pictures either.]

(emphasis original)

Take legal action? What the f$#@ is wrong with these folks?

Needless to say, when folks like this (Web Sheriff, not Mr. Adams) engage in dick swinging like this, they deserve all the satire that they receive.

As to Mr. Adams, I would suggest that you retain someone with a clue to protect your reputation on line, though the best way to improve your reputation would be to stop making record albums.

BTW, it appears that Web Sheriff is a British firm, and Britain’s nutzo libel laws might very well be behind WS’s attitude.

They Can’t Even Get Arrested in This Town

No Comments

I am referring, of course to the group of Christo-Fascist bigot whack-doodles who call themselves that Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, who protested the expansion to the hate crimes law outside Department of Justice headquarters.

It turns out that the law requires, that one explicitly plan, or actively incite violence against a protected group, so they could not get themselves arrested, though they did attract counter protesters, who quickly owned them:

No hands were cuffed. In fact, the few cops in attendance were paying no attention to the speakers, instead talking among themselves and checking their BlackBerrys.

The evangelical activists had been hoping to provoke arrest, because, as organizer Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission put it, “we’d have standing to challenge the law.” But their prayers were not answered. Nobody was arrested, which wasn’t surprising: To run afoul of the new law, you need to “plan or prepare for an act of physical violence” or “incite an imminent act of physical violence.”

Instead of getting arrested, the ministers got something else: A couple of dozen gay activists, surrounding them with rainbow flags and signs announcing “Gaga for Gay Rights” and “I Am a Love Warrior.” By the end, the gay rights activists had taken over the lectern and the sound system and were holding their own news conference denouncing the ministers.

The kicker to all this:

Cass turned angrily to the AV guy. “We’re not on the clock, are we?” He turned with equal anger to Valk. “You guys gonna help us pay for the microphones?”

The gay activist smiled. “God,” he said, “works in mysterious ways.”

In this case, God took the form of Chuck Fazio, from DC Podiums. Fazio was hired by the religious conservatives to provide the sound system for the event, but upon learning of their cause, he decided to donate his proceeds to the gay rights activists and to give them a chance at the microphone before shutting down the amplifiers. “I don’t want bad karma,” he explained, noting with some pride that the lectern they were using was the same one used by Borat on a recent Washington visit.

(emphasis mine)

Heh.

Paul Krugman Has a Very Good Point

No Comments

He usually does, but in this case, his point is good even by his standards.

Specifically, he says that the bank bailout that Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner and His Evil Minions™ was so badly executed, and so without consequences to the people who made this mess, that it has completely soured the public on any further attempt by the government to fix the problem:

…..

So could the feds have negotiated a haircut? Yes. It might not have been that much money, but it would have had a lot of symbolic importance. And that matters.

Brad DeLong says that the loss of public trust due to the kid-gloves treatment of bankers has raised the probability of another Great Depression, because the public won’t support another round of bailouts even if it becomes desperately necessary. I agree — but I think the bigger cost is that we’ve greatly increased the chance of a Japanese-style lost decade, with I would now give roughly even odds of happening. Why? Because bank-friendly policies have squandered public trust in all government action: try talking to the general public about stimulus, and it’s all confounded in their minds with the deeply unpopular bailouts.

(emphasis original)

Krugman is talking about Geithner’s decision to pay off AIG’s swaps to the counter parties, like that great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,* Goldman Sachs at 100¢ on the dollar, which was both stupid and highly unusual:

But Wall Street doesn’t work like that, and never has.

Big financial institutions are a small club, with a shared interest in sustaining the system. Ever since the days of JP Morgan it has been standard practice, in times of crisis, to get major players together in a room and get them to forgo short-term profit maximization on behalf of the industry interests. It happened in the Panic of 1907; it happened in the Latin American debt crisis of the 80s; it happened in the LTCM bailout, which was financed by private firms, not the feds.

I fear that these actions, amongst others, have completely soured the American public on the idea of any government bailout.

To quote a subordinate, who was speaking to Captain Tupolev as they were about to be sunk by their own torpedo, “You arrogant ass. You’ve killed us!”

Let me make this clear: This sad state of affairs is not Geithner’s fault. It would be absurd, and stupid to say, “If only the Czar knew.” This is going on, and continues to go on, because this is what Barack Obama wants.

He has people around him, like Paul Volker, who have been giving him contrary advice, and he chooses not to listen to them.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

Texas May Have Outlawed Straight Marriage

No Comments

Barbara Ann Radnofsky, Democratic candidate for Texas Attorney General, gave a speech in which she said that the 2005 amendment to the Texas State Constitution bans all forms of marriage:

The amendment, approved by the Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by voters, declares that “marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.” But the troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:

“This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”

Architects of the amendment included the clause to ban same-sex civil unions and domestic partnerships. But Radnofsky, who was a member of the powerhouse Vinson & Elkins law firm in Houston for 27 years until retiring in 2006, says the wording of Subsection B effectively “eliminates marriage in Texas,” including common-law marriages.

A strict reading of the law does seem to indicate that this is true, since marriage is a, “Legal status identical or similar to marriage,” it appears that marriage is illegal in Texas.

Oopsie.

The late, and much missed, Molly Ivins used to say that Texas was, “Mississippi with good roads,” but not it appears that it appears that Texas is “Mississippi with good roads, and no brains.”

Well, at least they are safe from zombie hordes.