This is odd. He will be resigning in January to take a job at a Washington think tank.
Thankfully, the district is very blue, but his decision is out of the blue, so I’m wondering if something odd is going here, and I do not mean the coke and prostitutes:
It goes without saying that Stephen Colbert is a genius.
I give it a 7 out of 10.
You know, despite all those folks in Washington, DC helping him and raising money for him, the people of Pennsylvania really do not like Arlen Specter, with only 31% of voters wanting him reelected.
And in New Jersey, the governor’s race is too close to call, with Christie and Corzine separated by just 1% in the Quinnipiac poll. There is the same margin in the PPP poll. (PDF link)
Pat Leahy has introduced a bill to eliminate the insurance companies antitrust exemption, and the entire Sentate Democratic leadership is cosponsoring it.
Here is Chuck Schumer explaining the basics:
According to accounts of the minutes, not only are they not looking at winging down their sh$%pile for cash program, but there are a number of members who want the program expanded. (See also here and here)
Unfortunately, boosting stock prices by giving money to banks for worthless assets does not get people back to work, and it could be argued that it creates the illusion of a recovery that makes banking reform that much more difficult.
I’m really starting to like this guy.*
I’m told Dem Rep. Grayson will hold a press conference this afternoon in D.C. to unveil a petition to Reid bearing more than 90,000 signatures, collected by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, insisting that “any Democratic senators who support a Republican attempt to block a vote on health care reform should be stripped of their leadership titles.”
While it is clear that Harry Reid could not do this on his own, he would need backing from other people in the senate leadership, as well as the White House, if he can’t keep Democrats from filibustering healthcare reform, why should we pull the lever for Democrats?
*In a 110% purely heterosexual kind of way, of course, as the General would say.
As much as I think that the crossing of arbitrary numbers is bullsh#@, and I think that covering the daily swings of the market is bullsh#@, and I think that the Dow Jones is perhaps an even bigger load of bullsh#@, the fact that the DJIA topped 10,000 today is the obvious lede in today’s economics news.
The Dow closed at 10015.86, the highest number in over a year.
It should also be noted this makes the return on the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the past 10 years roughly 0%.
I still think that this is a dead cat bounce, fueled largely by the Federal Reserve printing money and laundering it into the stock market through the banks.
It appears that the Federal Reserve is similarly dubious about the meaning of the recent rally, as the newly released FOMC Minutes make notes about “Considerable Uncertainty” about the strength of the recovery, once the stimulus package wraps up.
When one looks at things like falling retail sales in September with the expiration of “cash for clunkers”, (though the number did beat expectations) and US business inventories falling in August, there is little sign that all this money doing anything but creating an equities bubble.
In real estate, we are seeing mortgage applications fall again as rates for the 30 year fixed mortgage head back above 5%.
The energy and currency markets are ecstatic about breaking the 10K barrier, which drove oil above $75/bbl for the first time in almost exactly a year, and because people are optimistic, and hence no longer looking for a safe haven, the Dollar weakened to $1.4924:€1.0000, the lowest number in 14 months.
So, it appears that the House of Saud, whose two businesses are shaking the world down for oil, and shaking down observant Muslims on Haj to Mecca are now saying that they want compensation if the world starts burning less oil.
They are claiming that, “assisting us as oil-exporting countries in achieving economic diversification,” is basic fairness.
Ummm….You are getting plenty of money now. Put your royal family on a more reasonable allowance, stop bankrolling a Neanderthal view of Islam around the world, and spend that money in diversifying your damn economy.
You have at least a decade before anything changes to do this. If you choose not to, you can go Cheney yourselves.
Tell Rush it was only businessWell it appears that Dave Checketts, who is heading a group looking to buy the St. Louis Rams, has given Rush Limbaugh the old heave-ho.
I guess that they thought that hiring the nations most prominent sex-tourist/junkie/racist bigot would be bad for business.
See this Rush? 
It’s the world’s smallest guitar, and it’s playing just for you.
It appears that a deal has been agreed to regarding President Manuel Zelaya. (also here)
Whether or not Zelaya needed to be removed from office, what happened was a coup. He was abducted at gunpoint by the military and put in exile: That’s a coup.
If there had been a vote in parliament, or an order from the courts to arrest him, that would be a legal removal.
I will note here that the lack of involvement of Obama and the State Department is both striking and depressing.
I give you Rush Limbaugh has been selected to judge this year’s Miss America Contest.
Well, what the hell do you think that he was doing when returned from the Dominican Republican with a bunch of Viagra®?
Let me give you a hint, it rhymes with “confusing spittle toys.”
They want to run against Democrats pretending to be Republican lite.
That’s why, despite promises of big bucks from the RNC and NRCC, they can’t find anyone to run against Alan Grayson in what is a pretty closely divided district in Florid.
Seriously, here is the video, where he calls himself a “cow on the tracks,” followed by a video of a meeting of a train and a cow.
This man is not a politician, he is a performance artist pretending to be the head of the RNC.
Warning: bad word in video.
Cow 0: Train 1
Let’s Send a Senator a Package of White Powder! That’s the Ticket!
John Cole reads Redstate, so the rest of us don’t have to, and he comes across one of the stupidest things yet written this millennium, by Eric Erickson, the “editor” of Redstate.
Yes, he is actually suggesting that people mail packages of a white powdery substance to a US Senator.
Un-dirtyword-believable. Was he dropped on his head at birth or something?
H/t Atrios.
I have to agree with Dean Baker when he excoriates New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin for this bit of crap:
That Treasury bills were trading for less than 1 percent interest, as if they were no better than cash, as if the full faith of the government had suddenly become meaningless.
When you have people who lend you money, and they ask for less interest from you, which is the position of the government when they sell Treasuries, it means that they have more faith in you, not less.
The issue was not that people stopped trusting the government as Sorkin implies, it is that people are desperate for Government debt, because the lost faith in everything else.
I’ve done a quick google, and it appears that he’s also one of the idiots who took the thoroughly debunked $70/hour pay rate propaganda GM workers, which included the costs of those workers who were already retired, and ran with it.
I Googled Mr. Sorkin, so see if this was perhaps yet another innumerate journalist covering finance, and while I know when he earned his degree (BS, in 1999), and where he earned his degree (Cornell University), I cannot determine what he earned his degree in, and hence the degree to which is actually able to count.
My guess is that he got it in pastry baking.
The guy taking point on repealing the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the Senate is Joseph Lieberman?
We are living in strange times.
H/T AMERICAblog
I sent my observations to Revere at Effects Measure, and he sent me a link to flu reports, and it does appear that cases are ramping up in our region, and October isn’t even ½ over.
This is going to be a bad flu season.
The vote was 14-9, with President Olympia Snowe voting with Democrats, but she said very clearly that she is only voting this way today.
You know if a couple of Dems had voted against the bill, like Rockefeller, who has been leading the charge for a real public option, and Wyden, who got screwed by Baucus, the measure would still have passed by 12-11, and a shot would have been fired across the bow of morons like Baucus and the Nelson twins.
Of course, now the press is wringing its hands at the likelihood that Snowe may not get Huchison’s position as ranking member of the Commerce Committee, when Kay Baily Hutichison leaves to run for governor against Rick “Goodhair” Perry….My heart bleeds. It’s clear that she has no interest in voting for real healthcare reform.
In the least surprising news of the day, it turns that the insurance industry’s biggest bitch in Congress, Senator Joe Lieberman, is taking the insurance companies’ line, and supporting the status quote.
Well, if you are a small business that relies on CIT for your credit, you have a problem, because the company’s CEO is resigning as a likely prelude to bankruptcy.
There are over a million small and medium sized businesses that rely on CIT for their credit.
Additionally, the meltdown among the monoliners continues apace, with Fitch downgrading Assured Guaranty from AA+ to AA, which, given the fact that their business is basically renting out their credit rating, they are pretty close to “toast” status.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, investor confidence in Germany has fallen for the first time in 3 months, down to 56 September’s 57.7 and well below the forecast of 58.8.
Meanwhile, we are seeing increased demand for Treasuries because foreign investors think that they have become cheap with the falling dollar, and investors are expecting a rebound in the dollar when the Federal Reserve finally does tighten monetary policy.
It appears that this optimism also pushed the price of oil to $74.15/bbl.
