Here, the Rude one taking on Sarah Palin.
Very funny….rude…but very funny.
Author: Matthew G. Saroff
Why State Secretaries of State Matter
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat who replaced the Uncle Tom Republican Ken Blackwell, has just moved against voter caging, “Brunner issued a release last week directing that 60-day notices sent by boards of election to voters that are returned as undeliverable cannot be used as the sole reason for canceling an Ohio resident’s voter registration.“
This is why having a Democrat as the chief election official in the state, and why Republicans try for these positions.
Republicans take a page out of Stalin’s book,* “Those who cast the votes, they decide nothing. Those who count the votes, they decide everything.”
*Actually, it’s not his book, it was the memoirs of his secretary, who quoted Stalin as saying this.
McCain Wants to Take Your Health Insurance
You can read the full report from Health Affairs, a medical journal, but the under rated Bob Herbert completely nails the issue when he says, “These are changes that will set in motion nothing less than the dismantling of the employer-based coverage that protects most American families.“
Read both.
Barack Obama: Fire Cass Sunstein Now.
Because he just called Roe v. Wade an unsupportable decision. He does day that it should remain as precedent, underthe principle of stare decisis, but that the decision is not based, “in either the text of the Constitution or its own precedents.”
First, this analysis is just plain wrong, the precedents of Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird, which prohibited states banning contraception on the basis of privacy rights, and which he studiously, ignores is clearly on the path to Roe.
Second is that his embrace of stare decisis would invalidate rown v. Board of Education, the national minimum wage, and the National Labor Relations act.
For Barack Obama to continue to have him as an adviser, or to consider him as a member of the cabinet, or as senior Department of Justice appointment would be a betrayal of his supporters and the Democratic party.
H/T TalkLeft.
Well, It’s a Start
It looks like some states are making the restoration of voting rights for ex-convicts easier, though it would be nice if they were restored once no longer incarcerated.
One of the consequences of the “war on drugs” is that over 5 million people are denied the right to vote, but that’s a feature, Republicans don’t want n*gg*rs to vote.
What Matt Said
Mr. Yglesias is a wise man:
Unlike the guy who runs Lehman Brothers, the guys who clean the bathrooms in the Lehman Brothers office have, as best one can tell, been doing an excellent job. And yet if the company going under results in everyone involved losing their jobs, the guy who runs Lehman will wind up being better off than the guys who clean the bathrooms. This is because in the United States of America, hard work is the way to get ahead.
Madame Guillotine is beginning to look remarkably attractive.
A Good Consequence of the Lehman Failure
It appears that they are shuttering their carbon trading desk.
Anything that kicks carbon trading in the teeth is a good thing. It is bad, incredibly bad, policy.
The stated idea is, “Let’s let Wall Street apply the same practices ant techniques to a world threatening problem, the innovation unleashed will solve that problem.“
The real goal is, “If we create a market mechanism for this sh#@, then I can pull down major fees as an expert in this sh#@, my Ivy League classmates can get commissions whenever someone sells this sh#@, we can get more commissions whenever we repackage these things as sh#@ backed obligations, and I can get a Porsche.“
Market based solutions: Because baby needs a Porsche.
Boeing Continues to Fail Amazingly
In addition to all the other problems with Boeing, it appears that their determination to screw their workers is now preventing the first flight of the 787.
I have no clue as to what Boeing was thinking when, in a year of record profits, it presented its employees what amounted to a pay cut…Actually I have no clue IF Boeing is thinking at all.
Nouriel Roubini and the Collapse of the Shadow Banking System
He is predicting that the current model for investment banks is unsustainable.
He thinks that independent brokerages are done, and will be purchased by some of the mega banks, including extensive foreign ownership and control.
It’s a good read, but the interview below is good too. My favorite quote is, “They’re all toast.”
Pakistani Forces Now Clashing with US Forces
We are now seeing reports that Pakistani troops are firing on US troops, and the Pakistani military is saying that they repelled a US border incursion.
This is why it was so disasterous to take our eye off the ball in Afghanistan. There was a limited window in which to act, and the window is at best rapidly closing at this time.
Bad Foreign Policy Analysis
So now Bloomberg is suggesting that western flight from the Russian markets may drive russia to moderate its position on Georgia.
This is bovine scatology….the people who will flee are the foreign investment banks, and the people who will snap up stuff at depressed prices are Putin supporters, and they will make more money when the money reenters the Russian market, and the net result will be a movement of ownership from transnational corporations to Putin and his cronies.
This is a feature, not a bug.
Brave New Torture Technology
Yep, we now have a report of what is quite literally a pain ray that causes no tissue damage.
How long before this comes home, and this “torture with evidence of torture” device finds it’s way into police interrogation rooms”
Cows, Barn Doors, and the SEC
We now have a report that the SEC will be taking actions to restrict naked short selling. (primer on the practice here)
Of course, they are a bigger problem with small stocks, where someone can naked short shares in a micro cap, and drive the price down, because the stocks that they are selling dwarf the total volume of trading, but the SEC only noticed it when it affected the big guys.
The Problem With Journalists
Will Bunch has an interesting observation regarding the press, that they are almost completely divorced from life around them.
He was reading an account of Len Downie upon his retirement from the Washington Post, and he noted that Downie said that he did not have any friends outside of the paper. Note also that Downie also did not register to vote until he retired.
So Bunch asks the question, “If Len Downie only hung around with other journalists, where did he get his ideas for what was news?”
The answer is, of course, PR flacks, because he has no context to make these decisions on his own.
AIG in Trouble Too
And considering the fact that American International Group is the largest insurer in the world, this is a big deal.
I’m not sure how bad it is, but they just cut a deal with New York State to recapitalize from their subsidiaries, which sounds a lot like eating seed corn, and is normally against regulations, and the Federal Reserve is twisting arms in an attempt to get private firms to help out.
Meanwhile, In Iraq
Imam Fouad Ali Hussein al-Douri, a leader in the so called “Awakening Councils”, was assassinated today, there is now a string of assassinations of Sunni leaders, and call me a cynic, but just as the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis pointed back to al Maliki, I’d guess that his folks are behind this too.
What the War Nerd Said
Gary Brecher makes a very good point, that the Neocons who are suggesting that Georgia needs to be reorganized along the lines of Hezbollah do not have the best interest of the Georgians at heart.
Rather, as the War Nerd so eloquently puts it, “America’s chickenhawks are ready to turn Georgia into a nation of missing-relative-seeking refugees.”:
I’m pretty sure if you asked any Georgians, they’d screech, “Agh! No! We don’t want to live like Hezbollah, cowering in our huts under constant bombardment, raising kids with no prospects but martyrdom!” But then the neocons haven’t asked anybody in Georgia. Safe in their living rooms, they think it’d be a great idea for Georgia, a very unwarlike little middle-class country, to try to imitate the Lebanese Shia who make up Hezbollah’s suicide squads.
Why Save Bear Stearns, and not LEhman
Buried in a very good post by the Angry Bear is this little gem:
But the effect of LEH going out of business would not be so severe as the effect of BS going out of business for one reason that Roubini, for some reason, appears not to have mentioned.
Lehmann has no clearing business.
Had Bear gone out of business, about 30% of the hedge funds in the country would not have been able to execute virtually any transaction for the following thirty days. Not a payment. Not a redemption. Not a trade on a listed exchange. Not a receipt. Not a de-leveraging. Not a swap payment, not a CDS payment, not fulfilling an option exercised against them.
There’s not just a “maybe” about financial collapse in such a scenario; P probably well in excess of 0.9944. $30 billion is a “bargain” in such a situation.
(emphasis mine)
Bear Stearns was a surprise. Lehman was not. This has been bubbling up for months, and the firms have been able to create contingencies to allow for trading in the departure of the firm from the market.
Diving Deeper in the Financial Mess: Lehman and Bankruptcy Laws
Well, it appears that while Lehman technically filed for chapter 11 reorg, because of changes to the laws the effect is much closer to that of a Chapter 7 liquidation, particularly with the 2005 changes to the bankruptcy laws.
The bullet points:
- The holding company has filed for BK, but , its subsidiaries, “its brokerage-dealer subsidiaries, asset management unit, and investment management division”, continue to function.”
- Lehman will try to sell off the good bits.
- Under normal BK procedures, there is a stay on collecting debts, but, “most financial contracts — including securities contracts, swaps, repurchase agreements, commodities contracts, and forward trades — are unaffected by automatic stays.“
- By declaring bankruptcies, it means the creditors can file to collect immediately.
So have this problem:
Now comes the downside potential. The risk is that lots of these commercial counterparties will choose to terminate their financial contracts with Lehman — say, for instance, credit default swaps — all at once, and then try to rehedge themselves all at once, causing the market to seize up.
But the market is already seized up.
The US financial system is in a pit of ugly, and no know knows which way is out.
Answering Joe Biden
Joe Biden asks, “Whatever happened to McCain’s Principles?
There have no principals there since well before John Sidney McCain, III dumped his wife to pursue a rich heiress and enter politics.
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.