This is a serious problem, but ordering your top official on sexual abuse to ignore a Congressional subpoena only makes it look like you are trying to cover up the problem….because you ARE covering up the problem.
The only real question is whether this is a systemic problem with the military, or an artifact of the military being broken by Iraq.
Still the statistics, 41% of female veterans saying that they have been raped and an 8% prosecution rate, are mind boggling if only half accurate.
The FCC took a vote to order Comcast to stop throttling internet applications.
What is interesting is the pressure that Republicans put on FCC chairman Kevin Martin to vote for Comcast having the right to throttle applications.
Here is a question for you, “Are the Republicans f%$#ing insane?!?!?”
Seriously, I can think of no entity in American life more universally loathed than the cable companies, and the Republicans were going on record supporting these folks?
Between a Karadzic and Holbrooke, I won’t venture a guess on who to trust, as I’ve never believed that Holbrooke’s casual slip about Valerie Plame was unintentional.
Holbrook could have promised this, or he could have not promised this, or he could have said it in a private moment with no intention of following through with his promise.
I don’t know, but I do not trust Richard Holbrooke.
Well, it looks like our friends in the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, helped plan the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.
I believe that there is a serious need to reevaluate our relationship with Pakistan, and make it a bit more conditional.
His name was Bruce Ivins, and it appears that his arrest was imminent.
More important than the possibility, and no evidence has been presented, that the Anthrax mailer has been identified is the question about who lied to the press about the presence of Bentonite in the spores.
Not only was this completely untrue, there were none in the samples, but it was used to point a finger at Iraq, which, unlike the US, used Bentonite in its bio-weapons program.
Glenn Breenwald has a rundown of how the press, ABC in particular, were used to finger Iraq for the Anthrax by mentioning non-existent Bentonite.
Who were the government sources who were lying to the press? Was Bruce Ivins one of them? Was this a part of a concerted effort to gin up support for the attack on Iraq?
Because it is now clear that US intelligence operatives were torturing detainees at the British base of Diego Garcia.
Tony Blair, pack your toothbrush.
We have a straight news story that calls out his hypocrisy
RACINE, Wis. — Sen. John McCain continues to slam rival Barack Obama for wanting to raise taxes on Social Security, even as he periodically explains that he might be willing to do the same.
Pretty amazing. They are actually checking out what he says.
Then there is a columnist who literally asks, “Is John McCain Stupid?” and says that “This isn’t a flip-flop. It’s a sex-change operation.”
And he loses Howie “Mr. Conflict of Interest” Kurtz, whose wife is a Republican consultant, when he describes McCain as having, “gone tabloid“.
So now various countries’ nuclear power industries have a green light to enter into business arrangements with India for civilian nuclear power.
My emotions are mixed on all this, because I don’t see how this won’t benefit their nuclear weapons program.
Well, first, and least important is the appearance on Wikileaks of a document on the fast track process which seems to imply that the fast track approval of the Microsoft® OOXML document standard was improper.
Someone with more knowledge than me needs to check it out though, it’s only 2 pages.
Of more note, is that Microsoft® will natively support ODF in Office. The head of Griffin Brown, the organization nominally in charge of maintaining the ODF standard thinks that this will relegate OOXML to second place status, but I’m more inclined to believe that this is an attempt to “embrace and extend” (damage) ODF to the maximum degree possible.
This time, it’s his chief foreign policy guy, Randy Scheunemann, who Achmed Chalabi, Iranian agent, corrupt banker, and general con man calls a “Close Friend.”
As Lionel Beehner puts it, “What puzzles me is his long and distinguished résumé of being wrong on pretty much every major foreign policy issue of our time.”
The Republicans, having a phony issue, the kind that they like best, that they think that they can run with, offshore drilling, have vowed to block everything until they get a vote on the issue.
Well, it looks like the Dems are calling their bluff, and daring them to block a troop funding bill which includes:
Why does the Republican party hate the troops?
Linen ‘n Things and SHOEQ Shoe Pavilion, both filing Chapter 11, reorganization, as opposed to Chapter 7, liquidation.
I’m just not sure what.
I’m checking the Bloomberg financial news, and I come across this story, all of two paragraphs, about conducting all the trades for credit default swaps through a clearinghouse of some kind.
Some of the names that planning to do this are, “JPMorgan Chase & Co., Deutsche Bank AG and Morgan Stanley,” and the article further goes on to state that, “The clearinghouse would be designed to absorb losses in the event a major market-maker fails.”
Considering the value of the CDS market, which is roughly equal to that of world GDP, I gotta figure that something bad is heading down the pipeline, and that the big players are looking to offload it onto either stupid investors and/or the taxpayers.
Can anyone translate this into meaningful English?
The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) just postponed a rule that would require that off balance sheet entities* onto their books for one year.
They were getting a lot of pressure from banks and their allies on Congress about this.
The question is: what are they hiding, and at least part of the answer is:
Many lenders made profits in the run-up to the subprime- mortgage crisis by selling pools of loans to off-balance-sheet trusts known as qualified special purpose entities, or QSPEs, which repackaged the pools into mortgage-backed securities. Some banks then sold those securities to other off-balance-sheet vehicles they sponsored, such as so-called asset-backed commercial paper conduits.
*Things like “mortgages and credit-card receivables.”
Specifically, the called him an uppity N*****, when they accused of him playing the race card.
I think that by November, Senator John McCain will sound a lot like Senator Theodore Bilbo.
When generating employment numbers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)uses something called a Birth/Death adjustment, which is supposed to account for small new businesses that it misses in its surveys.
Well, the always quotable Barry Ritholtz has a question, is anyone at the BLS looking at the “death” part of the model?
Specifically, commercial bankruptcies are up 45%, but the BLS is still using their Birth/Death model to increase employment numbers.
Henry Waxman (D-CA) is Blackwater International’s misrepresentation of itself as a small business to get contracts.
If fraud can be shown, they could be declared ineligible for future government contracts, which would, thankfully, put them out of business.
As Waxman explained in a memo (PDF) accompanying the launch of the three investigations, they each hinge on Blackwater’s self-classification of its workers as contractors rather than employees. Waxman argues that classifying security personnel as contractors has allowed Blackwater to apply for small business contracts for which it wasn’t eligible, underpay income taxes and workers benefits, and avoid complying with DOL anti-discrimination requirements for federal contractors.
As useless as Pelosi is sometimes, it’s good for Waxman to have subpoena power.
The US Navy has proposed ending production at 2 Zumwalt class DDG-1000, and making up the difference with additional DDG-51s, and incumbent Republican Susan Collins opposes this while Democratic challenger Tom Allen supports it.
The total amount of dollars from the Navy would be similar, but the Burkes have more local content, as the Zumwalts are made from modules from all around the country (the better to spread the pork around to many Congressional districts)and then assembled at Bath Iron Works, so the Burkes mean more money for Maine, which should be a selling point for Allen.
If there is anything to be learned from the disastrous counter-insurgency experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is that the use of air power must be kept to a minimum, because the collateral damage crates more supporters for the insurgents.
Of course, this bit of knowledge appears not to have registered with the USAF, which is looking at an expansion of its role as US troops draw down.
This is why we need to be completely out. Every bomb we drop risks creating anothere Osama bin Laden.
Yep, the Rand Corporation just released a report on how to fight terror, and as right wing as they are, they still say that intelligence and law enforcement are the way to fight terrorism. Throwing soldiers at the problem does not work.