His decision is not surprising. The Alaska state Lege has a constitutional right to investigate whatever they want.
Category: Corruption
SEC Reauthorizes Faith Based Accounting
It looks like the banks lobbying the SEC has gotten the desired results. The SEC has relaxed rules on “Mark to Market” accounting:
The three-page joint statement today from the SEC and the Financial Accounting Standards Board does not do away with fair value accounting provisions altogether.
But it gives companies more leeway to employ estimates and their own judgment in many cases when they deem the market to be “disorderly” or seized by liquidity problems. It also gives companies room to determine whether the impaired value of their assets is no longer temporary, a conclusion that could trigger massive write-downs.
Not to get in to the minutiae of this, but it appears that they largely gutted mark to market.
This will make any final reckoning worse.
Not Enough Bullets, Part 2 of Who Knows How Many
Alan H. Fishman. former CEO of the former Bank Wamu, got $20 million for his 17 days on the job:
According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, WaMu threw a $7.5 million bonus at Fishman when it hired him on Sept. 8, and guaranteed him an immediate cash severence of $11.6 million — both of which he gets to keep.
He also was eligible for annual bonuses of up to 365 percent of his annual base pay — set at $1 million — to go with millions of shares of company stock.
Fishman does lose out on a big bonus that would have kicked in had he remained on the job through 2009.
We are paying a bunch of Harvard MBAs to fail, and not surprisingly, that’s what they produce, failure.
Of course, the employees and their pensions….C’est caduc.
Stevens Trial Continues
No mistrial for now, but it seems to me that the prosecutors now have to deal with a seriously pissed off judge.
Still, Senator Ted Stephens is clearly as guilty as hell, and it’s marginally easier to get a conviction against a guilty man.
Not Enough Bullets
It looks like former AIG CEO CEO Maurice “Hank” Greenberg will net over a billion dollars on the sale.
He should be looking for dishwasher work.
How to Understand the Economic Crisis
These guys are comedians, but they do a better job of explaining this than journalists and economists.
Must Read on History of Ratings and How they Destroyed Wall Street
When You F*#@ Up a Trial THIS Badly…..
When you look at the trial of Saddam Hussein, you have to start with one fact: He was as guilty as hell. He was so guilty of brutality, genocide, and other crimes against humanity, that it would have been impossible not to get him on something.
But still, the Western lawyers who attempted to create a fair trial say that the trial was neither free nor fair.
When someone is this guilty, why on earth does the Iraqi government feel the need to cheat….Why does the US sponsored Iraqi government feel the need to cheat….Why does the Bush and His Evil Minions&trade Iraqi government feel the need to cheat…And deliver a verdict just days before the 2006 mid terms elections.
Never mind, question answered.
Rick Davis Was Getting Freddie Mac Money Until Last Month
John Sidney McCain III’s campaign manager’s firm was getting $15,000 a month until the government took them over.
Note that Davis is still on the board of Davis & Manafort, and two sources in the story that the money was specifically in order to maintain access to John McCain.
McCain claims to have learned from his Keating 5 experience, but now it appears that he could swim in a sea of knowledge, and emerge completely dry.
Overpaying for Assets is Key to Paulson Plan
Krugman Calls Paulson a Liar
Flat out, and he uses the “L” word, he quotes David Davies, and notes that “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.”:
So, this morning Hank Paulson told a whopper:
We gave you a simple, three-page legislative outline and I thought it would have been presumptuous for us on that outline to come up with an oversight mechanism. That’s the role of Congress, that’s something we’re going to work on together. So if any of you felt that I didn’t believe that we needed oversight: I believe we need oversight. We need oversight.
What the proposal actually did, of course, was explicitly rule out any oversight, plus grant immunity from future review:
Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
He’s right too. Paulson wants no oversight as he bails out his buddies.
Maliki Says that Bush Wanted Changes in Withdrawal for Electoral Advantage
So Nouri al Maliki said in an interview with al-Iraqiya:
MALIKI: Actually, the final date was really the end of 2010 and the period between the end of 2010 and the end of 2011 was for withdrawing the remaining troops from all of Iraq, but they [the Bush administration] asked for a change [in date] due to political circumstances related to the domestic situation [in the US] so it will not be said to the end of 2010 followed by one year for withdrawal but the end of 2011 as a final date. Agreement has been reached on this issue. They are willing to respond positively because they, too, are facing a critical situation.
Impeach Cheney today.
Impeach Bush tomorrow.
Lehman’s New York Staff Still Getting Bonuses
To the tune of $2.5 billion to be distributed amongst 10,000 staff in New York, and a lot of former Lehman employees who are not part of this deal.*
Running the numbers, these folks will be getting ¼ of a million dollars each, despite that many of the folks are the ones who ran the company into the ground.
Not enough bullets.
*And any right thinking people.
Well, He Wasn’t Fired for Fighting Sexual Assault
It turns out that Walt Monegan’s trip to Washington to secure funding for fight child rape was with permission.
The McCain campaign’s response, and they are running the Alaska governor’s office right now, is that he may have been approved to travel, but preventing child rape was not approved by the governor.
Whatever these folks are smoking, I want none of it.
Making a Bad Situation Worse
Well, it appears that the American House fetish and the lobbying of predatory realtors is getting results, as the House Financial Services Committee has approved the markup of H.R. 6694, which re-institutes the insane downpayment assistance program, in which sellers make a payment to non-profits, plus a “service charge”, and the non profits “gift” this to a potential home buyer, so that they can qualify for a FHA loan.
Typical scenario: a home owner has a buyer who has no downpayment for a $100K house, so the home seller “donates” $6000 to to a “non-profit” group, which takes a $500 fee, and “gifts” the remainder to the home buyer, so the home buyer now buys the house at $106,000, which the FHA recognizes as 5% down, and so qualifies for a loan.
Of course, the buyer has still put no money down, and they owe more on the mortgate, and the statistics show a much higher default rate.
It does not put people in houses. It creates a default/foreclosure timebomb.
The Undeniable Lightness of Being a Rich Pig
We are now seeing sob stories out of Wall Street like this:
‘A lot of those people will have to sell their homes, they’re going to cut back on the private jets and the vacations. They may even have to take their kids out of private school,’ said Frank. ‘It’s a total reworking of their lifestyle.’
He added that it’s going to be no easy task.
‘It’s going to be very hard psychologically for these people,’ Frank said. ‘I talked to one guy who had to give up his private jet recently. And he said of all the trials in his life, giving that up was the hardest thing he’s ever done.’
The Chinese have the right idea: A bullet to the back of the head for the folks who managed this fiasco.
H/T Kevin Drum.
Your Daily Palin Update
Well Palin has now gotten her AG to instruct her employees not to honor subpoenas from the state senate, and the Anchorage Daily News cuts them a new one on this.
McCain doesn’t get it. Sarah Palin is not Cindy McCain, and the press won’t sweep this under the carpet for the “Maverick Straight Talker”.
Heck, they wouldn’t sweep it under the carpet for Cindy McCain these days, they’ve been wringing their hands about how McCain now, and when you have a cover-up this blatant, people will keep looking.
Mindless paranoid secrecy is almost always the worst course of action, which is why it’s so ironic that it bit them on the butt with Sarah Palin’s email.
It seems that she was using Yahoo Email for much of her correspondence with staff, and someone from 4chan hacked into her email (here, here, and here), and then posted what they found on Wikileaks.
Note to self: Never ever piss off anyone from 4chan.
Lawyers File Ethics Complaint Against Monica Goodling
They have drafted a letter asking the Virgina Bar to investigate former DoJ lawyer Monica Goodling, which is about the only way that anything close to justice will happen, since Michael “Bush’s Bitch” Mukasey has refused to prosecute clear violations of the law.
Background here.
Now Palin is Now Plagiarizing Her Lies
Remember when political operatives maintained that Sarah Palin’s teleprompter broke and that she had to “wing it”?
Remember, that reports watching the speech, who were in a position to see the teleprompter, and saw that she was reading from a fully working teleprompter, and they could actually read it as she was talking, and that she followed the directions, such as adding emphasis at underlined texts, and pausing when the instruction “pause” was there.
It appears that someone was feeding Neanderbloggers and Drudge a load of crap
Well, now, apparently having run out of her own lies, Palin now feels compelled to use someone else’s lies:
At a fundraiser in Canton, Ohio, this evening, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had an interesting description of her speech to the Republican convention.
“There Ohio was right out in front, right in front of me,” Palin said. “The teleprompter got messed up, I couldn’t follow it, and I just decided I’d just talk to the people in front of me. It was Ohio.”
It really is pathetic when a Republican runs out of lies to tell.
On the bright side for Ms. Palin, I do believe that it is a sign of the coming “Rapture”, which she has been waiting for with baited breath.
Palin Refuses to Cooperate with Investigation
They are claiming that the investigation approved by a unanimous bipartisan vote of the Alaska Senate is too political…Though the announcement came from the McCain Campaign, not the governor’s office.
I gotta check if Lieberman is showing up again on the Intrade Prediction Markets: