It appears that they lobbied Senators Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Daniel Inouye (D-HI) to insert language allowing the services to veto joint bases decisions made by the commission.
Once again, it looks like the USAF’s real core competency is gaming the federal budget process.
According to the article, it looks like the USAF then used this language to blackmail the other services at joint bases more control and more of the budget.
Yep, we have Rupert Mordoch’s New York Post going front page on an article about CPS reporter Lara Logan having an affair in Baghdad.
Imagine that, a war correspondent in theater having an affair.
In any case, I agree with Will Bunch. Lara Logan is being smeared for her criticism of Iraq war coverage, which she has been highly critical of.
This started when she said on the Daily Show, that, “If I were to watch the news that you’re hearing in the United States, I’d just blow my brains out. ‘Cause it would drive me nuts.”
So now, the Republicans are blocking paying doctors through Medicare in order to protect their HMO friends:
But Senate Republicans (and President Bush) don’t like the way the bill finds money for docs by cutting subsidies to Medicare Advantage, the privately administered Medicare plans.
If they needs subsidies, then, “Medicare Advantage, the privately administered Medicare plans”, are less efficient than big government, and hence are government waste, which should be abolished.
The cloture vote failed 58:40, and it needs 60 votes. Kennedy was not there because he has cancer, and McCain was not there because he doesn’t give a damn about doing his job as Senator.
When Republicans complain about earmarks, they are looking at amounts that are in total less than 1/10 of this.
I hope that the Democrats pound them mercilessly on this until election day.
Because if the members of the House Judiciary Committee expect US Attorney General Michael Mukasey to comply with a subpoena regarding documents connected to political scandals*, they have the political acumen of Little Orphan Annie©.
You have to vote on the subpoena, but once the deadline passes, have him arrested.
*DoJ foot dragging on the New Hampshire phone jamming, the US Attorney firings, political interference in the Civil Rights Division, etc.
Stanford University’s law and business schools just completed a review of the various corporate governance rating firms, “which include the Corporate Library and RiskMetrics Group’s ISS Governance Services”, and conclude that their ratings on corporate governance have little to do with whether a company is actually well run.
This is not surprising. When we look at the credit rating firms such as S&P, Moody’s, etc. we see a very similar pattern.
A private ratings agency is always at risk from conflicts of interest.
*Most commonly translated from the Latin as “Who Watches the Watchmen”.
OK, it may be a bit of an exaggeration. It’s true that Coutrywide’s shareholders approved the Bank of America takeover.
And as to the question as to whether BoA got a good deal, or whether they come to regret it, I would note that the state attorneys general of Illinois and California have both filed suit for what amounts to fraud and deceptive business practices against the mortgage lender.
Countrywide’s founder, Angelo Mozilo, aka “the Tanned One”, must be breathing a sigh of relief.
Typical. Money that was supposed to be spent on counter-terrorism was spent on…lord knows what.
Of course Pakistan has been spending our money down south, to counter the Indians, as opposed to up north, where the Taliban is, anyway.
Once again, I am compelled to make the repeat the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:
But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:
- It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
- It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
- It wasn’t in some important way completely f#$@ed up during the execution.
Seriously. I’ve yet to see anything wiser yet, and I’m using the loose definition of the 21st century which includes the year 2000.
In the most recent Supreme Court decision on Gitmo, Scalia noted that 30 former detainees had, “Returned to the Fight”.
Well, thanks to Sabin Willett, whose firm has represented some of those detainees, writing in the Boston Globe, we now have a definition of what this means:
It is a serious allegation, so the lawyers looked into it. It turns out that clients of our firm, who were sent to Albania in 2006, were two of the 30. What fight had they returned to? Abu Bakker Qassim had published an op-ed in The New York Times. Adel Abdul Hakim had given an interview. These press statements were deemed hostile by the Department of Defense.
Surely the Pentagon was joking? They weren’t.
So I can’t speak for the other 28, if indeed there are another 28, but for the two men I do know about, giving hostile interviews constituted “returning to the fight.”
The basic institutions of state security in the United States have become very profoundly pathological indeed.
The DoJ inspector general is now reporting that Bush political appointees used political affiliation in their hiring practices.
It started under Ashcroft, and got worse under abu Gonzalez.
Not a surprise.
The question is what to do about it in January of 2009. There needs to be a real house cleaning.
It’s called the DAP, Down-payment Assistance Program, and it allows buyers to purchase a home with no down payment, even though FHA regulations require 3% down.
The offers — including “100% financing” — are made possible due to down-payment assistance programs run by nonprofit organizations. These programs are funded largely by home builders and also by private homeowners desperate to sell. The seller-funded groups provide enough down-payment money to buyers that they can qualify for a mortgage backed by the Federal Housing Administration, which requires at least a 3% down payment.
Basically, realtors and builders set up non-profits, and the home seller contributes to the non-profit to cover closing costs and down payments, which are made as grants to the buyers.
Of course, that money from the seller gets tacked onto the selling price. So if a condo were to sell for $100K, they would sell it for $110K, with 7K covering closing costs, and 3K covering the down payment required by the FHA.
Net effect: the buyer has no skin in the game.
They now account for 34% of downpayments on FHA loans.
Thankfully, the current FHA overhaul in Congress eliminates this…for a while, at least.
In any case, how about letting the pictures do the talking:
They are threatening to, “cut off financing for as-yet-unspecified programs in Iraq that are not directly in support of U.S. troops,” but in the end, they will once again collapse like a bunch of overcooked broccoli to George W. “@9% Approval” Bush.
Even though it is clear that these deals would “deepen political tensions in Iraq and put our service members in even greater danger,” when push comes to shove, I expect more capitulation from the Dems.
Yes, the American Medical Association just voted to lobby to outlaw home births, because midwives are taking too much of OB/GYN’s business.
I would never have used a midwife or done home delivery with my wife, and if she had wanted it, I would have done everything in my power to make her go to a hospital instead, because she is a poster child for major birthing complications.
But that’s our choice. It’s not a profit center for doctors.
He donated $1000 to the McCain primary campaign, which the good people at Housing Panic found through the NEWSMEAT campaign contribution search engine.
So, the tanned one supports McCain? So not surprised.
I am not surprised, except for the fact that Congress has been so complicit in this coverup:
“The continuing cloud of suspicion is not something I can remove because I only one part of the story,” McClellan said in his opening statement before the House Judiciary Committtee this morning. “Only those who know the underlying truth can bring this to an end. Sadly, they remain silent.”
Yves Smith notes that monoliner bond insurer MBIA, after raising over a billion dollars through an equity offering, is refusing to transfer the proceeds from its holding company to its insurance subsidiary.
It appears that they are doing this because senior executives are paid by the holding company, and not the insurers.
One wonders then, why regulators, in this case Eric Dinallo, the New York State insurance commissioner, aren’t doing something about this, and the answer is blackmail:
The risks associated with the vast, unregulated market for credit default swaps played a crucial role in the bailout of Bear Stearns. Now these financial instruments are taking center stage in another Wall Street drama: whether regulators will let MBIA, the big bond insurance company, renege on a promise to shore up a crucial unit with $900 million in capital.
MBIA has written $137 billion in swaps, which are privately traded insurance contracts that let people bet on companies’ financial health. Most of these contracts stipulate that if MBIA’s bond insurance unit becomes insolvent or is taken over by state regulators, buyers can demand payment immediately.
But if that were to happen, MBIA would have far less money to pay policyholders and owners of municipal bonds backed by the company. So the swaps give MBIA significant leverage over Eric R. Dinallo, the commissioner of the New York State insurance department, who wanted the company to bolster its insurance unit with the $900 million in cash.
As the old saying goes, “If you owe the bank $1000, the bank owns you. But if you owe the bank $1,000,000, you own the bank.”
I’m thinking that perhaps a better solution for New York State regulators might be to find a way to arrest senior management at MBIA, as it appears that their capital raising was clearly fraudulent.
Well, it looks like the Iraqi oil ministry, likely on the advice of the American advisers who work there, have cut some deals with some oile companies for field maintenance
Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for No-Bid Contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.
(emphasis mine)
No bid contracts…says it all.
I was wondering when this shoe would drop.
My take is that she likely did something wrong, though whether it rises to the level of a major crime, I don’t know, because she has a long history of nepotism and favors for friends and relatives, see here and here, and she has done this repeatedly.
It should be an interesting few months.
William Jefferson (D-LA), who was found with $90,000.00 in his freezer, and has since been indicted, is running for another term.
This is an embarrassment.
There is a deal for telco immunity going that Steny Hoyer is shepherding through congress, and as American Civil Liberties Union says, it stinks.
The court review consists of only verifying that the telcos got a letter from Bush and His Evil Minions™. Glenn Greenwald has the skinny on what is going on, and it’s Hoyer who is at the center of passing a law that will cover up for the Bush’s illegal wire tapping (and probably spying on political opponents).
If you want to do something, check out the Blue America PAC vs Retroactive Immunity, which has raised about $180K in the past 24 hours to target someone.
This betrayal goes beyond party politics, so if you live in Hoyer’s district, MD-5, don’t vote for him in the general election.
One bit of bright news in all this is that the New York Times came out against the Telco immunity deal today. What’s more they called for Obama to do something more than just vote against it.
Word up on that. Obama is now the de facto leader of the Democratic party, and he needs to make it clear that this deal is not good for the country.
[Update] I just checked Greewald’s latest, and it now appears that Hoyer is trying to pretend that he hasn’t been working for this for months, but instead it’s all those Bush Blue Dogs that are making him do it.
Bull sh$@!
FWIW, we now know that the targets of the campaign, and the nearly two hundred thousand dollars raised for it, will be Steny Hoyer, Chris Carney, and John Barrow, the latter two having been the most prominent of the Vichy Democrats on this issue.
Note that the primary for Barrow is not until July, and he has an opponent with a lot more progressive cred, Regina Thomas, who I have added to my act blue page so money spent against him could defeat him in July.
No surprise, all of them are big recipients of telco largess by way of campaign contributions.
Your best place for updates is Glenn Greenwald’s blog.
Hey, if it’s not illegal torture, why was so much effort spent covering it up?
The U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday.
“We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques,” Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who’s since retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison to discuss employing interrogation techniques that some have equated with torture. Her comments were recorded in minutes of the meeting that were made public Tuesday. At that same meeting, Beaver also appeared to confirm that U.S. officials at another detention facility — Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — were using sleep deprivation to “break” detainees well before then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved that technique. “True, but officially it is not happening,” she is quoted as having said.
…
These people need to spend the rest of their lives in jail.