That was always the question, was he lying for the policy purposes of Bush and His Evil Minions™, or simply because he is a liar
It’s now confirmed that he lies because he has some problems. Seriously.
This time he is doing it about a myth that has been debunked on Snopes, specifically he claimed in a speech that he “heard the tape” of the exchange in which an officer on an aircraft carrier demanded that a lighthouse change course.
In truth the Navy debunked this a decade ago.
Maybe I’ve grown hard hearted in my middle age, but somehow, the plight of upper management at Bear Stearns does not inspire the empathy in me that it does Landon Thomas Jr. of the New York Times.
Bear Stearns has always been one of the shadier brokerages, with line fuzzing being a part of their investment strategy, so I’m just not upset that James E. Cayne “billionaire just over a year ago when Bear’s stock soared past $160, his 5.8 million shares are now worth about $28 million at Monday’s closing price of $4.8”.
Nor am I distressed that, “Some executives had moved quickly, putting their weekend homes on the market”.
Because of their work there are now people with no home at all.
And then there are the poor investors, “Bear executives were not the only big losers. Joseph Lewis, the Bahamas-based financier, invested $1 billion at prices above $100 last year, and top institutional investors like Morgan Stanley, Legg Mason and Barrow, Hanley, Mewhinney & Strauss, a value investor in Dallas, have been recent buyers of the stock.”
Boo F*&%ing Hoo.
Representatives Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Kendrick Meek have declined to support Democratic candidates running against Republicans incumbents in Florida.
Here’s the kicker. If you want a house leadership position, and Meek is a member of the 30-Something Working Group, and has been a vice chairman of the DCCC, and Wasserman Schultz is co-chair of the Red to Blue committee.
These are leadership positions. If you take those positions, you have an obligation to do your damn job.
I don’t care if your daughter is running as a Republican, and her alleged rapist is running as a Democrat, you work for the Democrat. If you can’t hack it, then go and be a back bencher.
We need to go after both of these folks in the 2010 primaries, hard.
Money quote on the real reason:
However, Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report, which tracks political campaigns, said the lack of support from top Democrats could make donors leery.
”Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a favorite of leadership, somebody on the move,” Rothenberg said. “When somebody like that doesn’t want to be a major player in taking on a Republican, that’s a signal.”
Yet Rothenberg says the situation is not without precedent: He noted several Republican and Democratic senators from the same states honor nonaggression pacts.
Both Meek and Wasserman Schultz have benefited from a close affiliation with the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, which since its founding in 2003 has contributed $22,000 to Wasserman Schultz’s campaign committee and $10,500 to Meek’s.
Wasserman Schultz said the PAC support played no role in her decision, but she acknowledges she’s closer to the Republican incumbents on Cuba issues than she is to the Democratic challengers, who favor easing restrictions on family travel to the island.
When Castro dies, can we send tham all back to Cuba? Let them f$%# up that country.
Well, for those of you who were wondering if the corruption case against, “Celebrity pathologist Cyril Wecht” was politically motivated, the fact 24 of the counts filed against Wecht involve the sum of $3.06.
Nope….Not missing a decimal point. Three dollars and six cents. Not three hundred dollars, not three millions, three dollars.
Nope, nothing political here.
He had some people working for both his private practice, and for the county, and this is a Federal case, because he is a Democrat.
The crux of their case:
Wilson noted the work of Eileen Young, who was Wecht’s top administrative aide in the coroner’s office. Despite being paid a county salary, Wilson said Young spent the bulk of her time in the county office as “office manager” for Wecht’s private practice.
Wilson said the evidence showed that, for 2004 alone, the correspondence Young mailed or faxed brought $790,000 in revenues to Wecht’s private practice.
So, Wilson might have made some faxes or phone calls on county time, and they are literally trying to make a federal case out of this.
This is the sort of thing where the local DA gets him removed, and he gets a fine, if it’s true.
I’m still trying to get my head around the whole concept of “celebrity pathologist” thing though.
I really don’t want to know what a “celebrity proctologist” is.
I’m not normally on the side of overpaid chief executives, but Joe Nacchio is the exception.*
Nacchio was convicted of insider trading, but this has ju
st been overturned by the appellate court, and remanded back to the lower court, with a the old judge being removed from the case.
This is noteworthy, because much of the financial problems resulted from Qwest refusing to execute surveillance against the American public when requested to do so in February 2001, a full 7 months before the attacks on the Pentagon and WTC.
Basically, the judge excluded a number of arguments improperly, and he got seriously reamed out by the appellate court.
I believe that the prosecution was intended as a warning shot to other Telco executives by Bush and His Evil Minions™, “You do whatever we tell you, and f%$# the law, or you sleep with the Fishes.
It was 2-1 decision, with one ultraconservative Bush II appointee, Jerome Holmes, siding with a Bush I appointee who dropped 3 grand at a strip club one night, and may have patronized an “adult dating service”. He also parks in handicapped parking, and threatens people who complains.
We really are going to have to “debushify” our government when this is all over.
*Full disclosure, Qwest is my long distance carrier. I dumped AT&T and signed on with them about a year ago, specifically on the illegal surveillance issue.
He has a post on the Group News Blog, where he asks the following question:
How come, the Feds didn’t have a clue that this GOP fella took $1 million out of the NRCC? But they busted Spitzer in less than a month.
My answer, because IOKIYAR.
He is unhappy because people are blaming him for the upcoming catastrophe.
As I’ve said before, the idea that the noble entrepreneur must be allowed to innovate, no matter how many people it hurts, is simply delusional Randroid bull#$it.
Ayn Rand was a person to whom great evil was done, by a thoroughly evil and corrupt, much like Leo Strauss. Rand by the Bolsheviks, Strauss by the Nazis.
Their response was to create, and aggressively promote their own personal sort of evil, and both have proved, and will continue to prove disastrous.
Speaking as an Existentialist Jew, and yes they are compatible, when you create philosophies in which people are made unpeople, and in which the concept of personal responsibility for the world one creates is an anathema, you create another template for evil.
Of course, you could read his article in the Financial Times, but there may be some side effects:
Witnesses were called to testify before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Consumer Credit regarding changes to the terms of their credit cards for what appear to be completely arbitrary reasons, and the Republicans on the committee demanded that they sign releases allowing the credit card companies to release their complete credit records on any public forum.
My question is why the Republicans were given veto power over witnesses. They are no longer in the majority.
The answer appears to be that they would have:
Their removal, however, was more the result of political gamesmanship than it was a legitimate legal move. That is, the Democrats could have attempted to seat the consumer panel even without the members signing the waivers. But, according to a Democratic staffer familiar with the dance, the Republicans, in that case, would have presented a number of procedural roadblocks that would have stalled the hearing indefinitely. Rather than waste the entire morning fighting endless motions to adjourn, Democratic committee leaders Barney Frank (Mass.) and Carolyn Maloney (N.Y.) decided to scrap the first panel and salvage some of the hearing.
I think that a better understanding of Republicans, that they have no interest in the legislative process, and thus should be accorded no courtesies whatsoever, is needed.
The Waivers read as follows:
I hereby authorize Chase Credit Card Services to publicly discuss my Chase credit card account(s) in connection with the March 13, 2008 and April, 2008 credit card hearings by the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit.
Translated, this means that if they thought it was “in connection with the March 13, 2008 and April, 2008 credit card hearings by the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit, they could release their account numbers, SSNs, mother’s maiden names, and passwords for online access.
I read an interest review of Greenspan’s Bubbles by William A. Fleckenstein:
… He sets out to deflate Alan Greenspan’s reputation by parsing Greenspan’s own comments during his tenure as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. His conclusion?
“Greenspan bailed out the world’s largest equity bubble with the world’s largest real-estate bubble,” he writes. “That combination easily equates to the biggest orgy of speculation and debt creation the United States (and the world) has ever seen.”
Bernanke was left to sweep up after the debauch while Greenspan rewrote history in The Age of Turbulence.
I’m not sure that there is a whole bunch to learn from his book, so I’ll wait until it hits the library.
What I find interesting, and well deserved, is that Greenspan will find himself increasingly reviled in the final years of his life.
In a very real way, this is more than a repudiation of Greenspan, but it is also a repudiation of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.
The fact that Greenspan endorsed the worst excesses of the market for ordinary people, but rushed to bail out the “noble entrepreneur”, is a direct consequence of his experience of Ayn Rand’s acolytes.
I’m not sure if this is real, or if the prosecutor, a Chertoff crony, is looking for something that won’t appear to be a political hit job.
On August 2 of last year, I said that within a year, Bear Stearns would cease to function as an independent entity.
I’m not right yet, but I don’t see how I won’t be right in the next 5 months.
Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
And it would seem, that I actually get a prediction right, which is another sign of the apocalypse.
Just yesterday, the Bear Stearns CEO said that there were no liquidity issues, but today, JPMorgan Chase and the New York Fed have gotten together to bail them out.
Basically, the Fed can’t bail out Bear Stearns, it’s out of its authority, but it can guarantee JP Morgan’s loans to the embattled investment bank, which it did.
Actually, a closer reading makes it even more extraordinary. The Fed directly lent money to Bear Stearns, using an authority last used in the 1960s, which required a vote of the Fed’s Board of Governors.
Typically, the Fed is only supposed to lend to banks, and Bear is not a bank, but an investment house.
As to the statements of the CEO yesterday, I would call them a bald faced lie, but I don’t have a Harvard MBA, so I don’t know the fancy term for blowing smoke up everyone’s ass.
Of interest is some potential insider trading, specifically, someone traded 55,000 Bear Stearns puts Tuesday. (A “Put Option” is basically a bet that the stock will decline in value.)
One of the results of all of this is that money has been fleeing to Treasuries, or fleeing the US entirely, with the dollar down.
One of the things you have to understand is that Bear Stearns is a pretty small player in all this, with a market capitalization of “only” about $15 billion dollars, and we’ve got the markets jumping out windows.
Yes, the Avignon President is busy making the air we breath unsafe for humans and other living things:
The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.
EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA’s scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.
“It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA’s expert scientific judgment,” said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
This is more than just bad policy. His actions are also against the statute.
Really, just despicable.
The National Republican Campaign Committee’s treasurer, Chris Ward may have stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from this organization.
Not only did he take the money, but he gave reports showing that they had more money than they actually did, so now they are nearly broke, and involved in an investigation involving forensic accounting.
I’m so crushed.
This has been a time for Schadenfreude.
According to Forbes, it’s “tighter standards”, but by the standards of any thinking human being, it’s a big wet tongue kiss on the mouth of the bad players in this drama.
The only substantive proposal is better licensing of mortgage brokers, the rest is voluntary, and it’s clear that Paulson, and the rest of Bush’s cronies, are not interested in reform when they say, “The objective here is to get the balance right — regulation needs to catch up with innovation and help restore investor confidence but not go so far as to create new problems, make our markets less efficient or cut off credit to those who need it.”
Let me explain this in very simple terms, the so-called “innovation” that Paulson is looking to preserve, is deception, complexity, fraud, self dealing, and general corruption.
These “innovations” did not make housing less expensive, or easier to get. They caused housing inflation, and threatened the stability of our housing market, banking system, and society.
This so-called innovation is not something we need to protect. We need to put a stake through it’s black heart.
Cruel, but oo funny not to post.
The thing that the media will cover, of course, is the expensive cars, private jets, and so on that many of these “prosperity preachers” have.
There is actually a very real issue here. Churches, unlike every other 501(c)3 tax exempt organization, is not required to file a publicly accessible 990 form.
I incorporated a 501(c)3 tax exempt organization and chase the paperwork through the IRS in 1990 as a non-lawyer, Arisia.
When I was involved in running it, gross revenues were less than $50,000/year, and now it’s probably less than $200K/year.
For any church, considering building, maintenance, salaries and benefits for, preacher, secretary, education director, and janitor, you are well above $500K on anything but the tiniest church.
It’s too expensive for them, but it’s not too expensive for us.
They object to form 990s because they do not want their parishioners to know that they are wasting their money on their own inflated lifestyles.
Check out the Trinity Foundation a Christian reform organization that has been talking about this for years.
There are new indictments involving corruption in Guam, and one of Abramoff’s partners in this, Howard Hills, has apparently been singing like a bird.
One wonders who authorized the investigation, but that will have to wait until January 22, 2009.