Category: Hypocrisy

Lieberman Watch

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The dynamics of the whole thing seem to be interesting. We had Obama’s statement (which I see as correct, he is President elect, and should give the Senate its due) where he said that it was a Senate matter, and now the Clintons are denying that they were making calls supporting Lieberman.

Also, we have reports that Schumer and Durbin Lieberman removed as head of the Homeland Security Committee, and since Schumer raised a lot of money for the incoming Senators, this may be a big factor.

TPM is now confirming that
the full Democratic caucus will vote on his remaining DHS chair, and so this makes Chris Bowers’ whip count interesting reading.

I don’t think that Dems should eject Lieberman from the caucus, but he should not be a chairman, with subpoena power, of anything beyond the knitting committee.

Not Enough Bullets: Scotland Edition

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Specifically, the Royal Bank of Scotland, which just received a £20 billion bailout from the British government, but still intends to pay bonuses to the people who screwed up the bank in the first place:

The bank has set aside £1.79bn to cover “staff costs” – including discretionary bonuses – at its investment banking division for the first six months of the year alone. The same division caused a £5.9bn writedown that wiped out the bank’s profits for the same period.

The last ‘graph in the article says it all:

Banking sources privately acknowledge that the sight of these bonus accruals may provoke anger. They concede the industry’s pay and bonus regime is under unprecedented strain as it fails to reflect profitability, asset writedowns or share price declines.

The idea that you give people bonuses who lose you money is not, “Unprecedented Strain”, it is insanity.

Oh, To Hell With It, Should I Just Register, “NotEnoughBullets.com”?

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So now, we find that Wall Street has lines it won’t cross, specifically, they consider obscene bonuses to be a matter of principle:

Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) — Wall Street’s chief executives will hunker down and pay bonuses this year in the face of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a taxpayer bailout and mounting political outcry, industry veterans say.

…

How many yachts to you need to water ski behind?

Seriously these folks are well on their way to killing more Americans and harming the country in to a degree that Osama bin Laden could only dream of.

Let’s just declare them economic terrorists, and freeze their assets.

Blame the NGOs for the Dead

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Well, right now, there is something very close to a full blown war in the Congo going on, and the proximate cause is the presence of Hutu militias, largely led by the same men who directed the Rwandan Genocide, which is the Causus Belli for Gen. Laurent Nkunda, and his militia.

This problem has two sources, the original Rwandan Genocide, and the actions of NGOs like Oxfam, the World Food Program, CARE, the International Rescue Committee, Caritas Internalis, etc.

They NGOs provided food and support to camps on an indefinite basis, even when it was clear that they were run internally as military bases, so long as no one wore a uniform or carried a gun when in line for food.

While it was understandable in the context of the immediate crisis, it is less so on a continuing basis, particularly when it was clear that the militias in the camp were preventing refugees from returning home.

In so doing they took the tragedy of the Rwandan Genocide, and multiplied it by many times, creating death and warfare across Zaire, later the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As callous as it sounds, if they had had a firm end date in the 6 month range after the refugee flow, everyone but the perpetrators of the Genocide would have benefited, but that’s not the organizational imperative of the NGOs.

It was short sighted, and destructive, just as was their signing off on supporting Serbian concentration camps in Kosovo before the NATO invasion, but without refugees, these organizations have no purpose.

Think about that the next time you are contacted for a donation.

Seriously, Do Chriso-Fascists even Read the Bible?

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The grand high priestess of snark, Wonkette, notes that a Christian group has called for prayer to repair the broken financial system.

While the obvious rejoinder would be something about chasing money lenders out of the temple, that’s not my holy book, but Christo-Fascist (she says it’s because of gay marriage) nutcase Cindy Jacobs has done me the favor of allowing me to go seriously Old Testament* on these folks:

For these and other reasons Cindy is calling for a Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies on Wednesday, October 29, 2008. They are calling for prayer for the stock markets, banks, and financial institutions of the world on the date the stock market crashed in 1929. They are meeting at the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve Bank, and its 12 principal branches around the US that day.

“We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems,” she said. “While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.”

(emphasis mine)

Umm…Folks, bull, as in adult male cow, as in it was once a CALF, and Bronze is a GOLD colored alloy…..Gold….Calf….does that ring a bell?

On a more amusing note, that photograph really does look like the one from The Ten Commandments

*Normally, I do not use the term, “Old Testament”, I use the term Tanakh, because “Old Testament” implies that there is a “New Testament” out there, which is somehow divinely connected, and I do not accept the divinity of the Christian bible. In this case, however, the phrase, “Going seriously Tanach on these folks,” loses something in the translation.

Not Enough Bullets: A Continuing Series

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Well, now that Merrill Lynch was forced to sell itself to Bank of America, some of it’s employees are feeling insulted by the retention packages offered:

The problem isn’t with high-flying producers bringing in at least $1.75 million in annual revenues. Those employees will most likely get 100 percent of their annual revenue as a retention bonus, spread out over seven years. The bad feelings are among those making less. A financial advisor producing $700,000 in revenues is being offered $175,000 in cash over seven years and a 25% growth bonus over three years. Manis says that same producer could get a lot more defecting to a competitor—”around $850,000 in cash on about a 9 year deal plus another $700,000 or so back end bonuses (after one to two years).”

Yeah, because so many investment banks are hiring so many people right now…..You have options.

Seriously, the unbridled sense of entitlement of these folks just buggers the mind.

These people are overpaid used car salesmen, and as has been shown over the past few months, their advice is less reliable than my cats, who at least don’t try to conceal their self interest.

In the mean time, RJ & Mckay, a financial services body shop has a video out to try and generate some recruiting fees:

We’re Lending Them Money for This????

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Well, it looks like the US Department of the Treasury is looking at laoning General Motors, so that they can afford to They will use the money to buy Chrysler.

I don’t know why they need the loan, according to Daimler Benz, who still owns an equity stake, Chrysler is worth nothing. They have depreciated their stake in the troubled automaker to $0.00.

They had the stock on their books at $268 million at the end of june.

I gotta think that the only motive behind this is that Bush Henry Paulson and His Evil Minions™ they are trying to make companies out there so big that they can block any regulations Congress might want to achieve in the future, because they will be throwing around so much lobbying cash.

Eurocrats Looking at Massive Propaganda Campaign in Ireland

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It looks like they are looking for another bite at the apple after the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty went down in flames.

So, now we are seeing EU propoganda minister communication commissioner Margot Wallstrom suggesting what is needed is a major education campaign, but remember, don’t actually talk about the treaty that is at issue:

“Whatever you do, you won’t have in the end everybody reading a 400-page document,” she said. “That’s what MEPs are being paid for.”

Better yet, don’t have a 400 page constitution. The original constitution of the United States, including all amendments, is less than 15 pages.

You had people vote on a byzantinely complex document where no one, not even your vaunted MEPs understand the complete document.

That’s enough reason to vote against it, because who knows what mischief, corruption, and self dealing lives in those pages.

Not Enough Bullets, Bloddy Kraut Edition

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Well, the Germans have a bailout plan, one they developed after stiffing the rest of the Euro zone, and now they have been browbeaten into softening pay limitations of their bailout package by bank executives making noises about not accepting state aid.

It was to be a hard pay limit of €500,000 ($666,000), but that was too much for the upper failed management at the failed banks to accept.

Where is my revolver.

Sarah Palin’s Clothing Bill, and the Big Picture

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While the comment of a Talking Points Memo commenter about Palin and the GOP dropping over $150,000.00 of campaign funds on her cloths and bling is amusing, “If Sarah Palin’s $150,000 wardrobe had a life of its own, it would get a tax cut from a President Obama,” it misses the big picture.

We have to remember that she also accepted per deim payments intended for away from home expenses for times when she was at home, which should have the IRS coming after her, and her bilking the state out of over $21,000.00 for travel expenses for her children.

This is not about Sarah Palin. It is rather about movement conservatism, of which Sarah Palin is, at least until after election day, a sterling example.

Movement conservatism is by its nature corrupt.

Basically, these people read too much Ayn Rand, or more accurately they took it too seriously, because any amount or Ayn being read is too much.

Because of this these people believe that the government, and government service to be inherently evil, and so they enter into service to do what they believe to be evil.

The only reason for them to enter government service is money and power, and they believe that they are owed these little bits of corruption, whether it be Palin’s per deim or Stevens’ house renovations, because they are doing something so awful.

Rats are Leaving a Sinking Ship

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By rat, I mean Peggy Noonan, and by sinking Ship, I mean McCain/Palin.

Her latest piece in the WSJ cuts Sarah Palin a new one.

Of course, 6 weeks ago, she said the same damn thing on an open mic by mistake, but now she puts it in the Journal.

Her article is not about the Sarah Palin, or the election, or conservative philosophy, it is about Peggy Noonan, and an attempt to have plausible dependability about what she sees as a coming electoral drubbing.

White Space Passes Tests With Flying Colors

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The FCC Office of Engineering Technology just finished its tests on “white space devices”, which operate in the space between television channels, and they have determined that they work without interfering with licensed TV channels in the spectrum.

Basically, these devices are supposed to detect which channels are in use by broadcast TV, and avoid those specific frequencies, which will open massive amounts of spectrum to small relatively low power devices.

It should be noted that there are strong forces opposed to such an application:

Opponents to the Google’s white spaces plan have included not just T-Mobile, but also the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the wireless microphone industry. These two groups contend that interference will be caused to HDTV and other digital TV signals if mobile devices start operating in currently unused white spaces next to spectrum allocated by the FCC for TV broadcasting.

And this opposition occurs without regard to whether there is interference, they object to the possibility of interference from infringing devices.

The fact is that the broadcasters and T-Mobile want to find a way to make money off of unused spectrum, and the wireless microphone industry has been a laboratory for interference problem, since they have been operating illegally in this spectrum for well over a decade, despite complaints from the public safety community (see here and here for some of Harold Feld’s marvelous takes on the hypocrisy of the Wireless mike industry).

I’m not sure where this is all going to go, though the fact that FCC chairman Martin is optimistic on open use of the spectrum is encouraging.

Note though that he is a short timer, and we don’t know who his successor will be after Bush and His Evil Minions™ leave office.

Special Prosecutor in US Attorney Gate a Coverup

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Here is an interesting tidbit on Mukasey assigning a special prosecutor to look at the US Attorney firing scandal: “

Because of the litany of public corruption cases Dannehy, 47, has prosecuted, she has a reputation as a pitbull, say attorneys. But in actuality, they say, she’s merely meticulous, hard-working and dedicated to her job. To that end, lawyers involved in cases with her know she sometimes calls meetings on Sunday evenings. And given Mukasey’s request for a report in 60 days, Nora might well log some weekend work between now and Thanksgiving

Enough time so that nothing comes out before the election, but not enough to send it to the next administration, clever, Mukasey, clever.

I have to believe that Mukasey’s actions have gone beyond mere hypocrisy. He is actively obstructing justice, and needs to be criminally investigated too.

H/T Emptywheel

Your Daily Palin Update

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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.