Big surprise this, the office of special counsel which was tasked with investigating Karl Rove’s various corrupt misdeeds, will have to curtail operations because they have no money to operate.
It appears that Special Counsel Scott Bloch turned in his budget before the investigation.
Bloody typical.
It should come as no surprise that the ACLU is supporting Senator Craig’s attempt to withdraw his guilty plea.
Additionally, there is a good point made by the ACLU:
Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s executive director, argued that police sting operations sometimes trap innocent people. He said police must show that sex was to occur in public, not just that someone was soliciting sex.
“If the police really want to stop people from having sex in public bathrooms, they should put up a sign banning sex in the restroom and send in a uniformed officer to patrol periodically,” Romero said.
Let’s be clear if crude come ons were a crime, the cops would be arresting 20% of the people in your average singles hangout bar.
Congressman Rep. Jim Ramstad (MN-03) To Retire is not running for reelection.
Expect to see a lot more of these. There are those who don’t want to lose, and there are those who are unhappy with being in the minority again, and (of course) those under investigation.
This is weird. Thomas Kontogiannis, who has already admitted to bribing disgraced former Republican Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham was out on bail and money laundering, and as such he was not supposed to leave the country.
It turns out that he did leave the country, he went to a vacation resort in Greece, and the judge was ready to revoke bail and to lock him up, when an assistant U.S. Attorney said at a hearing this morning that the man’s recent trip to Greece was at the direction of federal agents.
This is beyond weird.
I’m wondering if someone in the DoJ wanted to send Kontogiannis a message about not fingering too many Republicans, and thought that they could do so more easily in Greece.
Honestly, I think that Reid has spent way too much time being too accommodating to Republicans. He’s given them repeated opportunities to support phony withdrawal bills.
I don’t know why he is now saying that the negociations are off. This is without warning.
One wonders why the abrupt change in position:
Some possibilities:
My guess is the last one.
Matthew Yglesias makes a very interesting point, that it is in fact in the Democrats best interest NOT to get out of Iraq.
Basically:
As the other Matt puts it:
But given that Republicans aren’t doing what everyone expected them to do and reducing their political exposure on Iraq by winding the war down, Democrats are disinclined to go out on a limb to do it for them.
That being said, we should still get out, and we should do so today.
Republicans may not give a damn about government doing right by its citizens, but Democrats should.
One wonders though, why the Republicans are being so self destructive? Did Karl Rove get pictures of all of them in the Minneapolis airport bathroom or something?
Here is where we get to fish or cut bait time. The Iraqi Government* has told Blackwater to get out, and has suspended their license to operate.
This is not surprising. They are a bunch of trigger happy goons who have immunity from Iraqi law and the military’s UCMJ.
The interesting thing here is that Blackwater, nor (IIRC) any of of the other mercenaries employed by the US, are operating under an Iraqi license.
On the other hand, Blackwater is operating under a State Department contract, and while this may give them a measure of diplomatic immunity, it also allows them to be declared personae non grata, and forced to leave the country.
My guess is that Malaki will be told to pound sand, and thus the government will be revealed to be a puppet of the US formed primarily to allocate oil resources to American oil companies.
*Yes, I know that “Iraqi Government” is currently an oxymoron.
Chris Dodd, chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, has put forth interesting proposals on the current housing/mortgatge* mess.
These are good policies, and they would have been much better had they been implemented, or at least proposed, 2 or 3 years ago. to the degree that these can be made retroactive, they should be (you could make prepayment penalties immediately illegal, for example).
More importantly, it places much of the onus upon those who profited through their highly leveraged, and ruinous, financial products.
It’s taken him up a notch in my view of the presidential candidates.
*To all but the blind, this horse has left the subprime stables, and is roaming the prairie.
I don’t generally venture too deeply into sexuality. It’s not that I’m a prude, but except on an academic level (I can give you schpiel on how neoteny influences human sexuality), I’m not particularly interested in the sexual motivations of people that I don’t know.
Suzie Bright, however, has a very good insight into the head of the Republican political wife, when she asks the question, “How does Suzanne Craig, wife of the outed senator, stand next to her liar of a husband at a press conference and not hurl her guts?“
It is a complex matter, but I think that Ms. Bright’s essay shines a lot of light on it.
Alan Keyes announces for President, or as Josh Marshall put it, “Alan Keyes throws his straitjacket into the ring.“
Needless to say, he makes the Fred Thompson clown show look like John Houseman, though I imagine for close relatives, it’s not so funny.
Desperation is the reason that Shays is threatening retirement unless he is given the top GOP spot on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
He is the last Republican member of Congress from New England, and people are starting to recognize that he is irrelevant, because Republicans ignore their more moderate members, so he is unleashing this threat.
He almost lost last time, and there is no way that another Republican can win.
His language is actually a bit stronger:
Even if he runs and wins, and somehow gets denied the top Republican spot anyway in 2009, “I will resign,” Shays said.
That’s fear speaking.
For those of you who are not American, or are too young to remember him, Eddie Haskell is a character from an almost year old comedy, “Leave it to Beaver*“. He was the friend of the title character’s older brother, and a repulsive troublemaker who never failed to suck up to the adults when they were around†.
Well, it appears that Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), and the good general’s boss feels much the same way about Petraeus as the audience was supposed to about Eddie Haskell. It has been reported that the admiral told the general that he thought he was:
“an ass-kissing little chickens*it” and added, “I hate people like that”, the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.
Of note, Fallon appears to be a stand up guy, who is doing major pushback against the politicization of the military, and he has been steadfast, in opposing an attack on Iran.
Fallon acquired a reputation for a willingness to stand up to powerful figures during his tenure as commander in chief of the Pacific Command from February 2005 to March 2007. He pushed hard for a conciliatory line toward and China, which put him in conflict with senior military and civilian officials with a vested interest in pointing to China as a future rival and threat.
He demonstrated his independence from the White House when he refused in February to go along with a proposal to send a third naval carrier task force to the Persian Gulf, as reported by IPS in May. Fallon questioned the military necessity for the move, which would have signaled to Iran a readiness to go to war. Fallon also privately vowed that there would be no war against Iran on his watch, implying that he would quit rather than accept such a policy.
It should also be noted that the General’s duties in Iraq had been securing arms Saddam’s military, the ones that are used against us, and training the Iraqi police force, the one that is a Shia militia actively engaging in ethnic cleansing.
Let us pray that there are more Fallons than Petraeus in the Pentagon.
Sorry if this is old news, but Rosh Hashana has gotten me a bit behind.
*This show had what had to be the most unintentionally sexual line on TV of the day, at least until Batman’s gay innuendo, “Gee Ward, weren’t you a bit hard on the Beaver last night?”
†It should be noted that the actor who played him, went on to become a police officer, and was shot in the line of duty, forcing his retirement from the force, so he was nothing like Eddie.
The artical is an excellent description of the dynamic that leads people to see a “light at the end of the tunnel” in Viet Nam Iraq.
Lessons on the surge from economics 101
By OLIVER R. GOODENOUGH
Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result. They call it a “dollar auction.” The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in. The first bids a penny, looking to make 99 cents. The second bids 2 cents, the third 3 cents, and so on, each feeling they have a chance at something good on the cheap. The early stages are fun, and the bidders wonder what possessed the professor to be willing to lose some money.
The problem surfaces when the bidders get up close to a dollar. After 99 cents the last vestige of profitability disappears, but the bidding continues between the two highest players. They now realize that they stand to lose no matter what, but that they can still buffer their losses by winning the dollar. They just have to outlast the other player. Following this strategy, the two hapless students usually run the bid up several dollars, turning the apparent shot at easy money into a ghastly battle of spiraling disaster.
Theoretically, there is no stable outcome once the dynamic gets going. The only clear limit is the exhaustion of one of the player’s total funds. In the classroom, the auction generally ends with the grudging decision of one player to “irrationally” accept the larger loss and get out of the terrible spiral. Economists call the dollar auction pattern an irrational escalation of commitment. We might also call it the war in Iraq.
….
Emphasis mine.
Considering the names that have been floated by the Bush admin, Ted Olson, and other F%$# yous to the Senate Democrats, it appears that someone must been able to twist his arm over this.
Senator Charles Schumer originally suggested the name, so Bush had to choke to select this guy.
I just can’t think about what they had for leverage to stop him from acting like a petulant child…Unless Senator Larry Craig knows that Bush has a “wide stance” too.
John McCain is now saying that he has been a baptist for years:
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who has long identified himself as an Episcopalian, said this weekend that he is a Baptist and has been for years.
He’s not going to get the nomination. He needs to accept that, absent some major upheaval not of his own making, he will not get the nod.
I’d say that he should try to take all of this with a bit of class, but really and truly, he’s never shown any, he’s just convinced the press that he has some by keeping their glasses filled, both literally and figuratively.
This is why these folks need to be removed from power. Watch the clip. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Dumbphuquistan) is saying that he does not care about our troops dieing.
It’s clear that’s what he meant, and no amount of weaseling changes this.
It’s a wonderful headline for this Asia Times article, but there is some real meat and potatoes if you scroll down a bit.
…
He relates, “In 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS] was faced with an awkward dilemma. If it continued to include the cost of housing in the Consumer Price Index, the CPI would reflect an inflation rate of 15%, thereby making the country’s economy look like a banana republic. Worse, since investors and bond traders have historically demanded a 2% real return after inflation, that would mean that bond and money market yields could climb as high as 17%.”
Yikes! What to do, what to do, what to do whattodowhattodo? “The BLS’s solution was as simple as it was shocking: exclude the cost of housing as a component in the CPI, and substitute a so-called ‘Owner Equivalent Rent’ component based on what a homeowner might ‘rent’ his house for.” Hahaha! The government resorts to lying! “Wow! Why didn’t we think of this before?” they are heard to ask among themselves.
Fortunately for the government, it worked. “The result of this statistical sleight of hand was immediate and gratifying,” Mr Hardaway writes, “for the reported inflation index quickly dropped to 2%”, down from the real, and horrifying, 15% which was due “in part” to the drop in rents caused by speculators wanting to “offset their holding costs by renting out their homes while their prices skyrocketed, thereby flooding the market with rentals that pushed down the cost of renting a house or apartment.” Hahaha!
You can almost hear the contempt in his voice when he says, “While the BLS was correct in assuming that this statistical ruse would fool the average citizen into believing that inflation was only 2% (and therefore be willing to accept a meager 4% return on his bank savings), what is remarkable is that the ruse also fooled the bond traders, and apparently continues to do so, leading analyst Peter Schiff to describe these supposed savvy bond traders as the ‘hormonal teenagers of the capital markets’.”
Putting it all together, he concludes, “The present subprime credit crisis can be directly traced back to the BLS decision to exclude the price of housing from the CPI. It is now clear that the ‘benign’ inflation figures reported over the last 10 years” were, (using my awesome editorial powers to insert my own words for special emphasis), “A big stinking load of lying crap by the corrupt Federal Reserve and the despicable government (except Ron Paul).”
…
This subterfuge has not just been about housing. It’s everywhere in the BLS statistics, and it’s used to shortchange pensioners and to mask the real decline in standard of living for the median worker in the US since the early 1970s.
There’s not a hole bunch of love for Petraeus in the halls of the Pentagon.
Maybe they know that he’s destroying hte Army and Marines by sucking up to Bush:
But it’s questionable whether even the smoothest-talking salesman could appease public opinion—or Petraeus’s Pentagon detractors—at this point. NEWSWEEK has learned that a separate internal report being prepared by a Pentagon working group will “differ substantially” from Petraeus’s recommendations, according to an official who is privy to the ongoing discussions but would speak about them only on condition of anonymity. An early version of the report, which is currently being drafted and is expected to be completed by the beginning of next year, will “recommend a very rapid reduction in American forces: as much as two-thirds of the existing force very quickly, while keeping the remainder there.” The strategy will involve unwinding the still large U.S. presence in big forward operation bases and putting smaller teams in outposts. “There is interest at senior levels [of the Pentagon] in getting alternative views” to Petraeus, the official said. Among others, Centcom commander Admiral William Fallon is known to want to draw down faster than Petraeus.
Well, Rep. James Walsh (R-Onondaga, NY) is finally taking a stand against Bush on the war.
FWIW, this is his district:
This is upstate New York, Syracuse used to be a manufacturing center, and New York Republicans outside of Long Island are in the mold of Tom Dewey, not Alphonse “Da Woim” D’Amato.
He’s covering his ass. A number of Republicans lost their seats in New York in 2006. Every Republican in New England except for Chris Shays lost his seat in 2006.
The Republican party, and the war are an albatross around his neck, and he’s running scared.
Yes, his given legal name is Freddie Dalton Thompson, and not it has been revealed that the Fredster did legal and lobbying work for the Libyan bombers of the Pan Am 103, Jean Bertrand Aristide, and the abortion counseling group.
The Republicans have no bloody bench this year, do they.