Kitty Box of Evil Edition
Meow Queida
And a his North Korean ally.
Month: July 2007
Wanker of The Day
Stephen Dunne.
That’s tough dude, I guess you have to keep living in your parent’s basement, surfing the net for gay pr0n.
Bar-exam flunker sues: Wannabe rejects gay-wed question
By Donna Goodison
Friday, July 6, 2007 – Updated: 08:15 AM ESTA Boston man who failed the Massachusetts bar exam has filed a federal lawsuit claiming his refusal to answer a test question – related to gay marriage – caused him to flunk the test.
Stephen Dunne, 30, is suing the Massachusetts Board of Bar Examiners and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, claiming the “inappropriate” test question violated his religious convictions and his First Amendment rights. Answering the question, Dunne claims, would imply he endorsed gay marriage and parenting.
The suit also challenges the constitutionality of the 2003 SJC ruling that made Massachusetts the nation’s first state to legalize same-sex marriage.
Dunne, who describes himself as a Christian and a Democrat, is seeking $9.75 million in damages and wants a jury to prohibit the Board of Bar Examiners from considering the question in his passage of the exam and to order it removed from all future exams.
“There’s a different forum for that contemporary issue to be discussed, and it’s inappropriate to be on a professional licensing examination,” Dunne told the Herald. “You don’t see questions about partial-birth abortion or abortion on there.”
Dunne scored a 268.866 on the bar exam, just missing a passing grade of 270. The exam question at issue concerns two married lesbian attorneys and their rights regarding a house and two children when one decides to end the marriage.
“Yesterday, Jane got drunk and hit (her spouse) Mary with a baseball bat, breaking Mary’s leg, when she learned that Mary was having an affair with Lisa,” the bar exam question stated. “As a result, Mary decided to end her marriage with Jane in order to live in her house with Philip, Charles and Lisa. What are the rights of Mary and Jane?”
Dunne claims the question was used as a “screening device” to identify and penalize him for “refusing to subscribe to a liberal ideology based on ‘secular humanism,’ ”according to his lawsuit.
“Homosexual conduct is inconsistent with (Dunne’s) Christian practices, beliefs and values, which are protected by the First Amendment,” the lawsuit states.
“I respect people with alternative lifestyles, and we must do that in a civil society,” Dunne said. “I just have a different opinion that millions of people share with me, and I believe that my opinion should be respected just as much as (pro-gay) opinions. I have no intent in spreading hatred or discrimination.”
In his court documents, Dunne described homosexuality as a “voluntary human behavior that is changeable.”
“Societal recognition and perpetuation of rampant homosexuality is neither prudent nor wise,” his lawsuit states.
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Would Someone Pleas Throw Him In Jail for the Next 8-12 Years
Let me get this straight. This snake oil salesman gets fired over his financial shenanigans, and Fannie Mae is told NEVER to hire him again, and they are still giving him stock options?
Would someone please throw this corrupt jerk in gaol?
Raines Sues OFHEO Over Stock
By David S. Hilzenrath
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 6, 2007; D01Former Fannie Mae chairman Franklin D. Raines has mounted a new challenge to the government’s power over the federally chartered mortgage funding company, arguing that regulators have no authority to delay his receipt of a $3.9 million stock award.
Raines sued regulators this week to get the shares released, and yesterday a federal judge scheduled a hearing on the question for July 16.
The fresh challenge comes as legislative efforts to give federal regulators more power over the company have stalled.
Raines is one of many current and former Fannie Mae executives who have been waiting to receive payouts pegged to the company’s performance from 2003 through 2006, including periods when Fannie Mae’s earnings were misstated and, regulators allege, the company was mismanaged.
Raines left the company after the Securities and Exchange Commission ordered it in 2004 to correct years of financial reports that overstated profit by billions of dollars. In reaching a $400 million settlement with regulators last year, Fannie Mae agreed never to employ Raines again.
As the company worked on straightening out its books, it delayed deciding how much stock its executives should receive under certain incentive plans. Last month, Fannie Mae’s board proposed releasing millions of dollars of awards — subject to approval by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.
The agency has since sought more information from Fannie Mae about how it arrived at the amount of the awards and told the company to keep the payments on hold until it completes its review.
The agency has warned Fannie Mae that any stock awards it released “could prove irretrievable” and could leave the company liable if later found to be excessive, according to a document filed in court yesterday.
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A Moooooving Experience
Sorry for the pun.
OK, not sorry for the pun.
Police hunt renegade cow sex youth
By Lester Haines
Published Friday 6th July 2007 08:29 GMTWarning: no IT angle North Yorkshire police are on a state of high alert after a youth was spotted coupling with an English longhorn cow at a specialist breeder’s farm in Skipwith, The Sun reports.
The lad was clocked at 4.30am, dressed only in black briefs, by a “shocked” passer-by who interruped proceedings by shouting at the nocturnal bovine botherer. A 999 call alerted the authorities, but when officers arrived at the scene, the perp had made good his escape.
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Maybe it’s a Yorkshire thing.
The Religious Right is Going Insane
And I’m loving it.
They are now going after Romney because Marriott lets you rent pr0n, and he sat on their board.
AIM-9X Is Not All It’s Cracked up To Be
Physics says that the AIM-9X will have inferior kinematics (speed and range) and a smaller warhead than its competitor.
The AIM-9 is a 125mm (5″) diameter missile, while its competitors, the ASRAAM, Python 5, IRIS-T (I think), R-73 (AA-11), MICA, are all 150 mm+ (6+ inches), giving more than 40% internal volume.
This means more fuel and a larger warhead.
Additionally, when compared to the other thrust vectoring missiles, which have new motors which provide less thrust during the early thrust vectoring stages, and hence less thrust vectoring losses, the motor is less efficient.
There is also the argument that with an agile airframe, and a seeker that has a wide scan angle, you can get the same effects, which is what the Python 5’s game, and/or using the capability of locking on after launch (ASRAAM largely operates in this mode) to achieve similar targeting, because all these missiles require that the platform pass pretty detailed information on the target, typically with a helmet mounted sight, to the missile in order to engage off boresight targets.
None of the larger missiles even fit in the F-22 side bays for IR missiles, and once one is in a visual encounter, the F-22 has lost a its advantages of stealth and super cruise, so the USAF probably sees this as a weapon of last resort (the cannon is more for that random enemy truck convoy that happens by).
That being said, this is a neat video.
No More Dead Bloggers
I’m not a professional blogger. Heck, I’m not likely ever to even be semi-pro.
In fact, if I pay for my anniversary dinner with my wife, I’ll count myself lucky.
That being said, there are pros out there, and a lot of them are VERY good and one of them, Jim Capozzola of the Rittenhouse Review, just died because he did not have health insurance. Go to Suburban Guerrilla, and read No More Dead Bloggers.
What Charlie Said
In this case, Charles Pierce, in a letter to Eric Alterman.
Damn, that dude can write.
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I don’t know if it counts if you only said it in a bar and never wrote it down anywhere, but back in 1988, when it became plain that absolutely nobody was going to pay a price — criminal, civil, or in the case of the senior Bush, political — for the staggering mess that was Iran-Contra, I was in the late, lamented Eliot Lounge in Boston, chewing it over with a friend who’d reported extensively on the scandal. I told him that the country was going to pay a fearsome price one day for having let these crimes go unpunished. That the whole business lodged something malignant deep in the government that needed to be roughly, and bloodily, excised.
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Dems are Finally Telling Lieberman to Go Cheney Himself
Let me be the first to say:
Don’t let the door hit you on the butt on the way out, loser.
Altitude Drop For Lieberman the Hawk
by Steve Kornacki
Early last week, a distressing, if not entirely unsurprising, Newsweek poll found that fully 40 percent of American adults continue to believe that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.It must, then, have been this exasperating chunk of the electorate that Joe Lieberman had in mind when he declared Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that Democrats are doomed in the 2008 presidential race unless they re-embrace the Iraq War.
“I think that’s the best tradition of our party, and if we don’t recapture it … the Democratic candidate is going to have a hard time winning that election next year,” Mr. Lieberman said, likening his own hawkish Iraq posture to Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson – all of them much too deceased to protest such a questionable comparison.
Ouch!!!!!
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Given the Senate’s partisan balance – 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats (one still recuperating from a December cerebral hemorrhage), and two tie-breaking independents who caucus with the Democrats – Democrats are still technically at Mr. Lieberman’s mercy, their fragile control of the chamber dependent on his continued willingness to live up to his campaign pledge to side with his old party for organizational purposes.
But it’s now apparent that they need nothing more than that from him. Republicans have labored to portray Mr. Lieberman’s defeat in last year’s Senate primary as evidence that the Democratic Party has been over-run by weak-willed McGoverniks, a contention that Mr. Lieberman, in making reference to Democrats’ past vulnerabilities on foreign policy and national security issues, sought to reinforce on Sunday.
That game, however, has ceased to work. In years past – 2004 and 2002, say – a public association with Mr. Lieberman was helpful to Democrats, a reassurance to a more hawkish electorate that they were as “tough” as the G.O.P. But in 2007, embracing Mr. Lieberman’s intransigence is a decided political liability – evidenced most startlingly by a recent poll that found that even 58 percent of Republicans in Iowa want a troop withdrawal in the next six months. When, as he did on Sunday, Mr. Lieberman uses a national television interview to dust off old attacks on the Democratic Party’s foreign policy credentials while at the same time actually declaring that “the surge is working,” it only benefits his former party’s standing with the war-wary public. There are few, if any Democrats, quaking at his threat to endorse a Republican in ’08.
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Those politicians are on the run to catch up with the public before November 2008. Mr. Lieberman should probably consider himself lucky that his seat was up last year – and not next year.
Congress Grows a Set of Balls (FINALLY!)
Not only is this of limited utility and provocative, it’s being pushed because it’s provocative.
Lynn Cheney was trying to start a war with China in the early 1990s, and Francis Fukuyama said that during the 90s, “There was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn’t do as well”.
This is a calculated attempt to put a new enemy in the pipe line for Republican partisan advantage.
Senate threatens Bush missile plan
Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Friday July 6, 2007Guardian
President George Bush’s controversial plan to establish a missile defence system in eastern Europe could be scuppered next week if Congress votes to block funding.The Senate appears ready to join the House in cutting from the defence budget the millions Mr Bush requested to fund US missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic. The president would have to use his veto to go ahead but that would put the whole defence budget in peril.
The Senate move would add to the lengthy list of obstacles that have built up to Mr Bush’s plan. A consequence would be to end the stand-off with Moscow, which views the missile system as a threat. Speaking on Monday at the Bush family retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, reiterated his opposition to placing the missile system so close to Russia. There is also opposition within Poland and the Czech Republic.
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“DC Madame” Phone Records Available.
The big lesson, of course, is about how asset forfeiture is used in coercive ways in the United States.
The fact that it is this totalitarian regime is going to reveal all the law and order types who want to be made to dress up in French maid uniforms and be urinated upon, is really just an ironic side effect of this policy.
Judge lifts injunction on ‘DC madam’ phone records
A judge in the US district court in Washington, D.C. has lifted the temporary restraining order (TRO) preventing the so-called ‘DC madam,’ Deborah Jeane Palfrey, from selling or distributing the list of phone records from her escort business.
“The List in question is the Defendant’s personal property,” wrote judge Gladys Kessler, “and contains only a log of telephone numbers. It was neither seized by the Government when it searched the Defendant’s residence in California, nor listed in the Indictment putting the Defendant on notice as to which items of her property were subject to forfeiture.”
Kessler concluded that the government had not satisfied the requirements of the forfeiture statute that would enable them to make the “extraordinary step of freezing the property of an individual, not yet convicted of any crime, and barring her from giving away that property.”
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Danes tout flamethrower-packing robot ‘farmworker’ | The Register
This is not a farm impliment. It’s the non-nuclear alternative to neighborhood nuclear superiority.
Watch the vid, it’s funny as hell, and proof that Nesmith is a genius.
Danes tout flamethrower-packing robot ‘farmworker’
By Lewis Page
Published Thursday 5th July 2007 13:50 GMTDanish agro-boffins have developed a robot which appears at first sight to be a welcome diversion from the ongoing parade of deadly military slaughter machines.
“Hortibot“, brainchild of Scandinavian scientists led by Dr Rasmus Nyholm Jørgensen of Aarhus University, is supposedly a peaceful robot farmworker. It uses GPS to navigate itself around the fields, mowing, spraying, or doing other tiresome tasks while the human landowners fill in the subsidy forms.
Hortibot can even do the weeding, and not simply by spraying chemicals about. The Daily News of Ludington, Michigan, got the story when one of the Danish designers visited the States.
“Currently, the robot can identify approximately 25 different kinds of weeds,” according to the Michigan newshounds.
“Hortibot has a variety of weed-removing attachments and methods. It can manually pick weeds,” apparently.
This is good news indeed; at last, a faithful robot pal intended to toil away for the benefit of humanity rather than spying on people or eliminating them in an apocalyptic mechanised bloodbath.
But such foolish dreams of amity and between man and machine were swiftly unsettled. It seems that Hortibot also has other, more robust capabilities as well as its weed-picking apparatus. The agro-droid can also target its adversaries with “flames, or a laser”.
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“The labour problem will bring this in, when the government gets done with their immigration laws,” Schwass reportedly commented. He was no doubt referring to the US Border Patrol’s plan to install Eye-of-Sauron style scanner towers along the Mexican border in order to stand off the terrorists and huddled masses.
People Cannot Sell Their Hedge Fund Investments at ANY Price.
There is something like 500 trillion in instruments like this. What happens if even 5% of that goes south?
Buyers avoid Bear Stearns’ cut-priced sale
By James Mackintosh and Gillian Tett in LondonPublished: July 4 2007 03:00 | Last updated: July 4 2007 03:00
Investors in the worse-hit of two stricken Bear Stearns hedge funds are offering to sell their holdings for as little as 11 cents on the dollar but still finding no buyers, according to unfilled trades on Hedgebay, a secondary market for funds.
Vulture funds and others have been quick to bid for holdings in the two funds, but the best bid for Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leveraged Fund, the more geared of the two, is just 5 cents on the dollar.
Private sales of stakes are the only way investors can exit the two Bear funds, after the bank suspended redemptions in May amid a wave of withdrawals.
“There are buyers but they can’t agree on price,” said Jared Herman, co-founder of Bahamas-based Hedgebay.
The less-geared Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund, which the bank has rescued with a $1.6bn loan, is being offered at about 70 cents on the dollar. The fund is only attracting bidders at about 30 cents, according to people who use the system.
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The Enhanced Leverage Fund’s net assets of $638m were more than 10 times geared in March, meaning a drop of just 10 per cent in the value of its holdings would wipe out investors.
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drop of half the value is not unrealistic right now if a seller needs to sell
A 50 percent drop means that anyone who has bought or refinanced in the past 15 years would be owing more than they could sell the home for.
This is why short sales, where the bank accepts a loss, are becoming more common.
Seller cuts price of house by $1 million
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Mary Anne Windes, a veteran broker in Destin who has Real Estate Professionals of Destin, said in an e-mail interview, “The trend is that prices are moving to the same level that they were in 2003. As you will recall, 2004 and 2005 saw tremendous and often unrealistic growth. The market has now corrected itself. Many properties doubled in value during that time, so a drop of half the value is not unrealistic right now if a seller needs to sell.”
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The Money Is In Batteries
Seriously, the expansion of batteries, whether in hybrids, military, laptops, etc. makes this an area where the rewards, and the potential for investors is nearly unlimited.
DOD officials offer $1 million prize for wearable power innovations
by Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service7/5/2007 – WASHINGTON (AFPN) — A typical dismounted troop going out for a four-day mission carries as much as 40 pounds of batteries and rechargers in his pack. Defense Department officials want to reduce that load significantly, and they’re dangling a $1 million carrot to entice people to help them do it.
They launched their “wearable power” prize competition July 5 to come up with new innovations to lighten warfighters’ loads.
The goal, explained William Rees, deputy undersecretary of laboratories and basic sciences, is to reduce the weight for the power system that drives radios, night-vision devices, global positioning systems and other combat gear, including a recharging system, to about 2 pounds per day.
“The mantra is four days, 4 kilograms,” he said.
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Bush To Seek New Powers to Spy on Political Opponents
There is credible evidence that Bush’s illegal wireless surveillance activity targeted CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour in 2004.
Her husband is James Rubin, who served as Wesley Clark’s chief foreign policy spokesman, and then as a senior foreign policy adviser for John Kerry, so he would be included in any such surveillance. It’s unavoidable.
Does anyone believe that these intercepts did not get passed off to Karl Rove?
VOA News – Bush Seeks Changes in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
By Deborah Tate
Capitol Hill
05 July 2007The Bush administration is seeking to update a law governing U.S. foreign intelligence surveillance. But members of the Democratic majority in Congress are signaling they may be reluctant to approve the proposed changes because they have concerns about a controversial administration wiretapping program. VOA’s Deborah Tate reports from Capitol Hill.
The Bush administration is asking Congress to approve changes to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The proposed modifications would give the government more power to gather foreign intelligence information. Supporters say the changes would bring the law up to date with changes in new technology, including e-mail and wireless communications.
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Military Times Says Army “Nearing a Breaking Point”
They are deploying troops for a year. In WWII, they determined that soldiers needed relief after 180 days.
When this is over, we will have many broken men, and recruiting problems for a generation.
Editorial: Balance home, away time
Many soldiers have deployed three, four and more times to Iraq, Afghanistan or both. But you won’t hear much in the way of complaints, because a shared sense of honor and duty overrides most self-interest.
Yet there is no escaping the fact that the Army is nearing a breaking point.
In the fifth year of war in Iraq, when deployments should be winding down, combat tours instead are being extended.
Time between deployments, meanwhile, is unchanged. So today, soldiers can look forward to 15 months in the war zone for every 12 months at home.
Fifteen-month deployments mean some soldiers can expect to miss two Christmases, two anniversaries, and two of the same child’s birthdays in one war tour. It means more mental health problems for soldiers, more stress on families and less support for the mission at home.
This is bad policy.
Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., plans to introduce legislation to mandate that deployed troops get a month at home for every month deployed. So if a deployment does have to last 15 months, soldiers wouldn’t have to go back for another 15 months.
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US Mega Embassy in Baghdad Uninhabitable
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:
1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
3. 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.
Construction Woes Add to Fears at Embassy in Iraq
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 5, 2007; A01U.S. diplomats in Iraq, increasingly fearful over their personal safety after recent mortar attacks inside the Green Zone, are pointing to new delays and mistakes in the U.S. Embassy construction project in Baghdad as signs that their vulnerability could grow in the months ahead.
A toughly worded cable sent from the embassy to State Department headquarters on May 29 highlights a cascade of building and safety blunders in a new facility to house the security guards protecting the embassy. The guards’ base, which remains unopened today, is just a small part of a $592 million project to build the largest U.S. embassy in the world.
The main builder of the sprawling, 21-building embassy is First Kuwaiti General Trade and Contracting Co., a Middle Eastern firm that is already under Justice Department scrutiny over alleged labor abuses. First Kuwaiti also erected the guard base, prompting some State Department officials in Washington and Baghdad to worry that the problems exposed in the camp suggest trouble lurking ahead for the rest of the embassy complex.
The first signs of trouble, according to the cable, emerged when the kitchen staff tried to cook the inaugural meal in the new guard base on May 15. Some appliances did not work. Workers began to get electric shocks. Then a burning smell enveloped the kitchen as the wiring began to melt.
All the food from the old guard camp — a collection of tents — had been carted to the new facility, in the expectation that the 1,200 guards would begin moving in the next day. But according to the cable, the electrical meltdown was just the first problem in a series of construction mistakes that soon left the base uninhabitable, including wiring problems, fuel leaks and noxious fumes in the sleeping trailers.
“Poor quality construction . . . life safety issues . . . left [the embassy] with no recourse but to shut the camp down, in spite of the blistering heat in Baghdad,” the May 29 cable informed Washington.
Such challenges with construction contracts inside the fortified enclave known as the Green Zone reflect the broader problems that have thwarted reconstruction efforts throughout war-torn Iraq.
The “fairly serious problems” noted in the cable indicate that First Kuwaiti’s work fails to meet basic safety standards, said an administration official who was not authorized to speak to the news media. But the State Department’s Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO), which oversees construction of the new embassy, has kept a “close hold” on the project, making it difficult for anyone else in the government to gauge progress. “We are suspecting we will find the same issues in the new embassy,” resulting in months of delays, the official said.
The embassy cable prompted a stinging response from James L. Golden, OBO’s managing director for the embassy project. In a cable dated June 8, he berated personnel in Baghdad for sending their message over an open embassy system, rather than keeping the complaints in-house. He defended First Kuwaiti and accused the embassy and KBR — a Texas-based company that runs many facilities in Iraq and discovered the wiring problems — of making false claims to deflect attention from their own errors.
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Hmmm….is James L. Golden a political appointee? I quick google can’t confirm one way or the other.
United Capital Asset Management hedge funds halt withdrawals – Jul. 3, 2007
This is called a run on the bank, and when investments start to become illiquid this way, people lose everything.
United Capital Asset Management hedge funds halt withdrawals
Embattled hedge fund management group suspends redemptions from four funds following losses in subprime mortgages.
July 3 2007: 3:43 PM EDTNEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — United Capital Asset Management has temporarily suspended payments from four of its Horizon funds following losses from its investment in subprime mortgage bonds.
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In the past ten days, the firm received an unusually high number of redemption requests, including one from its largest investor which accounts for one-quarter of the firm’s assets under management.
Where People Will Find Themselves Under Water with Their Mortgages
Under water means owing more than it is worth.
Top 10 Places Where the Housing Bubble Will Bust
The current housing bubble first reared its ugly head in 1997. Prices began to climb so rapidly that they quickly became unaffordable for potential buyers making the median household income. By 2006, some of the air started being released from the bubble, and now the balloon is on the verge of busting.What Goes Up…Must Come Down
Experts say that prices need to fall to 1997 levels to be sustainable.
Which experts? Nice Chart though. Also, there is always an overshoot.
Metro Area 2007 Price 1997 Price* % Decline to Return to 1997 Prices SF-Oakland-Fremont, CA $748,100 $288,484 61.4 Miami-Ft Lauderdale, FL $385,300 $148,900 61.3 Riverside-San Bernardino, CA $404,400 $157,011 61.1 Sarasota-Bradenton, FL $337,000 $135,977 59.6 Los Angeles, CA $589,800 $241,976 58.9 San Diego, CA $595,200 $249,553 58.0 Orange County, CA $697,300 $293,362 57.9 San Jose-Sunnyvale, CA $788,000 $390,660 50.4 Nassau-Suffolk, NY $479,800 $240,933 49.7 Sacramento, CA $365,500 $196,738 46.1 *1997 prices have been adjusted at the general inflation rate and are reported in 2007 dollars.
Note also, that anyone who got a conventional old fashioned mortgage, 20% down, fixed rate, will be under water in these locations, and in many more not shown.
For those with interest only, no money down, negative equity, 5% down, etc., these numbers will be much higher.