Well, despite the best efforts of the craven Bush Dogs to kill it, Barney Frank’s mortgage reform bill was voted out of committee.
It tightens restrictions on issuing mortgages (a barn door cow thing, but still good), and gives people more options in bankruptcy.
This is why Democrats matter.
Iraq Plans to Confront Security Firms on Guns – New York Times
The Iraqi interior minister said Wednesday that he would authorize raids by his security forces on Western security firms to ensure that they were complying with tightened licensing requirements on guns and other weaponry, setting up the possibility of violent confrontations between the Iraqis and heavily armed Western guards.
…..
If anyone here does not think that this will result in all out warfare between the Iraqi security forces and the mercs, I want what you are smoking.
Another brokerage with massive losses.
The problem is that for the past 30 years, due to deregulation, these entities have become too big for the government to allow them to fail, so we will all pay for it.
Of course, the Very Serious People™ are claiming that it’s a compromise, but it’s a weasel.
You see, his “compromise” would make the Federal Government, as opposed to the telcos, the defendants. This allows for wholesale classification, foot dragging, sovereign immunity, and all the other tricks which would guarantee that nothing would come out.
Seriously, this sort of crap is why our government is so f*^%ed up.
Honda will be putting ultracapacitors in their cars in the next few years. They will use it on a fuel cell vehicle to handle demand peaks.
Capacitors have some advantages and disadvantages relative to batteries.
The pluses: hey don’t wear out, and they can put out a lot of juice in a short time (they are in camera flashes).
The minuses: They slowly* leak stored energy over time., and they have lower energy density.
The technology is advancing rather quickly†, so the disadvantages may decrease.
You could also use the capacitors in conjunction with batteries to go with a higher energy/lower power battere (higher power means lower energy and vice verse),
*Very slowly, as anyone who has gotten knocked on their when they open up a TV that has been in a junkyard for two years can attest.
†When I was in school, I was told that a 1 Farad capacitor would be the bigger than a a pick up truck, now there are commercially available ones that are smaller than a thimble.
Wicked cool. Popcorn Popping filmed with a very high speed camera..
As a result of the Opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan, farmers are switching to Marijuana.
This is development is best summed up by the comment, “The powers that be often forget that people are NOT going to voluntarily starve to death.”
Go to Matthew Saroff’s Act Blue Page, and show her some love.
This is not something I would expect Hillary to do
An Arkansas lawyer recalled a story about Hillary from her days at the Rose Law Firm that demonstrated her sense of humor. Someone at her firm had made off with a slice of pizza she had put aside for later, prompting her to send a firm-wide memo which said, “Who took the evidence she was saving for a poisoning trial?
Funny and sick…A sense of humor after my own heart.
6 days ago, I noted Andrew Cuomo’s investigation of collusion between banks and property assessors.
Now, he has expanded the investigation to include Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
I think that we are going to find that corruption was the rule, not the exception, in the real estate bubble, at all levels.
If credit for small business has not dried up because of the ongoning debacle on Wall Street, why has he felt compelled to deny it?
Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
The prosecution dropped the attempted murder charge.
At the end of the day, the only just resolution will be that the Jena 6 have their charges dropped, and the racist cracker DA goes to jail.
It now appears that the Bush Dogs are taking the side of abusive mortgage issuers over the people harmed by this fraud. Chris Bowers has it right:
It’s time to understand that Bush Dogs are part of a working conservative majority. They are not our friends, they are not our allies, they are political opponents who want to bail out wealthy investors and hurt people trapped in subprime mortgage markets. Politically, they are also the people hurting Democratic capacity to differentiate ourselves as populists and capture swing areas and exurban Republicans hurt by the housing meltdown.
I would take it further. These people are so damaging to the party, and to the country, that liberals shoule provide significant opposition to them in both the primaries and the general election.
The Democrats are going to pick up seats in 2008. If alle of these seats are foregone in order to excise Bush Dogs from the party, it would be a good thing.
Here is a guy who takes our money, and as opposed to going after terrorists in the north, has spent it on gold plating his military machine to go after India in the south, but according to John Negroponte, he is indispensable.
The Pakistani military has spent the past 60 imagining the glory of der tag*, and Musharraf is very much a part of this dysfunctional and anti-Democratic culture.
Of course, the current alternative, Benazir Bhutto, is remarkably corrupt, even by the standards of Pakistani politics (Yes, I know, “corrupt even by the standards of Pakistani politics”, is hard to wrap one’s head around).
*The German Imperial Navy, in the days before World War I, constantly longed for der tag, the day, when they would confront the British Navy.
Seeing as how the statute of limitations expires on November 15, this is not surprising in the least.
The most basic point is that Guiliani plucked this guy out of obscurity, and he will be going to jail because he is mobbed up.
Of course, there is also the bit where used an apartment that had been donated to the city for the benefit of ground zero workers to f%$# Judith Regan, but he’s still Rudy’s guy.
It raises the obvious question, just how will Rudy screw up in selecting his inner circle next? Is he going to select a pedophile priest or something?
Oh….Wait…He already has.
It appears that there may be a filibuster on Mukasey. FWIW, I’m hoping that there is one.
I don’t expect it to stick, but this should be a defining issue for any Democrat: Do you support, or oppose torture? If you do, I, and you, should work towards defeating these people in the primaries, and yes, that means you Schumer and Feinstein.*
*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers.
Mark Klein is an American hero.
For those of you who don’t know, Mark Klein is a retired technician at AT&T, and he was responsible for running wires to a splitter for the benefit of Room 641A of 611 Folsom Street, the secret room set up by the NSA at AT&T’s offices in San Francisco. He is Now lobbying congress not to grant retroactive immunity to the Telcos over the illegal NSA spying.
“That was my ‘aha!’ moment,” Klein said. “They’re sending the entire Internet to the secret room.”
The diagram showed splitters, glass prisms that split signals from each network into two identical copies. One fed into the secret room, the other proceeded to its destination, he said.
“This splitter was sweeping up everything, vacuum-cleaner-style,” he said. “The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just AT&T’s customers but everybody’s.”
The illegal wiretapping that most telcos did on behalf of the NSA was far more extensive than previously revealed.
This was not targeted at foreign calls routed through the US. Nor was it calls where one party was overseas. The NSA is actively collecting ALL THE DATA going through AT&T internet exchange point. Everything. Every email, every google query, every music download, every IP telephone call (and BTW, pretty much all long distance telephone calls at some point use TCP/IP these days.)
They took everything.
The telcos are claiming that they need immunity, because they were just being good citizens, and that they were not clear on the law.
There is one problem with argument, as Mr. Klein noted on Olbermann, THESE ENTITIES WROTE THE LAWS INVOLVED. They were heavily involved in drafting the laws at every step of the way.
They knowingly broke the laws, and they did because they saw the example of Qwest, where the government retaliated by denying and pulling contracts, and they chose to break the law because it was profitable.
He was wondering as to what arguments would be made by the blogosphere might make to explain the Democratic Party successes in Virginia.
He list 9 alternatives, and finishes with this bon mot, which is one of the wisest things I’ve read this year:
Whatever the consensus turns out to be, I’m declaring right now that I think it’s wrong. And somewhere in my archives there will be a post to prove that I thought this all along.
This man is a Regular Nostradamus. I gotta make more predictions like this. Curmudgeons get all the prognostic props, you know.
In an otherwise completely conventional story from USA Today, I found this little gem at the end:
Meanwhile, Bush reached an unwelcome record. By 64%-31%, Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. For the first time in the history of the Gallup Poll, 50% say they “strongly disapprove” of the president. Richard Nixon had reached the previous high, 48%, just before an impeachment inquiry was launched in 1974.
I must resist urge to rub hands together and say, “Excellent”, like Monty Burns.”
Too late….
It appears that Regenry Press, incubator of right wing nutjobs who can’t write*, is getting sued for cheating authors out of royalties. The claim is that Regenry, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”
In Regnery’s case, according to the lawsuit, the publisher sells books to sister companies, including the Conservative Book Club, which then sells the books to members at discounted prices, “at, below or only marginally above its own cost of publication.” In the lawsuit the authors say they receive “little or no royalty” on these sales because their contracts specify that the publisher pays only 10 percent of the amount received by the publisher, minus costs — as opposed to 15 percent of the cover price — for the book.
Mr. Miniter said that meant that although he received about $4.25 a copy when his books sold in a bookstore or through an online retailer, he only earned about 10 cents a copy when his books sold through the Conservative Book Club or other Eagle-owned channels. “The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books,” Mr. Miniter said. “It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.” He added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”
I love that last quote. FWIW, they are not acting like a “Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company“, they are acting like a Harvard Business School professor.
As a matter of law, I am not a lawyer. As a matter of the facts, this is rather complicated. Regenery has a long history of basically giving its books away to boost numbers, you see it all the time at places like Newsmax, where if you subscribe, they’ll throw in a bloody library of conservative hardcover tripe. This way, someone who writes a book that might sell 3,000 copies gets to do the pundit circuit as a someone who has sold 100,000 copies,
I’d love to be a part of the legal discovery process, but right now I’m basking in the Schadenfreude.
*Yeah, like I’m one to talk, but at least I don’t think that I’m the next Hemingway.