Year: 2007

Rampant Torture Makes Cases Against Real Terrorists Impossible

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It now turns out that the CIA was so torture happy that the FBI is finding it difficult to make cases against major Al Queida operatives, and they are scrambling to find alternate evidence.

The FBI is quietly reconstructing the cases against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 14 other accused Al Qaeda leaders being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, spurred in part by U.S. concerns that years of CIA interrogation have yielded evidence that is inadmissible or too controversial to present at their upcoming war crimes tribunals, government officials familiar with the probes said.

The process is an embarrassment for the Bush administration, which for years held the men incommunicado overseas and allowed the CIA to use coercive means to extract information from them that would not be admissible in a U.S. court of law — and might not be allowed in their military commissions, some former officials and legal experts said. Even if the information from the CIA interrogations is allowed, they said, it would probably risk focusing the trials on the actions of the agency and not the accused.

We are talking about folks like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is so guilty that it boggles the mind, but Bush and His Evil Minions™ are so enamored with torture that they tainted the evidence.

I thought that it would be impossible for Bush to screw up a prosecution worse than that of Saddam Hussein, but they are now on a path to do so with KSM.

Another Politically Motivated DoJ Prosecution

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This time, it’s a hat trick, State Senator Matt McCoy: he’s Democratic, he’s gay, and he’s in Iowa, where the first of the nation caucuses occur.

According to court documents, the government withheld from the grand jury taped conversations in which McCoy explicitly told Vasquez that he would not suffer retribution if he didn’t share his earnings. The filing also accuses the government of intercepting emails between McCoy and his attorney, as well as surreptitiously paying Vasquez to cooperate in the prosecution (even offering him a bonus if the case returned a guilty plea).

For what it’s worth, he is charged with extorting his business partner, and appears to be rooted in sharing profit on installation of alarm systems.

How the feds got involved in this…..

Abu Gonzales May Be Facing Prosecution

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At least that’s what one of the fired prosecutors thinks. He believes that the IG will recommend prosecution.

FWIW, “Fredo” Gonzalez clearly thinks so too. He’s lawyered up, and he’s not saying a word to anyone.

Personally, I’d like to see him go to the Hague, not for his perjury, but for his active participation in the torture policies of Bush and His Evil Minions™. He’d get a fair trial, and it would be telecast.

Gantry-Gate

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It appears that there is a major scandal at Oral Sex Roberts university.

Richard Roberts, Oral’s son, has taken a leave of absence pending an investigation.

Among the allegations:

  • remodeled their home 11 times in 14 years
  • used the university jet for personal trips
  • forced members of the university to play an active role in a political campaign
  • retaliation against whistle blowers
  • Richard Roberts’ wife, Lindsay, spent the night in the ORU guest house with an underage male “on nine separate occasions
  • Lindsay was photographed 29 times with an underage male in her sports car

Many people, when they see self-righteous professions of faith, assume that at the bottom of everything is corruption. Episodes like this show why.

Watch Out for Porcine Poop, Because Pigs are Flying

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When a Fox News anchor criticizes Bush on S-CHIP, pigs are flying. In this case, the person launching the pigs is Mort Kondracke.

You have George Bush, who promised in 2004 at the Republican National Convention that he was going to cover millions of children who were not covered by SCHIP if he was reelected? And what does he do? He proposes a bill that would result in almost a million kids losing their coverage from the level it’s at. It’s no wonder Bush’s approval ratings is in the 30’s.

Truth be told, they are in the twenties. 25% when I last checked.

The only things less popular than him are hemorrhoids and Dick Cheney.

US loan default problems widen

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Banks are continuing to take losses and write down loans.

Poor quarterly results from banks across the US over the past two weeks suggest credit problems once confined to high-risk mortgage borrowers are spreading across the consumer landscape, posing new risks to the economy and weighing heavily on the markets.

This is not a problem limited to one portion of the market. It is wide spread, and it is systemic, driven by the Fed’s, specifically Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan’s, decision to create a credit bubble to address the dotcom meltdown of 2000-2001.

Too many people owe too much money, and much of this money should never have been lent out in the first place.

Fatah Planting Bombs in Gaza????

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Three Hamas militants wounded in Gaza in a Gaza explosion, and not only does Israel deny involvement, but Hamas agrees that the IDF had nothing to do with it.

It could be Islamic Jihad, of course, but given the PLO’s record on both conventional and urban fighting, their military record implies that they are over matched by a mean little kid with a pea shooter, this seems more the work of the PLO, particularly Fatah.

It requires a significant investment in resources and planning, but very little risk to the perps.

Is the Pakistani State Failing???

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See the opening paragraph of the New York Times article on the recent political upheval.

The scenes of carnage in Pakistan this week conjured what one senior administration official on Friday called “the nightmare scenario” for President Bush’s last 15 months in office: Political meltdown in the one country where Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and nuclear weapons are all in play.

In Augues, I referred to Pakistan as an almost failed state. Significant portions of the country are not under government control, the place is lousy with automatic weapons, and there is a significant Islamist movement there.

Pakistan is not fully cooperating because it cannot. It would destabilize the already fragile country, and then its nuclear arsenal would be up for grabs.

Scaife Divorce Schadenfreude

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I really can’t do justice to the reporting of the Washington Post with regard to the Scaife divorce, but it could not happen to a nicer guy than the man who ran the Arkansas project against Bill Clinton, drove Vince Foster into suicide, and very likely contributed to the death of Steve Kangas.

Here’s a quick sample, then go and read, and enjouy:

The culture of his own marriage is apparently past restoring. With the legal fight still in the weigh-in phase, the story of Scaife v. Scaife already includes a dog-snatching, an assault, a night in jail and that divorce court perennial, allegations of adultery.

Oh, and there’s the money. Three words, people.

No. Pre. Nup.

…

Dickie, as he’s known to his handful of friends, acquired a mean streak at an early age, according to his now-deceased sister, Cordelia Scaife. (She once told The Washington Post that she and her brother hadn’t spoken for 25 years.) His trouble with alcohol started when he was at prep school, and he later was tossed out of Yale when he rolled a keg of beer down a flight of stairs and broke the legs of a fellow student. His father, a below-average businessman, died a year after Richard graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. His mother was “just a gutter drunk,” as Cordelia put it.

Scaife owns a handful of newspapers and newsweeklies, including the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, a conservative answer to the Post-Gazette. When he isn’t tending to this modest publishing empire, he’s underwriting what Hillary Clinton once called “a vast right-wing conspiracy.” His highest-profile expenditure is the $2.3 million he gave the American Spectator magazine in the mid-’90s, to try to unearth prurient and embarrassing details about Bill Clinton’s years as governor of Arkansas. (The magazine came up virtually empty-handed.)

I wish his soon to be ex-wife all the best. Him, I am not so magnanimous in his wishes.

Swiss Right Wing Party Scores Major Electoral Victory

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The right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) won 29% of the vote and 62 of the 200 seats in the National Council, so they will still need to govern in a coalition with the other major parties.

Their success appears largely to be driven by anti-immigrant animus.

I would like to think that most of the voters in Europe are neither bigots or nativist by inclination, but given the political consensus outside of the bigoted and nativist parties, their only choice is to vote for people like the SVP.

The consensus among European intelligencia is that immigration is nearly a human right, while most of the populous sees immigration as serving the national, and to some degree their parochial, interests.

Every society goes through periods of more and less restrictive policies on immigration, and the fact that there is not a more progressive alternative to people like le Pen and the SVP is why they achieve economic success.

Shailagh Murray is a Tool and an Idiot

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Dodd Makes Play on FISA Legislation
Her analysis:

Whenever that big day comes, Dodd — as the keeper of the “hold” — must return from the campaign trail to officially block debate on the bill. That entails standing around on the Senate floor, forcing procedural votes, avoiding the furious glares of colleagues who don’t share the same concerns. The standard duration of such showdowns is about a week — time that Dodd, who is trailing badly in early primary polls, can scarcely afford.

Of course, there is the reality, with facts, as opposed to bloviating:

Chris Dodd: The Netroots Show the Love

Senator Dodd’s campaign communications director Hari Sevugan tells me that $150,000 in small contributions have poured into Dodd’s campaign in the past 24 hours, since his announcement that he will put a hold on–and may even filibuster–a foreign intelligence surveillance bill approved yesterday by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Dodd objects to a provision that would grant immunity to the telecommunications companies that turned over their customers’ phone and e-mail records to the government’s warrantless surveillance program. The companies have been hit with 40 pending lawsuits charging them with privacy violation.

You have a 3rd tier candidate for president who has just raised $150K in about 24 hours, and is probably in the 2nd tier (with Bill Richardson) as a result of his stand.

He’s on every bloggers lips right now, but according to Shailagh Murray his move is somehow a really bad idea.

My guess is that the lead levels in DC water are higher than they are letting on.

Margin and Leverage, and the Risks Involved

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For a while, I have been talking a bit about the dangers of highly complex and highly leveraged financial instruments, and how they might contribute to a crask.

It appears that some folks at Barron’s Magazineare now beginning to have the same concerns.

Let’s give some background on how a lot of these instruments work:

Investing on Margin:

What happens here, is that you borrow money from your broker to purchase stock, which is the collateral to the loan. Let us assume that you want to purchase stock for a company, you have $10,000 to spend.

If the costs $10/share, you can buy 10,000 shares. If the price goes to 11, you make $1,000.

Let us assume that you were to buy those shares on margin. The current US margin limit is 50% (correct me if I’m wrong), so with your $10,000, and the borrowed $10,000, you could buy 20,000 shares, and when they went to $11, you would make $2000, which after loan and margin fees would be around $1700.

The problem is that if the stock drops to $5.00, you will have lost all of your money.

If the stock drops to $3.00, you owe money to your brokerage.

Leverage can improve the upside of investments, but at the risk of significantly larger downside risks.

Securities Futures:

These are similar to commodities futures, except that deal with entities rather than stocks and bonds. They lack the justification that commodities futures do: If a tire manufacturer gets a large OEM contract from General Motors, there is a real business case for them to lock in the price of rubber with a futures contract, but a stock future’s contract is just speculation.

You make money with an appreciating stock by purchasing a contract to sell a stock purchased today at a later date, and you make money with a depreciating stock by purchasing a contract to sell a stock today that you are buying at a later date.

Generally, you only have to put down the cost for the contract, and ;”>not the cost of the security, so where a typical margin purchase may be 50% leveraged, stock futures might be more than 90% leveraged.

Obviously, if one is in possession of ;”>inside information both of margin purchasing and futures can greatly increase the return on this information for an unethical broker.

Just so you know, leverage has increased markedly over the past few years, see below for a picture of the roughly 300% increase in Margin since 1990.

It should be noted that the use of leverage, specifically margin purchasing, was one of the major causes of the stock market crash of 1929. It forced people who got margin calls to unload into a collapsing market. It is why the loan to value rate was set to about 75% in the 1930s (and subsequently lowered to 50% in the mid 1970s).

It should be noted that none of these techniques aid ;”>investors, they aid ;”>speculators, and they provide perverse incentives for people to cheat in some manner or another.

The repackaged loans that are currently weighing on the market are a rather similar sort of leverage, where the idea was that by packaging a large number of loans together, you would spread the risk of any individual loan defaulting, which allowed people to trade these securities in a brisk, and potentially lucrative manner, particularly for the brokers, who got a commission on each sale.

If we have a 1929 style crash in the stock market, or worse, a 1987 style crash in the stock market (it was a worse one day drop), the swings will be exacerbated by people who will be forced by their brokers to sell on the drop on a roller coaster ride.

If we were to return to the Depression era regulations that FDR implemented, much of the instability and speculation that causes this risk would be eliminated, but it would take years for the exotic financial instruments to work their way out of the market, so it is likely too late now.

Corrupt Maricopa County DA and Sheriff Back Down from Confrontation with a Press

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A Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution The object of this story, the Phoenix New Times, got the hed for this story correct when they called it Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution. The story begins a few years back, when the The Phoenix New Times, a Phoenix, AZ alternative newspaper began looking into the affairs of the very prominent, and very controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio*, and found that since his election as sheriff, he has accumulated millions of dollars in real estate investments on a $78,000 sheriff’s salary, and he used “an arcane statute meant to conceal home addresses of law enforcement officials to shield his investments.” In commenting on Arpaio’s extensive real estate holdings, the New Times published his home address in an OP/ED on their web page, to show how this information was already publicly available, and the Arpaio filed a criminal complaint with the DA, Andrew Thomas†, who appointed one of his cronies, Dennis Wilenchik, as special prosecutors, to see if there was a violation of the law in publishing this information. ‡ Then, in a stunning abuse of the grand jury process, Wilenchik issued a grand jury subpoena to the Phoenix New Times, requesting:

  • “all documents related to articles and other content published by Phoenix New Times newspaper in print and on the Phoenix New Times website, regarding Sheriff Joe Arpaio from January 1, 2004 to the present.”
  • Detailed information on every person who has visited the Phoenix New Times web site since 2004.
    • which pages visitors access or visit on the Phoenix New Times website;
    • the total number of visitors to the Phoenix New Times website;
    • information obtained from ‘cookies,’ including, but not limited to, authentication, tracking, and maintaining specific information about users (site preferences, contents of electronic shopping carts, etc.);
    • the Internet Protocol address of anyone that accesses the Phoenix New Times website from January 1, 2004 to the present;
    • the domain name of anyone that has accessed the Phoenix New Times website from January 1, 2004 to the present;
    • the website a user visited prior to coming to the Phoenix New Times website;
    • the date and time of a visit by a user to the Phoenix New Times website;
    • the type of browser used by each visitor (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape Navigator, Firefox, etc.) to the Phoenix New Times website; and
    • the type of operating system used by each visitor to the Phoenix New Times website.”

The publishers of the paper, published that they had been subpoenaed, along with this analysis of the entire affair:

The seemingly picayune matter of Sheriff Arpaio’s home address getting printed at the bottom of an opinion column on our Internet site — and the very real issue of commercial property investments the sheriff hid from public view — have now erupted into a courtroom donnybrook against a backdrop of illegal immigration disputes, Mexican drug cartels, the Minutemen, political ambition, and turf disputes between prosecutors and the judiciary.

What’s more, the special prosecutor attempted to use a third party to set up an ex parte meeting with the judge supervising the grand jury, in direct violation of the most basic canons of legal ethics. Well, the newspaper, or more specifically its founders Michael Lacey, the executive editor, and Jim Larkin, chief executive, had had enough, so they published about the secret grand jury subpoena, and they were promptly arrested. Well, if they wanted news of the subpoena, and abuse of the grand jury process, covered up, they got it wrong, because, it got coverage from the New York Times here, and here, Slate, and (FINALLY) the Arizona Republic, to name a few. At this point, realizing that they were completely screwed, Thomas ended the investigation, with much press coverage. As an poster on the New Times web site said, “Not surprising. Cockroaches never do like being exposed to daylight.” *He has created a jail tent city, and sold himself as the “America’s toughest sheriff”. †Who appears to be so close to Arpaio that they could share a bathroom stall with Senator Larry Craig. ‡No, there wasn’t. You know the first amendment allows for reporting stuff like this. It’s news, and furthermore, it is germane, as they are covering the corrupt sheriff’s real estate holdings, which include his house, which he has covered up by misusing a that refers only to his home.

Global Warming Leads Coast Guard to Open Arctic Base

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The base would likely be located near Barrow, Alaska.

It will handle the expansion of traffic in the Arctic Ocean, and will coordinate traffic through the Bering Strait with the Russians.

When there is an open path during the summer months, which appears to be happening ahead of the worst cases given by climate change scientists, the traffic through such a “Northwest Passage” could be significant, and would require significant monitoring and aid by coast guards of all the nations on the arctic ocean.

Needless to say, this is a rather profound manifestation of global warming, notwithstanding the protestations of the global warming deniers.

Mens and Womens Poems

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Not my poem, it was posted by a friend I’ve never seen in person on a message board (by invite only) called Stellar Parthenon. Neat place. We’ve had a thread on thread about the collapse of the US Economy Since December, 2003.

WOMAN’S POEM
Before I lay me down to sleep

I pray for a man, who’s not a creep,
One who’s handsome, smart and strong.
One who loves to listen long,
One who thinks before he speaks,
One who’ll call, not wait for weeks.
I pray he’s gainfully employed,
When I spend his cash, won’t be annoyed.
Pulls out my chair and opens my door,
Massages my back and begs to do more.
Oh! Send me a man who’ll make love to my mind,
Knows what to answer to “how big is my behind?

I pray that this man will love me to no end,
And always be my very best friend.

MAN’S POEM
I pray for a deaf-mute nymphomaniac with huge boobs
who owns a liquor store and a golf course. This
doesn’t rhyme and I don’t give a sh$#.

Obama Should Not Be Hanging Out With Homophobic Bigots

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Barack Obama is doing a gospel music tour called the “Embrace the Change” tour with three dates in South Carolina.

I understand that this is a part of his message of inclusiveness, but review the highlighted portion:

As religious conservatives gather in Washington this weekend for the “Values Voters Summit,” Senator Barack Obama’s campaign announced its latest effort to attract people of faith to the campaign: a gospel concert tour.

All three of the dates of the “Embrace the Change” tour are in South Carolina, where Mr. Obama is locked in battle with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for black voters.

Gospel acts including Mary Mary, Donnie McClurkin and Hezekiah Walker, Byron Cage and the Mighty Clouds of Joy are scheduled to appear.

It seems innocuous enough, until you dig into the statements and actions of Donnie McClurkin in this 2004 article:

Gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, who has detailed his struggle with gay tendencies and vowed to battle “the curse of homosexuality,” said yesterday he’ll perform as scheduled at the Republican National Convention on Thursday, despite controversy over his view that sexuality can be changed by religious intervention.

He is also claiming that he was “made gay” by being raped by an uncle.

Unless McClurkin has recanted these views, he is a messenger of bigotry and hypocrisy, and no Democratic candidate should have him sing as a part of their political campaign.

Lenders in La Now Slashing Prices to Unload Foreclosed Properties

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This is no surprise. The question is never been whether this would start, it has always been where, and when, and how much, and how fast it moves across the country.

There are very few places in the country that will be untouched by the real estate meltdown, and now the first three questions have been answered, and the 4th question is in process:

On average, a foreclosed property sells 20.3 percent below its market value. The median discount level is slightly lower in Orange County at 19.6 percent compared with 21 percent in Los Angeles County.

The real estate folks are saying that it won’t depress the market because it is only 6% of sales right now, but if 1 of every 17 house sales is at a 20% discount, it will have an effect, particularly as that number goes up, both in terms of percentage of sales, and in terms of discount.

I remember this joke from the 1989-1992 real estate crash in Massachusetts:
Q: Which of these things do not belong:

  • AIDS
  • Herpes
  • Gonorrhea
  • A Condo in Massachusetts

A: Gonorrhea. You can get rid of it.