It appears now that both sides are trying to peel off resistance. The big studios are trying to get shows to cross the picket lines, and the WGA is trying to negotiate a deal with the small independent producers.
This is going to be a long strike, I think.
Calculated Risk: Banks Studying Bailout of ACA
ACA, which insures $26 billion in bonds is insolvent, and the banks are looking at bailing it out. Bailing out an insolvent company generally makes no sense, but if they don’t then the banks have to record the non-uninsured bonds on their balance sheets.
Then we have MBIA, the largest bond insurer in the world, being threatened with a downgrade by Fitch, if it does not rais $1 billion in cash in the next 4-6 weeks.
While these companies in and of themselves are not very large, the consequences are staggering:
The insurer, ACA Capital Holdings, which lost $1 billion in the most recent quarter, has been warned by Standard & Poor’s that its financial guarantor subsidiary may soon lose its crucial A rating. If it did, the banks that insured securities with the ACA Financial Guaranty Corporation would have to take back billions in losses from the insurer under the terms of the credit protection they bought from the company.
The troubles at ACA could also serve as the first real test for credit default swaps, the tradable insurance contracts used by investors to protect, or hedge, against default on bonds. In June, the value of bonds underlying credit default swaps rose to $42.6 trillion, up from just $6.4 trillion at the end of 2004, according to the Bank for International Settlements.
“The hedge is only as good as the counterparty, or the other party, to the hedge,” said Joseph R. Mason, a finance professor at Drexel University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “This is part and parcel of the financial innovation that has grown very rapidly in recent years.”
In other words, phony money and real debt.
If MBIA loses its AAA ratings, more than $2 TRILLION in securities would lose its AAA ratings too.
We are still on the downslope of this collapse, so it has got a ways to go before we turn a corner.
The Vatican has blasted Golden Compass as Godless and hopeless. Considering their view of Monty Python’s Life of Brian this movie must totally rock, and it sounds like I could take my kids to it.
It’s our fault.
All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion for Discord, Study Shows
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 19, 2007; Page A14Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of “occupying forces” as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month.
…
To quote Billy Joel (and of course, Alvin and the Chipmunks, who did the definitive cover), you may be right.
Someone at Sadly, No! had to read Johna’s book, Liberal Fascism.
I just read the paragraphs that they scanned in.
The stupidity…It burns…..It Burns.
The comments are amusing though.
So, now the lawsuits start:
Barclays sues over sub-prime losses
British bank says hedge fund losses were hidden
Andrew Clark
Barclays’ exposure to America’s sub-prime mortgage fiasco took a dramatic turn last night as the bank sued the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns for fraud and deception over the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in an ill-fated hedge fund.
In a lawsuit filed in New York, Barclays accused Bear Stearns of systematically hiding losses in a fund which swallowed $400m (£200m) of the British bank’s money. The fund had to be bailed out in June after reaching the brink of collapse following a disastrous series of investments in mortgage-backed securities.
Barclays described the fund’s demise as “one of the most high profile and shocking hedge fund failures in the last decade”. The suit alleges that up to the last days before the bail-out, Bear Stearns executives engaged in a cover-up to hide the slump in its value.
…
This is going to get worse. We are going to see more lawsuits, and some very big jury verdicts.
With proper regulations, you stop this sort of stuff before it gets out of hand. Without it, you just have lawsuits after the fact.
In addition to reports that the Bush Department of Justice dragged its feet in investigating the 2002 New Hampshire election day phone jamming, which crippled the Democratic party GOTV efforts, we now have one of the perps dropping a dime on his former partners in crime at the Republican party.
A former GOP political operative who ran an illegal election-day scheme to jam the phone lines of New Hampshire Democrats during the state’s tight 2002 U.S. Senate election said in a new book and an interview that he believes the scandal reaches higher into the Republican Party.
Allen Raymond of Bethesda, Md., whose book Simon & Schuster will publish next month, also accused the Republican Party of trying to hang all the blame for a scandal on him as part of an “old-school cover-up.”
Raymond’s book, “How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative,” offers a raw, inside glimpse of the phone scandal as it unraveled and of a ruthless world in which political operatives seek to win at all costs.
McClatchy obtained an advance copy of the book.
I believe that we will be seeing a lot more of this.
With Democratic control of the congress, the opportunities for rewards for keeping one’s mouth closed have diminished, and if the Dems take the White House, the possibility for a pardon vanishes.
We will see a lot more people ratting out former friends, and writing books.
BTW, I love his last line, “As for his three months in a Pennsylvania prison, he wrote: “After 10 full years inside the GOP, 90 days among honest criminals wasn’t really any great ordeal.“
No big surprise here. Bush loves polluters. Governor Schwartzenegger* says that he will file suit. The EPA is using the recently passed energy bill as one of the justifications.
Since 12 other states follow California regulations, and 5 other states are considering it, this is a significant thing.
*I still have a problem getting my head around, “Governor Schwartzenegger”.
Well, it appears that there are still more depths to plumb in l’affaire Kerik.
Laurence Ray, one of Kerik’s closest associates, he was best man at Kerik’s 1998 wedding and he was convicted of mob-related securities fraud, appears to be singing like a bird:
This spring, Ray’s friend Sidney Baumgarten, a New York lawyer, told former deputy mayor and longtime Giuliani ally Ninfa Segarra that Ray was embroiled in a bitter divorce and an even worse custody dispute over his two daughters. Baumgarten said he told Segarra that Ray possessed “damaging” information about Giuliani but that he would not go public with his allegations if he could receive help with the mounting legal troubles.
“That was the implied quid pro quo,” Baumgarten recalled in an interview with The Post, saying the conversation stemmed solely from his desire to help Ray’s children in the custody case.
The following day, Baumgarten received an e-mail from Segarra advising Ray to call an acquaintance of hers, a “political heavyweight” lawyer who could assist Ray in the custody dispute in New Jersey. “For now I would ask not to identify me as the referral,” Segarra wrote in the March 5 e-mail obtained by The Post.
I am so hoping that the Republicans nominate Giuliani.
Matthew Yglesias comments on the Washington Post OP/ED by Harold Meyerson. They both ask why if the the words in the Christian Bible are so full of peace and love, that the Christo-Fascists are so mindlessly selfish, punitive, violent, and warlike.
Meyerson mentions the punitive nature of their immigration positions, which favor punishing children of illegals.
It’s not just Bush whose catechism is a merry mix of torture and piety. Virtually the entire Republican House delegation opposed the ban on waterboarding. Among the Republican presidential candidates, only Huckabee and the not-very-religious John McCain have come out against torture, while only libertarian Ron Paul has questioned the doctrine of preemptive war.
But it’s on their policies concerning immigrants where Republicans — candidates and voters alike — really run afoul of biblical writ. Not on immigration as such but on the treatment of immigrants who are already here. Consider: Christmas, after all, celebrates not just Jesus’s birth but his family’s flight from Herod’s wrath into Egypt, a journey obviously undertaken without benefit of legal documentation. The Bible isn’t big on immigrant documentation. “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him,” Exodus says the Lord told Moses on Mount Sinai, “for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Yet the distinctive cry coming from the Republican base this year isn’t simply to control the flow of immigrants across our borders but to punish the undocumented immigrants already here, children and parents alike.
So Romney attacks Huckabee for holding immigrant children blameless when their parents brought them here without papers, and Huckabee defends himself by parading the endorsement of the Minuteman Project’s Jim Gilchrist, whose group harasses day laborers far from the border. The demand for a more regulated immigration policy comes from virtually all points on our political spectrum, but the push to persecute the immigrants already among us comes distinctly, though by no means entirely, from the same Republican right that protests its Christian faith at every turn.
I would add the death penalty, support for Iraq, opposition to social programs.
I do not know the whys of this. I am not a Christian, and I have read little of the Christian theological works, so my understanding of this cognitive dissonance is limited.
By the same token, I am not in the least surprised. While I am not a student of Christian theology, I AM a student of Jewish history, and the behaviors that they are all so very shocked about have long standing historical precedents.
History shows that the use of the Christian texts to promote hate is the rule rather than the exception.
More happened in 1492, for example, than Columbus going to America.
The Financial Times has an absolutely snarkalicious review of John Bolton’s book, Surrender is Not an Option.
A quick sample:
….
A lack of intellectual curiosity might not matter if Bolton were a gifted storyteller, or interestingly introspective. But that is not the case. If he has ever had difficult personal or moral choices to make, he is not letting on. At one point, he does acknowledge that he took steps to avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam. He writes: “I made the cold calculation that I wasn’t going to waste time on a futile struggle,” adding: “Looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation.” The whole episode is dealt with in a paragraph.
Many people of Bolton’s generation made similar decisions. But it would be interesting to hear a little more on this subject, from a man who has given his book the bellicose title Surrender is Not an Option. When it came to Vietnam, surrender was not an option for Bolton because he never got close enough to the enemy to make it feasible.
….
(emphasis mine)
Go read it.
It all comes down to the tapes. It always does.
First, we have reports that the White House discussed whether or not to destroy the torture tapes. Harriet Miers, John Bellinger, Alberto “Abu” Gonzales and David Addington engaged in extensive discussions over a long period as to whether or not to destroy the tapes.
Furthermore, some White House officials were lobbying hard for these tapes destruction.
No big surprise, but there is a surprise, and a good one, the C.I.A. has agreed to share relevant documents with congressional investigators, which means that at least part of the Bush Admin coverup is now over.
Time Magazine has decided not to renew the contracts with William Kristol or Charles Krauthammer.
If you are wondering if this means that there is an outbreak of sanity with Time‘s editor, the answer is no. They are in negotiations with Ramesh Ponnuru to write some OP/EDs for them.
It’s pretty clear that they were pushed. Kristol is not talking, and Krauthammer has made it clear it was pushed:
“I was very happy to work with them,” said Mr. Krauthammer on the phone from his Washington office. “And I have a lot of things that occupy me.”
Asked if he would have preferred to stay with the magazine, Mr. Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize winner who writes a regular column for The Washington Post, suggested there wasn’t much of a choice. “It’s a hypothetical that didn’t arise,” he said.
(emphasis mine)
As to my little funny about, “outsourcing punditry to India”, if the Wingnutosphere decides to get up in arms about it in an orgy of phony offensensitivity, that’s fine with me. They are a bunch of inbred, knuckle dragging, drooling idiots.
good. A new nuclear warhead is the last thing we need right now.
This program is not about need, but about another attempt of the Bush Admin to encumber his successor with a program and the attendant policies.
Yes, it’s true, Blackwater has decided to expand its operations into peacekeeping.
Well, I guess that the dead do not conduct war.
(to the tune of Ghostbusters)
Blackwater
If there’s men with guns
in your neighborhood
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
If there’s random death
and it don’t look good
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
If there’s a fear of death
running through your head
Who can ya call?
Blackwater
An populist man
turning your country red
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
If ya all alone
pick up the phone
and call
Blackwater
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
I here it likes the mercst
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
If you’ve had enough of those
Looters and scum
Ya better call
Blackwater
Lemme tell ya something
Bustin’ makes me feel good!
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
Don’t get caught alone no no
Blackwater
When it comes through your door
Unless you just want some more
I think you better call
Blackwater
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
I think you better call
Blackwater
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
I can’t hear you
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
Louder
Blackwater
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
Who can ya call?
Blackwater
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
Yep, that’s what the Wall Street Journal says (subscription required):
The joint housing and mortgage-market crisis once again reminds us that all financial implosions stem from the same cause: borrowing short and lending long without enough equity to weather periodic storms in the gap between.
But this bubble was different. Besides being fueled by housing purchases and repackaged loans, each with inadequate equity — doubling down with other people’s money — at the end of the capital-gains rainbow was the right to take up to $500,000 of profit, tax free.
Thank you President Bill Clinton for your 1997 action, applauded by the banks, the realtors and all citizens in search …
The changes add both scope and teeth to the law.
It’s clear that Bush won’t sign it, but with Reid keeping the senate in session again, it may become law without his signature.
Basically, this means that he will be elected South African president. While there is a lot of hand wringing about how Zuma won’t be as “investor friendly” as Mbeki, the fact that there was a contested leadership election in the ANC, and that the incumbent lost in a free and fair vote is a good thing.
This is good…it’s called democracy…
I think that its clear that Zuma’s mandate is to improve the lives of South Africans who live in poverty, and as such, members of the foreign and domestic investor class are likely to have to pay a bit more in taxes and fees, but this is a good thing, not a threat to democracy.
He got more votes than the other guy, and it appears that the exhumation of old corruption charges is more about an anti-democratic effort of Mbeki to stay in power than anything else.
Paul Krugman looks at Obama’s tepid venture into healthcare reform during his days as an Illinois state senator, as reported by this Boston Globe article, and he concludes that Obama is not ready for prime time:
My thoughts: being president isn’t at all like being a state legislator, Illinois Republicans aren’t like the national Republican party, 2009 won’t be 2003, and the insurance industry’s opposition to national health reform — which must, if it is to mean anything, strike deep at the industry’s fundamental business — will be much harsher than its opposition to a basically quite mild state-level reform effort.
The point is that if national health reform is going to happen, it will be as the result of a no-holds-barred fight of an entirely different order from what Obama saw in Illinois. The president’s role will have to be far more confrontational, involve far more twisting of arms and rallying of the public against the special interests, than Obama’s role as a state legislator in the Illinois case. And it will take place against a backdrop of fierce attacks not just from the industry but from Republicans who fear, rightly, that any kind of reform will move the country in a more liberal direction.
My thoughts are much less charitable, because of one paragraph in the Globe article:
The bill originally called for a “Bipartisan Health Care Reform Commission” to implement a program reaching all 12.4 million Illinois residents. The legislation would have made it official state policy to ensure that all residents could access “quality healthcare at costs that are reasonable.” Insurers feared that language would result in a government takeover of healthcare, even though the bill did not explicitly say that.
By the time the legislation passed the Senate, in May 2004, Obama had written three successful amendments, at least one of which made key changes favorable to insurers.
Most significant, universal healthcare became merely a policy goal instead of state policy – the proposed commission, renamed the Adequate Health Care Task Force, was charged only with studying how to expand healthcare access. In the same amendment, Obama also sought to give insurers a voice in how the task force developed its plan.
(Emphasis mine)
Let’s be clear on this: This is not just the “big table” that Obama is so fond of talking about. This is the wholesale abandonment of a core value, and he didn’t just vote for it, he proposed the amendment to abandon it.
Truth be told, I’m sick of his “Red Sea will part before my awsomness” schtick. This was just selling out.
Read Krugman’s blog post, but you may find the Globe article more interesting. He appeared to be joined at the hip with the insurance companies.