“Dickie” Scruggs, here and here.
The prosecutor is recommending 5 years in prison.
Month: March 2008
Allegations that Spitzer Used Campaign Funds for Tryst
I’m not sure if this is real, or if the prosecutor, a Chertoff crony, is looking for something that won’t appear to be a political hit job.
UK May Not Deport Gay Man to Face Execution in Iran
Now that there has been some press coverage, the home office is reviewing their deportation 19-year-old Mehdi Kazemi.
Bear Stearns, I May Have Gotten a Prediction Right
On August 2 of last year, I said that within a year, Bear Stearns would cease to function as an independent entity.
I’m not right yet, but I don’t see how I won’t be right in the next 5 months.
Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
And it would seem, that I actually get a prediction right, which is another sign of the apocalypse.
Just yesterday, the Bear Stearns CEO said that there were no liquidity issues, but today, JPMorgan Chase and the New York Fed have gotten together to bail them out.
Basically, the Fed can’t bail out Bear Stearns, it’s out of its authority, but it can guarantee JP Morgan’s loans to the embattled investment bank, which it did.
Actually, a closer reading makes it even more extraordinary. The Fed directly lent money to Bear Stearns, using an authority last used in the 1960s, which required a vote of the Fed’s Board of Governors.
Typically, the Fed is only supposed to lend to banks, and Bear is not a bank, but an investment house.
As to the statements of the CEO yesterday, I would call them a bald faced lie, but I don’t have a Harvard MBA, so I don’t know the fancy term for blowing smoke up everyone’s ass.
Of interest is some potential insider trading, specifically, someone traded 55,000 Bear Stearns puts Tuesday. (A “Put Option” is basically a bet that the stock will decline in value.)
One of the results of all of this is that money has been fleeing to Treasuries, or fleeing the US entirely, with the dollar down.
One of the things you have to understand is that Bear Stearns is a pretty small player in all this, with a market capitalization of “only” about $15 billion dollars, and we’ve got the markets jumping out windows.
Economics Update
In terms of market stability, Carlyle Capital share prices have tripled after Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubinstein said that it was looking at ways to compensate investors.
I’m not sure how much it means. The collapse of Carlyle Capital, that was so yesterday….hold it….it actually WAS yesterday.
Today, it’s Bear Stearns, which gets its own thread for reasons of personal ego.
Inflation in February was 0%, largely due to some moderation in food and energy, which won’t happen in March, given that oil is still at around $110/bbl, and the dollar is still tanking.
In insurance, it appears that losses are approaching the levels of Katrina, though we are probably less than 1/3 of the way through this.
David Petraeus Is Now Saying that Surge Failed
He’s more circumspect, saying that Iraqi leaders are not making sufficient progress, but it amounts to the same thing.
One wonders if this is some sort of push back against an Iran invasion, or he’s just trying to cover his ass.
Time for Your Weekly Tanker Saga Update
First, lets start with my analysis. As soon as Airbus proposed the A330, Boeing knew that they were facing a larger, more modern, and more capable plane.
They stuck with the 767 for a very simply reason, they believed that they were God’s gift to tankers, and commercial clients still wanted to buy the 777, so they thought that it was more convenient.
First, Boeing has filed a formal protest on the award, which is as surprising as the sun coming up in the morning. (See here, here, and here.)
Needless to say, Democrats are using this to take shots against John Mccain (Read a fantastically funny riff on the politics here)
Truth be told, the first deal to lease was corrupt, with DoD and Boeing officials going to jail over the deal, and. McCain was right to challenge the deal.
A lot of the problem for Boeing is that they were unbelievably arrogant and unresponsive to the DoD:
“The Boeing team was not responsive and often was not even polite,” said Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., based on conversations he said he had with defense officials. “Somehow that all eluded senior management,” Mr. Thompson said. “They were not even aware there was a problem.”
Add to this that Boeing’s record in defense contracting is worse than that of Northrop Grumman in terms of being on time and on budget, and that they had an inferior product, and this was a done deal.
Boeing was hoping to rest on its laurels, and the fact that much of the Congress would flip out over the choice.
Of course it doesn’t help that McCain campaign staffers lobbied for EADS.
Additionally, one of Boeings arguments, that EADS was ill equipped to create a working boom (boom and probe primarily used by the USAF, and products developed for the USAF, everyone else uses hose and drogue), was not accurate. They were already developing a boom for Australia (I guess for their F-111s, the F-18s use hose and drogue).
Furthermore, EADS was motivated to move work to the us, because they wanted to take advantage of the cheap dollar. That’s a reason that all the A330 freighter assembly will be moving to the US. It’s cheaper for them now.
For what it’s worth, The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) has issued a statement supporting the deal, so it met their snif test.
Boeing has now released the specifics of its complaint against the process:
- That the formula used to rate the competitors was changed at the last minute.
- That this changed favored EADS by making range and payload more important, and ramp space requirements less so.
- That they failed to give Boeing credit for its commercial airliner experience.
My comment on the last point is that the DoD took a look at your contracting performance with them and decided that you sucked.
Bush Personally Intervened to Poison National Parks
Yes, the Avignon President is busy making the air we breath unsafe for humans and other living things:
The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.
EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA’s scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.
“It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA’s expert scientific judgment,” said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
This is more than just bad policy. His actions are also against the statute.
Really, just despicable.
House and Senate Pass Phase Out of Bush Tax Cuts
It’s a, good start, but we are in a deep hole, both in terms of the Federal budget deficient and the economy, and the Wall Street types who created this whole, and benefit from this hole, need to pay more of their share of the hole.
The maximum marginal tax rate needs to be increased, probably into the 45% to 50% range for people making over $½ million a year, because we are going to need massive government spending to avoid Japan’s 15 year deflationary trap, and we have massive infrastructure needs that have to be addressed regardless of the state of the economy.
Truths in Life: Law Enforcement Agencies will ALWAYS Abuse Survelliance Abilities
In this case, we have the FBI using national security letters, which require no judicial review, as a giant Hoover to spy on tens of thousands of Americans illegally.
What’s more, when they were informed that this was illegal, they engaged in an orgy of illegal ass-covering:
This created a backlog of records that the F.B.I. had obtained without going through proper procedures. In response, the letter said, the F.B.I. devised a plan: rather than issuing national security letters retroactively for each individual investigation, it would issue the blanket letters to cover all the records obtained from a particular phone company.
Lets be clear. This is not the exception, this is the rule. It is the basic place that any part of the state security apparatus is coming from, and it has been since well before the founding of the Republic.
These sorts of situational ethics are simply part of the mindset.
It Is What It Is
Down at TPM Cafe, FlyOnTneWall has a very interesting post on the realities of Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., the pastor at Obama’s Church.
Specifically, he discusses the Fox News (who else) coverage of a rather incendiary sermon in which he makes it clear that he supports Obama.
Ostensibly, the article is about the potential implications with the IRS, but in reality Fox uses it get some potentially disastrous sound bites on the table.
In addition to the use of the N-Word, and describing Bill Clinton as having done the Black community, “just like he did Monica”, which I think that Obama can, and did defuse with his “crazy uncle” disavowal, there are some statements that are far more troubling from a political perspective:
Brian Ross’s report for Good Morning America on Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, is potentially a huge problem for Obama. In the piece, Ross has clips of Wright delivering sermons in which he says we should not say God Bless America, but God “Damn” America, in which he calls America the US of KKKA (referring to how racist the country is), and in which he says about September 11 that America’s “chickens have come home to roost.”
From a purely tactical perspective, he needs to get ahead of this story, and he needs to do so in the next few days.
If he waits until Monday, it may well be too late.
It is necessarily a painful thing, after all, Rev. Wright’s has been his pastor for over 20 years, but these are the sound bites that will be used to destroy his campaign.
Rev. Wright is not Louis Farrakhan, but the political reality in the US in 2008 is that he will have to be disavowed and denounced in the same manner, and even then you will still see his clips all over Fox News.
He needs not to repeat Clinton’s weakness with Ferraro.
The Republicans are salivating at the opportunity to turn Obama into the scary angry black man. It’s not fair, it’s just the way it is.
They need to throw Wright off the bus, and back up over him, and do it again, and then tie an anchor to him and throw him in the river.
Clinton Apologizes for Ferraro at National Newspaper Publishers Association
She spoke before the publishers and editors of 200 black community newspapers at the NNPA meeting, saying, that, “I certainly do repudiate it and I regret deeply”.
Should have happened yesterday, but better late than never.
She also apologized for the government incompetence and inaction with regard to Katrina.
House to Hold Closed Session over FISA Update
This is not a common event, and if you have a “blue dog” representative, call him, and make it clear that you will never vote for him for anything under any circumstances if he approves Telco immunity.
I’m still not sure what put some spine in the House dems, but when Pelosi is saying things like, “the president is wrong, and he knows it“, it’s clear that something has given them the will to resist Mr. Nineteen percent.
My theory is that when they left without passing telco immunity, they were overwhelmed at the support that they received, and that they realize that opposing Bush on anything for any reason is a winning tactic.
Of course, Senator Rockefeller is still determined to put telco immunity back in there. My guess is that he was briefed and signed off on it, and thinks that it will harm him politically.
Same Old, Same Old
Rockets and air strikes in Gaza.
**sigh**
Te Gay, Too Funny
I got this in the mail.
Click image for full size.
The Very Model of A Modern Republican
The National Republican Campaign Committee’s treasurer, Chris Ward may have stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from this organization.
Not only did he take the money, but he gave reports showing that they had more money than they actually did, so now they are nearly broke, and involved in an investigation involving forensic accounting.
I’m so crushed.
This has been a time for Schadenfreude.
Great Googly Moogly!!!! Another Debate
There will be a debate in Philadelphia on April 16, hosted by ABC.
If that wasn’t enough to make you scream, Obama upped the ante. He also accepted a debate on April 19 in North Carolina, hosted by CBS, and moderated by Katie Couric and Bob Schieffer.
So we’ve got the chipper cheerleader, and Bush’s buddy moderating the 2nd debate.
Gah!!!!
Mulligans in Michigan and Florida
Michigan seems to be further along, with the Republicans in the state legislature being rather helpful.
The deal seems to be as follows: The state holds a new primary, and the Dems pay for it.
It’s the right thing to do, both politically and morally, but I’ve learned never to trust a smiling Republican, and the Republicans seem awfully helpful right now, which implies that they have found a way to put a proverbial turd in the punch bowl.
Hopefully, this is just my cynicism.
Florida is far more unsettledwith the state Democratic party and Senator Nelson on one side, and the congressional delegation on the other.
My guess is that if MI gets its act together, so will Florida.
From a purely tactical perspective, the Obama campaign has to see any sort of “re-vote”, even a caucus, as a losing proposition, since it adds about 300 delegates to the mix, and a large number of votes, probably a larger number than who voted in January.
Furthermore, the majority of those people will have already pulled the lever.
The Bush Administration Punts on the Mortgage Debacle
According to Forbes, it’s “tighter standards”, but by the standards of any thinking human being, it’s a big wet tongue kiss on the mouth of the bad players in this drama.
The only substantive proposal is better licensing of mortgage brokers, the rest is voluntary, and it’s clear that Paulson, and the rest of Bush’s cronies, are not interested in reform when they say, “The objective here is to get the balance right — regulation needs to catch up with innovation and help restore investor confidence but not go so far as to create new problems, make our markets less efficient or cut off credit to those who need it.”
Let me explain this in very simple terms, the so-called “innovation” that Paulson is looking to preserve, is deception, complexity, fraud, self dealing, and general corruption.
These “innovations” did not make housing less expensive, or easier to get. They caused housing inflation, and threatened the stability of our housing market, banking system, and society.
This so-called innovation is not something we need to protect. We need to put a stake through it’s black heart.
It’s Always the Tapes
It turns out that the military has dozens, if not hundreds of tapes of interrogations, and that some of them do show “harsh tactics”, including FBI agents participating in torture.
I want my country back.