Month: March 2008

The Pope Bitch Slaps Condi Rice

No Comments

OK, my opinion of Benedict has improved a bit, though he is still a reactionary idiot.

The title is not mine though, I whole heatedly approve the hed, and will defend it, but that bon mot is not mine, so I cannot take credit for it.

It appears that Pope Benedict XVI has refused an audience for Condolleza Rice.

She had requested an audience in August (you know, in order to play politics with the conventions and the November election).

The pope has denied this request, ostensibly since it was his August holiday, but really for two reasons:

  • Bush and His Evil Minions™ in general, and Condoleeza Rice in particular, were hostile and rude to John Paul II when he sent emissaries out to attempt to prevent the war.
  • Because the US has steadfastly rebuffed requests from the “Holy See” to prevent the ethnic cleansing to of the Christian minority in Iraq.

Condoleeza Rice should not be too upset by this, “Instead of meeting the Pope, Ms Rice had to make do with a telephone conversation with the Vatican’s number two, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was visiting the US during August on other business.”

So, he won’t talk to her, but his number two will talk to her on the phone.

Girlfriend, maybe he just ain’t into you…You know.

McCain Aggressively Pursued Hagee’s Endorsement

No Comments

One of the questions about John McCain’s hookup with Rightwing Bigot Evangelical pastor John Hagee is just who pursued whom.

Obviously, if McCain pursued Hagee’s endorsement, there is a greater obligation for due diligence.

Well, now have this directly from Hagee’s NY Times Magazine interview:

NYT: As a prominent evangelical pastor based in San Antonio, you were recently catapulted into national controversy when you endorsed Senator John McCain for president. Is it true that McCain actively sought your endorsement?

John Hagee: It’s true that McCain’s campaign sought my endorsement.

Mr. “Straight Talk” doesn’t give a damn. There is no corner he won’t cut, nor any value he won’t turn his back on, in order to be president.

Sick

No Comments

Just me…Started Feeling at about 3:00pm yesterday.

Spiked at 101°, but now in low grade territory. Just had about a dozen ravioli, the first real meal in about 24 hours, and I’m at about 99.3°.

Not much posting for a while.

Economics Update

No Comments

It’s Purim, so let’s lead off with currency.

First, the dollar is a bit stronger vs the yen, but I think that the trend, and the underlying fundamentals, are in the other direction. No secrets here, just the combined federal and balance of payments deficit, along with the rise of the Euro as a reserve currency (brief primer here on what a reserve currency is), will push the dollar down.

There is an article in CNN Money about why there will be no bailout of the greenback by other nations central banks, but it misses an important point, that this bailout has been ongoing for over a decade.

The dollar is now falling in spite of the best efforts of the central bankers.

And in the “economists are always late to the game” news, the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) says that we are definitely in a recession.

Not to worry though, as majority of Americans think economy will turn around in 2009. I expect that the predictive powers of the American public will not be as good as mine.

We are looking at a deep and long recession, as credit contracts, and the stagnant wages of the past 30 years catches up with us. This will be worse than 1982, when unemployment broke 10% (Ronnie added the military to the count to keep the number below 10%), and real (i.e. subtracting inflation) interest rates in excess of 6%.

I think that it will be worse.

In the short term, the Visa IPO that I erroneously derided seems to have given a lot of banks some breathing room. It’s generated a significant amount of cash, which should help with upcoming liquidity issues….for a while, at least.

Still, banks will be leery of making loans even to exemplary credit risks, for some time to come.

In the world of companies in trouble, S&P is considering downgrades to Goldman and Lehman, and it has downgraded National City’s outlook rating.

However, this is all pretty mild compared to where Thornburg Mortgage which, in order to prevent margin calls (people demanding their loans be paid back now) for the next year, gave its creditors the following:

  • To generate liquidity, it will issue “convertible bonds paying 12 percent annual interest”.
  • The bonds can be converted to stock at about $0.72/share.
  • This means that existing stockholders will have their equity diluted by a factor of 9.
  • Without conversion, the interest rate would be in the 25% range (!!!)
  • The assets that it is protecting through these bonds yield somewhere around 6%, but they cannot be sold now. They hope that the market will improve in a year.

Michigan Getting Very Ugly Very Fast, Florida Getting Better

No Comments

As I said a few days ago, the issue of whether folks who voted in the Replithug primary could vote is a legitimate one, but it’s Obama who has everything to lose here. For Clinton, any resolution has an upside.

So, the Michigan re-vote plan has died in the state senate, because the Obama people were objecting to the exclusion of Republican voters.

I understand the principal, but on all other levels, it is mind-bogglingly stupid.

I agree with Jeralyn Merritt’s take onObama’s preferred solution, a 50-50 split of delegates. This is explicitly preventing a legitimate vote with a legitimate count. You are in Bush buddy James Baker territory.

The math is bad for Clinton right. It’s very, very bad. If there were a revote in Florida and Michigan, Hillary would need to win by about 20% to improve her position, which is not going to happen absent an Elliot Spitzer type revelation.

By playing hardball on this, Obama is opening the door for a fight in the credentialing committee and a floor fight at the convention.

It’s worse than a sin, it is a mistake.

In Florida, however, things are looking brighter, with a proposal to give ½ the delegates according to the Jan 29 votes, and the remainder according to the nationwide split of votes received.

Verizon Big Winner in 700 Mhz Auctions

No Comments

No Google, though I think that the Goog was playing to lose, they just wanted to ensure open access on part of the spectrum.

The auctions were quite successful, with the exception of the “D Block”, the which was supposed to cover emergency first responders too, which is now under a corruption investigation as to whether Morgan OBrien and Cyren Call, who vetted the bids, were self dealing. (The answer is pretty clearly, “yes”)

Prosecutors Threatened by LA US Attorney Over Public Corruption Unit shutdown

No Comments

Note that they were investigating Republican Jerry Lewis (no relation) at the time that the office was closed, which my guess is a lot of the reason for this.

LA Times has the scoop:

But in interviews with The Times, several members of the disbanded unit challenged that explanation, saying the move was intended to punish lawyers for a perceived failure to produce and for bad-mouthing their boss, U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O’Brien.

The lawyers described a meeting last week in which an angry O’Brien derided attorneys in the office for working too few hours, filing too few cases and for speaking ill of him to subordinates.

They said O’Brien also threatened to tarnish their reputations if they challenged the official explanation for the unit’s dismantling in conversations with reporters. Members of the unit contacted by The Times either spoke on the condition that they not be named or declined to comment. Several said they wanted to talk about the situation but feared reprisals if they did so.

Critics of the move said they were concerned that it would severely limit the office’s ability to file long-term, complex corruption cases involving elected officials and other high-profile figures.

FCC Forbids Exclusive Telco Deals With Apartments

No Comments

This is the correct decision, which is why I’m surprised that the FCC made it:

Regulators on Wednesday unanimously approved a rule banning exclusive telephone service agreements in apartment buildings, giving tenants their pick of providers.

The five-member Federal Communications Commission said in a release that exclusive contracts between carriers and apartment-building owners “hurt consumers and harm competition, with little evidence of countervailing benefits.” It noted that the deals have also blocked residents from getting bundled voice, video and high-speed Internet service packages.

…

Really, Really, Really Bad Ideas: Steve Jobs Edition

No Comments

Steve Jobs is in negotiations with Universal Music about selling preloaded iPods, where the player will have a subscription attached to the device.

I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad idea, if I want music, I want to own it, and if you want me to rent it, I will just fire up µTorrent, additionally, eMusic is clearly threatening an antitrust lawsuit on this.

However, I do know that one thing is a bad idea, the idea of giving music distributors a cut of the hardware sales. There is a difference between making a subscription service available on your player, and giving a cut of each hardware sale to those distributors.

It is the camel’s nose under the tent, and it will be used ad precedent in future lawsuits against the hardware manufactures and against independent distributors of music.

It’s bad for the consumer and it’s bad for Apple.

Why Economists Suck, Crooked Timber Edition

No Comments

Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber notes that Greg Mankiw is doing some serious hating on “Joe Sixpack” in his latest NYT OP/ED:

Ahh go on then, try and tell me that Mankiw’s just engaging in a little bit of humour (possibly even a self-deprecating sigh at the pomposity of the average economist). No sale. This is how the average professional economist thinks of you lot, for all that you pay his wages; you’re a bunch of mugs who are incapable of understanding anything and just react like children to whatever’s dangled in front of your nose. It’s another of the many scandals of the profession, it is taught in the universities, and you can see it in more or less every popular book entitled something like “Fu$#younomics: How Nobody In The World Knows Jack Sh&@ Except Economists”.

(Bowlderization mine)

I would note, however that this is not limited to Economics.

You find this in many primarily academic fields, high energy physics, theoretical math, literary analysis, etc.

Take String Theorists…..Please.

With economists, however, the field is literally in front of our noses, and effects us in our daily lives, so the arrogance of economists is galling for that reason

Well, It’s Not Like USA Today is a Newspaper

No Comments

But does not mean that I’m not disappointed that USA Today declared Lawrence Yun, the chief economist at the National Association of Realtors as one of the top economic forecasters in the US.

Ummm….Covering your ears and saying, “there is no housing crash” does not make one a “top economic forecaster”. He is a paid shill of the realtors, and as such he only reflects reality to the degree that he doesn’t reveal himself as a complete and total pratt.

His record is worse than mine, though it might be better than his predecessor at paid shill for the NAR, David Lereah.

USA Today‘s Barbara Hagenbaugh and Barbara Hansen, and possibly their entire business journalism department, are my wankers of the day.

Judge in Gitmo Kangaroo Court Allows Defense to Call Witnesses

No Comments

While this is quite magnanimous of Navy Capt. Keith Allred to all lawyers for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, bin Laden’s driver, this still gives no credibility to military commissions.

It appears that the prosecutors have no concept as to the rule of law, arguing that, “the driver could have conspired in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks without knowing about the suicide plot”.

Under the rules that they have would like to see adopted, this would place the truck drivers supplying food to the guards at Abu Ghraib under jeopardy for torture.

I agree with Captain Allred’s assessment, that “The issue of whether the accused was ‘merely a driver,’ or knew the unlawful purpose and was actively engaged in the unlawful work of al Qaeda seems to be very much at issue”, though I think that excluding subsequent treatment at CIA run and Military run Gulags from the purview of questions, when their answers may have been coerced is a bad decision.

Calling for a New “New Deal”

No Comments

This is not just an indictment of Republican economic policy, it is also a also a critique of New Democrat Wall Street Loving economics:

...

The key lesson Americans need to learn from today’s troubles is how to distinguish faux prosperity from the genuine article. Over the past hundred years, we’ve experienced both. In the three decades after World War II we had the real thing. Led by our manufacturing sector, productivity increased at a rapid clip and median family incomes rose at a virtually identical rate. The value of the American work product grew significantly and that value was shared with American workers.

But we’ve had other periods of apparent prosperity that were based not on broad increases in personal income but on the inflation of assets. So it was with stocks in the late 1920s, a time when most Americans lacked substantial purchasing power. So it was with the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s. And so it was with the rising value of American homes in recent years.

In the broadest sense, the American economy over the past three decades has been powered by ever more ingenious extensions of credit to a people whose incomes were going nowhere, unless they were in the wealthiest 10 percent of the population. There were some limits, as a result of New Deal regulations, on how old-line banks could extend credit, but investment banks and other institutions not legally obliged to keep a certain amount of cash in reserve operated under no such constraints. The risk was that one day, burdened by debt and static incomes, American homeowners would have trouble making their payments and the house of cards would come tumbling down. But what were the odds of that?

Pretty good, it turns out. And out of this debacle emerge two paramount lessons for our highest-ranking policymakers: Regulate the American financial sector, which is now turning to the government for a bailout. And commit the government to doing all in its power to generate broad-based prosperity, through laws enabling workers to bargain collectively, through a massive public commitment to projects “greening” the economy, through provision of universal health coverage and affordable college educations.

…

Go read the whole thing.

Just don’t go to Robert Rubin’s house. You will feel an urge to spit on him.