Ever since the Elian Gonzalez debacle, which revealed the right wing of the Cuban to be something akin to terrorists, US sentiment has increasingly turned against our cuba policy.
John McCain just slammed Obama for “being soft on Cuba”.
The problem is that “being soft on Cuba” this is exactly what most Americans want, it’s what dissident Cubans actually living in Cuba want, and it’s the best policy for both countries.
Our mindless anti-Castro foreign policy has harmed the US, the people of Cuba, and butressed the Castros hold on power in Cuba.
Obama should confront McCain on this. It’s old thinking from an old man.
What’s more, the old anti-Castro whack jobs won’t vote for him anyway. They would never vote for a negro.
I would appreciate some information on just how F%$#ed up the cable broadband providers networks are, because we now have the results of a study on BitTorrent blocking, and it’s only the cable providers doing it, and they (Comcast, Cox, and Starhub, a cable/internet provider in Singapore)are doing it regardless of network load, and they are the only ISPs to do this in the world.
A brief technical rundown why the cable network architectures providers’ suck is here.
Basically, the technology is not there, but instead of being open with their customers regarding limits, they are engaging in stealth filtering, and not particularly good stealth filtering at that.
I’m surprised, given the sterling reputation for customer service of the cable companies.
Here Is The City News does a rundown on, “ust how much in writedowns and credit losses firms have written off per wholesale banking employee”, since the beginning of last year.
Dagon’s Donuts, this is grim.
The top 4 lost over a $million/employee, and the top 8 at are over $500K.
The House Armed Services Committee just authorized $566 million to develop the F-136 engine.
I’m not sure how much of this is pork, and how much of this is a real belief that the savings and engine improvements derived from the F-100/F-110 competition in the 1980s can be repeated.
The Senate went with only $36 million, so the question is how it will resolve in conference.
With changes to lobbying rules at the beginning of this yearmaking revolving door payoffs more difficult, the unpleasantness of being the minority party, and the prospect of losing a seat in what was once a safe election, Republican incumbents are retiring in droves, and now it’s reported that this is crippling their fund raising apparatus:
Of the 32 Republicans who have resigned or announced plans to retire, 26 have political action committees known as leadership PACs — which members of Congress typically use to make donations to colleagues facing tough campaigns. Those 26 PACs raised $17 million in the last campaign cycle, but only $5.3 million for this election, a USA TODAY analysis of the latest campaign reports filed in March and April shows.
The bigger picture is that when your fund raising is based on bribery and extortion, which is what Tom Delay’s “K Street Project” was, you can no longer raise money if you lack the power to deliver.
Fee for service also means no fee for no service.
Pretty much as expected.
The Pentagon will stay at 140,000 deployed to Iraq in the war to save Bush’s ego.
It appears that he will end his reelection bid.
If you recall, Fossella was busted for driving drunk. At the time he was driving from his home to his mistress’s, who had also born him a child.
I guess that we’ll be hearing a comment that he wants to spend more time with his families…..heh.
Basically, there are no tactile differences between the bills, and U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has ruled that this is in violation of the law.
Among other things, they said that the government did not shot that fixing this would be an undue burden.
When you consider the stuff that they’ve done lately, putting a bit of texture on the bills has got to be cheaper than the holographic inks, etc. that they are using/
The case is American Council of the Blind v. Paulson.
Here is the more detail on the PPI that I promised in an earlier post:
I would note that of the news networks, I find that CNN is the most breathlessly optimistic, and their take on the PPI numbers is simply wrong, but even they got it a bit right about the seasonal adjustment for the end of the heating season:
The overall moderation in prices primarily reflected how the government adjusts its data to compensate for seasonal changes. Those adjustments showed gasoline prices falling last month even though motorists were seeing prices soar.
When CNN starts questioning official inflation numbers, it’s game over.
You will note that they scream to the high heavens that it’s down to 0.2%, of course the core rate is twice that, 0.4%, and the 0.2% is an artifact of already suspect seasonal adjustments.
When the total number is bad, they report core, when the core number is bad, they report total numbers, with a little caveat slipped in. CNN’s financial reporting sucked.
Barry Ritholtz puts this in some perspective:
Follow this if you will: Each year in the Spring, we get a fairly large seasonal adjustment. If memory serves, its about a ~7% increase in Energy for April. This year, however, energy prices are up so much in advance of April, that we only got a ‘modest’ one month energy increase of 5.2%. In other words, the market ran up in advance of the usual seasonal gains. Hence, a 5.2% increase looks like a reduction after seasonal adjustments. (Note: I need to double check the precise #s).
So does Dean Baker:
The core finished goods index rose by 0.4 percent in April. It has now risen at a 5.0 percent annual rate over the last quarter. The core intermediate goods index rose by 1.2 percent in April and has risen at a 12.4 percent annual rate over the last quarter. With productivity growth having slowed sharply, it is difficult to believe that these higher costs won’t be passed on at the consumer level. This is big news.
So we are looking at some very real, and very troubling inflation numbers. Barry Ritholtz has some nice graphs that I recommend.
In inflation, it appears that producer prices may be a problem (also here), with the overall rate going up by .2%, and the core rate going up by 0.4%.
Of interest is that the first link, from Bloomberg, basically casts it as a “low inflation” story, and the second link casts it as a “high inflation” story. I’ll explain why the latter is wrong in a bit.
In any case, the market saw the rate as low, which drove the dollar down in expectation of further rate cuts in the US, and the expectation of rate hikes in the Euro zone.
In energy, we have crude hitting another record, above $129/bbl, and gas prices at the pump hitting a new record for the 13th straight day.
In the middle of a housing crash, with prices still falling, Fannie Mae has reduced down-payment requirements to as low as 3% on some loans.
The only thing that I can think of is that they hope that this sort of gesture will keep Congress from looking too closely at tighter restrictions.
Bad move, because it opens them up to even more risks.
While the 737 is a good plane, there is a reason that Airbus does better with the A320, it entered service a full 20 years later, and so its basic design is more modern.
To its credit, Boeing has been looking at a replacement for the 737, but now it’s back to square 1, as they have disbanded the 737RS (replacement study) group(paid subscription required)
The the project did not show the sufficient performance improvements to justify the capital costs of a new airframe.
They were looking at a roughly 10% reduction in costs, and felt that they needed 20-30% cost reduction, so something like incorporating Pratt’s GTF into existing airframes makes more sense for now.
The always thoughtful Nouriel Roubini wonders, “How will financial institutions make money now that the securitization food chain is broken?”
In the good old days, you made money by originating a loan, and then collecting revenue from it, but today you make money by originating and then reselling the loan.
The resale, and the fees involved in what Roubini calls it “originate & distribute”, model generate your profit.
The kicker is that but the new model appears to have broken down:
This food chain of fees on top of fees is now broken: securitization of mortgages, that was running at the annual rate of $1,000 billion in January of 2007, was down 95% to an annual rate of $50 billion by January of 2008. So the process of generating fees and commissions is broken.
It’s really scary, because these companies, by which I mean investment banks and a lot in the way of commercial banks, increasingly look to have no business model at all. The model until mid 2007 was “make income out of securitization fees rather than by holding the credit risk”, but no one trusts securitized debts any more.
What’s more, it’s clear that the flight from these instruments is a rational act by the market. What’s more, it is reasonable to expect, even in the absense of regulatory reform, that these instruments will not be accepted by the market for the next decade, the time that lessons stay learned in Wall Street.
So, somewhere north of 20% of our financial industry has no reason to exist any more.
Publius makes an an argument that the realities of votes and politics require that the Democrats keep Joe Lieberman in his chairmanship on the Homeland Security Committee.
While his arguments are logical, they are also wrong. They are predicated on the idea that he generally votes with the Dems, and this is really not true. He votes with the Dems when it does not matter, so he voted against Alito, and voted for Cloture.
If he is the 60th vote for cloture, he will not vote for cloture, because as he has already made clear, he is intent on extracting vengeance against a Democratic party that he feels has betrayed him.
As to whether you allow him to caucus with the Dems, that’s their business, but he should not be chairman of anything significant, particularly homeland security, which has been politicized, and needs to be de-Bushified.
Any authority that he is granted will merely serve his petty vendetta.
It looks like that will be one of the conditions set down by the Senate Republithugs to allow the bill housing bailout to the floor.
Senator Dodd’s bill also creates a housing trust fund with resources from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to build or preserve rental housing for extremely low and very low income people. Senator Shelby wants those funds to be used to pay for the new FHA program instead.
I’m not sure what upsets me more, the ‘Phants balancing the budget on the back of people who are closest to being homeless, or the fact that I’m not surprised by their venality and evil.
Captain Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
It appears that when career staffers at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development noticed that contracts were going to unqualified, but politically connected, contractors, in what appeared to be a highly irregular process senior management ignored their warnings.
Who could imagine that HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson and His Evil Minions™ would let out contracts on the basis of politics….Oh wait….he said this on tape in a speech….Never mind.
As is to be expected, the defense attorneys in the Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, et al trial are making a number of motions to dismiss. It happens in any trial. It’s what defense attorneys are supposed to do.
This time however, they make a fairly good point, specifically that the convening authority is illegitimate because it’s head acted inappropriately (the equivalent to this in a civil trial would be along the line of a juror talking to an attorney involved in the case).
Seems like they are half way there, because the presiding officer has already removed Brig. Gen. Thomas W., “What, Me, Ethics?” Hartmann from the case for his inappropriate behavior.
The five defense lawyers representing the so-called high-value detainees, who face the death penalty if convicted, argued in a 127-page motion that military commission rules require the legal advisor to provide “neutral and objective” advice.
The lawyers cited testimony that last summer Hartmann urged prosecutors to target “sexy” cases and those in which American blood was shed, hoping to boost the tribunal’s image as the presidential election approaches.
….
The defense motion said Hartmann had steered Guantanamo prosecutors away from other cases and toward the five defendants in hopes of racking up high-profile convictions.
Seriously, they screwed up the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein too, turning one of the more detested figures in the Arab world a martyr.
On the up side, there is no way that these trials start before the elections now.
