It appears that regulators have sent a letter notifying the GSEs of this, here and here, and the details will be announced tomorrow.
It won’t be called a nationalization, my money would be on “conservatorship”, but the share holders are rumored to get little to nothing, and management will be replaced by people who answer to the government
One of the interesting dynamics here, and one that is barely covered in the financial press is the fact that Fannie and Freddie have been aggressive lobbyists and soft money contributors (their employees are big hard money contributors) for years, and with a nationalization, that will stop.
This means that Congress will stop writing laws, and pressuring regulators, for the benefit of Fannie and Freddie, which is apt to lead to major changes in said laws, regulation, and oversight.
Olbermann apologizes, but what he should have done is ask, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?“
Sasha Issenberg notes that this is the death of a taboo, and it does not bode well for our political discourse:
One of the most enduring taboos in American politics, the airing of graphic images from the September 11 attacks in a partisan context, died today. It was nearly seven years old.
Republicans, at least the idealogue ones who grew up sucking at the tit of Ayn Rand, believe that there is no role for government in public life….None at all, so all that running for office is an attempt to grap power.
They believe that they can do evil to seize power, because they believe that all government is evil.
Comcast has filed suit in federal court, claiming that the FCC has no authority to require network neutrality.
Interestingly enough, one of their claims is that they had to institute their new hard bandwidth limitations because of the FCC ruling, which as Harold Feld notes, is another bald faced lie from them.
It turns out that the new 250 GB/month limit is as a result of a consent decree with the Florida Attorney General, who had taken action because Comcast was kicking off heavy users in an arbitrary and capricious manner.
As stipulated in the decree:
Comcast simply knocked off the highest 1000 users regardless of their actual bandwidth usage or geographic location.
While the top 1000 users out of 14.m million will doubtless be very high bandwidth users, the bell curve being what it is, this is a policy that is a complete mind f%$#.
Comcast is so evil that they make Verizon look nice.
Andrew McCain, the sick old man’s son, was on its board of directors for the bank and its parent, and also sat on the banks audit committee….until he resigned “for personal reasons” in July…..Very convenient that….
McCains and failed banks go together like….McCains and failed banks.
They appear to be very well preserved, so it should be an interesting archeology find which will help bridge a gap in knowledge between viking longships and more modern watercraft.
After Boeing’s Canard-Rotar-Wing crashed and burned…literally…twice, it appears that they will be getting another bite at the apple, this time with a concept called Diskrotor, in which retractable rotor blades are housed in a circular wing.
This is separate from the $4 billion bid they have out for long range SAMs for use by the military in operations, which has the US Patriot competing with the Chinese HQ-9, Israeli Arrow, and Russian S-400.
I love this quote from the article:
The United States has raised concerns that if NATO-member Turkey were to purchase Russian missiles it would create an inter-operability problem with NATO.
Because, I guess, US operators using Patriot missiles are more than capable of shooting down an RAF Tornado during the invasion of Iraq.
While all militaries support their national defense industries, the degree to which the US does is particularly whorish.
Well, it’s beginning to look like the west is finally catching up to the former Soviet Union in solid fuel ramjet technology, with the British working on their Meteor, and the US looking at adding the technology to the HARM anti-radiation missile (it homes in on SAM radars).
Note that the Soviets had fielded the SA-6 “Gainful” with this technology starting in the late 1960s, and had been sufficiently confident in the technology that it was extensively exported to Egypt and Syria in time for the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
The picture is of a test launch of a missile with an AGM-88E HARM guidance system and a integral rocket ramjet (IRR) propulsion system launched at White Sands in August.
What is in advance of the system deployed by the Soviets in the late 1960s is that the booster does not have a separate nozzle, and the thrust can be throttled, which would allow the missile to loiter in the area waiting for an emitter to switch on.
Basically, they are focusing together multiple “strings of solid state lasers in order to boost the power of the beam.
This is far more useful, and much less expensive, than the chemical lasers that have been tested by the military previously, which typically involve the use of exotic, expensive, and highly toxic chemicals to achieve the necessary results.
Northrop-Grumman is claiming that they achieved 30 KW for 5 minutes continuously recently.
One other technology that might benefit from this is advanced capacitor technology, as to get the desired 100 KW, you are looking at putting in at least 500 KW (about 670 hp), and when one considers the power required for cooling and other issues, you could see the total power requirements during firing be in the 1000 KW range, which is a big generator, but storing the energy in capacitors would eliminate much of that problem.
I would expect the the first military application to be something like a laser to intercept things like mortar rounds and Katyusha rockets.
The article makes some grandiose statements about how a new networked battlespace will require naval ships to operate further offshore, but I think that this is bunk. Rather there are two imperatives driving this decision:
Having a ship run aground ends a career in the Navy, even if it was really unavoidable, and littoral operations, because they are in shallower water, increase the possibility of a ground by at least an order of magnitude.
Because of the US history of separation from enemies by oceans, there is a myopic focus on a blue water navy
The author mentions that the new study contradicts a 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield, but ignores the fact that he was accused of, “suppressing and falsifying data”, that his co-authors of this study have disavowed his reasearch, and at this time is under investigation for serious professional and financial misconduct.
He faces removal of his medical license as a result.
If there is any justice in the world, he will end up in to jail too.
*There is some dispute as to whether Aspergers is mild Autism, or a different condition on the Autism spectrum, a distinction which I would generally expect a reporter to miss.
Sorry, but Lieberman jumped the shark when he refused to investigate failures during Katrina; in which he clearly showed that he was aggressively covering up for Bush and His Evil Minions&trade, and you did not do anything then.
And we are supposed to expect that you will do something now?
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, we won’t get fooled again.
Well, it turns out that right wing pundits Mike Murphy and Peggy Noonan got caught in an unguarded moment with an open microphone, and suddenly, when they though that no one was listening, they stopped pretending that John Seymour McCain III was a man of honor.
Chuck Todd is part of the conversation, but he is not guilty of journalistic malpractice here. Journalists have opinions, and their job is to keep them off the air.
Murphy and Noonan, however, are lauding McCain and his alleged “honor” when the red light is on, and calling him an incompetent doddering hack when the light is off.
That is journalistic malpractice.
Transcript:
Chuck Todd: Mike Murphy, lots of free advice, we’ll see if Steve Schmidt and the boys were watching. We’ll find out on your blackberry. Tonight voters will get their chance to hear from Sarah Palin and she will get the chance to show voters she’s the right woman for the job Up next, one man who’s already convinced and he’ll us why Gov. Jon Huntsman.
(cut away)
Peggy Noonan: Yeah.
Mike Murphy: You know, because I come out of the blue swing state governor world: Engler, Whitman, Tommy Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush. I mean, these guys — this is how you win a Texas race, just run it up. And it’s not gonna work. And —
PN: It’s over.
MM: Still McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech to do himself some good.
CT: I also think the Palin pick is insulting to Kay Bailey Hutchinson, too.
PN: Saw Kay this morning.
CT: Yeah, she’s never looked comfortable about this —
MM: They’re all bummed out.
CT: Yeah, I mean is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?
PN: The most qualified? No! I think they went for this — excuse me– political bullshit about narratives —
CT: Yeah they went to a narrative.
MM: I totally agree.
PN: Every time the Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at, they blow it.
MM: You know what’s really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism, and this is cynical.
CT: This is cynical, and as you called it, gimmicky.
Actually he doesn’t, he explains just what Republicans find unacceptable about media coverage, and his use of the famous Lily Tomlin quote, “No matter how cynical I get, it’s just never enough to keep up,” is a nice use of quote.
Go read.
I’m not sure if it means much, except that perhaps the “elite media” that McCain is now complaining about, the media that literally heckled Mitt Romney, and did everything it could to get McCain the nomination, is beginning to realize that McCain isn’t another pundit.
It’s only taken them about 26 years that McCain is all hat and no cattle.
“Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity,” Westmoreland said.
Asked to clarify that he used the word “uppity,” Westmoreland said, “Uppity, yeah.”
Needless to say, if he had said this just two weeks earlier, he’d be the vice presidential nominee right now.
I guess we should be grateful that he didn’t use the term n*gg*r.
In this case 
The dividing line is 100 KW, and it looks like 
