Something weird is going on. Bank of America just fired David Sambol, Countrywide’s president and chief operating officer (technically, he’s retiring), when they had previously said that he would head their combined mortgage operation.
My guess that someone uncovered some more “chocolaty goodness” at the center of Countrywide…only it wasn’t chocolate.
It might also be some sort of attempt to queer the deal on BoA’s part, because they realize that it’s a really bad idea.
The DMCA is pretty clear on this. If someone posts something to an internet service, and they get a notice, and then take it down, it’s no harm, no foul.
This appears to be YouTube at a glance, but Viacom is now claiming, “that YouTube is guilty of public performance of such content due to the way it presents and plays the videos“, because it allows for embedding and sharing (actually referrals) to the material.
This is going to get very, very ugly.
The Constituent Assembly there has voted to abolish the monarchy.
This is a good thing. The real question is what will happen when the Maoists actually start facing a competent political opposition, which should happen in the next 5-10 years.
Jessica Valenti asks, “What’s the first concert you attended?”
Not counting events where the band was secondary, it was John Entwhistle on a solo tour, backed up by a pretty decent band called Rat Race Choir, who did a set on their own before he came on.
The opening act was called Gotham City, and was a bad Heart clone.
At The Channel, in Boston.
The Field Poll survey found 51 percent against approving a possible November ballot measure to prohibit gay marriage, with 43 percent in favor. A slightly differently worded question on the same issue found 54 percent opposed and 40 percent in favor.
Once again, the right wing is on the wrong side of history and morality.
Olbermann broke the story of Phil Gramm was a lobbyist and vice-chairman for UBS, the Swiss bank embroiled in the problems of the subprime market.
Straight talk express, my ass!
The SEC is looking at how the ratings agencies do business:
The U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) is looking into the workings of the three main credit rating agencies, prompted by their handling of the subprime crisis and a report of computer errors at Moody’s
. “We sent letters to Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch asking for them to get back to us on aspects of their methodology,” said Erik Sirri, director of the SEC’s trading and markets division.
The basic problem, however, is that they are paid by the people that they rate, creating an inherent conflict of interest.
This is at the core of many of the problems that we are seeing now. The felons are running the prison.
At a summit, they complained that these deals allow for barriers to their products while requiring those of the industrialized nations into their markets.
Cotton is a classic case of this, where US subsidies allowed under the current regime undercut what would otherwise be competitive 3rd world supplies.
That’s because “free trade” deals are really not about free trade. They are about establishing an economic regime that favors stake holders such as investors and IP holders.
If you look at the economic development of the US though, it was built on what is now called “piracy” of European, largely British, technologies.
The unwitting drug mule found the dope in his suitcase, and called police.
The “first of the story” is here.
The fact that he opposes the agreementand calling for regular protests should come as no surprise. Sadr is the only real Iraqi nationalist amongst the Shia leaders, with Dawa and the ISCI being pretty much in the pocket of Iran.
It is also a position which is likely very popular in Iraq, as all independent assessments show that Iraqis as a whole want the US out, and this agreement is clearly a part of Bush’s “Iraq forever” policy, and would keep troops and bases in Iraq for decades.
We have the case of a belligerent patient in a Connecticut hospital, who was brought in with atrial fibrillation brought on from a jump into an ice covered lake.
When he would not control himself, security tasered him, and it corrected his irregular heartbeat.
This is what a medical defibrillator does, and it can kill people too, just like the taser, though the defibrillator has not been called an instrument of torture by the UN’s Committee Against Torture
The use of TaserX26 weapons, provoking extreme pain, constituted a form of torture, and that in certain cases it could also cause death, as shown by several reliable studies and by certain cases that had happened after practical use.
Because they believe that there is a significant risk of arrest should they do so.
These are the people that John McCain’s economics guy, Phil “Mr. Personality” Gramm, lobbied for, and they know that they are crooks.
Seriously, Francis Fukuyama’s endorsement of Barack Obama is something akin to the Union of Bullfighters endorsing the ASPCA.
Fukuyama was one of the signers of the infamous PNAC letter, which called for Clinton to invade Iraq and spread democracy through the middle east in 1998, so this is just whack.
Goldman Sachs is saying that it will leave the Institute of International Finance because of its calls for relaxed financial standards.
When Goldman f$#@ing Sachs says that the accounting is too dicey for them, you know that something is seriously wrong.
Basically, it all comes down to “level 3 assets”, those for which there is no ready market. This is the stuff that Atrios calls the big sh%$pile.
In any case, the IIF wants to implement rules that, “would enable financial companies to cushion the blow of financial crises by valuing illiquid assets using historical, rather than market, prices“.
Meaning that they want to value this sh^% as it was valued a few years ago, when everyone thought that there had to be a pony somewhere.
Corruption at its finest.
A copy of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been leaked online, and it appears that once again the regulators miss the point.
IP protections are not property. They are liberty that we take from every member of society in the form of temporary exclusive licenses, because the society as a whole benefits from the creativity encouraged by these licenses.
The leaked copy of the proposal is here, courtesy of Wikileaks.
Oil is up again today, to $131.03/bbl, even though demand is falling, and retail gas prices hit a record for 21st straight day, $3.944/gallon.
I think the only question is whether it will break $4/gal before June.
Paradoxically enough, the dollar strengthened, despite the higher oil prices.
Finally, we’re seeing a drop in mortgage applications, because rates are rising.
Rates will go up eventually, and when they do, the housing market will get even more ugly.
So we now have $150,000 in cash going to olmert:
A Long Island fund-raiser and businessman testifying in a corruption investigation told an Israeli court on Tuesday that he gave $150,000, mostly in cash, to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Pool photo by Uriel Sinai Morris Talansky, an American businessman, before testifying on Tuesday in Jerusalem.
It is no surprise therefore that Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, is calling for Ehud Olmerd to step down.
The flight lasted 30 minutes, took place yesterday and was uneventful.
You can see the differences between the demo and the stock Gripen in this photo:
Notice that the inlets are slightly reshaped, and the wing roots increased to include the repositioned landing gear.
This should not be a big deal, but when Barack Obama recalled his uncle liberating Auschwitz a few days back, he actually meant Buchenwald.
Needless to say, the ‘Phants are all over this.
Welcome to the bigs, Mr. Obama.
While this is a refreshing change from the Bush administration’s policy of nukes forever, it’s also loaded with caveats and absent any real specifics, so it won’t go anywhere.