Year: 2008

Bush and His Evil Minions™ Next Plan for Politicizing Terror Trials?

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One of the things that is going on right now is that the Bush administration, recognizing that they will be leaving power shortly, are trying to protect themselves from future prosecution and litigation. Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker* notes that the Bush administration is desperately trying to make their system of kangaroo courts and torture appear legal, or, failing that, at least make it appear routine:

In any case, according to lawyers inside and outside government, the Bush Administration may launch a proposal for a national-security court this summer or fall, after what they presume will be its next loss in the Supreme Court. “It looks like when Boumediene comes down the Court may say to the President and Congress that they need more procedures for the detainees,” Goldsmith said. “So, to correct the problem, the President might consider sending something up to Congress this summer or fall. It would help the Republicans in the fall election.” The measure would force congressional Democrats to take a stand on the issue in the middle of the campaign—just as Bush did successfully with the Military Commissions Act after the Hamdan defeat. “It worked very well in 2006,” Goldsmith said. “The only way the Democrats have to not make it an election issue is to give the President the powers he seeks.”

Seeing as how the only driving ideology of the Bush administration has been the abuse of government power for political advantage, this surprises me not one whit.

H/t Mithras

*So there are other reasons to read them besides just the cartoons…though their cartoons are da bomb.

American housing | Map of misery | Economist.com

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The Economist is suggesting that, “America may well be only halfway through the house-price bust“.

They lead off with the scary picture:

Though I would note that this is now almost 6 month old data, so there would be a lot more red now.

They make the obvious point, that the delta in house prices is still not clear, with a number of different ways of measuring, with OFHEO covering sales financed by the GSEs, and the two different Schiller numbers.


Note that the gray area is projected, and I think that they ignore the possibility of overshoot in the buy/rent ratio.

They note the fact that banks are still tightening standards at an unprecedented rate, which will push house prices down, but they neglect to mention that the 5-6% fixed rate mortgage is historically low, and that if there is a return to the 9% rate, we would see even further downward pressure.

Keeping N***ers from Voting

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The bigots in this country moved from Democratic to Republican over the past 50 years, and now Republicans in Missouri are doing their level best to reinstate the poll test.

They are going one step beyond the photo ID requirement in Indiana, Missouri is now attempting to require voters to provide proof of citizenship, either a birth certificate or a passport.

Lillie Lewis, a voter who lives in St. Louis and spoke at a news conference last week organized to oppose the amendment, said she already had a difficult time trying to get a photo ID from the state, which asked her for a birth certificate. Ms. Lewis, who was born in Mississippi and said she was 78 years old, said officials of that state sent her a letter stating that they had no record of her birth.

“That’s downright wrong,” Ms. Lewis said. “I have voted in almost all of the presidential races going back I can’t remember how long, but if they tell me I need a passport or birth certificate that’ll be the end of that.”

Look at this woman, and know that the sponsor of this amendment to the state constitutional, State Representative Stanley Cox, thinks that this is just fine, because he does not want N***ers to vote.

Government Crisis Over Pakistani Judges Continues

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It appears that Nawaz Sharif’s party has quit the Pakistani government ruling coalition over the issue of reinstating judges.

It appears that at the center of this disupte is deposed Chief Justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, who has committed the sin of being a judge:

He held the ruling elite to account. He rattled the security establishment by pursuing the case of the “missing” – alleged terror suspects abducted and held incommunicado by Pakistan’s intelligence services.

And he took up legal challenges to President Musharraf’s re-election.

Additionally, there are indications that the Pakistani high court would likely rule that the state of emergency, and possibly Musharraf’s grant of amnesty to PPP head Asif Zardari who would otherwise be charged with corruption.

Zimbabwe Runoff to Be Delayed, ZANU-PF Placing Conditions on Election Observers

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Theoretically, the runoff for president of Zimbabwe is supposed to be held within 21 days of the announcement of results, but the electoral commission is saying that it will not be able to conduct an election in that time frame.

I’m not sure how much is organizational incompetence, and how much is the desire of ZANU-PF to have time to use the state security forces to intimidate the opposition.

The MDC has demanded outside observers/peacekeepers for the elections, and Mugabe’s government has not been receptive, to put it mildly.

They are now demanding an end to economic sanctions before allowing western observers in.

My Apologies, There is a Schadenfreude Shortage, and I Haven’t Mentioned This

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I really should be writing about the travails of New York Republican congressman Vito Fossella, following his arrest for drunk driving while on the way to his mistress, with whom he had fathered a child.

The sane* Republicans in New York, are calling for his resignation, but congressman Peter King, showing that he’s firmly in the nutzo category, is blasting them for, “Putting a knife in the back of a good guy who’s made a mistake.”

Actually, it’s at least two mistakes…heh.

It gets better, because it appears that not only is Vito not resigning, it looks like he has decided to stay in the race for reelection.

*Well, relatively sane…they are Republithugs.

Massachusetts Has Great Idea, A College Endowment Tax

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Specifically, the measure calls for a 2.5% tax on any endowment in excess of $1 billion.

Massachusetts has 9 colleges and universities that meet this criterion, with Harvard’s endowment of $35+ billion leading the list, and it would be expected to raise $1.4 billion for Massachusetts.

There are a number of reasons that I think that this is a good idea, the first is that Greg Mankiw, former head of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors hates the idea with a passion, and if a Bushie opposes an idea, you are unlikely to be wrong supporting it.

The second, and more logical reason, is that these endowments are so excessive as to run counter to the goals of these institutions as educational non-profits.

Brad Delong, a Harvard Alumni, runs the numbers, and notes that over the past 50 years, Harvard’s graduation rate has gone from 1200 to 1600/year (which means that there is $5.5 million of endowment for each student there), while the UC starting from 5000/year created many more educational openings, both through expansions at UC Berkeley and UCLA, and by improving other parts of the UC system noting that, “Today we have UC Davis, UC Merced, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, UC Sunnydale*, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UC San Diego which together with UCB and UCLA graduate 40,000 undergraduates a year.”

Matthew Yglesias, also a Harvard Alumni, says “Long story short if you, like me, are a graduate of a fancy college and the development people come around asking you for money don’t do it save your money for institutions that (a) have less money and (b) do more to help people in need.“

It raises an interesting point, specifically that endowments and foundations become a sort of charitable money pit, where the accumulation of more resources become a major, if not the major driving force behind institutional activities.

*Never knew Delong was a Buffy fan.

Guantanamo Court Bars Senior General from Participation

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General Thomas Hartmann, the senior officer in the Office of Military Commissions, has been barred from any participation in the Hamdan trial by senior judge Navy Captain Keith Allred.

The defense, bolstered by testimony from former chief prosecutor Morris Davis, claimed that Hartmann was exerting undue pressure on the prosecutors to rush the “sexy cases”, and hurry prosecutions for political gain, and use evidence obtain by torture.

We are seeing increasing push back, on many levels against the Bush Agenda, by judicial and bureaucratic forces, because there is an increasing realization that Bush and His Evil Minions™ have less than 9 months left on their term, and they are irrelevant.

The judge’s decision on the Yoo memos also reflects this.

What’s Going on in Lebanon

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Well, it appears that proximate cause of this conflict boils down to two thing, control of the Beruit airport and Hezbollah’s communications system:

It has been announced by all sides that today is the first day of the civil war in Lebanon. This has been building with the steady assassination of political leaders since the conclusion of the war in 2006. Hezbollah is not happy, and all of a sudden the government of Lebanon has access to some very accurate intelligence.

It started with a tip regarding airport security and the means by which Iran was reportedly flying in military supplies to Hezbollah. It didn’t go over well with the militia when the government announced they were going to seize control of a security camera system in the Beruit airport. That was followed by the removal of the head of airport security, a member of Hezbollah.

It’s not particularly surprizing that this would lead to violence. You are talking about the supply lines and the communications network of Hezbollah, which are crucial to them tactically.

Hezbollah has now appeared to lave largely withdrawn from west Beruit, but they appear to still be aggressively confronting Walid Jumblatt’s pro government Druze forces east of the city.

Bush is Batsh$@ Insane

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In an otherwise unremittingly negative review of retired general Ricardo Sanchez’s book detailing his experiences in (mis)managing the Iraq war, Washington Post columnist William Arkin of, we find this rather remarkable quote from the general’s book: “

Today in the San Antonio Express-News, Sanchez blames everyone else for what happened during his 14 months in Iraq and says he experienced ‘confused’ pep talks from President Bush. ‘Kick ass!’ Bush is said to have said in the video-teleconference during the battle of Fallujah in 2004. ‘If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell!’

(emphasis mine)

While I agree that Sanchez’s tenure in Iraq deserves nothing but disdain, he, along with Paul Bremer are the two people most responsible for US missteps, I think that he misses the importance of this quote.

The importance is not that Sanchez blames someone else. It’s that what George W. Bush said is are indicators clearly, and deeply, disturbed mind. I’m not talking Pat Buchanan crazy here. I’m talking really, literally insane.

GW Bush’s finger is on the button, and I think that we are seeing someone who is suffering from some severe psychosis, the sort that would normally require compulsory medication, and possibly detention, and Arkin misses it because he, with much justification, hates Sanchez so much.

We’re Now Getting the Calls for a Housing Bottom

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This is the next stage of an asset collapse, the declaration that a bottom has been found, and it has no where to go but up now.

First, we have an OP/ED in the Wall Street Journal declaring the housing crisis to be over. This is suspect for two reasons:

  1. It’s made by Mr. Moulle-Berteaux is managing partner of Traxis Partners LP, a hedge fund firm based in New York, and he has a financial interest in all this fixing itself.
  2. It’s a Wall Street Journal OP/ED

Additionally, the logic is just plain silly. He claims, among other things, that low interest rates will have housing bottom out, even while there are increasing inflationary and interest rates pressure.

He also believes that since the inventory is not at 11 months, near historic highs, it will turn around.

He could be dishonest, or he could be an idiot, but my money is on both.

I also think that he does not understand how much Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan distorted the market during his tenure as Fed Chair.

We are also seeing some bargain hunting in the financial markets, but again, we saw that, and the declaration of a number of times during the dotcom crash.

To put it bluntly the market is a fool some times.

Of more significance are reports like this, where we see those neighborhoods hit earliest hardest are seeing an up tick. Is this because they are cannibalizing from other neighborhoods that people perceive as still being on the way down?

I agree with the Rich Toscano, when he suggests:

So what does it all mean? One really helpful puzzle piece was supplied by SD Realtor a couple weeks back. He posted some data showing that while volume has declined in many higher end areas, it is actually up quite substantially in some of the areas that have really been crushed (e.g. Eastlake).

His conclusion was that the price declines have gotten so bad in some areas that buyers are starting to creep back in. But where the prices have been stickier, demand remains quite weak. This is a sensible analysis and I tend to agree. If this is what’s going on, and volume is still the good leading indicator it once was, those hard-hit areas are likely closer to the bottom than the rest of San Diego.

There’s one other twist to the question. The months of inventory figure has declined, but that measures sales against “want to sell” inventory. What’s arguably more important is the number of sales vs. “must sell” inventory. It could well be that even as the total amount of inventory declines, must-sell inventory is steady or even rising. I attempt to proxy this relationship with my sales-per-notice-of-default charts. Perhaps the next update of that chart will fill in some blanks, but given that we’ve just been at or near all time high default levels and that defaults generally represent future must-sell inventory, it doesn’t seem like there is a real danger that must-sell inventory will decline much any time soon.

Banks are still foreclosing, and the numbers are continuing to increase, and that is the data which we should consider.

U.S. Lobbying G7 to Prop Up Dollar

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It looks like Henry Paulson and other members of the Bush administration are finally beginning to realize that the falling dollar may be a problem:

The Bush administration is leading the international effort to put a floor under the falling dollar.

The conventional wisdom holds that the Europeans, worried that the mighty euro is making their companies less competitive, prodded Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and other group of seven finance ministers last month into signaling their joint disapproval of the dollar’s plunge. Canada has also been troubled by the strong loonie.

But a senior U.S. Treasury official says that the move actually came at the behest of the American side.

The problem with the dollar is not a speculative artifact, it is a result of two things, that the dollar is objectively overvalued when one looks at the fundamentals of the American economy, and that the Euro has become a reasonable alternative as a reserve currency.

The dollar will continue to trend down until some sort of equilibrium is reached in the best case.

More likely, we will see a stampede of the speculators and a significant downside overshoot.

Real Exports are Not Growing

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Interesting…When correcting for raw materials, and that is a lot of US exports, things like ore, food, and hides, exports are not growing.

Our export economy is that of a 3rd world nation. It’s raw materials and food, not finished goods.

One of the problems that we are facing is that if the dollar falls, we lack the domestic industrial capacity to pick up the slack. It has been dismantled over the past 30 years, and it may take it 30 years for it to recover in any significant way.

Transit Update

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There has been a surge of people moving to mass transit driven by higher gas prices, though I have to say that after 60 years of direct and indirect subsidies to the “own a car” lifestyle, this will either be a short term change, or a part of a slow change.

That being said, the City of San Francisco has come up with an interesting idea, congestion pricing on parking meters, the theory being that if you price the meters high enough that there are always a few open, you eliminate the people driving around and around looking for parking, and reduce congestion, in addition to reducing the total number of drivers.