Im not sure how I missed it, but it appears that the Iraqi parliament approved the status of forces agreement with the US in a rather raucous session.
The final capitulations required of Bush and His Evil Minions™ to get this passed are an indicator of just how weak Bush is. He gave away the store, because to do otherwise would require him to admit that Iraq was a mistake, and he’s to narcissistic to do that.
It looks like Hank Paulson and His Evil Minions™ and his evil minions have are considering they need to steal the second half the $700 billion in bailout money:
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is debating whether to ask Congress for the second installment of the $700 billion bailout package, concerned about competing demands for the funds and a potentially hostile reaction from lawmakers.
This is an easy one for members of Congress.
Paulson is incompetent and corrupt, choosing to serve his friends over the nation, and doing even that incompetently.
So the good professor Dorf is discussing the issues caused by the 2nd amendment intersection of DC v. Heller and the sad matter of New York Giants receiver, and sad sack, Plaxico* Burress, who shot himself with his own unregistered gun in a New York night club:
Which brings us to Plaxico Burress. Suppose he had applied for a NYC handgun license. As I read the application materials, he could not have gotten a carry license because he had no reason related to his business to need to carry a handgun. His story that he needed a gun because he wears a lot of expensive bling and carries a lot of cash, while touching, doesn’t establish a business need. Burress’s business is catching footballs, and with the possible exception of playing the Eagles on the road, would not generally expose him to the risk of armed attack.
(emphasis mine)
After cleaning my screen, my thought was, “Ahhh yes….Philly sports fans….The only people capable of making me feel empathy for former Dallas tight end Michael Irvin.”
*Ask your physician if Plaxico® is right for you. Nursing and pregnant women and persons with sensitivity to lead should not take Plaxico.†
†
As much as I’d like to, I cannot claim credit for this line. Manny at Stellar Parthenon came up with this.
Matthew Yglesias again:
To go stronger here, it’s worth observing that absolutely integral to starting to achieve success in Iraq was the rolling strategic decision to abandon our main war aims. In particular, we’re now neither trying to create a strong Iraqi state, nor trying to create an Iraqi state that isn’t dominated by pro-Iranian forces, nor trying to create an Iraqi state that’s a base for American military power, nor especially trying to create a stable Iraqi democracy. I think all of those decisions were the right decisions, based in smart pragmatic thinking about Iraqi realities and American interests. But if we didn’t want to do that stuff, that we could have just not invaded in the first place. Which is exactly what we should have done!
(emphasis original)
Too true.
Somr more leaks;
Mary Beth Maxwell on for Labor Secretary, which is interesting. She is gay and the founding executive director of American Rights at Work…..I’m not sure if this is good sign, that Obama wants a strong labor person , or a bad sign, that he could put a gay person there to act as a safety valve to diminish pressure on eliminating DADT.
It also appears that Rep. James Ramstad (R-MN) is his choice for Drug Czar, which counts as a Republican on the cabinet, though there is a lot of opposition.
Ramstad has a record of opposing things like needle exchanges to bring down AIDS rates, and voting against increased funding for treatment. He is a lock them up kind of guy.
For Trade Representative, the word is that it is, Representative Xavier Becerra (D-CA), who has some fairly good cred on the free trade agreement skeptic side of the house. He did vote for NAFTA, but has publicly regretted it ever since, and has been a harsh critic of recent agreements.
Well, the Franken campaign is now explicitly claiming that it is in the lead over Coleman, maintaining that his campaign is using bogus challenges to keep their numbers up.
They say that their lead is somewhere in the mid 20 vote range (here and here)
Basically, they took notes of all the challenges, and recorded the precinct staff’s opinion as to the clear intent of the voter.
Additionally, it appears that 133 ballots have gone missing from a solidly Franken precinct.
Even if the missing ballots are a clerical error, and I doubt it, it’s been clear from the start that Coleman is going full Bush 2000 on this.
Well, some employment numbers are out, and they suck wet farts from dead pigeons. Job cuts in November were up 148% from last year, 181,671 according to Challenger Gray & Christmas said and 250,000 according to ADP.
Other metrics are bad too, with the Fed’s Beige Book showing economic slowdown in every one of the Federal reserve districts, and the Institute for Supply Management’s Non-Manufacturing Index dropped off a cliff, falling to 37.3 from 44.4 in October.
Service activity in Europe is falling, with the Euro Zone service activity falling to a 10 year record.
In retail, we have Retail Tracker more than tripling its estimate as to the decline in this years holiday shopping season.
There is some bright news, with mortgage applications rising 112% in last week, though I tend to believe this analysis, that this is not new demand, but people scrambling to lock in the rate.
It’s one of those things that makes week to week stats noisy.
What isn’t noisy is the fact that Manhattan empty office space has doubled, and if there is a glut of office space there, there’s a glut of office space everywhere.
In international finance, we have, VEB, a Russian State Bank asking for a $34 billion cash injection, and the Kiwis% and the Thais central banks slashing their rates by 150 and 100 basis points (1% and 1.5%) respectively.
This makes it no surprise that the dollar gained against the euro and pound.
In energy, despite OPEC’s announcement of its intent to cut wasdown again today, and retail gas prices fell for the 77th straight day.
And I don’t want it to be my country, and I don’t want to be….Take the Royal Family….please!
That being said, I really wish that we had their banking regulators:
Credit card giants have been given two weeks to agree to stop charging exorbitant rates to borrowers or risk losing their operating licences.
Ministers said they were giving Britain’s major lenders one last chance to prove they were not profiteering from the downturn. The ultimatum was delivered at a four-hour Whitehall summit called after The Independent disclosed some credit card and store card providers had raised interest rates – in some cases to 30 per cent – even though the cost of borrowing had fallen.
Perhaps we can trade them Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, for a few dozen Trident Missiles and future considerations?
He’s leading strongly in polls, here and here, and the Labor Party has triangulated itself into irrelevancy, with Kadima not being meaningfully to the right on either economics or security, and more progressive parties parties, particularly Meretz (also here) picking up the folks who oppose Thatcherite domestic policies.
Labor simply does not stand for anything any more, and the fact that it is basically tied with Meretz is an indication that it has no ideological base.
While he is staying, his people at the undersecretary level are leaving.
He does not get to keep his own people, and everything he wants to do will have to be implemented via undersecretaries and the like who are Obama people.
He has been effectively marginalized, which begs the question, “Why is Obama keeping him then?”
So the elections are over, and now, unencumbered by future elections and even the remotest possibility of a political future, we see the real George W. Bush, and he makes the George W. Bush of the past 7 years look like Al Gore.
I first came across this when I found out that he had issued an executive order stripping 5000 employees of the BATF, some of whom are already represented by a union, of their collective bargaining rights.
Think Progress has a list of what he’s pushing through now, titled Bush’s Backward Sprint To The Finish, and it’s grim: (quoting directly)
- HEALTH CARE
- – Cutting medicaid
- – Allowing healthcare workers to refuse “morally objectionable” procedures [meaning allowing anyone to refuse birth control and abortion at any time]
- – Revising rules for international drug trials [more dead foreign babies]
- – Narrowing the definition of combat related disability [meaning that if you get injured when your vehicle crashes because the vehicle in front of you gets blown up, it’s no longer “combat related]
- – Allowing states to set premiums and higher co-payments
- ENVIRONMENT
- – Allowing mining near the Grand Canyon
- – Discounting global warming when assessing species risks
- – Weakening the Endangered Species Act
- – Eliminating review of fishing regulations
- – Allowing more emissions from power plants
- – Opening protected land to energy development
- – Allowing factory farms to self-regulate waste
- – Altering solid waste definition
- – Allowing snowmobiles in Yellowstone
- – Allowing coal companies to dump dirt and rock into streams
- CIVIL LIBERTIES
- – Allowing guns in national parks
- – Allowing broader law-enforcement monitoring
- – Implementing the REAL ID Act
- LABOR
- – Making it harder to take time off
- – Allowing truckers to work 14 hour days [More dead on the US interstates]
- – Requiring labor unions to file extensive financial reports
- – Making it harder to regulate toxic substances on the job
- – Stripping collective bargaining rights from federal employees
- – Relaxing rules on investment adviser conflicts of interest
- ADMINISTRATION
- – Moving political appointees to permanent posts
The complete list, with descriptions is at the link.
This is someone would not be satisfied until he destroys everything America really stands for.
Damn.
Disappointing, but not unexpected.
No 60 Dem Senators.
Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) will not run for re-election in 2010.
No word on whether or not he will finish out his term, or resign to allow Governor Crist to appoint a successor to run in 2010 as an incumbent.
Link to Original Cartoon
So NATO agrees to resume limited ties with Russia while also allowing for better ties with Georgia and the Ukraine without any road map to NATA membership.
Obviously, it makes sense to resume ties with Russia. They are geographically and historically very important in dealing with Iran and Afghanistan.
As to kicking NATO membership down the road for the two former Soviet Republics, that’s just stupid, but the best that could be had with Bush and His Evil Minions™ still in power.
NATO does not need expansion, and the idea that a nut job like Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili, or a man who seems to be actively in the running for nut job like Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko to have the ability to mandate actions on the part of three nuclear powers is absurd.
One of the great diplomatic missteps of the 1990s was the expansion of NATO.
Just imagine how bad it would have been if Georgia had been a NATO member when it launched its assault on civilians. Do governments in the rest of Europe want to be held hostage by someone like Mikheil Saakashvili?
Do the militaries in the rest of Europe want to have to share data with a country whose military was so completely penetrated by Russian intelligence?
The expansion of NATO has been driven by 3 things:
I will note that the rapid expansion of the EU, which is, after a civilian institution hasn’t gone well either.
One need only look look at Bulgaria, a virtual Mafia state whose accession to the EU was driven by pan European triumphalism, to a lesser degree places like the Baltic republics, which are engaging in genteel ethnic cleansing, and that whole “twins” thing in Poland.
Both the EU and NATO have over expanded because of this, and the possibility of adding Ukraine and Georgia gives me the willies.
If the road to a unified Europe is inevitable, and I think that it is near inevitable, then expansion can take part at a measured pace.
The greatest threat to a real European super-State policy is the EE’s collapse from overambitious expansion.
A review of the Windows Vista™ successor beta, Windows 7:
So far, Windows 7 looks and behaves almost exactly like Windows Vista. It performs almost exactly like Vista. And it breaks all sorts of things that used to work just fine under Vista. In other words, Microsoft’s follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues.
Ouch, though some of the things that it breaks may very well just be the fact that it’s beta, but the final analysis, which uses some fairly deep level diagnostics to see how the OS works is that, “We can now say with some certainty that Windows 7 is in fact just a repackaging of Windows Vista – an “R2” release, to use Microsoft’s nomenclature on the Windows Server side of the house.”
The folks at Microflaccid still do not get it. They don’t need a software upgrade drop, they need rewrite.
Hank Paulson and His Evil Minions™ are completely clueless
The head of a new Congressional panel set up to monitor the gigantic federal bailout says the government still does not seem to have a coherent strategy for easing the financial crisis, despite the billions it has already spent in that effort.
Elizabeth Warren, the chairwoman of the oversight panel, said in an interview Monday that the government instead seemed to be lurching from one tactic to the next without clarifying how each step fits into an overall plan.
Hoocoodanode?
Hank Paulson is not trying to save anything but his friends and buddies back in Wall Street, and does not realize that much of that industry resembles a gangrenous limb, and requires amputation.
This is not just incompetence. It is incompetence and a complete unwillingness to do anything that might fix the problem, because that would make the high life style of the investment bankers largely obsolete.
Or more specifically, the man who ran the company into the ground, Hank Greenberg, who is demanding more information on the government bailout of his former firm, because he feels that it may have adversely effected his portfolio:
Greenberg wants the government to do more for AIG, suggesting it provide guarantees to cover counterparty collateral agreements, according to an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
(emphasis mine)
What was it that I just said about the WSJ Editorial Page again?
We really need to send the lot of them to prison.
2007-2008 and 2008-2009 (foreground) phone books.
That’s how much businesses have cut back on ads.
In this case it’s Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who continues to pimp the lie that the Rissians attacked first.
No, they didn’t. They knew that you would attack, and they knew when and where you would attack almost before you did, and so massed troops on their side of the border waiting for the balloon to go up, but you attacked first.
Being stupid, and having your state security apparatus thoroughly penetrated by a large unfriendly neighbor does not make you the victim of an attack. It just makes it either stupid or insane to launch an attack against their troops and allies.
You sir, notwithstanding your vaunted Western education, are both stupid and insane.
First, we have some developments on the other side of the pond, with the Australian Central Bank lowering its rates by 100 basis points (1%), the most since 1991, and a major Russian investment bank is calling for a 20% depreciation of the Ruble, to boost exports.
It might be a good idea, depending on how export dependent the Russian economy is. It would boost local and export oriented industries.
On more general metrics of the credit crunch, Calculated Risk’s credit crisis indicators show little progress, and the fact that the rates on Treasuries have fallen off a cliff, with people getting virtually nothing (0.05%) for 3 months T-Bills, 2.68% on 10 year notes (a near record), and 3.17% for a 30 year note (a record).
Basically, this means that investors are paying the government to hold their money safe for them.
For what it’s worth, people are not trusting anything, including much in the way of US and European sovereign debt, with the cost of swaps to insure that debt skyrocketing.
In energy, we have OPEC deferring a production cut, and so oil is now firmly below $50/bbl, and retail gasoline falling to $1.812/gal, a price I never thought that I would see again, and the 76th straight daily drop.
Meanwhile, the the dollar has weakened though there is downward pressure on the Yuan from rumors that the Chinese will actively move to push the value down to boost their economy.