Year: 2008

I Hope That Obama is Handling this Problem the Wright Way

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Obama has has disavowed incindiary statements made by his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and he has been removed from his campaign’s African American Religious Leadership Committee.

I’ve not been a fan of Obama, but this should be enough. For all intents and purposes, except for literal genetics, this guy is his family. He was married by him, his daughters were baptized by him.

His statement about him sometimes being like an uncle who makes statements that you disagree with is in my assessment 100% true.

In any sane world, this should close the matter. In fact, it should also remove the whole “Obama as Muslim” slime too.

He’s not a Muslim, and he has a nutty pastor to prove it.

Of course, the world of a presidential campaign is not “sane” by any measure.

This sucks.

The only bright spot is that I think that he has handled it well, which bodes well for him if he gets the nomination.

The Stupid, Mindless Security State

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In this case, it’s USAF Gen. Michael Hamel, who feels the need to warn us about the extential threat that Google Earth poses to the United States.

“It could be as simple as how is it that an adversary gets an image off of Google Earth that could somehow threaten American lives or interests ….. “That is an example of a space threat that we may face in the future.”

And as a commenter said, “Right… and pigs can fly. Or rather, the good General may wish a Pig Ban because if pigs could fly they might somehow hurt US interests.”

I’m beginning to wonder why a disproportionate number of these mind-boggling stupid statements coming from generals seem to come from USAF generals.

Must be something in the water at Colorado Springs…Come to think of it, that is where dog and child beater James Dobson’s Focus on the Family is located.

The USAF is Integrating the GBU-57 Into the B-2

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Stephen Trimble, who has a lot more patience than I do, notices a solicitiation document for bids to integrate the GBU-57 into the B-2.

He does some research, and all he can find is a reference to it being a 5000lb penetrating bomb from an article in the Grauniad* circa 2003, but this appears to be an error actually referring to the GBU-28.

So, why is the USAF putting out bids to integrate a new weapon into the B-2? Why does it appear to be a penetrator?

Is this a preparation for a first strike on Iran?

*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”

Books I Need To Read: Greenspan’s Bubbles

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I read an interest review of Greenspan’s Bubbles by William A. Fleckenstein:

… He sets out to deflate Alan Greenspan’s reputation by parsing Greenspan’s own comments during his tenure as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. His conclusion?

“Greenspan bailed out the world’s largest equity bubble with the world’s largest real-estate bubble,” he writes. “That combination easily equates to the biggest orgy of speculation and debt creation the United States (and the world) has ever seen.”

Bernanke was left to sweep up after the debauch while Greenspan rewrote history in The Age of Turbulence.

I’m not sure that there is a whole bunch to learn from his book, so I’ll wait until it hits the library.

What I find interesting, and well deserved, is that Greenspan will find himself increasingly reviled in the final years of his life.

In a very real way, this is more than a repudiation of Greenspan, but it is also a repudiation of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.

The fact that Greenspan endorsed the worst excesses of the market for ordinary people, but rushed to bail out the “noble entrepreneur”, is a direct consequence of his experience of Ayn Rand’s acolytes.

Successful Test of Meteor Breathing Air to Air Missile

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On the 6th of this month, at the Vidsel Missile Test Range in Sweden.

It’s generally in the AMRAAM range of performance, though it offers significantly better kinematics (Range 100+km reported on the wiki, and I’d bet on more than 150km) due to its solid fuel ramget/ducted rocket propulsion system.

Of note, it will
never fit in an F-22 weapon’s bays, though it might fit in those of an F-35.

It’s supposed to enter service in about 5 years….Yeah…I know…what takes so %$#@ing long.

HouseTelco Free Fisa Bill

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From The Gavel, Pelosi’s Blog:

House Passes FISA Amendments Act
March 14th, 2008 by Jesse Lee

The House has just passed the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 3773, to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to establish a procedure for authorizing certain acquisitions of foreign intelligence, and for other purposes, by a vote of 213-197-1. The revised House legislation to amend FISA grants new authorities for conducting electronic surveillance against foreign targets while preserving the requirement that the government obtain an individualized FISA court order, based on probable cause, when targeting Americans at home or abroad. The House bill also strongly enhances oversight of the Administration’s surveillance activities. Finally, the House bill does not provide retroactive immunity for telecom companies but allows the courts to determine whether lawsuits should proceed.

You can find the vote here.

In the anti-American crowd (Nays), you have 12 Democrats, including Lampson and Shuler.

Nick Lampson I keep getting emails from, because he bought Richard Morrison’s mailing list when he took over the campaign.

As to Heath Shuler, he was an overpaid, no brain, no guts punk when he played for the Redskins, and he’s an overpaid no brain, no guts punk now.

Bear Stearns, I May Have Gotten a Prediction Right

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On August 2 of last year, I said that within a year, Bear Stearns would cease to function as an independent entity.

I’m not right yet, but I don’t see how I won’t be right in the next 5 months.

Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

And it would seem, that I actually get a prediction right, which is another sign of the apocalypse.

Just yesterday, the Bear Stearns CEO said that there were no liquidity issues, but today, JPMorgan Chase and the New York Fed have gotten together to bail them out.

Basically, the Fed can’t bail out Bear Stearns, it’s out of its authority, but it can guarantee JP Morgan’s loans to the embattled investment bank, which it did.

Actually, a closer reading makes it even more extraordinary. The Fed directly lent money to Bear Stearns, using an authority last used in the 1960s, which required a vote of the Fed’s Board of Governors.

Typically, the Fed is only supposed to lend to banks, and Bear is not a bank, but an investment house.

As to the statements of the CEO yesterday, I would call them a bald faced lie, but I don’t have a Harvard MBA, so I don’t know the fancy term for blowing smoke up everyone’s ass.

Of interest is some potential insider trading, specifically, someone traded 55,000 Bear Stearns puts Tuesday. (A “Put Option” is basically a bet that the stock will decline in value.)

One of the results of all of this is that money has been fleeing to Treasuries, or fleeing the US entirely, with the dollar down.

One of the things you have to understand is that Bear Stearns is a pretty small player in all this, with a market capitalization of “only” about $15 billion dollars, and we’ve got the markets jumping out windows.

Economics Update

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In terms of market stability, Carlyle Capital share prices have tripled after Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubinstein said that it was looking at ways to compensate investors.

I’m not sure how much it means. The collapse of Carlyle Capital, that was so yesterday….hold it….it actually WAS yesterday.

Today, it’s Bear Stearns, which gets its own thread for reasons of personal ego.

Inflation in February was 0%, largely due to some moderation in food and energy, which won’t happen in March, given that oil is still at around $110/bbl, and the dollar is still tanking.

In insurance, it appears that losses are approaching the levels of Katrina, though we are probably less than 1/3 of the way through this.

Time for Your Weekly Tanker Saga Update

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First, lets start with my analysis. As soon as Airbus proposed the A330, Boeing knew that they were facing a larger, more modern, and more capable plane.

They stuck with the 767 for a very simply reason, they believed that they were God’s gift to tankers, and commercial clients still wanted to buy the 777, so they thought that it was more convenient.

First, Boeing has filed a formal protest on the award, which is as surprising as the sun coming up in the morning. (See here, here, and here.)

Needless to say, Democrats are using this to take shots against John Mccain (Read a fantastically funny riff on the politics here)

Truth be told, the first deal to lease was corrupt, with DoD and Boeing officials going to jail over the deal, and. McCain was right to challenge the deal.

A lot of the problem for Boeing is that they were unbelievably arrogant and unresponsive to the DoD:

“The Boeing team was not responsive and often was not even polite,” said Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., based on conversations he said he had with defense officials. “Somehow that all eluded senior management,” Mr. Thompson said. “They were not even aware there was a problem.”

Add to this that Boeing’s record in defense contracting is worse than that of Northrop Grumman in terms of being on time and on budget, and that they had an inferior product, and this was a done deal.

Boeing was hoping to rest on its laurels, and the fact that much of the Congress would flip out over the choice.

Of course it doesn’t help that McCain campaign staffers lobbied for EADS.

Additionally, one of Boeings arguments, that EADS was ill equipped to create a working boom (boom and probe primarily used by the USAF, and products developed for the USAF, everyone else uses hose and drogue), was not accurate. They were already developing a boom for Australia (I guess for their F-111s, the F-18s use hose and drogue).

Furthermore, EADS was motivated to move work to the us, because they wanted to take advantage of the cheap dollar. That’s a reason that all the A330 freighter assembly will be moving to the US. It’s cheaper for them now.

For what it’s worth, The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) has issued a statement supporting the deal, so it met their snif test.

Boeing has now released the specifics of its complaint against the process:

  • That the formula used to rate the competitors was changed at the last minute.
  • That this changed favored EADS by making range and payload more important, and ramp space requirements less so.
  • That they failed to give Boeing credit for its commercial airliner experience.

My comment on the last point is that the DoD took a look at your contracting performance with them and decided that you sucked.

Bush Personally Intervened to Poison National Parks

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Yes, the Avignon President is busy making the air we breath unsafe for humans and other living things:

The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.

EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA’s scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.

“It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA’s expert scientific judgment,” said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

This is more than just bad policy. His actions are also against the statute.

Really, just despicable.

House and Senate Pass Phase Out of Bush Tax Cuts

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It’s a, good start, but we are in a deep hole, both in terms of the Federal budget deficient and the economy, and the Wall Street types who created this whole, and benefit from this hole, need to pay more of their share of the hole.

The maximum marginal tax rate needs to be increased, probably into the 45% to 50% range for people making over $½ million a year, because we are going to need massive government spending to avoid Japan’s 15 year deflationary trap, and we have massive infrastructure needs that have to be addressed regardless of the state of the economy.

Truths in Life: Law Enforcement Agencies will ALWAYS Abuse Survelliance Abilities

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In this case, we have the FBI using national security letters, which require no judicial review, as a giant Hoover to spy on tens of thousands of Americans illegally.

What’s more, when they were informed that this was illegal, they engaged in an orgy of illegal ass-covering:

This created a backlog of records that the F.B.I. had obtained without going through proper procedures. In response, the letter said, the F.B.I. devised a plan: rather than issuing national security letters retroactively for each individual investigation, it would issue the blanket letters to cover all the records obtained from a particular phone company.

Lets be clear. This is not the exception, this is the rule. It is the basic place that any part of the state security apparatus is coming from, and it has been since well before the founding of the Republic.

These sorts of situational ethics are simply part of the mindset.

It Is What It Is

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Down at TPM Cafe, FlyOnTneWall has a very interesting post on the realities of Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., the pastor at Obama’s Church.

Specifically, he discusses the Fox News (who else) coverage of a rather incendiary sermon in which he makes it clear that he supports Obama.

Ostensibly, the article is about the potential implications with the IRS, but in reality Fox uses it get some potentially disastrous sound bites on the table.

In addition to the use of the N-Word, and describing Bill Clinton as having done the Black community, “just like he did Monica”, which I think that Obama can, and did defuse with his “crazy uncle” disavowal, there are some statements that are far more troubling from a political perspective:

Brian Ross’s report for Good Morning America on Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, is potentially a huge problem for Obama. In the piece, Ross has clips of Wright delivering sermons in which he says we should not say God Bless America, but God “Damn” America, in which he calls America the US of KKKA (referring to how racist the country is), and in which he says about September 11 that America’s “chickens have come home to roost.”

From a purely tactical perspective, he needs to get ahead of this story, and he needs to do so in the next few days.

If he waits until Monday, it may well be too late.

It is necessarily a painful thing, after all, Rev. Wright’s has been his pastor for over 20 years, but these are the sound bites that will be used to destroy his campaign.

Rev. Wright is not Louis Farrakhan, but the political reality in the US in 2008 is that he will have to be disavowed and denounced in the same manner, and even then you will still see his clips all over Fox News.

He needs not to repeat Clinton’s weakness with Ferraro.

The Republicans are salivating at the opportunity to turn Obama into the scary angry black man. It’s not fair, it’s just the way it is.

They need to throw Wright off the bus, and back up over him, and do it again, and then tie an anchor to him and throw him in the river.