OK, not really news, but the news that following the Bank of England’s surprise 150 basis point (1.5%) rate cut, banks have continued to increase the interest rates of credit cards.
There is some relief in discovering that it’s not just US bankers. Still, how about taking a few hundred, sending them to Gitmo, and keeping them in solitary until the courts rule, because they are doing more damage to the economy than Osama bin Laden could even imagine.
Well, it looks like a bunch of pranksters created a phony New York Times, and handed it out in major cities:
The Associated Press reported that copies of the spoof paper were also handed out in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, and that the pranksters — who included a film promoter, three unnamed Times employees and Steven Lambert, an art professor — financed the paper with small online contributions and created the paper to urge President-elect Barack Obama to keep his campaign promise
The usual suspects for organizing this are the Yes Men, and there is a web page, which, at least for me, is not that Firefox friendly.
In addition to the War Nerd, pretty much everything from The Exiled Online is pretty amaxing stuff, and I highly recommend it.
Case in point, Mark Ames review of the life and times of Lawrence Summers:
Let’s be clear here, in any sane place, and Washington, DC is apparently not a sane place, not only would this man not be considered for a public position, but just on the basis of his calling Africa, “Under Polluted”, he would be shunned from polite society.
The man is a corrupt and incompetent ideologue, and the idea that he is being considered as Secretary of the Treasure, and that he was Secretary of the Treasury, leaves me stunned.
Read Nouriel Roubini’s latest on the US economy.
I think that he’s right, and it’s clearly written, but it’s clear that we are going to be in a world of hurt.
After her disgraceful behavior with regard to telco immunity, I will support a syphilitic goat in against her in the primary.
Power Line’s John Hinderaker wrote, and I’m not linking to his post, but rather to Steve Benen’s post on Washington Monthly, because any page views that Hinderaker gets will just encourage him:
Obama thinks he is a good talker, but he is often undisciplined when he speaks. He needs to understand that as President, his words will be scrutinized and will have impact whether he intends it or not. In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush never gets sloppy when he is speaking publicly. He chooses his words with care and precision, which is why his style sometimes seems halting. In the eight years he has been President, it is remarkable how few gaffes or verbal blunders he has committed. If Obama doesn’t raise his standards, he will exceed Bush’s total before he is inaugurated.
I’m sure that someone from The Onion read this, and had to check and see if someone on their staff had actually written it.
Thank God.
The religious right in Israel has been doing their level best for the past 20 years to make Jerusalem as inhospitable as possible for people not like them, and the fact that he won the race there is a victory for anyone who does not want to live in the stone age.
Well, Calculated Risk has your daily inventory of interest ratescredit crisis indicators, and today, they are pretty neutral.
In Hank Paulson and His Evil Minions™ news, he has finally publicly eschewed the idea of buying distressed assets.
I think that the reason for this is that the sales price would either be so low that all of his Wall Street friends would be technically insolvent, or so high as to land his corrupt ass in jail, because the big sh$#pile is near worthless. That’s why there is no market. Wall street cannot handle the truth.
It also looks like he will start requiring some level of private capital to match any bailout money. My translation is that now that he’s bailed out his Wall Street friends, anyone else who wants money needs to work for it.
Of course none of this will do much for the economy, with estimates that holiday sales will drop 1%, the first decrease since 1985, and home values falling for the 7th straight quarter.
What we should be thinking about is not how to rescue Wall Street, but rather how to amputate it from out economy, because these parasites are on a path to destroy more than 10% of US GDP.
Speaking of parasites, it looks like GE capital just got the FDIC to insure $139 billion of their debt. It appears that, “GE’s finance businesses are able to seek FDIC debt coverage because its GE Capital subsidiary also owns a federal savings bank and an industrial loan company, both of which already qualify.”
Like I said, parasites.
In the mean time, recession worries drove oil down again today, to a 21 month low, and it appears that the world thinks that the UK is in worse shape than the US, because not only was the dollar up today, it hit a 6-year high vs. the pound.
If you are worried about a resurgent Russia though, you have less to worry about, with Russia easing up support on the Ruble, which promptly fell.
His only posts every few weeks typically, and when he covers conflict, there is a glee that is a bit unsettling (he admits it himself), but he knows and understands conflict, both on the tactical level and the social level, to a degree I have not seen elsewhere.
Case in point, his latest post on the ongoing conflict in eastern congo:
Every word, every disgusting damn word, of these BBC and Guardian stories is bullsh@#. actually makes me sick, listening to these stupid lies over and over. The reason Nkunda’s little army (estimates range from 5000 to 10000 men) advanced into Eastern Congo this week is that the Hutu gangs were getting a little too aggressive about jumping ethnic-Tutsi villages in eastern Congo, killing the men and kidnapping women and girls as sex slaves. Nkunda knows very well nobody else will protect the Tutsi, for the simple reason nobody ever has. So he went in to do it himself.
(expletives expurged mine)
Read the whole thing, because it’s a wonderful background on the whole region, Rwanda included, and it makes it clear that the continued operation of Refugee camps by the UN and NGOs long after it was clear that almost all of these people could return home without any major retribution is the real problem here, and not Nkunda.
Quoting again:
The rest fled into the forests of Eastern Congo. They’re the “refugees” that [BBC Reporter] Orla Guerin feels so sorry for: the frickin’ monsters who did their best to kill the whole Tutsi population of Rwanda in ninety days, like they were on one of those timed shopping sprees.
As I’ve said before, I lost most of my respect for the NGO’s, and much in the way of the UN’s refugee apparatus, when they signed off on running concentration camps for the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
If there were no refugees, they would not have a job, so they do their best to make sure that there are refugees.
Go read the whole thing.
Because at the end of the day, it’s a tax, and it’s not just a tax, it’s a hard to regulate and administrate one, which means that folks like Goldman Sachs are going to look for ways to game the market to line their own pockets, and the money that they make will come out of taxpayer’s, or consumer’s pockets.
Case in point, Goldman Sachs, “Recently bought pieces of two carbon-offset companies, in the latest sign of investment banks’ interest in the area.”
The idea that somehow or other allowing mini-Wall Streets will create innovation and make things better is simply wrong. Look at what they did to home mortgages.
What this is really about is Ivy League alumni politicians and bureaucrats deciding on policies based on the best interests of their Ivy League alumni friends on Wall Street.
It is senseless and destructive tribalism, and no different than Sunni-Shia in Iraq, or Hutu-Tutsi in Rwanda.
Read his opening ‘graph:
Some readers think my continuing attempt to expose all the lies and flim-flam and bizarre behavior of Sarah Palin is now moot. She’s history – they argue. Move on. I think she probably is history. Even Bill Kristol and his minions in the McCain-Palin campaign may not be able to resuscitate her political viability now. But even if she is history, she is history that matters.
That she is a disaster is certain. That she will fade back to well deserved obscurity is likely.
That this should have never happened in the first place is what needs to be examined.
The idea that Bill Kristol, a man who has nothing to recommend him except his parents, got her nominated as VP because he had a crush on her after meeting her at the governor’s mansion while on an Alaska cruise for conservatives is frightening.
That the media treated her as something other than a joke compounds the terror.
That the media is now actively participating in her rehabilitation leads one to despair.
He wrote a commentary on CNN.com:
Now, in light of the election, many are asking: What is the future of the Republican Party?
But that is the wrong question. The proper question should be: Where is our country heading?
(emphasis mine)
I don’t believe that it is particularly likely that they will ask that question though, because it is a 2nd cousin to asking, “What is best for the country,” and movement conservative Republicans don’t ask that question with regard to governance, because governance, and the government are evil in their minds.
It appears the the contracts were all written to expire at the end of November, and this may simply be an administrative screw up of, well, Democratic Party proportions.
If contracts are written this way at the DNC, so as not to encumber a successor chair, this is completely whack. There should be a 4-8 week overlap, so that you do not have a vacuum while the new guy is finding his feet.
Original post here.
Excuse me while I clean what I was drinking from the screen.
It appears that former Maryland Lieutenant Governor and US Senate candidate Michael Steele is looking to chair the RNC.
There is no way to put this delicately.
Michael Steele is stupid….Mind bogglingly stupid….I mean comparing stem cell research to the Holocaust in front of the Baltimore Jewish Council stupid.
I think in terms of raw brain power, he’s probably not that stupid, but it’s clear that he is so convinced of his own wit and genius, that he cannot help but make it worse.
He may not actually be stupid, but he has a penchant for doing stupid things that buggers the mind.
If he gets the post, I’m going to need to take up a collection for the popcorn.
Not my hed, but rather Paul Keil’s, who is reporting that Paulson is disparately looking to get the second half of the 700 billion bailout in his hands, so that he can benefit his Wall Street cronies before someone honest, or Larry Summers, ends up in charge of the Department of the Treasury:
In order to keep tabs on how the Treasury Department is handling the $700 billion bailout, Congress split up the payments. The first $350 billion is dwindling fast. $250 billion was set aside to buy stakes in the nation’s banks (here’s our tally of where that’s going) and yesterday $40 billion went to AIG as part of its renegotiated bailout.
That only leaves $60 billion. The Treasury has not even begun implementing its original plan, to purchase troubled mortgage assets. And with a number of major American institutions — General Motors, GMAC, bond insurers, insurance companies, etc. — pushing for their share of the bailout, that figure is likely to run out soon. Before it does, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson will be forced to return to Capitol Hill for the second helping. Such a journey is proving increasingly “likely,” the Wall Street Journal ventures.
IMNSHO, if he comes back to congress, he should not be allowed to take a piss without a Congressional staffer looking over his shoulder.
They were suspended during the Russo-Georgian war. Unsurprisingly, Lithuania is throwing a diplomatic hissy fit over this.
The dynamics of the whole thing seem to be interesting. We had Obama’s statement (which I see as correct, he is President elect, and should give the Senate its due) where he said that it was a Senate matter, and now the Clintons are denying that they were making calls supporting Lieberman.
Also, we have reports that Schumer and Durbin Lieberman removed as head of the Homeland Security Committee, and since Schumer raised a lot of money for the incoming Senators, this may be a big factor.
TPM is now confirming that
the full Democratic caucus will vote on his remaining DHS chair, and so this makes Chris Bowers’ whip count interesting reading.
I don’t think that Dems should eject Lieberman from the caucus, but he should not be a chairman, with subpoena power, of anything beyond the knitting committee.
Chris Bowers says pobably yes, with a follow up.
Pertinent quotes:
….
And, confirming earlier reports, the nearly 200 locally based organizers who form the core of the fifty-state strategy have all been fired….
….Further, Rahm Emanuel has long been the most outspoken opponent of the fifty-state strategy, and now he is Obama’s Chief of Staff. So really, given the amount of say Emanuel will have over this, kiss the fifty-state strategy goodbye.
…
People inside the DNC are telling me that the program is not dead. This doesn’t surprise me, because it is a popular program and I imagine that many of the remaining staffers at the DNC are committed to the program. At the same time, all of the organizers–who were chosen by local state parties–have been fired. That effectively kills the program, no matter the messaging and commitment of the remaining staffers. (emphasis mine)
…
Update: I’ve seen in the comments that many people think Obama is replacing “Deaniacs” with his own people. That is a failure to understand how the fifty-state strategy works. The DNC organizers were all chosen by the local state parties, not by Dean. Now, the idea that you fire a bunch of locally chosen people, and then send “your own” people back to those local areas, is absurd. The new people will be reviled, and unable to function with the local parties. No one is being replaced. The program is being terminated. 200 community organizers just got fired by Obama’s campaign. How ironic. (emphasis original)
I actually disagree with some of the analysis.
I don’t think that the “Rahm Emanuel and His Evil Minions™” are behind this. I think that this is really a part of the character of Barack Obama and his campaign.
I have never seen a more highly disciplined campaign at a national level, and they are, and I mean this is a good way, serious control freaks.
The 50 state strategy was a policy of sending money to the local state parties, and allowing them to choose their people as local organizers. It was the “them” and the “their” which made the program work, I hope that the Obama administration is not moving away from that.
Remember the stolen laptop that had “slam dunk” evidence of the Iranians having an active and aggressive nuclear weapons program?
Probably a forgery.
Son of Curveball.
That we should forgive and forget the Republicans, just like the victorious powers in WWII forgave the war crimes of the Axis powers and saw no need for judicial activity.
It’s snark, and marvelous snark, and I’ll just leave you with this:
Remember, nobody is a villain when they are doing what they feel is right for the country. This isn’t like the movies where a short bald “Dr. Evil” laughs and holds the world ransom for 700 billion dollars.
__________
To attack them now, after we have won, isn’t helpful. Why?
One warning…Not only should you avoid drinking anything before reading, you should empty your bladder too….It’s that funny.
