Month: January 2009

The Road to 60 Through the Commerce Department?

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We are hearing reports that New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg (R) is being considered for Secretary of Commerce.

This is interesting for a number of reasons:

  • Secretary of Commerce is typically low profile, the last, and possibly only “Rock Star” Secretary of Commerce was Herbert Hoover.
  • Gregg is a sitting senator in a state that has become reliably blue, so this might be preferable to his standing for election in 2010.
  • The governor of New Hampshire is John Lynch, who is a Democrat, and would likely appoint a Democrat to the post.

If this is true, then, once the Norm Coleman clown show is done, we would have 60 votes against a filibuster, assuming, of course, that Joe Lieberman doesn’t knife the Dems in the back.

The Minnesota Election Trial Continues to be the Norm Coleman Clown Show

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Well, we just had another example of one of Coleman’s hand picked witnesses saying something that they shouldn’t, though this time, it was under cross, as opposed to direct, examination.

Peter DeMuth admitted that the Coleman challenge team cherry picked him, even though they have maintained that there has been no such activity:

Upon cross-examination by Franken attorney Kevin Hamilton, DeMuth said he was contacted by the Republican Party and told about the problem. “They asked me if I knew my absentee ballot had been rejected. I said no,” said DeMuth. “They asked me if I was a supporter of Norm Coleman, and I said yes, and they proceeded to ask me if I would like to go further.”

Let’s think about this for a moment: Over the last several days, the Coleman camp has said repeatedly that they are not cherry-picking who they’re helping out, that they don’t know who the people they’re advocating for actually supported, and for all they know they’re helping out Franken-voters.

This is becoming really pathetic.

I’m not sure why Norm Coleman and His Evil Minions&trade are doing this…My best guess, based on nothing, is that they figure that they will have a donation list that they can use in the future that is, as Rod Blagojevich would say, is “Bleeping Golden.”

Senate Passes SCHIP Expansion

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One interesting thing is that ‘Phant support for the bill has plummetted, because the prior times that they voted, they knew that Bush would veto, so there was no chance of it becoming law.

The Republican Party, opposing healthcare for children since 1945.

The GOP claimed that it was about providing healthcare to the children of legal immigrants, but really, it’s another case of their opposing a program because it will work, albeit imperfectly, as it will still leave about 5 million children without health insurance.

A similar measure has already passed the house.

Geithner Needs to Work for the People of the United States of America

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Barry Righolts of The Big Picture puts his finger on what is bothering me about Geithner:

  • You no longer work for the Banks: The NY Fed is a private corporation, doing the bidding of the FOMC and its private sector owners — primarily, the primary dealers. In other words, the President of the NY Fed works for the biggest commercial and investment banks in New York. That is no longer operational for you.
  • As Treasury Secretary, your immediate boss is the President, and your ultimate charge are the citizens of the United States, and the finances of the country.
  • When any conflict comes into play between the nation and the banks, you as Treasury Secretary are on the side of the Nation.
  • You cannot serve two masters, especially when they are in direct conflict with each other.

In its most basic form, all this talk about nationalization being somehow beyond the pale is really about people who do think that whatever is good for the banks is good for the county, and Geithner and Summers are both on that side….Or they are for now.

The question is not, “How do we save the banks,” it’s, “How do we get normal access to credit going again with a minimal impact on the taxpayer,” and throwing trillions at banks for their sh%$pile assets does not serve the nation or the taxpayers.

Major Oil Refinery Strike Possible

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Talks between Royal Dutch Shell and the United Steelworkers do not appear to be going well, and a strike would idle about ½ the Gasoline refining in the United States.

The contract expires on Sunday, and if they go on strike, we can expect to see a significant spike in gasoline prices.

Needless to say, the ‘Phants would then be screaming for Obama to invoke Taft-Hartley, though I do not think that this would happen.

Activity Declined in Every State in December

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For the first time ever, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has released a report showing a decline in the coincident index in all 50 states.

Not only are we in a recession, but every single state is individually in a recession, for the very first time.

Look at 1982, when Paul Volker was doing his best to crush wages, and still, there were 7 states whose economies were expanding.

This is going to get very very bad.

Obama Considering Ditching Karzai

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Not a bad idea, since Karzai and his people are about the only people on the face of the earth worse at governance than Bush and His Evil Minions™:

The Bush administration’s close ties to the corrupt and ineffective Karzai government kept it in power long past its expiration date. During his tesimony, Gates wouldn’t say corruption reached into the “highest” levels of the Afghan government when prodded by one senator, settling for a more political “high levels” of government.

Since the Afghan people view the government in Kabul as corrupt, our propping it up does us no favors. Which is one of the reasons why Obama’s choice for Afghanistan/Pakistan special envoy, Amb. Richard Holbrooke, is such welcome news. Speaking last year at CSIS, Holbrooke made it clear he views Karzai as part of the problem, not the solution. He said the U.S. must stop trying to bolster the Karzai government in Kabul, which he called “weak and corrupt,” and focus more on governance in the provinces. “I don’t believe you can have a strong unitary government running the country from Kabul, its going to be a loosely governed country.” There is little risk of Afghanistan fragmenting, like so many feared might happen in Iraq, he said, as Afghans do not have “separatist tendencies.”

Gee, you think?

FWIW, I do not think that this was malice on the part of Bush, just an unwillingness to admit error.

I’m beginning to think that the willingness to admit error is among the rarest, and most beneficial, traits in a politician.

My Driveway Will Be Much Cleaner

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The Baltimore Examiner will cease publication on February 15.

It’s a free, and right wing, rag, that has continued to leave papers on my driveway whether I want them or not.

I’m not surprised. They set up shop in an expensive area, basically across the street from the Camden Yards ball park, and for a freebie paper, particularly one that sucked on the journalism side, they spent too much money on stuff like that.

Here is the memo to staff from management.

Iraq Denies License to Blackwater

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Iraq has notified the State Department of their decision, and the U.S. government will not renew their contract.

Hopefully, this is the start of a more general withdrawal of the use mercenary forces by the U.S. government.

Of course the problem is not limited to combat contractors (mercenaries), it’s also increasingly obvious that the explosion of contractors throughout the bureaucracy has created an explosion of fraud, waste, and abuse.

The Romans as Inspiration in the Banking Crisis

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Should Barnabas Francus hold the next hearing of his House banking committee atop this cliff?

Tom Ricks notes the similarities between the current financial crisis and the financial crisis of the Roman Empire in 33 CE.

It appears that regulations limiting the amount of interest charged caused a collapse of lending, and from there it became a collapse of property values.

Finally, Emperor Tiberius disperses something over 100 million sesterces to the banks with explicit instructions to lend to anyone who can provide collateral that is double the amount borrowed.

It is a little different, it’s not an insolvency problem, it’s an illiquidity problem, and as I have noted before, the prescription is rather different.

That being said, one of the things that Tiberius did does look rather appealing:

Tiberius also raised funds by accusing Sextus Marius, the richest man in Spain, of incest — almost certainly a trumped-up charge — and then having him thrown headlong from the Tarpeian Rock (see below), a cliff at the edge of Rome’s Capitoline Hill. “Tiberius kept his gold mines for himself,” Tacitus notes.

I want a bigger cliff though.

Speaking of Insubordination

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The presiding judge at Gitmo, Army Colonel James Pohl, is refusing to suspend one of the trials, and has scheduled the arraignment for February 9:

Hours after taking office last week, Obama ordered Guantanamo prosecutors to seek 120-day delays in all pending cases to give his administration time to decide whether to scrap the widely criticized tribunals created by the Bush administration to try suspected terrorists outside the regular U.S. court system.

But the judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, said the law underpinning the tribunals gives the presiding judges sole authority to delay cases. He ruled that postponing proceedings against Abd al Rahim al Nashiri would harm the public interest in a speedy trial.

Note that al Nashiri appears to be one of the “high value” defendants who was water boarded, and he has been held for over 5 years…so much for speedy trials.

Seriously, Bush and His Evil Minions™ did their level best to politicize every level of government, including the military.

This will be poisoning the military and the civilian bureaucracy for decades to come.

Obama Needs to Tell Ray Odierno to STFU

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Because it’s clear that General Odierno is doing his level best to box Obama in on Iraq:

Among those consulted by the president was Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, who has developed a plan that would move slower than Mr. Obama’s campaign timetable, by pulling out two brigades over the next six months. In an interview in Iraq on Wednesday, General Odierno suggested that it might take the rest of the year to determine exactly when United States forces could be drawn down significantly.

This is borderline insubordinate.

A president needs his generals to tell him, and congress, the truth, but you don’t want them spouting off to the press in order to make your job more difficult.

If this is not slapped down now, it will only get worse.

Senators Levin and Grassley Move to Regulate Hedge Funds

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The Hedge Fund Transparency Act would force hedge funds to register with regulators, file annual disclosures, and cooperate with SEC investigators.

It’s a start.

The most worrisome thing, Madoff not withstanding, is not how hedge funds can break the law, but how much of what they do is legal, since a lot of it appears to be market manipulation and insider trading to my untrained eye.

White House Denies Non-Prosecution Promise

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An unnamed Holder aide is denying that he made any promise not to prosecute torture:

Eric Holder has not made any commitments about who would or would not be prosecuted. He explained his position to Senator Bond as he did in the public hearing and in his responses to written questions.

So it appears that Kit Bond’s statements to the Washington Times are now in dispute.

I really think that Eric Holder and Barack Obama both need to publicly disavow the news report.

Why Media Consolidation is a Bad Thing

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You know that when you go to a new city, you find a different alternative weekly.

What you may not know is that most of them are owned by one company, Village Voice Medis, and VVM has decided to drop all the comics that it is currently running from these publications.

So consolidation gets us a stupid and self-destructive decision, because the conglomerate has to hit “the numbers” for Wall Street, and then it immediately propagates throughout most of the media markets in the US.

Economics Update

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Well, the jobless numbers are out, and they are not pretty with initial claims running at 588,000,continuing claims rising 159,000 to 4.776 million, which is the highest number recorded since the 1967, when they started collecting the data, and the 4 week moving average rose by 24,250 to 542,500.

Additionally durable goods orders fell by 3.7% in 2008.

And if you are wondering if there is a segment of the banking industry that won’t need a bailout, stop wondering.

There isn’t a segment of the banking industry that is not in trouble, as regulators are not moving to inject capital into credit unions, which are traditionally the most conservative, and the safest of the bank like institutions.

The fact that new home sales have fallen to the lowest level ever recorded (recording started in 1963) probably has a lot to do with this.

Also, freight truck tonnage is cliff diving. (H/T Calculated Risk)

Meanwhile, the most healthy of the Big 3 (Big 2½) auto makers, Ford, just reported a larger-than-expected $5.9 billion loss in the last quarter.

In international finance New Zealand is aggressively dropping its benchmark interest rates too, with their central bank 150 basis points (1½%) to the record low of 3.5%.

About the only good news is that it appears that deflationary expectations are easing, as the spread between 10 year Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS)and 10 year nominal securities has risen about 1% for the first time since November 10.

Meanwhile, the dollar was mixed today, and oil fell on the housing news.