Itulip.com has this 4 minute video:
Month: January 2009
Google Sets Trap for Cable ISPs
Well, I’m not sure if it is a trap, per se, since they announced its creation with a press release, but it certainly is a shot across the bow directed primarily at Comcast.
Google Inc on Wednesday unveiled a plan aimed at eventually letting computer users determine whether providers like Comcast Corp are inappropriately blocking or slowing their work online.
….
Google will provide academic researchers with 36 servers in 12 locations in the United States and Europe to analyze data, said its chief Internet guru, Vint Cerf, known as the “father of the Internet.”
Google Inc on Wednesday unveiled a plan aimed at eventually letting computer users determine whether providers like Comcast Corp are inappropriately blocking or slowing their work online.
The scheme is the latest bid in the debate over network neutrality, which pits content companies like Google against some Internet service providers.
The ISPs say they need to take reasonable steps to manage ever-growing traffic on their networks for the good of all users. Content and applications companies fear the providers have the power to discriminate, favoring some traffic over others.
Google will provide academic researchers with 36 servers in 12 locations in the United States and Europe to analyze data, said its chief Internet guru, Vint Cerf, known as the “father of the Internet.”
My guess is the first thing that they will discover is that Comcast is crippling competing VOIP applications, I’ve already heard reports of this anecdotally.
Bringing in Cerf was a masterstroke of publicity.
Canada: the Libs Cave
So the liberals wimp out, and Michael Ignatieff, showing all the moral courage and intellect he showed when he supported the invasion of Iraq gives Stephen Harper’s merry bunch of radicals a “Get out of Jail Free” card, as New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton so ably noted.
What did he get? It appears that he got a statement from the Canadian finance minister that he was, “open to opposition suggestions.”
Ignatieff does not get it, but he just sold the country down the river, and the coalition cannot be reformed in the foreseeable future, so the Conservatives get to continue their goal of making Canada just like Texas.
Judiciary Committee Votes to Approve Eric Holder
The vote was 17-2.
Full Senate approval as Attorney General looks to be a cinch.
Not One Republican Vote
The stimulus package passes the house without even 1 ‘Phant vote. So much for bitartisanship.
One of the nice things is that the Nadler amendment passed, adding $3 billion to mass transit.
Iceland’s Conservatives Out for the First Time in 20 Years
No surprise at the change in government.
The free-market mousketeers ran the country into the ditch, so the new government will be led by the Social Democrats, and will include the Left Green Party.
I believe that we are going to see a lot more of this over the next few years.
US Unions Gain Members for 2nd Straight Year
I think that these gains are an artifact of a new world view by workers, they’ve always believed that management was a bunch of cheap and contemptible greed-heads, but now, with just about every business out there showing evidence of incompetent and unethical behavior, the idea that they could trust management to do what is best for the firm has fallen by the wayside too.
Economics Update
Well, the FOMC meeting ended, and they relased statement saying that they will stay at zero interest rates for some time.
Additionally, they are looking at, “Unconventional Measures,” which appear to include buying longer term Treasuries.
It appears that one of those steps is that they will write down a significant of the mortgage backed securities that they picked up in the Bear and AIG bailouts, a sort of voluntary “cram down”.
Europe seems to have stabilized, at least for now, with consumer sentiment steadying.
Meanwhile, mortgage applications fell sharply, as interest rates have risen, from 4.88% at the beginning of the year to 5.22% now, in anticipation of ballooning deficits.
Of course, if reports that Moody’s is considering cutting GE’s triple-A credit rating, are true, we’re in for another big shock.
Politically Kosher: Don’t Mix Meat and Milk
Sometimes, the pork in the stimulus package is beef.
In this case it was an attempt by the Dairy industry to have the government purchase about 300,000 of milk cows and sell them to slaughter houses in order to arrest the recent declines in the cost of milk.
The dairy farmers wanted this, but the beef farmers did not, and when all was said and done, it ended up on the cutting room floor, but not before I made hay of the situation.
Don’t have a cow, man!
U.S. House Panel Approves Wimpolicious Cramdown Provision
Most notably, the bill , which puts us in a rinse, lather, repeat situation.
As the late Tanta (I miss her) said, “Just Say Yes To Cram Downs“:
In fact, I have some sympathy with the view that mortgage lenders “perform a valuable social service through their loans.” That’s why, when they stop doing that and become predators, equity strippers, and bubble-blowers instead of valuable social service providers, I like seeing BK judges slap them around. Everybody talks a lot about moral hazard, and the reality is that you’re a lot less likely to put a borrower with a weak credit history, whose income you did not verify and whose debt ratios are absurd, into a 100% financed home purchase loan on terms that are “affordable” only for a year or two, if you face having that loan restructured in Chapter 13. If you are aware that your mortgage loan can be crammed down, I’m here to tell you that you will certainly not “forget” to model negative HPA in your ratings models, and will probably pay more than a few seconds’ attention to your appraisals. You might even decide that, if a loan does get into trouble, you’re better off working it out yourself, via forbearance or modification or short sale, rather than hanging tough and letting the BK judge tell you what you’ll accept. That would be a major bummer, right?
Without the cramdown provision going forward, you have created moral hazard, and the lenders will do the same stupid things, over, and over, and over again.
Russia May Not Deploy Missiles to Kaliningrad
We have reports that the Russians are offering not to deploy missiles on the Polish border, but we also have official Russian denials of those reports.
My guess is that the truth is somewhere in between, with the leak intended as to jump start negotiations on the matter.
George Soros Slams Bad Bank Concept
George Soros has come out against the “Bad Bank” rescue scheme. He thinks that it will not save banks, but instead create “Zombie Banks”, the walking dead which will not be able to offer meaningful credit, so he proposes a “Nationalization Lite”.
I prefer the real nationalization, but I agree that the “Bad Bank” concept won’t fix anything.
By way of background, the current version of this is that the FDIC will buy toxic assets, at maturity value from banks, as opposed to current market value.
So, at its core it means overpaying the banks for their assets, so that $750K mortgage on a Miami condo currently worth $150K is purchased as if the underlying assets are still valued at $750K.
You can’t buy at market value, because the banks would then be insolvent, which is why more and more people are suggesting that the banks be taken over, and then the government would handle disposal of those assets.
It’s what the FDIC has done for years, and the RTC did with the S&L crisis, and what the Swedes did in the 1990s, and the government turned a profit in about 4 years.
It’s welfare for the rich.
Cello Scrotum A Hoax
It appears that a noted British doctor made up the condition and submitted it to the British Medical Journal in 1974, in response to reports, which she thought were a prank/hoax, of a condition called, “guitarist’s nipple”, which is or is alleged to be a chafed nipple from resting the guitar there.
Normally, I wouldn’t have cared, but I played cello when I was 9 and 10, before switching to trombone, so the hed made me want to read it.
Stating the Blatantly Obvious
It appears that Mssrs. Geithner and Summers are concerned about the increasing calls for bank nationalization:
Explicit nationalization of financial companies has little support among key Obama officials, sources said. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and top White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers think governments make poor bank managers and cannot efficiently manage a vast number of institutions, according to some of their associates.
Because, as Atrios notes, “Has it occurred to no one that bank managers also make poor bank managers?“
Another danger is that by taking over a substantial portion of a bank’s stock and wiping out the investment of the firm’s other shareholders, the government could also precipitate a sell-off across the banking system as investors flee, fearing they could be next.
No, investors will flee because they believe the banks to be insolvent, because the US government won’t seize solvent banks. Even the Swedes didn’t do that during their banking meltdown in the 1990s.
The real problem is that the regulators, Geithner, Rubin, and their mentor Robert “Soon to be Indicted” Rubin, have gone native.
Eric Holder Just Became a War Criminal, Will Barack Obama Follow? [With Update: Senate Dems Deny]
Update: Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee have just denied that Holder said any such thing. I’d like to see Holder deny this too.
If this report in the Washington Times is accurate, Eric Holder just agreed not to prosecute people who engaged in torture:
Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond, a Republican from Missouri and the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview with The Washington Times that he will support Eric H. Holder Jr.’s nomination for Attorney General because Mr. Holder assured him privately that Mr. Obama’s Justice Department will not prosecute former Bush officials involved in the interrogations program.
Mr. Holder’s promise apparently was key to moving his nomination forward. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 17-2 to favorably recommend Holder for the post. He is likely to be confirmed by the Senate soon.
Sen. Bond also said that Mr. Holder told him in a private meeting Tuesday that he will not strip the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the National Security Agency after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks of retroactive legal immunity from civil lawsuits–removing another potential sticking point among GOP senators.
When the United States ratified the Convention against Torture in 1994, it created an obligation to affirmatively act to prevent torture, and to prosecute torturers and co-conspirators through, “effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction,” including taking steps to “ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal law”.
If the report is true, and note that it’s the Washington Times quoting Kit Bond, so the possibility that the reporter or the Senator is lying is most assuredly non-zero, so, Holder could have said something as innocuous as, “There is such a thing as prosecutorial discretion,” and Kit Bond could have related this as, “there will be no prosecutions.”
Certainly, the Republicans have in the past fabricated promises in the hope that they would become accepted as the status quo…..It’s called poisoning the well.
That being said, if what Mr. Bond related is a true description of the discussions, then Eric Holder has entered into an illegal conspiracy to coverup torture, which is, under the convention against, a violation of the Convention against Torture in and of itself.
The pertinent sections of the convention are below (all emphasis mine, and but I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!*):
Article 2
- Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
- No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
- An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.
Article 4
- Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.
- Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.
Article 5
- Each State Party shall take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over the offences referred to in article 4 in the following cases:
- When the offences are committed in any territory under its jurisdiction or on board a ship or aircraft registered in that State;
- When the alleged offender is a national of that State;
- When the victim is a national of that State if that State considers it appropriate.
- Each State Party shall likewise take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over such offences in cases where the alleged offender is present in any territory under its jurisdiction and it does not extradite him pursuant to article 8 to any of the States mentioned in paragraph I of this article.
- This Convention does not exclude any criminal jurisdiction exercised in accordance with internal law.
Article 7
- The State Party in the territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is found shall in the cases contemplated in article 5, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.
- These authorities shall take their decision in the same manner as in the case of any ordinary offence of a serious nature under the law of that State. In the cases referred to in article 5, paragraph 2, the standards of evidence required for prosecution and conviction shall in no way be less stringent than those which apply in the cases referred to in article 5, paragraph 1.
- Any person regarding whom proceedings are brought in connection with any of the offences referred to in article 4 shall be guaranteed fair treatment at all stages of the proceedings.
*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
The Norm Coleman Clown Show
So, first the Coleman campaign submitted false documents to the judges, and now their own witnesses are admitting to completely bollixing up their absentee ballots:
One of the voters was Douglas Thompson, who admitted under oath that his girlfriend filled out his absentee ballot application for him, signing his name with her own hand and purporting to be himself. His ballot was rejected because the signature on his ballot envelope (his own) did not match the signature on the application (his girlfriend’s).
…
Another one of the voters, an older man named Wesley Briest, initially responded that he voted at the polls — not by absentee. Then Coleman attorney James Langdon showed him his absentee ballot envelope, reminding him that he did not go to the polls, too. Upon cross-examination by Franken lawyer Kevin Hamilton, Briest admitted that his wife, who served as the witness on his ballot, did not fully complete the witness section of the absentee ballot.
Jeebus, the stupid, it burns!
1000 Words on Republican Bipartisanship
Back to 1980*
The FDIC Proposes is suggesting interest rate caps on banks that are not “Well Capitalized” under accounting rules:
The FDIC recommended banks be limited in tapping higher- cost sources of funds, such as brokered deposits, and be barred from paying rates that exceed a national average plus 75 basis points. The agency also said premiums paid to insure deposits should be based on risks faced by the banks that fail to meet regulatory requirements.
The bank industry lobbyists are screaming, “Nationalization,” of course, but that’s what they do whenever there is an attempt to regulate.
It really is amazing just how much every rollback of New Deal regulations has resulted in disaster.
*That’s when statutory limits on interest rates for deposit accounts were repealed.†
†That was when Jimmy Carter was President. The regulatory origins of this crisis, as well as the Savings and Loan debacle, start with him‡
‡Yet another reason I hate “Saint Jimmy.”
Mad Magazine Still Has it Now and Again
You know, I just got the news that Mad Magazine is going quarterly from monthly, which unfortunately means that it’s circulating the drain.
Still, it appears that they still have comedic chops:
This is just as funny, in a Mad Magazine kind of way, as when the Onion says, “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job“.
It’s also a reason why I shouldn’t be President. I’d be mainlining bat guano right now.
Click pic to go to Mad.
My First Take on Obama’s Broadband Plan
I like it, because the telecommunications companies don’t:
The grants would be conditioned on companies building so- called open-access networks, which would allow other companies to offer competing service over the same lines.
The telcos want free money, which is what they got when the Clinton administration was trying to build out what they still called the, “information superhighway,” and they used the money for mergers.
They spent very little time or effort making broadband widely available, they used the money to reinforce their monopoly advantages.
I could be wrong, but if the incumbent providers don’t like it, it’s a pretty good indication that this is good policy.