This should get interesting, because we likely have an Attorney General, or will shortly, who might actually enforce a Congressional subpoena.
My guess as to the end game is that he will show up and then refuse to answer questions, but Rove sees himself as the smartest guy in the room, and if he talks, he’ll lie.
If he lies, that’s a federal crime.
So, Pope Benedict has reversed the excommunication of a Holocaust Denier Bishop, Richard Williamson, in an attempt to make nice with the so called “Traditionalist Schism” in the church.
Just in case you are wondering, this is who this Pope is. It’s the same as his infamous Regensburg speech where he called Mohammad’s teachings, “evil and inhuman”, only this time he won’t have to backtrack, because there is only one Jewish state, and they aren’t going on Pogroms against Catholics over this.
And in case you are wondering who Bishop Williamson is, he is the guy who thought that the movie The Sound of Music was too anti Nazi.
So while Barack Obama is meeting with Republicans to get support for the stimulus package, John Boehner has already instructed his caucus not to vote for it.
A bright spot in all this is the report that Obama told the ‘Phants at a meeting to go pound sand on low income tax cuts.
They are claiming that it’s “Welfare”, though Ronald Reagan called it the “Earned Income Tax Credit,” and strongly supported it.
H/t Americablog for the pic.
Karl Case, co-creator of the Case-Shiller index, is says that he expects housing to bottom out by the end of this year.
I disagree. First, you always get overshoot when a bubble collapses, and there are too many shadow foreclosures out there, where banks have not listed the properties, or are delaying foreclosures because their hands/balance sheets are full.
If I had an investment decision on it, I’d probably go with Karl Case, but I don’t, so I’ll stick with my prediction.
You may see a bottom in the worst hit places, like California, which is down 42% year over year (!), sooner than that, but a too much “wealth” has simply been destroyed for a recovery this year.
I do not expect an uptick until sometime after 2012.
The lede on most business sections was good news, that home sales rose in December, as you can see on the top chart, but as the bottom chart clearly shows, home prices continue to fall.
Prices are down 15.3% year over year, and sales in 2008 are down 13% from 2007 sales.
The real question is how much of this is foreclosures and other REOs creating a market for bottom feeders, because the percentage of foreclosures relative to sales is way up.
Of course, interest rates have gone up a bit for mortgages, as they have in Treasuries, and this might further reduce home sales.
We also have the Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators rising for the first time in 6 months, but it appears that this is entirely because of increasing money supply, as the Fed cranks up the presses.
The National Association of Business Economics’ (NABE) quarterly industry poll shows a far more pessimistic view of the path forward, with the worst numbers since they started the survey in 1982.
Israel’s central bank cut its benchmark rate by 75 basis points to 1%, on indications of a recession there.
In currency, the dollar fell, largely on good news on UK bank bailouts, and in energy oil was down about 6 bits, on reports of high inventories.
The 2nd Director of National Intelligence announced his resignation today, effective immediately, even though his replacement, Dennis Blair, has not yet made it through confirmation.
This is odd. Giving his history of lying about domestic surveillance and torture, my guess is that someone found something he had done, and he was told that he had to leave the building immediately.
Then again, my gut is frequently wrong, and even if it’s right, this sort of dirty laundry rarely gets aired out.
It’s the first day of the Minnesota Election trial, and the Judges just threw out Coleman’s evidence, and told him to submit originals, rather than certified copies, because their copies of ballot envelopers were discovered to have been altered.
Good way to piss of the judges.
I’ve always said that it is rife in opportunities for gaming the system and abuse.
We now can say that the system has already been gamed and abused:
China dams reveal flaws in climate-change weapon
By JOE McDONALD and CHARLES J. HANLEY – 1 day ago
XIAOXI, China (AP) — The hydroelectric dam, a low wall of concrete slicing across an old farming valley, is supposed to help a power company in distant Germany contribute to saving the climate — while putting lucrative “carbon credits” into the pockets of Chinese developers.
But in the end the new Xiaoxi dam may do nothing to lower global-warming emissions as advertised. And many of the 7,500 people displaced by the project still seethe over losing their homes and farmland.
…..
This is not a but, it’s a feature. If you want Wall Street and its worldwide siblings to run this shell game, this is what is called “value added”.
This is why a carbon tax is the way to go.
After driving Lehman Brothers into the ground, he just sold his Florida mansion to his wife for $10.
He’s burying assets with his wife so that he will be “poor” when people and regulators go after him.
I think that this would be a good time for the US Attorney to start investigating whether this is a criminal conspiracy to defraud potential litigants.
Evo Moralez got the new constitution he wanted for Bolivia:
Bullet points
Generally, it looks like a good thing, though I am always dubious of mandates of ethnically allocated slots in either government or bureaucracy.
The New York Times looks at increasing calls for nationalizing the banks, and wonders how you could find qualified people to run the banks, since pay would obviously be less:
Some of Mr. Obama’s advisers have asked who the government would get to run the banks. Many of the most experienced executives are tainted by the decisions they made during the age of excess. And how would the government attract the best talent if it demanded that they take minimal pay — a political reality in the current environment?
There are two answers to to this:
Seriously, I’ve yet to see a good argument against replacing senior management at the banks with first year liberal arts majors.
This is actually a potentially big deal for the net.
Gatehouse, which publishes community newspapers, sued the New York Times, because the Boston Globe, which it owns, was generating “Google News” style links, which show the hed and the first sentence or so.
Basically, the Times agreed not to link, but maintains its right to do so.
Complicating the issue was that the Globe tech folk went out of their way to avoid technical measures that Gatehouse put up to prevent this.
Or at least the best 6 words in one of his columns, “This is William Kristol’s last column.”
The Times did not renew his contract.
Unsurprising, as his columns, hell, his first column, generated a fairly large number of corrections for misstatements of basic fact.
He will be moving to the Washington Poat, where he will be doing a monthly column, as opposed to his weekly column at the Times.
It’s a better fit for Kristol. Any paper that publishes Charles Krauthammer doesn’t worry about whether facts stated by their columnists has a basis in reality or truth.
Consumer confidence just fell again, and hit an all time low, 37.7, the lowest number since the Conference Board started keeping records in 1967.
What with the Case-Shiller index showing a November home price drop of 18.2% year over year, and California home prices falling a staggering 42% year over year along with word of that there have been 519,895 job cuts announced since election day.
It’s all a major bummer.
We do have a report that Obama will direct his TARP funds toward consumers, as opposed to the corruption orgy under Bush and His Evil Minions™, which is good news, but it looks like Fannie Mae will need another $16 billion of that.
Meanwhile, Sweden, which handled its early 1990s banking crisis about as well as anyone, it was able to wrap up its intervention years ahead of schedule and with a profit, is looking at injecting cash into its banking system again.
Russia is looking at doing the same for its banks.
In any case, the lousy consumer confidence numbers have had the effect of driving oil down, and scaring people into fleeing to the safety of the dollar, which drove the buck up.
Kenny in this case is Bank of America’s CEO Kenneth Lewis, whose tenure is increasingly precarious following negative impacts of his ill conceived purchases of Countrywide and Merrill Lynch.
I know that we are interesting times when some of my predictions start coming true.
So, in their eagerness to torture people, it appears that Bush and His Evil Minions™ never bother to assemble files on the Guantanamo detainees, which makes an evaluation, much less a fair trial of the detainees.
As Hilzoy notes, “It takes, well, a special kind of administration to detain people for years on end without bothering to assemble case files on them. I’m just glad they’re finally gone.”(emphasis original)
Notwithstanding Bush’s insistence that the military commissions were the only way to try these folks, this makes it clear that they never wanted trials, just torture.
How bad was it? Here are the last two ‘graphs of the WaPo article:
In a court filing this month, Darrel Vandeveld, a former military prosecutor at Guantanamo who asked to be relieved of his duties, said evidence was “strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks.”
He said he once accidentally found “crucial physical evidence” that “had been tossed in a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten.”
This is not a serious attempt at competent prosecution or trial.
Sarah Palin is shopping a book, and the word is that she is looking for an 8 figure advance.
(on edit)
My apologies for this mental image.
You know, as much as I hate Thomas Friedman’s fictitious cab drivers who says what he wants, Ben Stein’s use of real people close to him in order to make a point is worse.
He uses them to depict the “real America”, much as Friedman does, only they are at least as Stein depicts them, are simply malevolent human beings, and he does not understand that this.
Case in point is his high school friend, who seems to be engaging in a form of arms length prostitution:
NOT long ago, a woman in California called me for advice. She is divorced, with two children, and has a series of interlocking financial problems.
She lives in a lovely home in a stylish inland enclave. It has an interest-only mortgage of about $2.2 million that requires a payment of $12,000 a month, very roughly. It was last appraised at $2.7 million, but who knows if it’s now worth anything remotely close to that price.
The woman, whom I’ve known since she was a teenager, has no job or other remunerative employment. She has a former husband, an entrepreneur whose business has suffered recently. He pays her $20,000 a month, of which roughly half is alimony and half child support. The alimony is scheduled to stop this summer.
She has a wealthy beau who pays her credit card bills and other incidentals, but she is thinking of telling him she is through with him. She has no savings and has refinanced her home repeatedly, always adding to indebtedness and then putting the money into a shop she owns that has never come close to earning a dime. Now she is up all night worrying about money. “Terrified,” as she put it. She wanted me to tell her what to do.
He calls her a “sweet woman,” but she is anything but this.
She is a user of other people, and a stupid one, because, while she has achieved success with her use of other people, she has not planned in any way for her future.
She is a parasite, and a particularly nasty one.
So, Mr. Stein thinks that she is the “real America”, and is thus indicative of how we all have gone wrong….When she was getting nearly $¼ of a million a year for having had sex with, and born children for, a wealthy “entrepreneur.”
It’s a toxic mix of entitlement and evil, and he thinks that she is a sweet woman.
Of course, then he brings up his son:
…… And all of this is compounded again because my handsome son, age 21, a student, has just married a lovely young woman, 20. You may have seen on television the pudgy, aging face of their sole means of support.
…
To not be able to eat at any restaurant he feels like eating at is just not on his wavelength. Of course, that’s my fault. (I have learned that everything bad that happens anywhere is my fault.) And I hope to be able to leave him well enough provided for to ease his eventual transition into some form of self-sufficiency.
(emphasis mine)
So first, he knows a, “sweet woman,” who thinks nothing of relying on alimony to maintain an inflated lifestyle, and now he admits that he has raised a son with no concept of limits in terms of money because it is, “just not on his wavelength”.
The rich feel that they are entitled because for the past 28 years, America has said that wealth is an artifact of virtue, and these is the people that Ben Stein thinks is America.
Where its Super Hornet joins the Gripen NG and the JSF.
I think that the fix is in for the JSF, bribery and coercion offsets and diplomatic considerations making any other choice highly unlikely.
The Gripen is still the cheapest alternative, but the F/A-18 E/F is not only flying, but actually in service, and so is even more of a know quantity than the Gripen.
But like I said, there is a very hard full court press going on with this aircraft.
Not surprisingly it shows an increase in spending, and far more focus on the application of the military in non warfare situations than the US military.
The Chinese see the use of their military in peacekeeping and aid situations as a necessary adjunct to their diplomacy, while the US military does its level best to stay within the bounds of “kinetic” warfare.
Certainly, China sees its military as a way to increase its diplomatic status and prestige.
Still, it’s an interesting picture of what really is the only near term meaningful military rival.