Month: July 2009

The Entire Officer James Crowley/Henry Gates Thing

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The basic point:

  • The police report shows that Officer Crowley knew that Henry Gates was in his own house, and there legally.
  • The police officer arrested him for being irate about his treatment.

Officer Crowley abused his position and should be fired, but he won’t be.

A police officer is a peace officer, and in situations like that their job is to defuse the situation, not arrest someone for being “mean” to them.

Whether or not Crowley refused to give his name and badge number, which is a crime in Massachusetts, and whether or not race was involved, the officer should simply have left once it was determined that Dr. Gates was in his own house.

This man should not be a police officer any more.

Jesus Was Best Man at a Gay Wedding

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Seriously, this is a part of early Christian mythology:

A Kiev art museum contains a curious icon from St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai in Israel. It shows two robed Christian saints. Between them is a traditional Roman ‘pronubus’ (a best man), overseeing a wedding. The pronubus is Christ. The married couple are both men.

Is the icon suggesting that a gay “wedding” is being sanctified by Christ himself? The idea seems shocking. But the full answer comes from other early Christian sources about the two men featured in the icon, St. Sergius and St. Bacchus, two Roman soldiers who were Christian martyrs. These two officers in the Roman army incurred the anger of Emperor Maximian when they were exposed as ‘secret Christians’ by refusing to enter a pagan temple. Both were sent to Syria circa 303 CE where Bacchus is thought to have died while being flogged. Sergius survived torture but was later beheaded. Legend says that Bacchus appeared to the dying Sergius as an angel, telling him to be brave because they would soon be reunited in heaven.

….

Prof. John Boswell, the late Chairman of Yale University’s history department, discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient Christian church liturgical documents, there were also ceremonies called the “Office of Same-Sex Union” (10th and 11th century), and the “Order for Uniting Two Men” (11th and 12th century).

So much for “traditional” marriage.

What the Christofascist jihad against gay marriage is really about is that some (far too many) people need to use religion to excuse their hate, and that gays, and gay marriage, are simply the latest target for their “5 minutes of hate.”

It’s a Half Step

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Barack Obama is now proposing a tax on “risky” financial transactions.

The problem here is two fold:

  • Many of the risky financial transactions were there to skirt regulations, and this just creates another incentive for people to do this again.
  • Many of the problems with our markets come from people who attempt to generate minuscule profits across thousands, or millions, of trades, Goldman Sachs front-running the entire US stock market comes to mind.

The solution to fixing this is to make rapid-fire low margin speculation unprofitable, and the way to do this is to to tax all financial transactions at something like ¼-½%.

For the investor, this is an infinitesimal cost of doing business, but it puts the rampant speculator out of business.

It eliminates regulatory arbitrage, and could go a long way toward paying for health care reform.

Why Friends Do Not Let Friends Link to the Associated Press

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So, the AP continues on its jihad against fair use of its work.

They are looking at including “beacons,” which will track just who reads which article, in their work.

When they appeared on Facebook, there was a revolt over this.

I would also note that it appears that their target appears to be Google News, “”The problem we have now is that our stories are getting scraped and reused in large quantities by aggregators who haven’t paid any license fees,” according to Jane Seagrave, Senior VP for global product development at the AP.

You know, if they get what they want, Google news, and other news search pages, will drop them, and they will vanish from the public consciousness with barely a ripple, so go ahead, commit Seppuku.

The problem here is two fold, their clients, the newspapers, are getting their asses kicked by Craigslist and its ilk, and 2nd, major news sources, including the AP, have decided that having the one side tell the truth, and having the other side lie, in an article is balanced journalism.

It’s not, it’s stenography.

This sort of sh&% is why whenever I come across an AP story, I look for an alternate source, using those “aggregators” that they hate so much.

Economics Update, One Day Late

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Normally, I don’t comment on stock market swings, but the Dow closing above 9000 for the first time since January allows me to invoke this Dragonball Z meme, sorry.*

Yes, I know that this should have been done yesterday, but once I got all the links together, we had heavy thunder storms, and so I shut down for the evening.

In any case, yesterday was unemployment claims Thursday, and new claims are up by 30K to 554K, but note that these numbers are all seasonally adjusted, which means that they really are not particularly valid, since the July shutdowns of GM and Chrysler happened in the spring of this year, so for this week, and to a lesser degree next week, we are flying blind on these statistics.

That being said, I think that the numbers on continuing claims are still valid, or at least more valid, and those numbers fell 88K to 6.225 million.

In any case, 550,000 weekly new unemployment claims, or for that matter anything over 400,000 new claims, is a grim picture, and so we are still well within the “grimness event horizon.”

I would also note that downward pressure on the continuing claims numbers is coming from people who are exhausting their unemployment benefits, and as Peter Boockvar at The Big Picture notes, the number of people on emergency unemployment benefits, which cut in after 26 weeks, are way up, but they are not counted in the continuing claims numbers.

So, I would not put a whole bunch of credence in the normally reported unemployment numbers until probably the August 7 numbers.

In terms of more general economic news, we have credit card charge offs rising again in June, hotel revenues down and vacancies up, and on a conference call, the CEO of UPS noted that he is not seeing any signs of recovery in his shipping business.

On the plus side, Canadian consumer confidence rose in July, and there was a surprise jump in U.K. retail sales, largely on increased purchases of clothing, which means that the Brits are poor, but not poorly dressed.

In real estate, existing home sales rose in June, but it should be noted that 1/3 of these are distressed sales, either foreclosures or short sales, and it should also be noted that prices are still falling off a cliff, down 15.4% year over year.

Mortgage rates are marginally lower, probably in reaction to Bernanke’s testimony before the Congress.

In the area of news that sounds important, but that I cannot for the life of me suss out what it means, it appears that Swiss banks are running out of vault space for gold bullion.

Finally, oil rose and the dollar fell yesterday.

*OK, I’m really not sorry, not one little bit.

So, Who is Representative Heath Shuler (D-NC) F%$#ing?

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Because it appears that he lives at the C Street complex too.

Considering the fact that it increasingly appears that the primary purpose of this residence is to allow philandering Congressman to collude to conceal the fact, it’s become a much less popular place to lose.

At the very least he’s refusing to explicitly deny that this is where he lives, and if he weren’t living there, he’d be categorically denying.

You know it was much easier answering the question, “W is Heath Shuler f%$#ing?,” when he was an overpriced underperforming rookie for the Washington Redskins.

When that was going on, we knew who was being f%#$ed: the fans, who at the end of the day were the ones who supplied the money to pay his salary.

Yeah, I’m still a bit bitter about it.

Largest Arbitration Firm in Nation Shut Down

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Three cheers to Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson (pictured) who just put the criminally corrupt National Arbitration Forum (NAF) out of business.

As of the end of this week, they will no longer be accepting any cases on consumer disputes under a consent decree.

The NAF, the favorite venue for credit card and cell phone company kangaroo courts, argues that they did not have the resources to defend themselves in this case, but the reality is that they do not have the facts to defend themselves in this case:

….In one case, NAF ordered a woman to pay the credit card company MBNA almost $8000 because she had the same name as another woman who owed MBNA money. Conversely, when a Harvard Law Professor named Elizabeth Bartholet, who used to work part-time as an NAF arbitrator, handed down a single decision against a credit card company she was immediately stripped of her caseload by NAF at the request of the credit card industry.

….

Unfortunately, NAF was vulnerable to this kind of attack because the evidence against it was so overwhelming–not every forced arbitration company has a Harvard Law professor prepared to testify about how they were strongarmed into shafting consumers–so it remains to be seen whether another, equally offensive company will emerge to fill the void (a bill, currently pending in Congress, would end the practice of forced arbitration in consumer and employment contracts altogether). Even so, the near-total demise of NAF is one of the most important pro-consumer developments in decades; for the first time in years, credit card companies may actually have to follow the law.

When a member of the Harvard Law faculty gets kicked for ruling for the consumer once, it will be hard impossible to get a jury not to throw your sorry asses in jail.

Pam Martens of Counter Punch properly calls the mandatory arbitration system Judicial Apartheid, and she also notes that the NAF was quite literally owned by the bill collection agencies like Mann Bracken, Wolpoff & Abramson, and Eskanos & Adler, and testimony that, “Management meetings in which personnel were instructed to call arbitrators and tell them, prior to the release of the decision to the parties to the arbitration, to change decisions they had issued that found against the Famous Parties [credit card companies].”

There is a bill in Congress to put an end to this, but I am not inclined to believe that it will see the light of day, and in any case, the people behind this need to go to jail, not just be put out of business.

Previous posts are here.

Imprison Ben Bernanke for Treason

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I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

Seriously, Ben Bernanke is saying that there is no need for a Consumer Financial Product Agency, because the Federal Reserve can handle this job.

He is referring to the same Federal Reserve that was run by Alan Greenspan for over 20 years and was an enthusiastic cheerleader of the toxic financial products.

The same secretive and opaque agency that revels in its lack of response to the public’s perceived needs.

The same one that was run by a man, who said, “Wasn’t a need for a law against fraud because if a floor broker was committing fraud, the customer would figure it out and stop doing business with him,” for over 20 years.

That Federal Reserve? The one whose New York bank, which is charged with regulating Wall Street, leaves seats on its banks allocated to consumer advocates empty?

You are suggesting that an organization that aided the elevation Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan, a man who basically got his PhD from the back of a cereal box, to a position the preeminent economic guru of the United States of America be allowed to be in charge of protecting consumers?

I’s just time to cue Captain Renault. (Top Pic)

What’s more the, as Elizabeth Warren, the woman who chairs the oversight committee being stonewalled by the US Department of the Treasury on TARP oversight notes, the arguments against a dedicated consumer protection agency are 3 parts outright lies, and 4 parts intentional stupidity.

Put the Federal Reserve in charge of consumer protection? Goldman F$#@ing Sachs would do a more honest and competent job of that.

Specter Loses Lead to Toomey In General Election Matchup

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The latest Quinnipiac poll has them in a dead heat, Specter 45%, Toomey 44%, while a Sestak/Toomey matchup has Toomey leading 39% to 35%.

The obvious implication here, beside the fact that a lot of people do not know who eityher Sestak or Toomey are, is that there are a lot of people who are voting for Specter, and not for Toomey, and that despite the strong support of the Democratic establishment, he is not a strong candidate in the general.

Specter is also generally a weasel, but that is another story.

Wow Very White of Them

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It appears that after the obscene profits, generated by risk taking that is being bankrolled by an implicit federal guarantee, Goldman Sachs has deigned to accept the US Treasury’s price offer on the sale of their stock warrants. (See also here and here)

I think that someone there realized that when people were referring to them as, “That great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,*” that it was time to throw a few crusts to the peasants government of the United States of America.

As a result of their unprecedented generosity, the chattering classes are once again singing their praises.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

Economics Update

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Well, it was a tough day for bonds, with prices falling, and yields rising, on US Treasuries, as investors look more to the downside of the economy.

Interestingly enough, we had a lot of mixed signals from real estate, with the
Federal Housing Finance Agency saying that single family home prices rose 0.9% in May, though they are down 5.6% year over year, the U.S. architecture billings index down again in June, which indicates a continued fall in construction, mortgage applications rose last week, though they remain very low, and Standard & Poor’s losses on subprime mortgage backed securities was revised higher.

In the world of real people, the PBGC took over struggling auto parts maker Delphi’s pension obligations, which should come as a surprise to no one.

We do seem to be seeing signs of “green shoots” in other countries though, with the
South Korean GDP growing at the fastest rate in 6 years in the last quarter, and the Central Bank of Brazil cutting its benchmark rate by the smallest amount since beginning of the year, indicating that they think that their recession is largely over.

In the old standbys of energy and currency, oil ended above $65/bbl on reports of tight inventories, and the dollar hit a 7 week low on increased optimism.

Jeepers????

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I was just on the phone with a recruiter for an agency, a very nice guy, and in the course of our phone conversation, I related my background:

  • Medical Test Equipment
  • Nuclear Power
  • Military Vehicles
  • Automotive
  • Locomotive
  • Missiles and space
  • Food processing equipment
  • Sheet metal
  • Shop floor interface
  • Electronics packaging
  • CAD
  • FEA

In response, he said, “Jeepers.”

He said it, and he said it without any intent of irony.

Woah. I guess it must be a Midwest thing.

This is an Unalloyed Good Thing

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The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee has voted to require airlines to allow passengers to deplane if the flights are held on the tarmac for more than 3 hours.

The measure is attached to a $34.6 billion FAA authorization bill.

The airlines are complaining that they do not want to lose the flexibility, but these long stays are most often about not having to put up passengers in hotels or paying for meals.

F$#@ the airlines.

A Republican Proposes a “Bristol Palin” Tax

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That name may not be entirely fair, since it the tax would also apply disproportionately to Republican lawmakers, particularly those living on the now infamous “C Street” Christo-Fascist funded residences.

I’m of mixed emotions here. A tax on unprotected sex is a really stupid idea, but the idea of making Bristol Palin, and the residents of “C Street” pay an “Ass Tax”, amuses me no end.

And here we thought paying for sex was a no-no, especially for scandal-wary Members of Congress. But Rep. Steve Buyer thinks people who engage in the act (specifically, the kind that takes place sans protection) should have to pony up.

The Indiana Republican floated his unlikely cash-for-sex proposal Thursday during the markup of the health care bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee. Under the plan Buyer posited, those who engage in risky behavior, like smoking, not exercising and (ding, ding!) having unprotected sex, should have to pay a premium for their health care. After all, the reasoning goes, those people are more likely to incur higher health care costs than cigarette-eschewing, condom-wearing gym bunnies.

The distinguished gentleman from Indiana had to have been a College Republican, he was born in 1958, so he’s of roughly the right age, and this is a classic sort of juvenile CR bullsh%$.

Are there any grown-up Republicans left in Congress?

Student-Loan Overhaul Passes House Education and Labor Committee

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Basically, the proposal becomes law, it will end subsidies to private student loan providers, saving money for students and taxpayers to the tune of $87 billion over 10 years.

The student loan providers are even less deserving than Goldman Sachs, so here is hoping that this becomes law, though getting it through the Senate may be difficult, as the 3rd largest student loan provider is Nelnet, based in Lincoln, Nebraska, home of Senator Ben Nelson, who will almost certainly support a filibuster against the measure.

CFTC Showing Some Balls

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The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is considering eliminating waivers on position limits in wheat trading:

The [Senate] subcommittee [on Investigations] released a study in June that showed wheat prices were inflated by index investors last year. It called for the elimination of waivers that allow funds to hold more than 6,500 Chicago Board of Trade contracts at any one time, which would lower the influence of non-agricultural buyers and curb speculation. [CTFC Chairman] Gensler said earlier this month the CFTC, which currently grants waivers for agricultural products, also is considering limits on holdings by oil and gas speculators.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen stuff like this, and I can’t quite remember the word for it….Oh….Yes….It’s called regulation.