Month: August 2009

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!?!?!?!? Journalism on CNN!?!?!?!?

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CNN Anchor Rick Sanchez interviews medical tea-bagger* in chief Rick Scott, currently director of Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, and went Mr. Sanchez actually did his homework:

  • He notes that Scott was fired as CEO of Columbia HCA for the largest case of Medicare fraud uncovered ever , with fines and restitution in excess of $1.7 billion.
  • He called Scott a “poster child for everything that is wrong with the greed that has hurt our healthcare system”.
  • Calls out Scott on his argument that that “everyone was doing it,” which argues for a public option.
  • Did his homework: When Scott claimed that the fines paid were after his tenure at Columbia HCA, Sanchez notes that the fines were for when Scott ran the firm.
  • Noted his history of shutting down hospitals in the area.

When TV media folks do their homework this way, they are either Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, or Journalists.

Somehow, it appears that CNN allowed a journalist to infiltrate their network. My congratulations to Rick Sanchez.

H/T Talking Points Memo.

*I mean that in the political sense, not the sexual act sense, and no offense toward people who engage in the sex act is intended.

This is a Sloppy Blowjob

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It appears that the mortgage industry has rolled out an industry “self regulation” group to forestall meaningful regulation by the government, and the New York Times presents it as the biggest move towards honesty since the birth of Jesus:

The Fair Mortgage Collaborative, a consortium of lenders, brokers and mortgage technology providers, made its debut in June with financial backing from the Ford Foundation, among other groups. Its purpose, the organizers say, is to make only those loans in a borrower’s best interest and to identify and certify the lenders that adhere to certain strict standards.

Because self regulation has worked so f%$#ing well in the past.

Bob Tedeschi, there is some semen on the corner of your mouth.

You Do Not Have Health Insurance

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So says James Kwak, and he is completely correct:

…That’s not insurance; that’s employer-subsidized health care for the duration of your employment.

…

In addition, there is the problem that even if you are nominally covered when you do get sick, your insurer could rescind your policy, or you may find out, as Karen Tumulty’s brother did, that your insurance doesn’t cover the treatment you need.

Just read the whole thing.

Foreclosures Have Not Yet Crested

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It’s still getting worse, and the commercial real estate crash is still on the way.

You will notice dips in foreclosures (purple) and REOS (yellow), but delenquencies have continued to increase unabated:

90 day delinquency rate: “everything 3 months late or more. Likely includes most all Foreclosures in Process. The categories are not separate.”

Foreclosure Rate is actual foreclosures in process: “Everything with NOD [Notice of Default] and Trustee’s Sale filing.”

REO Rate: “Everything foreclosed but still held by bank or servicer. This category is separate from other two.”

What we are seeing here is not a reduction in foreclosures, but delays in foreclosures, that are in response to regulatory changes at the federal and state level.

People still can’t pay their mortgages, and with half of all mortgage holders expected to be “under water” by 2011, we will be seeing more “walk-aways” and “jingle-mail”

The most effective solution is to make “Cramdown” legal again, as it was during the first 210 years so of the republic, but it won’t happen with the current crew in Washington, at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Cowards …. Pantywaists …. Yellow Belies ….

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I just can’t seem to come up with a word for this.

You see, the Democratic National committee (DNC) is doing its level best to make sure that everyone knows that the rent-a-riots at town hall meetings are AstroTurf that have been bought and paid for by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and His Evil Minions™.

What’s more, the DNC actually put out an ad about it (below), in which they suggest that people call the RNC to tell them to stop, but the RNC added a voice mail option to include this, which routes the calls to the DNC switchboard.

These are dangerous times, and the Republicans can’t deal with snippy callers….How can we expect them to keep us safe from Osama bin Laden?

Seriously, this is so chicken sh&% that it leaves me at a loss for words.

A Little Bit of Local Corruption

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Baltimore City Mayor Sheila Dixon is going on trial November 9 for theft and perjury.

I will have to say that this case, which is about the disposition of Best Buy gift cards, and failure to disclose gifts, is really kind of embarrassing.

In New Jersey, you have wide spread corruption involving envelopes of cash and the sale of human organs, and the best that Baltimore can manage is …… purloined gift cards????

I mean really, this is kind of lame…..I understand that corruption is evil, and needs to be weeded out, but this is just lame.

Also, I understand the whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing, but she has been repeatedly reprimanded by the ethics commission repeatedly, over a period of years for doing things like employing relatives, so I am disinclined to believe defense counsel.

Economics Update

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Yes, it does appear as if things may be bottoming in this pic, H/t Calculated Risk

So, initial unemployment claims fell by 38,000 to 550,000 (seasonally adjusted), which is good, but continuing claims* rose by 69K to 6.31 million, and this number does not include folks who have exhausted benefits, and those who are getting extended benefits, and any number much above 400K is bad news anyway, so this week is just less bad than expected.

We’ve also now had a 5th straight month of pending home sales increases, which seems like good news, though the foreclosure rate seems to still be on the “getting worse” side of the trend, (more in another post) and this includes the fact that somewhere between 30% and 50% of current home sales are in some manner distressed sales.

It’s likely that the continued rise in bankruptcy filings (click on pic for bigger picture), has a lot to do with this.

BTW, this is one of the problem that I have with the Obama/Geithner/Summers “stimulus”: it has very little to do with ordinary people in pain, and a lot to do with keeping the banks healthy.

The fake economy is a higher priority than the real economy.

Which is why the Institute for Supply Management’s Non-Manufacturing Index and the Manufacturing Index both fell again in July, while in the UK, where the stimulus was, you know, stimulus, and not a half baked plan which included inefficient tax cuts, and genuflecting to conservatives in the name of “bipartisanship”, manufacturing rose for the first time in 16 Months.

We do have some good news in real estate, with June pending homes sales increased for the fifth straight month, though I’m still of the opinion that this is largely vulture investors looking for cheap bargains.

Additionally, mortgage rates fell, though one cannot be too certain about how long that will last, as the yields on the mortgage backed bonds hit a 2-month high.

In any case, the good initial claims numbers strengthened the US dollar, which in turn pushed oil down from yesterday’s 6 week high.

*Full disclosure, this includes me…..Any engineering openings in the greater Baltimore area would be very much appreciated.

Senate Votes to Confirm Sotomayor

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The vote was 68-31 in the Senate.

About the only real surprise here is that Republicans have structured this entire thing in a way seemingly designed to piss off the Hispanic Americans, all for a Justice who really won’t matter:

  • She will not be a big change from Souter.
  • She won’t serve that long, she is 55, and has a condition, Diabetes, that statistically means that her lifespan will be on the order of 10 years less than that of a similar person.
  • The Dems had the 60 votes to close off debate pretty much from the start.

Not clear why they decided to be assholes about this…..Maybe Rush really does own the ‘Phants.

A Petition I Approve Of

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It’s to name the next United States Navy nuclear powered aircraft carrier the USS ENTERPRISE.

Actually, I’m not too set on the name….If they called it the Lexington, Saratoga, Enterprise, Ranger, Hornet, Midway, Coral Sea, or something with some history, but the idea that is being push by whack job Republicans, that it be named after Barry Goldwater, is just plain stupid.

Goldwater served in the USAF, and quite honestly, his claim to fame is having been crushed in a presidential election.

If you are going to name carriers after one term (GHW Bush) and ½ term unelected (Gerald Ford) presidents, you should name this one after LBJ or WJC, but I do not think that we should name warships after anyone.

Of Flop Sweats and Vista

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Well, I’ve been off for a few days. I got a cheap HP tower at a computer show, and I’ve been making it work.

OK, so I got myself a brand new HP/COMPAQ DC7900 tower.

Intel® Core2® Duo® CPU E6550 at 2.33 Ghz, 4 g RAM, one 80 & one 500 G hd, and an integral video on the mb.

On the physical level everything went together with an ease unimaginable a few years ago, without the level of tools, PITA and knuckle scraping that would have been required.

I added the 200 G HD and modem from the old machine, and added a floppy drive, and copied the files off the old 5 G HD.

This required an IDE to SATA adaptor for the HD, a floppy cable (witg a twist), and power adaptors from SATA to IDE and floppy, found local at CyberGuys.biz.

I can do this, but I really hate it. As soon as I crack the case, I start to sweat profusely….and stink.

The machine has 3 (whisper quiet) fans (!), one on the power supply, one exhaust for the case, and an inlet fan blowing over the plumbing (!) of the heat sink.

It appears very solidly built.

The big winner in this process is Firefox Portable. No backup, no reinstall, just copy over the directory, like in the good old DOS.

It’s designed to run off a memory stick, which I don’t generally do, because there is a performance hit doing that.

Running it on a hard drive, there is no performance hit once running, though it loads about 5 second slower.

Honorable mention here goes to Feedreader 3, which can be setup to do the same thing, but the folks at PortableApps.com get the gold medal because they have made this work for a number of other people’s software, including OpenOffice.

The big loser, the 10 yr old HP 6200C scanner. It died over the past few months, confirmed through 2 computers, operating systems, and USB cables, in all combinations, and nothing recognized it.

As to Vista, the machine is blisteringly fast compared to my older machine, so I can’t compare performance, though it seems stable on new and powerful equipment.

Vista dislikes:

  • Downgrading to XP appears to be a labor of Hercules.
  • Too much nannying….I have to tell the computer that I REALLY want to do this a lot.
  • Can’t figure out how to turn off wallpaper, so I used a solid color to approximate it.
  • Had to JFGI* to figure out how a DOS path is set up (setx). I miss autoexec.bat.
  • Still can’t figure out how to share the data drive on the network..
  • It puts up a security warning for F-Prot anti-virus, because it does not like how it talks to the OS. It still works, but it needs to change how it reports that it is running to the OS

In any case, this is the first thing that I’ve posted in about 4 days as a result.

So over the past 4 days, volume was down, but the quality of the writing probably increased.

*Just F%$#ing Google It.