Month: December 2009

Besides By Killing His Brother, Of Course

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The Washington Independent asks How to Hold [Afghan president Hamid] Karzai Accountable?

Truth be told, I’m not sure, but we know that his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is heavily involved in the drug trade, and we know that this means that he is routinely dealing with people who fund the Taliban.

I would suggest that instead of dropping a Hellfire on him when he meets with those people, that a photograph be taken, and presented to him, with the explanation that they would have fired, but they recognized his brother, and that he might not be so lucky next time, so getting his act together on purging corruption, including his dope dealer brother, should happen sooner rather than later.

A Failing State With Nuclear Weapons

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No, I don’t mean Pakistan, I mean India, where they have just carved up the province of Andhra Pradesh.

It appears to be political pandering to a coalition partner, but it also sounds a lot like a nation that will soon be joining Pakistan in having issues with its territorial integrity:

The Indian government agreed to carve a separate state out of the southern Indian province of Andhra Pradesh, which includes the information-technology capital of Hyderabad, following days of violent protests.

The government’s unexpected decision, which could spur social unrest and separatist demands in other regions, faces legislative hurdles — and prompted 83 of Andhra Pradesh’s 295 legislators to say they would resign in protest.

Hyderabad has been hit by protests from supporters of K. Chandrashekar Rao, who heads the Telangana Rashtra Samithi political party dedicated to establishing a separate state for the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh, which includes Hyderabad.

This is not the sort of thing that a cohesive nation state does.

Hopefully, this is not the beginning of a downward trajectory for India as a nation-state.

The Hague, Bitches

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We have new revelations on the British investigation of what happened during the march to the invasion of Iraq, the sort of investigation that US politicians have specifically eschewed, has revealed that Tony Blair was informed that Saddam had no WMD before the invasion:

Tony Blair was aware of last-minute intelligence revealing that Saddam Hussein had probably dismantled his chemical and biological weaponry, a key adviser has said.

Sir John Scarlett, who was the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee in the run-up to the war, said that two reports received in March 2003, which suggested that Iraq’s weaponry had been taken to pieces, were sent directly to the former prime minister. He also said that Mr Blair was made aware of doubts over Saddam’s access to the warheads needed to deliver them.

We now have enough evidence for the ICC to start an investigation, and perhaps enough for an indictment.

Please though, make it a secret indictment, so you can apprehend Reverend Smiler when he steps off the plane in Brussels.

Barack Obama Pimps for Big Pharma

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It looks like debate on healthcare reform is foundering on White House opposition to an amendment to allow the reimportation of drugs from Canada

The White House, aided by Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), is working hard to crush an amendment being pushed by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) to allow for the reimportation of pharmaceutical drugs from Canada, Senate sources tell the Huffington Post.

As a result, the Senate health care debate has come to a standstill: Carper has placed a “hold” on Dorgan’s amendment and in response, Dorgan tells HuffPost, he’ll object to any other amendments being considered before he gets a vote on his.

Note, though that this is not a bid at bipartisanship, as Dorgan’s amendment has a Republican co-sponsor, Olympia Snowe (R-ME),and significant ‘Phant support, John McCain (R-AZ), Charles Grassley (R-IA), John Thune (R-SD) and David Vitter (R-LA).

It appears that the Obama administration is afraid that Big Pharma will oppose the bill, but I don’t recall them actually having anyone electing Big Pharma president…..As we all know, the President of the United States is Olympia Snowe.

Economics Update

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Surprise! Geithner and Bernanke:
As popular as a case of the Clap.
H/t Calculated Risk


And ore Americans than ever are on food stamps, h/t Naked Capitalism

Well, we have a bunch of good news on the consumer front, with retail sales growing by 1.3% in November, more than the 0.6% forecast, and the Reuters/University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index rose to 73.4 in early December, up from 67.4 last month, and well above the forecast of 69.0, which is all very good, since the holiday season is a huge part of retail sales, but the Discover Financial Services survey is showing that consumers are looking to slash their spending by 15%.

Yeah, I’m confused too.

I would also note that the number of people collecting food stamps hit a record, 37.2 million, which raises the question if, “food stamps are the soup lines of this Great Depression?”

We are now seeing some rumblings of inflation on the other side of the pond, with UK factory input prices rising at fastest pace in a year, 4%:

Input prices gained by 4% last month from November 2008, and by 0.4% from October.

Output prices – the prices of goods leaving UK factories – rose 2.9% on the year, the fastest pace since February.

Output prices – the prices of goods leaving UK factories – rose 2.9% on the year, the fastest pace since February.

So we are likely going to have some of the central banks out there, most likely the ECB, panicking and jacking up rates at just the wrong time.

Still, the retail sales numbers drove the dollar rises to a 2-month high, though interestingly enough, oil fell for the 8th straight day, to $69.87/bbl, which is kind of odd, increased consumer sales implies increased demand, but a rising dollar may trump that in the mind of oil speculators.

F%$# the Shareholders, They Are Worthless Punks

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I don’t think that. I own shares in a number of Vanguard®‘s funds, but it’s clear that’s what the banks, and the bankers think about their shareholders.

We know that the UK is allocating a special levy on bonus funds for financial institutions, which will shrink the size of the bonuses that bankers get. The banker’s solutions is to increase the size of the pools to maintain the same outrageous bonus levels.

The way that these bonuses are supposed to work is that you allocate a certain percentage of profits in a publicly held firm to a bonus pool, based on the needs of the firm, things like profits, the need for cash on hand, and things like dividends for the shareholders, who are, after the people who own the f%$#ing company.

Well, that’s not how the bankers think, so when that pool gets taxed, you just take it out of the hides of the shareholders, and financial reserves, etc.

This is way beyond mismanagement. This is theft, just like what Conrad Black went to jail for, and it should be treated as such:

Bonuses are supposed to be determined by the amount of money available after you settle accounts for the year. If you decide it by starting from how much you want to pay for yourself, you are doing what Conrad Black did, and he’s now in prison:”

Several of the big US banks, and some UK banks, conceded in private that they were nervous of cutting the bonuses of City staff, partly for fear of causing internal friction, and partly to avoid having top staff picked off by bolder rivals or hedge funds

Disgraceful. Particularly when these guys were the ones who f%$#ed up our system in the first place.

Banking is not a meritocracy, not that it was ever much of one, it’s a kakistocracy.

House Votes to Tighten Regulation of Financial System – NYTimes.com

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House Votes to Tighten Regulation of Financial System – NYTimes.com thankfully, the CFPA survives, but they voted down cramdown on mortgages in bankruptcy, and voted for the contemptible Melissa Bean’s contemptible preemption language, which allows the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, to strike down state consumer protections.

USA Today, of all people was right hen it said that, “The Comptroller of the Currency, for example, behaved much like a banking lobby embedded in the Treasury Department,” so this is simply repulsive.

Bullet points:

  • The Creates the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) is created.
  • A Financial Stability Council is created.
  • Dissolution Authority, though the way that it is structured, it may be considered a “perpetual TARP”.
  • Shareholders get a non-binding “say on pay”, which means nothing.
  • Increases the SEC’s powers.
  • Regulation of Derivatives, but it’s full of loopholes.
  • Mortgage Reform.
  • Reform of Credit Rating Agencies:a biggie if the reforms mean anything, but they seem to be weak tea.
  • Registration of hedge funds, though it seems weak.
  • Creates an Office of Insurance, which is a big thing, since insurers are likely the to be in the meltdown shortly.

In the least surprising news of the day, it appears that no Republican voted for the bill.

A long list of the amendments is here.

It’s better than nothing, but not by much, and you know that the bad parts will be kept, and the good parts thrown overboard, in conference committee.

Another Jewel from Taibbi

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I posted the video of him going over the basics of this article last week, and this week, Matt Taibbi’s full article in Rolling Stone, Obama’s Big Sellout, goes into more detail.

Taibbi is more charitable than I am, because he wonders, “Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we’ve been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?”

Cynic that I am, I don’t think that he’s a wet behind the ears politico hoodwinked by Wall Street: Every action that he has taken has been about what makes things easier for Barack Obama, whether it be the banks, or torture, or gay rights, or the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

It’s no surprise then that he goes for the bankers over the ordinary people: The bankers could bankroll someone like Sarah Palin, and the ordinary people have no where else to go.

Taibbi’s article is a blistering indictment of what Barack Obama, and to a lesser extent Barney Frank have been doing, or more accurately not doing, about wall street.

To get a sense of the article, you need only read this paragraph:

The point is that an economic team made up exclusively of callous millionaire-assholes has absolutely zero interest in reforming the gamed system that made them rich in the first place. “You can’t expect these people to do anything other than protect Wall Street,” says Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Republican from Florida. That thinking was clear from Obama’s first address to Congress, when he stressed the importance of getting Americans to borrow like crazy again. “Credit is the lifeblood of the economy,” he declared, pledging “the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money.” A president elected on a platform of change was announcing, in so many words, that he planned to change nothing fundamental when it came to the economy. Rather than doing what FDR had done during the Great Depression and institute stringent new rules to curb financial abuses, Obama planned to institutionalize the policy, firmly established during the Bush years, of keeping a few megafirms rich at the expense of everyone else.

Though I would say that I enjoyed this slam of “Eddie Haskell” too:

That probably won’t happen anytime soon. But at a minimum, Obama should start on the road back to sanity by making a long-overdue move: firing Geithner. Not only are the mop-headed weenie of a Treasury secretary’s fingerprints on virtually all the gross giveaways in the new reform legislation, he’s a living symbol of the Rubinite gangrene crawling up the leg of this administration. Putting Geithner against the wall and replacing him with an actual human being not recently employed by a Wall Street megabank would do a lot to prove that Obama was listening this past Election Day. And while there are some who think Geithner is about to go — “he almost has to,” says one Democratic strategist — at the moment, the president is still letting Wall Street do his talking.

If you think that eleventy dimensional chess is going on here, you have the political acumen of Little Orphan Annie®.

Now go read the article.

The Fairy Dust Works*

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Finally in the air

The Airbus A400M has made its maiden flight maiden flight at 10L15 am (GMT +1) today in Seville, Spain.

It appears that they never retracted the gear (not surprising) , and I have no details of the flight plant, but here is some video and picture pr0n.

The most detailed report of the flight that I could find says that the flight lasted for 3h 45m, and that the aircraft reached 800 ft and a speed of 230 kts, below the original goal of 300 kt, but sufficient speed to imply that the gear was raised for some portion of the flight.

*See here for reference.

If Southerners Do Not Want To Be Cast As Ignorant Bigots

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Then when people try to ban atheists from sitting on the city council, the response should be a question along the lines of, “Are you on drugs?”:

North Carolina’s constitution is clear: politicians who deny the existence of God are barred from holding office.

Opponents of Cecil Bothwell are seizing on that law to argue he should not be seated as a City Council member today, even though federal courts have ruled religious tests for public office are unlawful under the U.S. Constitution.

Voters elected the writer and builder to the council last month.

“I’m not saying that Cecil Bothwell is not a good man, but if he’s an atheist, he’s not eligible to serve in public office, according to the state constitution,” said H.K. Edgerton, a former Asheville NAACP president.

It should be noted that H.K Edgerton flipped out some time ago, and can now can be found at Civil War reenactments wearing a Confederate uniform and waving a Confederate flag.

There is a point where you treat “Gums, the village idiot”* as “Gums, the village idiot,” or, by taking him seriously, you become a village of idiots.

*Virtual Kewpie doll for anyone who gets the reference.

Why is the Best Person on Obama’s Economic Team is a Bush Appointee

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I am referring, of course to Sheila Bair, who is now trying to use the FDIC’s leverage over banks that have loan loss sharing agreements with the agency to offer principal reductions on homes:

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair may ask lenders to cut the principal on as much as $45 billion in mortgages acquired from seized banks, expanding her bid to aid homeowners as unemployment rises.

The FDIC, which has taken over 124 failed banks this year, may seek to have lenders that sign loss-sharing agreements when acquiring the assets do more than cut interest rates or defer the loan’s principal, Bair said today in an interview at Bloomberg’s Washington office.

“We’re looking now at whether we should provide some further loss sharing for principal write downs,” Bair said. “Now you’re in a situation where even the good mortgages are going bad because people are losing their jobs. So you have other factors now driving mortgage distress.”

Good for her, though it reflects very poorly on Obama that his people are being shown to be in the pockets of the finance industry.

Thank You Blue Dogs

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Well, it looks like everyone’s corporate whores, Melissa Bean and Walt Minnick getting deals that are likely to scuttle any and all state consumer protection of financial companies and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, respectively.

What makes it worse is that Bean’s primary challenger has been bounced from the ballot, so the choice of the voters in IL-8 is the Bean, the Green, or the Crazy Mean.* (Republican)

*No, I’m not saying how long it took me to make up that bit of doggerel.

The European Human Rights Court to Review Irish Abortion Ban

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It looks like the Irish ban on abortion will have to defend itself before 17 justices at the European HCR:

Ireland’s almost complete ban on abortion was challenged before 17 European judges yesterday as a violation of fundamental human rights.

Three women, named only as A, B and C, brought a landmark case before the European Human Rights court in Strasbourg, the outcome of which could force Ireland to weaken its strict laws against abortion for the first time in 17 years.

The three plaintiffs – two Irish women and a Lithuanian – say that their own rights to health and life were threatened by pregnancies which they could not terminate legally in Ireland the only EU state other than Malta, with a near outright ban on the procedure. Like an estimated 7,000 Irish women a year, the three women travelled to the UK to obtain legal abortions in Britain.

The case is, in theory, not a frontal assault on a ban which has been enshrined in Irish law for more than a hundred years and reinforced in the Irish constitution since 1983. It is an attempt to clarify and widen the exception, approved in 1992, which permits a pregnancy to be terminated when a woman’s life is threatened. Nonetheless, the Irish government fears, and pro-abortion campaigners hope, that a court ruling in the women’s favour could lead to a de facto unravelling of Irish abortion law.

The Irish law is particularly egregious, since, “If an abortion was later judged to be unnecessary, an Irish doctor could be struck off [have his license pulled] or imprisoned for life. As a result, she said, no statistics existed to say whether any ‘legal’ abortions had ever taken place in Ireland.”

One hopes that the Europeans look at the United States, and realize that pandering the Neanderthals only makes them ask for more.

The Kaplan Test Prep Company,* Yet Again

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So, the Washington Post put Sarah Palin on their their OP/ED pages yesterday, for what seems like the gazillionth time, but is most likely 2nd or 3rd time, and once again they show why all editorial pages, most particularly that of the Washington Post, really need to fact check their OP/Ed Pages. (No link, they don’t deserve it)

Of course, if they started fact checking OP/EDs, then Krauthammer and George Will would have nothing left after the editors got through with them.

Tim Lambert notes that the article is full of lies which can be verified via 10 minutes on “The Google”, while Media Matters goes a bit further in their research and notes that the lies are contradicted in articles published by……… wait for it ……… the Washington Post.

In fact, the links in Palins article actually contradict what she is writing.

While I like Matthew Yglesias’s snark that the editorial page editor of The Washington Post, Fred Hiatt, “wants the Washington Post to go out of business, I think that Atrios has what is the final word on this:

I can never quite get a handle on just what the Washington Post people – its publishers, Fred Hiatt, etc… – think that it’s for? Is it about providing a product people want to buy/advertisers want to advertise in? It is about informing readers, giving them factual information and analysis they want? Are these missions in conflict or do they coincide?

And why does it take bloggers to point out how absurd they are? Where are all the journalists who spend their days bitching about bloggers? Don’t they care that the product they’re defending is basically sh@#?”

(@# mine)

I would be remiss in not pointing the reader to Marc Ambinder’s point by point takedown.

*The Washington Post owns, and generates the vast bulk of its revenue, by owning and operating Kaplan, Inc., a company best known for selling courses to help teenagers game the standardized test process.

Economics Update

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There is no wealth creation for ordinary folk, just bubble creation, h/t Calculated Risk


Crude prices, h/t OilEnergy

So, today is “Jobless Thursday, and initial unemployment claims spiked unexpectedly to 474,000.

Truth be told, it’s not a surprise. Non-farm payrolls need to rise at about 300,000 a month, so the “really good” NFP numbers in November, which had a -11,000 number indicates that things still really suck.

We have seen a drop in the U.S. trade deficit in November, which has been driven by export growth, though falling oil prices (see lower pic), and the fact that US consumers are still not in the mood to buy anything, including imports.

We have some good news on household net worth which grew by $2.7 trillion in the 3rd quarter, largely on the recent stock market bubble rally.

In real estate, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose this week, and
foreclosures fell in November, though, as the article notes, this may be a a pause more than anything else:

“They’re artificially low because of underlying causes,” said Rick Sharga, vice president of RealtyTrac.

He cites three reasons why foreclosures have dropped in certain states: The holiday season, when foreclosures typically slow down; the government’s mortgage modification program, which has created a slowdown in delinquent loans; and mandatory mediation in more states between homeowners and lenders before going into foreclosure.

In the world of central banks, the Bank of England left its benchmark rate unchanged at ½%, while maintaining its asset purchase (printing money) program.

Something interesting occurring in the world of US Treasurys though, the yield curve is the steepest since 1980.

The nickel tour is that when you buy a 2-year bond, you get less interest than if you buy a 30-year bond, because the risks of a 30-year bond are higher, not in terms of default, but because your money is locked up, and interest rates can go up, or you can need the money in a hurry, etc.

The difference is now 373 basis points (3.73%), with average over the past 5 years being 132 basis points.

It may be a market burp, or it may be inflationary concerns.

In currency, the dollar was essentially unchanged, while in energy, oil fell for the 7th day in a row on economic concerns.

Republican Family Values

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Former Missouri House Speaker Rod Jetton*, a Republican who fought to keep a law criminalizing gay sex in that state, has been charged with felony assault for beating and choking his girlfriend during a sexual encounter.

His defense, it appears is that, “she did not use the agreed on ‘safe word’ to end the activities”, but she is accusing him of having drugged her.

You can find excerpts of the police report here.

*Sounds like a pr0n star name.