Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) have introduced legislation to curb the widely abused National Security Letters (NSL) and significantly increases the standards, and the opportunity for judicial review.
It still allows FBI field supervisors to issue them, but it is still an improvement.
The election court has ruled against the Coleman campaign’s request that 1,400 absentee ballots be reviewed, instead allowing only 400 to be reviewed, many of which were stricken by the Coleman team.
With a 225 point vote gap, this comes very close to being “game over” at least in the state courts.
I think that one of the interesting subtexts here is that the ‘Phants have donated very large sums of money just to tie this up, and that Cornyn is suggesting that they will continue to refuse to seat Franken, which does not bode well for Republicans in Minnesota.
But, great googly moogly, make it stop!
But Dickipedia is prize:
Dickipedia is a monolingual (English), Web-based, free content encyclopedia project with information about people who are dicks. The word “dickipedia” is a portmanteau of the word “encyclopedia” and the word “dick.” Dickipedia does not contain information about people who are detectives.
Well, the job loss report from payroll processor ADP is out, and according to them, there were 742,00 job losses in March, well above the 655K forecast.
Part of this is driven by continued declines in construction spending, as Calculated Risk notes and graphs (see graph pr0n).
As he notes, non-residential construction spending is following residential spending off a cliff.
There was also an increase in the NAR’s pending home sales index, though it remains firmly in the horrible range, at 82.1, up from 80.4, with 100 being the average level of pending home sales in 2001.
Still, mortgage applications are up again, though this is largely still refi activity.
The Institute for Supply Management’s Manufacturing Index mirrors the pending home sales index, in that it is up, to 36.3 from 35.8, but still in a firmly contracting posture, as 50 is neutral.
On the other side of the Pacific, we are seeing Japanese business confidence numbers fall to record lows.
The news in the auto industry, whether foreign or domestic is grim, with sales numbers for GM, Toyota, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, and Nissan all falling significantly.
We also see the Fed printing money to buy $6 billion in Treasuries, so as to keep the interest rates down.
In currency, the dollar is up on risk aversion again. Investors are concerned about the G-20 meeting, though I’m not sure if the concern is about nothing being done, or something being done….Maybe it’s a bit of both.
In energy, oil fell on strong inventory reports.
Here is a sampling.
The biggest whopper is Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana, saying that using budget reconciliation to pass healthcare or environmental reform though dispite his, ““repeated concerns that doing so would damage bipartisan cooperation in the Senate.”
Bipartisan cooperation in the Senate….That’s a good one….What? He was serious????? Never mind.
Then we have Grauniad newspaper dropping paper, and going all twitter.
A sample from the archives, “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”
Google has CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity, which includes printable 3-D glasses and a CADIE powered submarine.
Also Gmail Autopilot™ by CADIE. Never have to read email again, CADIE will reply to all your email for you. (I actually want something like this)
Expedia has $99 Flights to Mars.
Qualcomm has new wireless convergence models, like the WolfPigeon, CrocodEagle, and SharkFalcon
Technologizer’s First Forty-Five Fabulous Years!:
Not everybody remembers that Technologizer began as an online service. When we launched in April of 1964, there were only three IBM mainframes in the world powerful enough to receive us, we charged an hourly access fee of $15,000, and our network ran at 300-bpw (bits per week).
Opera Face Gestures: ’nuff said.
And Amazon is appealing to the Ron Paul crowd with Floating Amazon Cloud Environment(FACE), “Using the latest in airship technology, we’ve created a cloud that can come to you.”
The DoJ is dropping charges because of rampant proprietorial misconduct.
That does not mean that Ted Stevens is not guilty as hell, though.
Now, how about looking at Don Siegelman?
It’s not clear if this means that many of the emails will be retreived, or if it’s just closing the barn door after the cow has left the barn, but the mutual agreement to withdraw motions on both sides for 3 months.
My money is on the cow-barndoor thing, because Bush and His Evil Minions™ were doubtless working overtime on destroying incriminating information.
CNN has a handy interactive chart, though Bloomberg, using slightly different math, gives us a figure of $12.8 Trillion, or over 90% of last year’s GDP.
Meanwhile, as has been noted earlier, AIG has been cutting sweetheart deals with the banking giants, and now the GAO, the investigative branch of Congress, is saying that the Treasury Department is being too lax in its policies on repaying AIG counterparties, confirming once again that Tim Geithner is the large banks’, and large Wall Street firms’ bitch.
There is no need for AIG to pay off at 100¢ on the dollar here, and the insistence that they do so is an excuse to pump more money into insolvent banking giants.
We now have Barney Frank calling for laws giving resolution authority for systemically important firms, which means FDIC style receivership powers to, “take over and unwind the businesses of big non-bank companies”, which could apply to bank holding companies like Citi and BoA, as well as their banks, and Peter Boone and Simon Johnson (the former chief IMF economist who is calling for kicking the corrupt banking elites out) are suggesting that are suggesting that this is exactly what Geithner’s plan is.
Honestly, I do not think that the White House is sandbagging the Congress and the public over this.
As I have said before, past is prelude, and for Geithner and Summers to sign off on such a thing would run completely counter to their entire professional lives.
I hope that I am wrong, but I fear that I am not.
It looks better on their balance sheets to evict the residents, and then put off foreclosure.
As a result of this problem, a Cleveland nonprofit has taken the banks to court as a public nuisance, and they have won the first round of litigation, which puts the decision in the hands of the local housing court, as opposed to federal court.
It looks like one Republican may actually vote for Obama’s budget.
Of course, it’s Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La.), who beat William “Dollar Bill” Jefferson in the general election after he was indicted for corruption.
Of course, the district that elected him went 74% for Barack Obama, and he is probably still hearing complaints about allow Eric Cantor to twist his arm into voting against the stimulus.
Honda has developed a EEG based controller for its Asimo robot.
It’s currently has a, “90% success rate at recognizing and then carrying out four commands,” so the capability for “mind reading” is really pretty rudimentary, but it is of interest.
Of course, it is only a matter of time before our robot friends become our robot masters, and this technology is used to monitor and punish us, so it’s the end of humanity.
On the bright side, if our new lords and masters look like the bottom picture, it will take some of the sting off the soulless regime which will soon dominate our existence.
Noting that the date has flipped to April 1, let me state that the story is not an April Fools gag, though obviously I am milking the news for laughs.
The margin is significantly less than the number of absentee ballots, and possibly smaller than the number of provisional ballots, so a final count may be weeks off, and then there will be the challenges.
IIRC, the provisional and absentee ballots will be counted in about 2 weeks.
I’ve kind of thought that the Obama administration’s ouster of Rick Wagoner was primarily a political ploy, but it has created a new question, with people asking why him, and not people like Bank of America’s CEO Kenneth Lewis, whose purchases of Countrywide and Merrill Lynch seem to be ample reason for his firing.
I’m hoping that someone in the White House actually intended this effect.
I don’t generally subscribe to the “Barack Obama has a plan, but it’s too subtle for us to see right now,” thing, but it does seem to me that, intentionally or not, the stage has been set for the firing of a bank president at one of the 5 or so banking giants out there.
It would be the a good thing to do, it would put the fear of God in these “masters of the universe.”
The reason that I am fingering Kenneth Lewis is that the other likely bank to be so target is Citi, but CEO Charles Prince was already forced out and replaced by Vikram Pandit, and BoA is the next sickest bank on the list.
Additionally, Lewis has been unrepentant in his attitude, continuing to (over) use the private jet, and chafing at the TARP restrictions, all while maintaining that he will send back the money “real soon now.”
The final reason for my suggesting that he might be forced out, in addition to my visceral dislike of him, is that he, and his bank, have aggressively lobbied against the EFCA (card check) legislation, and now directly calling for his ouster, which means that Obama picks up some labor credibility without having to go to the mat for the EFCA.
Because that’s what the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the government insurance fund for defined benefit retirement programs, did last year, just before the stock market crashed.
The reason given by the Bush Evil Minion™ Charles E.F. Millard was that the PBGC needed better returns to shore up its trust fund, because of all the companies going bankrupt and welshing on their pension obligations.
It may be true that they actually bought into the idea that they could get better returns, even in a stock market that was clearly overvalued and with an economy already shocked by the housing cost, but my money is that the real reason was that it was an election year, and they saw the signs of a stock market drop, and they wanted to push some money into the market quickly in order to keep everything afloat until after the election.
In either case, it should be noted that the PBGC’s trust fund is like a drop in the ocean compared to that of Social Security, and if they thought that it could effect the markets, just imagine what the multi-trillion Social Security fund would do.
In fact, it’s so large, that it would drive the stock market up upon being invested in the market, and when a large population cohort started to retire, it would drive it down, giving the Baby Boomers that wonderful “buy high, sell low” feeling.
Hamid Karzai, whose incompetence and corruption is such that he is now appealing to the most backward of religious impulses, because there is no other reason to vote for him, has just signed into law a measure that legalizes marital rape:
In a massive blow for women’s rights, the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman’s right to leave the home, according to UN papers seen by The Independent.
Hamid Karzai, yet another gift that keeps on giving from Bush and His Evil Minions™.
The Department Store Chain Gottschalks twill be filing for liquidation, and mall developer General Growth Properties has managed to put off bankruptcy, for a while at least.
I think that it is likely that GGP will go chapter 11, at which point, Thomas Friedman, whose wife is a Bucksbaum, the family that owns the developer, may have to downsize his lifestyle….I’m so sad for him (not).
Finally, the Sun-Times Media Group has filed for bankruptcy, and before you start wringing your hands over how these are dark days for newspapers, note that Conrad Black and His Evil Minions™, most notably David Radler, looted the company, and have gone to jail for doing so.
In a way, it’s a microcosm of what is wrong with the news business: Bankers take over from journalists, generate fantastic profit margins by destroying journalism at these institutions through draconian cuts, and then they walk away, leaving bleached bones.
There is a special election in the 20th congressional district of New York tonight. I hope the Democrat, Scott Murphy, wins. However, I am also frustrated that Murphy has received nearly $360,000 on Act Blue from around 2,000 donors. Given that Murphy has made it clear that he will attempt to join the Blue Dogs if he wins the election, the progressive small donor world should not have given him a single dime.
We–participants in blog and email list small donor fundraising efforts–have to completely stop raising money for Blue Dogs. We should not give a single cent to any current member of the Blue Dog coalition. We should not give any money at all to any candidate who refuses to rule out joining the Blue Dogs once in Congress. If we hope to improve Democratic behavior in Congress, this break has to be as public and as thorough as possible.
Agreed.
Scott Murphy may be the very best we can get in that district, and if that is the case, then liberal campaign contributions are better spent elsewhere.
I would “embrace and extend” his message, and include the corporatist “New Democratic Caucus” on the list of people that we should not contribute to.
This goes double for folks in safe Dem districts, which NY-20 is not, Republicans have a registration advantage there, but why pay for someone who will, when the going gets tough, shoot down your agenda?
But I still want Murphy to win, I just won’t give him my money or time.
I guess that the lede is that the consumer confidence numbers are out, and that they remain near record lows, at 26, just one point above the all time low reported in February.
If that were not enough, we now have a survey indicating that consumer spending may fall by $1 trillion after the recession is over (by way of perspective, the US total GDP is about $14 trillion) according to the AlixPartners Long-Range Economic Outlook Survey.
That’s a 7% haircut on GDP, exclusive of the secondary effects, closed stores, warehouses, etc., once the economy recovers…..Great googly moogly!
In the meantime, I don’t think that a whole bunch of people will be tapping their home equity, as the Case-Shiller home price indices show a 19% drop in home prices, though it appears that defaults are abating, as private mortgage insurers saw defaults, and claims, fall in February, the first decrease since June, 2008.
Additionally, 2nd home sales fell in 2008, down to 30% of total home sales, from 40% in 2005, and more of these buyers are paying cash, which implies that a lot of the contraction in this market is an inability to find mortgages.
In terms of the general state of the economy, the Restaurant Peformance Index is showing the 16th straight month of contraction (h/t Calculated Risk), and the Philadelphia Fed State Coincident indices have shown a decline in all 50 states (pdf), for both the past month and the past three months (again h/t Calculated Risk).
Meanwhile, we have an indication that the Bank of England is looking at significant inflation, they have adjusted their pension investments to account for it, so I think that they expect the £ Sterling to fall, and inflation to increase in the UK.
In any case, we now have the chief economist for the OECD suggesting that the Federal Reserve would take aggressive action against a precipitous fall in the dollar, and work to maintain its position as a reserve currency.
I think that this is more an attempt to talk up the dollar than anything else, because protecting the dollar would, over the long term at least, require higher interest rates, which would have the economy collapsing like overcooked broccoli.
In any case, the dollar was down today, largely because the flight to safety yesterday following Obama’s announcement that GM and Chrysler were on notice is now over.
Oil was up too, though it’s still a bit under $50/bbl.
You know, Tim Kaine, who Obama hand picked as head of the Democratic National Committee, who just signed a bill creating “Choose Life” license plates in Virginia, and has promised to support a bill banning state funding of embryonic stem cell research in the state.
I guess that throwing pro-choice advocates to the wolves is Obama’s way to “reach out to the right.”
Thanks a lot, Barack, for foisting this tool on the Democratic Party.