It appears that George W. Bush is having problems raising money for his presidential library, and has asked Karl Rove and his dad, George H.W. Bush to help get the necessary 5500 million to start construction.
…$500 million….For the two books that he’s read in his life?????
Whiskey tango foxtrot?
Japan’s economy contracted at an annual rate of 12.7% in the Q4 of 2008. Those are numbers more than a recession, they are near implosion, so I would take the Confederation of British Industry’s prediction that the UK economy will shrink 3.3% in 2009 with a grain of salt.
The UK is far more dependent on banking and investment than Japan is in its economy, the Japanese actually make stuff and sell it to people.
A further indicator of the likelihood of a brutal downturn is that the companies in the S&P 500 just turned their first ever aggregate quarterly loss ever, with something like 400 of the 500 companies declaring a loss.
However, today was not without good news, as junk bond sales hit a 6 month high, which implies that people are no longer fleeing so strongly to safe havens like US treasuries, though there is still enough uncertainty to push the dollar and the Yen higher.
Still, demand concerns are driving oil down, even as retail gasoline prices continue their march back towards $2.00 a gallon.
* Seriously, first an Iridium and a Cosmos satellite collide in orbit spewing debris all around the immediate vicinity, and now French and British boomers (SSBNs) have collided.
This is just weird.The HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant, each carrying 16 missiles, and an indeterminate number of warhead struck each other in the middle of nowhere:
Not only did it occur in the open ocean, as opposed to a choke point like a port or the Straights of Gibralter, but it was two SSBNs.
If one had been an attack submarine, I could see it, because you would have a “friendly” tracking exercise, but this is not the task of the SSBN.
Yes, I know about the story of the Leningrad elephant, but it’s just weird.
*Tin foil hat image swiped from Attytood.
Yes, it’s the gifts that keep on giving, courtesy of Roland Burris and Rod Blagojevich, and not it appears taht Burris “forgot” to mention that Blago’s brother hit him up for a donation before his appointment:
Senator Roland W. Burris of Illinois acknowledged in documents made public Saturday that the brother of former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich sought campaign fund-raising help from him in the weeks and months before his appointment to succeed Barack Obama as the state’s junior senator.
Mr. Burris said he provided no money to Governor Blagojevich’s campaign in response to the brother’s request.
The disclosure was different from Mr. Burris’s earlier descriptions, including one under oath, of his conversations with those closest to the former governor. It raised new questions about events that preceded Mr. Burris’s unusual appointment in late December and prompted some Republican lawmakers in Illinois to immediately demand an inquiry into whether Mr. Burris committed perjury.
Please, just make it stop.
If Burris had any illusion about running for office in 2010, this needs to stop right now.
On a more personal level, please, just make it stop.
David Ignatius nails it, that the idea that the markets, unlike the human beings who participate, are somehow rational actors is wrong.
Actually, he’s quoting Nouriel Roubini, who suggests that rationality from markets which are composed of irrational actors is actually irrational:
“The rational man theory of economics has not worked,” Roubini said last month at a session of the World Economic Forum at Davos. That’s why he and other prominent economists are paying more attention to behavioral economics, which starts from the premise that economic decisions, like other aspects of human behavior, are influenced by irrational psychological factors.
The most compelling rebuttal of the rational model, paradoxically, was delivered by the ultimate rationalist, Alan Greenspan. “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders,” the former Fed chairman told Congress last October.
That’s why Greenspan didn’t see it coming, argues Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton professor who is often described as the father of behavioral economics. His rational-actor model wouldn’t let him.
The people who have suggested that the market is not self governing and self correcting, and so real regulation from industry, as Ignatius notes, this includes Keynes, are right.
Just when I thought that this group of criminals have gotten me so jaded about their venality and corruption that they can no longer shock me, it now appears that they instituted rape as a part of their torture regime:
By Scott Horton
Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading.
…
Third, the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgment that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.
(emphasis mine)
Oh my God.
Waterboarding is the least of it.
[ON EDIT: My bad, I left off the link]
I am not surprised that H1B visas are being used to undercut wages of citizens and green card holders, but I am shocked that we are seeing raids and indictments on employers who engage in this practice.
Even more surprising is the fact that the prosecutors appear to be unloading some big guns against these folks:
The arrests were carried out by federal, state and local agents working in Iowa, California, Massachusetts, Texas, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and New Jersey. The government’s action “is the result of an extensive, ongoing investigation into suspected H-1B visa fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy,” said Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, in a statement. The investigation was dubbed Operation Pacific Vision.
(emphasis mine)
So we are seeing both arrests and felony indictments.
It appears that the investigation centers on the borker (temp firm) Vision Systems, who placed people in high cost areas like New Jersey, but used the prevailing wage of its headquarters in Iowa.
It’s a start. Better would be an H1B application fee high enough that it would remove the economic incentive.
If the writers at Saturday Night Live have their fingers on the thought process of the Congressional Republicans, then they are spending so much times chasing their own tail that they remember a Kline Bottle.
If not, it’s still funny as hell.
In 2007, I suggested that perhaps we needed to abolish the USAF as an independent service, quoting the then Air Combat Command chief Ronald Keys:
The hardest wars we fight are not on the battlefield, but the wars we fight in the halls of Congress. They are fought in the Pentagon, they are fought in these programs, to make sure the money is paid and eventually the program is operating.
Well, it appears that the USAF continues to see its most important role as a K Street lobbyist, because they are now scrubbing combat deployments from the records used to determine if an officer or senior NCO gets a promotion, so there is no credit for combat duty, because it’s more important to lobby for bloated weapons systems.
Nothing but REMF’s here sir.
Thew had to hold the vote open in the Senate for 5 hours, because Sherrod Brown (D-OH) had to attend his mother’s wake, and none of the Republicans had the decency to make an accommodation.
Charming to the last.
There are 2 more failed banks:
Pinnacle Bank of Oregon, Beaverton, OR
Corn Belt Bank and Trust Company, Pittsfield, IL
This is in addition to the Sherman County Bank, Loup City, Nebraska and the Riverside Bank of the Gulf Coast, Cape Coral, FL, who made the list before I closed down on Friday.
The trend is unsettling.
My Liary, “A journal to record all my fibs, white lies, and larger distortions of the truth.”
It is for recording those times when one stretches the truth, along with turn of the last century (c 1900) cartoons, which appeals to me, since I grew up with the original illustrations of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, and so they feel comforting.
I got a copy from a reader, and as a parent, it proves useful.
Between the tooth fairy and Keith Olbermann, I have to keep what I say to the kids straight.
It’s available for purchase at the link.
Pictures of interior below:
A friend of my game did this iPhone game called “Bailout Bonanza”.
Hats off to Patrick Rosario, who was in his basement when two people broke into his home and started stealing his stuff.
They didn’t see him, he was in his basement, and so he called 911, and got out of the house, and then he noticed that the perp’s van was there, unattended, with the motor running, so he stole their getaway van:
Meanwhile, back at his home, a passing driver visiting an across-the-street neighbor saw the burglars exit the house. According to the detectives’ report, “the males looked back … and appeared startled.”
“I wish I could have seen the look on their faces,” Rosario said.
The two fled the house toward busy Southeast Newport Way, leaving a pile of flat-screen TVs by the door, along with Rosario’s laptop, game consoles and his wife’s jewelry box.
…
Even as detectives took Rosario’s report, the story apparently was making the rounds. Rosario said he received more than a few high-fives from other responding officers.
“Two pulled up, and they looked over at me and go, ‘You stole their car — way to go, dude. That’s awesome.’ Another told me that I just made her month.”
…
I am amused, but this was a really really stupid thing to do.
H/T Mithras.
The Indian Army is refusing to induct the BrahMos missile into service without further tests.
My guess here is that the army is concerned that the 5000 lb supersonic missile won’t work reliably.
Considering the most recent failure, and the generally spotty record of India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), I’d want some real testing to verify this too.
There is also an element of bureaucratic infighting too, as Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor was at that test, where he was told that it was a success, but he visited the target area, and saw that it was a miss, and then DRDO criticized him for telling the press that it was a failure.
Oops.
Well, Saab is certainly going all out on India’s program to replace its aging MiG-21s, entering into a joint development with TATA for the Gripen NG.
While Saab claims that Saab VP Kjell Moller says that, “”The contract will continue irrespective of us getting the Indian order,” I’m inclined to believe that this is primarily a quid pro quo.
First a disclaimer, this is not an essay on the rightness or the wrongness of the Gaza operation. It is an analysis of the tactics used with an eye toward tactical lessons learned from the Lebanon war, and toward lessons that should be learned by the US military.
Think of it as the War Nerd, without the good writing.
Aviation Week & Space Technology has an analysis of the combat in the Gaza Strip (paid subscription required), and it’s basic conclusion is rather unsurprising, though it’s rather controversial in some military circles, that air force operations must be completely subordinate to the ground forces authority.
Considering the debacle in Lebanon in 2006, where the Chief of Staff was the first, and likely the last, Air Force general, and worked on the USAF model, basically the assumption that precision guided munitions delivered from altitudes in excess of 8000 feet could win the war, this is not an unanticipated change in tactics.
One need only look at Afghanistan to see that the Taliban’s best recruiting tool is the USAF.
Some of the things that they did that worked on a tactical level:
This does not make Gaza operations a victory, but these are lessons that the US military, and particularly the bomb happy boys in blue in the USAF, desperately need to learn for Afghanistan.
It’s The Onion, it’s very profane, it’s funny as hell.
Sony Releases New Stupid Piece of S@&* that Doesn’t F#$%ing Work
We now know that hundreds, perhaps thousands of children were sent to private juvenile detention facilities because the judges got kickbacks, more than 2.6 million dollars, from the operator of two private facilities.
The judges in question, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan have pled guilty, with a recommendation from the prosecutors for a term of 87 months.
It should be 87 years.
The particulars are an indictment of our culture of privatization of government services:
With Judge Conahan serving as president judge in control of the budget and Judge Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts, they set the kickback scheme in motion in December 2002, the authorities said.
They shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was in poor condition, the authorities said, and maintained that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the newly built private detention centers.
So, private players get into the system, pay off the right people, and these people shut down the government run facilities, and take kick-backs.
It’s worth noting that these kick-backs are called “consultancy fees” when the IMF and the World Bank do this in 3rd world nations, and have frequently involved basic human needs like a municipal water supply.
It should be noted that Robert J. Powell, the owner of the two facilities involved, PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care, is claiming that he did not bribe anyone, but rather that he was shaken down by the judges:
Robert J. Powell co-owned PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care until June. His attorney, Mark Sheppard, said his client was the victim of an extortion scheme.
“Bob Powell never solicited a nickel from these judges and really was a victim of their demands,” he said. “These judges made it very plain to Mr. Powell that he was going to be required to pay certain monies.”
Let’s see, you build jails for kids, and then suddenly they shut down the existing facility, because they think that you might bribe them?
I don’t think so.
BTW, these folks might never have been caught, but for the fact that they were doling out favors to friends in arbitration awards, and the insurance companies cried “foul,” and got an investigation.
In any case, they are now reviewing thousands of cases, and the federal prosecutors have petitioned the court to expedite notification to the victims.
Interestingly enough, the thing that seems to be bothering me the most involves a person who is not going to jail:
At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.
Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.
Why is anyone who would criminalize a satirical MySpace page allowed anywhere near children?
Why is this person still employed? Why are the police officers and prosecutors who did not laugh him off, or better still throw him in jail for harassment?
There is so much wrong here, that I’m beyond ranting.
Maybe there is an end in site for the seemingly endless Minnesota recount because the election court just ruled on 13 of 19 cases where Coleman wants to include ballots, and ruled “no” on all of them.
So, I think that we are moving into the end game here.