Sherman County Bank, Loup City, Nebraska
Year: 2009
Americans Want Accountability for Bush Torture
Though, interestingly enough, USA Today runs with the lede of Most want inquiry into anti-terror tactics, while Gallup goes with No Mandate for Criminal Probes of Bush Administration.
38% want a criminal investigation, 24% want some sort of “truth and reconciliation” panel, and 34%, the “dead enders,” don’t want either.
Sounds like a mandate to me.
FWIW, the numbers for investigation Attorneygate and warrantless wiretapping are even more in favor of investigating the matters.
The EU Gets a Major Case of the Stupids
The European parliament’s legal affairs committee just voted to extend copyright on music performances to 95 years. It was 50 years.
It has to go to the full parliament, but it’s likely to pass next month.
Stupid.
This won’t create any more performances, people don’t perform in the expectation of revenues on year 51, so it won’t create any more music, but what it will do is ensure that obscure works will be lost over time, because the difficulties of preserving and reproducing them will be too great.
Under the rules that they are proposing….Hell under the rules that they have now, Shakespeare’s works would have been forever lost to decay.
They would be gone, but we have to protect the f^%$ing mouse for another 45 f^%$ing years.
Not a Single Republican Vote
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the stimulus package, with no Republican votes….yet again….
The ‘Phants got your “bipartisanship” right there.
Good News In the Stimulus Package
It appears that whistle blower protections for contractors remains in the bill.
Good for Congress, and bad, I guess for Bath Iron Works.
It appears that attempts to strip out collection of performance data on drugs and medical devices have been defeated, which is good for all of us.
Karl Rove Subpoenaed … Again
He won’t show up, and even if he did, he would refuse to answer questions.
Economics Update
Well, GDP in the Euro Zone fell by 1.5% in the 4rth quarter, and 1.2% from the 4th quarter of 2007.
The quarterly drop is the largest in 13 years, and the year over year drop is the first recorded ever…..One of the joys of integrating your economy is that you integrate your recessions.
It’s no wonder that OPEC’s predictions for world oil consumption have been slashed again, though interestingly enough, oil is up today, by the largest amount this year, largely on the expectation that the stimulus bill will pass.
In real estate, the New York Federal Reserve is continuing its aggressive policy of buying from the sh$% pile, purchasing another $23.2 billion in agency mortgage-backed securities this week, for a total of $114.96 billion.
There is an interesting bit here though, this quote, “The Fed has also said it may soon begin modifying mortgages it owns within the assets it owns.”
Somehow I figure that this is part of a much bigger story, only I don’t know what it is yet.
Also we have Citi and J.P. Morgan Chase Agreeing to a foreclosure moratorium, and I think that this might be a part of the rest of that story. Specifically, I think that they are worried about Geithner’s “Stress Test,” and they are doing this because they are hoping for goodwill from regulators.
Finally, the dollar is down today, for the same reason that oil is up. The stimulus package looks like a light at the end of the tunnel, and so the “flight to safety” moderated a bit.
OK, This Puts Some Context in the Gregg Withdrawal
It appears that Judd Gregg’s intended replacement, Bonnie Newman, was facing strong opposition from the Taliban wing of the Republican Party, and was likely to withdraw, which would have given Democratic Governor John Lynch the cover to appoint a Democrat.
Gee, I wonder why the Taliban wing of the Republican Party would be freaking out about a life long Republican who just happens to be a 63 year old unmarried woman.
To be fair, I haven’t found anything online about her personal life, except in comments on stories that “the Google” brought up, but there is a rumor out there, which would get Dobson and his ilk upset.
This is Despicable
It appears that big pharma and medical device manufacturers are gearing up to fight a provision in the stimulus bill which would compare outcomes for different treatments, so that healthcare professionals would know how they compare to each other, they are claiming that it’s, ” the first step to government rationing.”
The real reason that they are opposed to this is because selling people expensive s#@$ that does not work better than the cheap stuff is their business model.
Senate Intel Committee OKs Panetta As DCIA
It’s not a surprise that they approved Leon Panetta as head of the CIA, it’s just that the ‘Phants had to spend a few weeks pretending to be important.
Update: the Senate approved him on a voice vote.
NPR Ombud Sick of Fox News Juan Williams
Well, the NPR Ombudsman has taken to completely disavowing anything Juan Williams says when he is on Fox News, and has notified her readers that, “NPR’s Vice President of News, Ellen Weiss, has asked Williams to ask that Fox remove his NPR identification whenever he is on O’Reilly.”
You see, when someone says that Michelle Obama has, “this Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going,” people tend to think that he’s not a functioning journalist.
The truth is that he hasn’t been one for a long time, when he led the lynch mob against Anita Hill, and neglected to mention that he had repeated allegations of sexual harassment against him, he stopped being a journalist.
Currently he’s a freelancer, as the ombud made abundantly clear:
His “Stokely Carmichael” comment got the attention of NPR’s top managers. They are in a bind because Williams is no longer a staff employee but an independent contractor. As a contract news analyst, NPR doesn’t exercise control over what Williams says outside of NPR.
When he wasn’t, he was for a brief period on Talk of the Nation, but proved too damn stupid to handle the interviews….The show is on today, and it can still be lame, but he was painful to listen to.
The problem here is not that he’s on Fox News, so is Mara Liasson, it’s that he’s on O’Reilly, and he’s stupid, and he’s very eager to please, you could use Dr. Boyce Watkins term to describe him, but that brings in race, and I think to Fox and O’Reilly, it’s more important that he’s “NPR” than that he’s black.
Truth Hits the Autism-Vaccine Wacko Community
Well, a couple of days ago, it was revealed that doctor Andrew Wakefield’s data on autism and vaccines were completely fraudulent, and now the federal vaccine court, which was largely created on the back of Wakefield’s myth, has ruled that there is no credible connections between vaccines and autism.
As to the court case:
The decision by three independent special masters is especially telling because the special court’s rules did not require plaintiffs to prove their cases with scientific certainty — all the parents needed to show was that a preponderance of the evidence, or “50 percent and a hair,” supported their claims. The vaccine court effectively said today that the thousands of pending claims represented by the three test cases are on extremely shaky ground.
In his ruling on one case, special master George Hastings said the parents of Michelle Cedillo — who had charged that a measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine caused their child to develop autism — had “been misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment.”
Hastings said that he was deeply moved by the suffering autism imposed on families such as the Cedillos, but that “the evidence advanced by the petitioners has fallen far short of demonstrating . . . a link.”
As to the despicable Andrew Wakefield and his 1997 article in the Lancet, this is more than just bad science.
Wakefield, in the employ of vaccine litigation specialists, simply made up data:
The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. It claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions.
However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.
You can see my earlier posts on this here.
A Breath of Fresh Air for Drug Czar
Obama has selected Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske as the new drug czar and it appears that while he is 100% cop, and a heavy duty law enforcement guy, unlike previous heads of the ONDCP, he’s not an insane drug warrior.
People who are looking at a more humane policy in dealing with drugs are pleasantly surprised by his appointment, as are legalization groups.
Specifically, during his tenure as police chief, he actually followed a law, initiative 75, which specifically deprioritized marijuana enforcement,* and kept the police from harassing needle exchange programs, which helps reduce AIDS transmission.
He’s never going to be NORML’s man of the year, and he’s not going to call for legalizing weed, but he is remarkable improvement over the ‘war on drugs’ crowd that has done nothing but fill prisons with non-violent offenders.
*I-75 saw a decline in drug use as well.
Is “Stress Testing” Spooking the Banks?
This is interesting. It seems that Timothy Geithner’s announcement of a bank rescue plan sent big name banks into full panic mode, because it looks like Goldman Sachs held an emergency meeting, which included, “20 of the firm’s biggest hedge fund and private equity clients from around the country,” as well as, “representatives of KKR, Fortress Investment Group , Bain Capital, Perry Capital, Capital Research, Putnam and Citadel.”
While Goldman claims that it was a regular meeting, CNBC’s report seems to indicate that this was not the case:
Goldman sachs says the meeting was planned well in advance. But people who attended tell CNBC that they received the invitation after the speech and decided to attend because of the speech. Goldman Sachs initially denied that the meeting, hosted by co-presidents John Winkelried and Gary Cohn, took place.
(emphasis mine)
Where I think the reporter did not go deep enough is to accept the line from the participants that this meeting was primarily about concerns that the plan is not coming together quickly enough.
That isn’t the sort of thing that has you call an emergency meeting. Something has them spooked.
My guess is that they are afraid that Geithner’s “stress testing”, which is a deep accounting analysis of their balance sheets, will show one, or more of the major banks (probably most of them) to be insolvent, and then the government will have no choice but to seize them.
I have this image of something resembling a meeting of Bond villains.
Huh???? Judd Gregg Drops Out As Commerce Secretary
OK, this is a surprise to me, and it appears to be one to the White House, where a source described themselves as blindsided by Gregg’s announcement.
The folks at TPM suggest that it might be that Gregg was the target of a wall of noise from the increasingly moribund Republican party in New Hampshire, or perhaps that the reason that he accepted the post in the first place was to run the Census, and Obama taking it out from beneath him made him change his mind, though this raises the question, “why now?” when it has been clear for a week.
I dunno, maybe someone has pictures of him with a goat. He’s a Republican, after all.
Economics Update
Well, the obvious lede here is the weekly initial jobless claims, which dropped 8000 to 623,000, still well within OMFG territory, and the four-week moving average, which is to my mine a better and less noisy metric, jumped from 583,500 to 607,500, while continuing claims rose to 4.81 million…..Ouch.
We have some more numbers for the real estate bloodbath too, with the NAR reporting that median home prices declined in Q4 of 2008 by 12.4% as compared to Q4 of 2007.
Foreclosures fell in January, but this is largely because the GSEs have put a temporary moratorium.
More telling is the fact that foreclosures and short sales accounted for 45% of sales in Q4.
Mortgage rates are down this week to 5.16%, which is still above the 4 and change percent from last month, so I do not expect this to do much to the market.
We do have a bright spot, with , it was +1% over December as opposed to the expected -.8%, but look as the chart on the right shows, it’s still very grim.
It’s worth noting that some of the increase is because retail gasoline prices have been trending higher (bottom chart), which along with increased spending for food and for clothing, were largely responsible for the increase.
In currency, the Yen and the dollar strengthened as investors fled to their relative safety, and in energy, oil fell below $34/bbl on high inventories and low demand.
Competition For Thee and Not for Me
As part of his initiative to make state government more efficient, New Jersey Governor, and former chief of Goldman Sachs, John Corzine is is looking to mandate competition for almost all goods and services that are purchases.
But, there is one exception, municipal bonds….You know, where companies like Goldman Sachs make an awful lot of money managing the sales of these instruments, and competitive bidding does save money:
Competitive bond offerings force banks to line up on an advertised day and submit the lowest interest-cost bid to win underwriting business. In a negotiated sale, states and cities decide in advance which banks will market the bonds. Underwriters have promoted the no-bid method, saying it allows them to get the best prices for issuers by tailoring the debt to specific types of investors.
Bid sales saved issuers 17 to 48 basis points, “on average and all else equal,” according to a study published in the Winter 2008 issue of the Municipal Finance Journal. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point. On $100 million of debt, the savings mean $1.7 million to $4.8 million less interest over the life of a 10-year bond.
I guess that his buddies at Goldman Sachs are suffering under the restrictions Obama has placed on executive compensation.
We Were Played By Hank Paulson and His Evil Minions&trade on TARP?
I think that we’ve all seen the video (below) where Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) said on CSPAN that there was a run on the money markets, and we were hours away from a complete meltdown of the financial system.
The money quote, if you don’t want to watch the vid, is, “If they had not done that, their estimation is that by 2 p.m. that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the U.S., would have collapsed the entire economy of the U.S., and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.”
The New York Post, the right wing flagship of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, and there are no on the record sources, though there is a cool graphic with Marlon Brando from Apocalypse Now (right).*
So, not only is the story completely based on anonymous sources, but there are no other contemporaneous reports of this happening.
Enter Felix Salmon of Portfolio.com, who looks at the underlying data, and finds out that it never happened. There was no massive run on the banks.
There were a lot of redemptions to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a day, not trillions per hour.
So, how did this bit of disinformation get out, and why did it get out to a paper not known for financial reporting in the financial capital of the world?
Inquiring minds want to know.
*As a purveyor of news, the New York Post sucks, but I do like their headlines and the way that they spice up their graphics.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!?!?!?!?
It appears that officials in the Department of Defense are denying Barack Obama access to information on Binyam Mohamed’s torture and abuse.
No, this isn’t a typo, someone in the DoD is refusing to turn over information to the President of the United States of America:
Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal charity Reprieve, which represents Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed, sent Obama evidence of what he called “truly mediaeval” abuse but substantial parts were blanked out so the president could not read it.
In the letter to the president [PDF] , Stafford Smith urges him to order the disclosure of the evidence.
Stafford Smith tells Obama he should be aware of the “bizarre reality” of the situation. “You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by US personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command.”
It is understood US defence officials might have censored the evidence to protect the president from criminal liability or political embarrassment.
George Orwell and Franz Kafka are now spinning in their graves at sufficient velocity to power all of Belarus.
Zimbabwe: Tsvangerai Sworn in as PM
So, Tsvangirai is finally PM, though, rather tellingly, his acceptance speech was not carried on state radio or TV.
Note that arrests by ZANU-PF aligned elements in the state security apparatus, and there is apparently an arrest order out for deputy agriculture minister nominee, Roy Bennett, and human rights lawyers have been placed arrested.
Meanwhile, treason charges against Tendai Biti have been dropped, which is a good thing, as the nominee for Finance Minister.
Truth be told, considering the state of finance in Zimbabwe, I might have gone with jail time.
On a less snarky note, Biti might very well be the person bets positioned to counterbalance Robert Mugabe, because he is the one who determines when, and how, civil servants get paid, and with Zimbabwe moving to abandon its own currency, the decision of who gets paid in $Z, and who gets paid in USD or Euro or Rand would be a very good way to create real disincentives for those agencies most willing to do Mugabe’s dirty work.
There are some new structures in place intended to create a more transparent and less political state security apparatus, but I am not optimistic that this will make much of a difference.