After driving Lehman Brothers into the ground, he just sold his Florida mansion to his wife for $10.
He’s burying assets with his wife so that he will be “poor” when people and regulators go after him.
I think that this would be a good time for the US Attorney to start investigating whether this is a criminal conspiracy to defraud potential litigants.
Evo Moralez got the new constitution he wanted for Bolivia:
Bullet points
Generally, it looks like a good thing, though I am always dubious of mandates of ethnically allocated slots in either government or bureaucracy.
The New York Times looks at increasing calls for nationalizing the banks, and wonders how you could find qualified people to run the banks, since pay would obviously be less:
Some of Mr. Obama’s advisers have asked who the government would get to run the banks. Many of the most experienced executives are tainted by the decisions they made during the age of excess. And how would the government attract the best talent if it demanded that they take minimal pay — a political reality in the current environment?
There are two answers to to this:
Seriously, I’ve yet to see a good argument against replacing senior management at the banks with first year liberal arts majors.
This is actually a potentially big deal for the net.
Gatehouse, which publishes community newspapers, sued the New York Times, because the Boston Globe, which it owns, was generating “Google News” style links, which show the hed and the first sentence or so.
Basically, the Times agreed not to link, but maintains its right to do so.
Complicating the issue was that the Globe tech folk went out of their way to avoid technical measures that Gatehouse put up to prevent this.
Or at least the best 6 words in one of his columns, “This is William Kristol’s last column.”
The Times did not renew his contract.
Unsurprising, as his columns, hell, his first column, generated a fairly large number of corrections for misstatements of basic fact.
He will be moving to the Washington Poat, where he will be doing a monthly column, as opposed to his weekly column at the Times.
It’s a better fit for Kristol. Any paper that publishes Charles Krauthammer doesn’t worry about whether facts stated by their columnists has a basis in reality or truth.
Consumer confidence just fell again, and hit an all time low, 37.7, the lowest number since the Conference Board started keeping records in 1967.
What with the Case-Shiller index showing a November home price drop of 18.2% year over year, and California home prices falling a staggering 42% year over year along with word of that there have been 519,895 job cuts announced since election day.
It’s all a major bummer.
We do have a report that Obama will direct his TARP funds toward consumers, as opposed to the corruption orgy under Bush and His Evil Minions™, which is good news, but it looks like Fannie Mae will need another $16 billion of that.
Meanwhile, Sweden, which handled its early 1990s banking crisis about as well as anyone, it was able to wrap up its intervention years ahead of schedule and with a profit, is looking at injecting cash into its banking system again.
Russia is looking at doing the same for its banks.
In any case, the lousy consumer confidence numbers have had the effect of driving oil down, and scaring people into fleeing to the safety of the dollar, which drove the buck up.
Kenny in this case is Bank of America’s CEO Kenneth Lewis, whose tenure is increasingly precarious following negative impacts of his ill conceived purchases of Countrywide and Merrill Lynch.
I know that we are interesting times when some of my predictions start coming true.
So, in their eagerness to torture people, it appears that Bush and His Evil Minions™ never bother to assemble files on the Guantanamo detainees, which makes an evaluation, much less a fair trial of the detainees.
As Hilzoy notes, “It takes, well, a special kind of administration to detain people for years on end without bothering to assemble case files on them. I’m just glad they’re finally gone.”(emphasis original)
Notwithstanding Bush’s insistence that the military commissions were the only way to try these folks, this makes it clear that they never wanted trials, just torture.
How bad was it? Here are the last two ‘graphs of the WaPo article:
In a court filing this month, Darrel Vandeveld, a former military prosecutor at Guantanamo who asked to be relieved of his duties, said evidence was “strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks.”
He said he once accidentally found “crucial physical evidence” that “had been tossed in a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten.”
This is not a serious attempt at competent prosecution or trial.
Sarah Palin is shopping a book, and the word is that she is looking for an 8 figure advance.
(on edit)
My apologies for this mental image.
You know, as much as I hate Thomas Friedman’s fictitious cab drivers who says what he wants, Ben Stein’s use of real people close to him in order to make a point is worse.
He uses them to depict the “real America”, much as Friedman does, only they are at least as Stein depicts them, are simply malevolent human beings, and he does not understand that this.
Case in point is his high school friend, who seems to be engaging in a form of arms length prostitution:
NOT long ago, a woman in California called me for advice. She is divorced, with two children, and has a series of interlocking financial problems.
She lives in a lovely home in a stylish inland enclave. It has an interest-only mortgage of about $2.2 million that requires a payment of $12,000 a month, very roughly. It was last appraised at $2.7 million, but who knows if it’s now worth anything remotely close to that price.
The woman, whom I’ve known since she was a teenager, has no job or other remunerative employment. She has a former husband, an entrepreneur whose business has suffered recently. He pays her $20,000 a month, of which roughly half is alimony and half child support. The alimony is scheduled to stop this summer.
She has a wealthy beau who pays her credit card bills and other incidentals, but she is thinking of telling him she is through with him. She has no savings and has refinanced her home repeatedly, always adding to indebtedness and then putting the money into a shop she owns that has never come close to earning a dime. Now she is up all night worrying about money. “Terrified,” as she put it. She wanted me to tell her what to do.
He calls her a “sweet woman,” but she is anything but this.
She is a user of other people, and a stupid one, because, while she has achieved success with her use of other people, she has not planned in any way for her future.
She is a parasite, and a particularly nasty one.
So, Mr. Stein thinks that she is the “real America”, and is thus indicative of how we all have gone wrong….When she was getting nearly $¼ of a million a year for having had sex with, and born children for, a wealthy “entrepreneur.”
It’s a toxic mix of entitlement and evil, and he thinks that she is a sweet woman.
Of course, then he brings up his son:
…… And all of this is compounded again because my handsome son, age 21, a student, has just married a lovely young woman, 20. You may have seen on television the pudgy, aging face of their sole means of support.
…
To not be able to eat at any restaurant he feels like eating at is just not on his wavelength. Of course, that’s my fault. (I have learned that everything bad that happens anywhere is my fault.) And I hope to be able to leave him well enough provided for to ease his eventual transition into some form of self-sufficiency.
(emphasis mine)
So first, he knows a, “sweet woman,” who thinks nothing of relying on alimony to maintain an inflated lifestyle, and now he admits that he has raised a son with no concept of limits in terms of money because it is, “just not on his wavelength”.
The rich feel that they are entitled because for the past 28 years, America has said that wealth is an artifact of virtue, and these is the people that Ben Stein thinks is America.
Where its Super Hornet joins the Gripen NG and the JSF.
I think that the fix is in for the JSF, bribery and coercion offsets and diplomatic considerations making any other choice highly unlikely.
The Gripen is still the cheapest alternative, but the F/A-18 E/F is not only flying, but actually in service, and so is even more of a know quantity than the Gripen.
But like I said, there is a very hard full court press going on with this aircraft.
Not surprisingly it shows an increase in spending, and far more focus on the application of the military in non warfare situations than the US military.
The Chinese see the use of their military in peacekeeping and aid situations as a necessary adjunct to their diplomacy, while the US military does its level best to stay within the bounds of “kinetic” warfare.
Certainly, China sees its military as a way to increase its diplomatic status and prestige.
Still, it’s an interesting picture of what really is the only near term meaningful military rival.
Another Friday, another failed, and seized, bank: 1st Centennial Bank of Redlands, CA
While my original source, Ynetnews, should be viewed with a jaundiced eye, their report that death figures were inflated is from the respected Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, which as best as I can tell is a well respected center to center-left paper based in Milan.
They quote a doctor as saying that deaths are likely in the 500-600 range (Google translation, original Italian version) , along with indications that a much higher number of the casualties were combatants than has been previously reported.
This is not uncommon following such a conflict, when people presumed dead start heading home.
Additionally, the dynamics in terms of public relations battle would tend create a situation where the Palestinians would be inclined to over report deaths in the first few days.
There is a historical precedent, the battle of Jenin, where the initial reports of casualties were as high as 500 , and eventually were determined to be 52 to 56.
I do not expect to see a 9.6:1 differential between initial and final numbers here, though.
His arrest, see also here, comes as a bit of the surprise, as he was always close to the Rwandan army, and his pursuit of the remnants of the genocidal Hutu Interahamwe militias were certainly in agreement with the Rwandan government.
It appears that this might be some sort of quid quo pro, with Congo allowing Rwanda to send in troops to take out the Hutu militias in exchange for neutralizing Nkunda.
After the Army canceled the Bell proposal because of delays and cost overruns and put out proposals for new bids, we are now seeing Eurocopter enter the fray.
As they are already delivering the UH-72A Lakota (EC145) to the US army, they may have a leg up on competitor Boeing.
Bell could reenter the competition too, but seeing as how their helo was canceled following a 4 year day and a threefold increase in development costs, I don’t think that they will.
They have suspended production and the prototype is yet to fly, though the engine has finally taken to the air in the C-130 testbed, and now the Financial Times Deutschland is reporting that EADS is considering walking away from the contract.
I’m not sure how that would work, but EADS is facing some fairly substantial penalties for the delays, and
My guess is that the rumors, and the dire statements made by EADS executives, are an attempt to move negotiations on delays in their favor.
The Mach 2.8 290 km missile missed the target, though the rest of the flight profile was successful.
It was originally developed for naval use, and the terminal guidance would be the biggest change.
There are reports that part of this test was to validate it carrying a nuclear warhead, just in case you were wondering if real peace were in danger of breaking out between India and Pakistan.
New submissions for the CSAR-X search and rescue helicopter contract.
This thing seems to have been in bid or being contested for like this whole century.