Year: 2009

National Archives to Get Boxes of Poo from Dick Cheney

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Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has ruled that Dick Cheney has the power to decide which of his papers are transferred to the national archives:

The Justice Department provided what U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly called “constantly shifting arguments” in the case, but, she said, “That confusion is not evidence” that would undermine the sworn deposition of Claire M. O’Donnell, a Cheney aide who handles record-keeping and other administrative tasks.

“The Court expects,” she said, that White House officials “will, in good faith, comply with the representations that their officials have made, by way of testimony, in this case.” As a result, she granted summary judgment on the White House’s behalf and lifted a five-month-old injunction mandating the preservation of Cheney’s records.

And I’m Jamie Lee Curtis.

One of the plaintiffs, Stanley I. Kutler, an emeritus professor of history and law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said he remains worried that “when the Archives goes to open Cheney’s papers, they are going to find empty boxes.”

Nope, they want some weight there, and an empty box is not his style. My guess is that Cheney threw out his back squatting over his document boxes and taking a dump in them.

Because Cheney is not leaving without a hearty f#@k you to everyone.

Fiat to Get 35% Chrysler Stake for Magic Beans

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We have the rumor that Fiat will be paid to take a stake in Chrysler:

Fiat, the stronger of the two, wouldn’t immediately put cash into Chrysler. Instead it would obtain its stake mainly in exchange for covering the cost of retooling a Chrysler plant to produce one or more Fiat models to be sold in the U.S., these people said. Fiat would also provide engine and transmission technology to help Chrysler introduce new, fuel-efficient small cars, they said.

Fiat is been trying to get back into the US market for years, and now they are getting a domestic factory for free.

If Fiat can get their Diesel model 500 or Panda into the US, both of which get something north of 50 mpg, they would have a real winner.

Update: the Freep confirms the deal.

H/T Calculated Risk.

Zimbabwe Update

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It seems that on the way out of office, Bush issued an order making it legal to sell arms to Zimbabwe. He found that, “Furnishing of defense articles and defense services to the Southern African Development Community will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace,” which authorizes sales to Zimbabwe too.

Meanwhile, the MDC is finally flat out saying that Mbeki is unacceptable as a mediator, which they should have done many months ago.

Of course, Mbeki is still there and mediating, and doing his best to enable Mugabe.

We also have reports of Senior MDC officials being arrested, along with reports of plans for an iminent arrest of Morgan Tsvangerai, head of the MDC.

Unsurprisingly, the most recent set of talks on powersharing have failed.

Damn Him, for Making Me Feel Sorry for a Member of the Bush Administration

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By him, I mean Spocko of Spocko’s Brain, who has made a bit of a habit of reviewing the antics of right wing shock jocks in the Bay Area.

He has contacted sponsors with tapes of what these guys said, and this time, he comes across ABC radio jocks talking about employing Dana Perino on their show, and wondering if her employment would require, “full frontal nudity.”

I am so glad I don’t listen to AM radio.

An Army of Over-Promoted, Ideologically Vetted Homunculi

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That’s the way that commie/pinko publication The Economist describes Bush appointees in general, and Alberto “Abu” Gonzales in particular, in an article describing his legacy.

It’s nice to see the knives come out from the right, even if it’s just the UK right.

I’m waiting for the Weekly Standard to do the same.

If I were a betting man, I would bet on their Labor Day issue of this year.

H/T WallStreetJackass.

Gaza Update

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Well things in Gaza are largely quiet, and Israel plans to have its troops outbefore the inauguration.

I would note that the matter of weapons movement across the Philidelphi crossing is still unresolved, which to my implies that this is not really much of a victory.

I’m not sure how they could have achieved a victory in any case, unless they had recovered Gilad Shalit.

I expect rockets to fall again before the election, and for Netanyahu to win as a result.

Nationalizing the Banks

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Well, it appears that we have Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, Portfolio’s Felix Salmon, and the Financial Times’ Willem Buiter’s all calling for nationalization.

Basically, all three of them say, and I agree, that that the banks are “zombie banks”, dead but still walking, and that the most effective, and the most cost effective for the taxpayer, solution is for the government to take them over and allow their problems to unwind.

They all agree that the idea of the “bad bank”, basically the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) from the S&L bailout, but without taking over the banks, is among the worst possible solutions.

Basically, if you buy these banks assets at market value, they are still insolvent, and if you overpay, the taxpayer loses and the banks are encouraged to do more stupid things.

To my mind, I would actually set up a government agency to directly make loans to business, and let the banks all hang…What I have repeatedly called “amputating the financial sector.”

I would add that with banks publicly declaring that they will take the money and not open up their lending, we need some serious tough love hate headed towards the banks.

My Heart Bleeds Borscht

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It appears that no one wants to hire people whose last job was as one of Bush’s Evil Minions™:

As President-elect Barack Obama’s team transitions into the federal government tomorrow, President Bush’s political appointees will be locked out, and in these tough economic times many of them are scrambling to find new jobs. High-ranking White House loyalists have deluged Washington headhunters with pleas for jobs. Corporations and nonprofit organizations have stopped hiring. With the GOP out of power, jobs on Capitol Hill are scant and K Street lobbying firms have trimmed their golden parachutes.

So this is the new reality: Instead of boasting to friends and colleagues of new jobs in goodbye e-mails, many longtime Bush aides have offered home phone numbers and Gmail and Yahoo e-mail addresses as their new contacts.

“For Republicans, the inn is full,” lamented veteran GOP operative Ron Kaufman, a close White House adviser to former president George H.W. Bush and an executive at Dutko Worldwide. “You have lots of folks in the House and Senate on the streets and 3,000 administration appointees on the streets at a time when the job market is shrinking anyways. It’s just not a fun time.”

You know, Republicans claim to hate the federal government and DC culture. So just go home.

This has been your daily dose of Schadenfreude.

Economics Update

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It really is beginning to look like the UK is going to be hit worse by this than the US, with Gordon Brown unveiling a new bank bailout, one which, shocker, requires the banks to lend the money out again, imagine that.

I would imagine that the catalyst for this action was that Royal Bank of Scotland posted a £ 28 billion loss for 2008.

Even more than the US, the UK seems to have banked on (pun not intended) finance being the future of their economy, and they are suffering as a result.

Spain, which created a boom on real estate, is doing worse with S&P cutting the rating on its debt from AAA to AA+.

The downgrades to countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Ireland are throwing a monkey wrench into the vision of the Euro Zone as a unitary institution:

Diverging bond yields hurt [Euro Central Bank President] Trichet’s argument that the ECB’s inflation-fighting mandate ushered in an era of stability for nations that once suffered rampant price growth. They also make it tougher for the ECB, which cut its key rate to a record yesterday, to set one benchmark for all 16 euro nations. That may delay recovery as governments try to fund stimulus plans.

Autos are not great either, with France talking about a partial takeover its car makers in order to bail them out, and GM at risk of defaulting on its recent government loan, because it cannot find enough debtors to swap debt for equity.

Likely, the sticking point here is PIMCO, the worlds largest bond fund, which has just been hired to manage a Federal Reserve facility, so they are extorting GM, while at the same time, they are being paid to manage the Fed’s attempt to fix the problem of frozen credit.

It’s nice when you can generate demand for your services without having to deal with the market, I guess.

Meanwhile, in currency, the dollar was stronger today, largely on the UK bank rescue, and the Ruble continues its slide.

In energy, oil is down, largely on the end of Gaza fighting and the Russian-Ukranian gas deal, and retail gasoline is up again today.

I don’t expect it to go above $4/gal soon, but I think that sub $2/gal gasoline will be gone shortly.

Gas Deal Reported

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I hope that this one is not a false alarm

Under the reported deal, Ukraine will pay 20 percent less than the European price for this year. This means a substantial increase for Ukraine in the first quarter but the price could fall significantly later in the year as gas prices are expected to drop.

It does seem to be a fair deal to both sides….Which Is why I’m wondering when it will fall apart.

Also, Slovakia has put off restarting is Soviet era nuke plant.

They had declared an emergency because of the gas crisis, and were talking about restarting it.

The 1990s Defense Industry Consolidation Did Not Save Money

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The report here only applies to a study of consolidation of U.S. shipbuilding operations, but having worked in the defense industry over that period, I can tell you it did not work there either.

Instead, you saw bizarre expensive workshare arrangements to preserve the only two entities capable of producing a weapon system, because if you only had one, then it makes sense to nationalize the industry.

It’s Rubinomics applied to the military-industrial complex, and a failure.

This Should Get Interesting

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It appears that now that Bush and His Evil Minions&trade are on their way out, judges are getting rather a bit more aggressive, or maybe the wheels of justice are just grinding slowly, and have caught up with reality, because Judge HenryKennedy Jr. of the US District Court for DC has just told the White House to turn over all computer storage devices in their possession, and to open up their PCs to forensic investigation, in order to support lawsuits involving the Iraq War and the Valeria Plame outing.

The judge wants all the emails.

What’s more, it appears that someone was actually looking for them, because Helen Hong, a lawyer for the DoJ civil division just said that they have found the backup tapes with the emails in question.

It’s always the tapes, isn’t it.

Pass the popcorn.

The 800 Pound Gorilla for the JSF

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It is that any nation operating the aircraft will be shut down in a very short time without direct US support.

As Bill Sweetman notes here, if the JSF progresses as anticipated, it will drive all other competitors out of business. Sometime around 2020, you could see the Typhoon, Gripen, Rafale and F-18 being unsellable, because, like the Italians and the F-104S, the nations using them cannot afford upgrades, because they have to go it alone.

While the Gripen model of using existing systems essentially unmodified in their aircraft might offer the ability to make support and upgrades affordable, there is a very real possibility that there will be no fighter industry left outside of the US/JSF and Russia, but the folks doing this do not have a good track record:

There hasn’t (for example) been one successful stealth warplane program since the F-117. The A-12 and Comanche were cancelled outright. The B-2 cost tens of billions to fix and is so costly to operate that efforts to sell more than 21 jets were unsuccessful. The F-22 works, but the current debate over whether to acquire more than 183 jets is driven to a great extent by the startling cost of maintenance and upgrades. JSF itself is already two and a half years behind the original schedule, and further problems are certainly not out of the question at this stage.

If your track record is Ishtar and Howard the Duck, and you tell me that you’ve got something that beats Gone With The Wind and Star Wars, you are going to have to prove it with more than a PowerPoint, or “trust me, but it’s secret.”

(emphasis mine)

This is something to think about, and it’s my favorite defense procurement quote of the year, but this is not the gorilla that I mentioned.

The 800 lb gorilla is the fact, as Bill Sweetman notes, that any nation adopting the JSF will be completely unable to field those aircraft without active and aggressive support from the US/Lockheed Martin:

The JSF is unique in the degree of integration in its information systems. So far, for example, it has no open-standard transmit datalink, at least in stealth mode. The automated logistics system will continuously transmit operational information back to Fort Worth. Not only is it a coalition-optimized airplane, it’s hard to see how it could be operated at all without direct, constant US support.

He further notes that the JSF will be shipped without a jammer, which will not be an issue for the US, which has EA-6Bs and shortly E/F-18-Gs to provide standoff jamming, but is a real problem for other nations, who do not operated dedicated stand off jammers, and it is nigh impossible for them to retrofit such a system into a tightly integrated airframe…Truth be told, I’m not sure that they could even find power, much less signal to do so.

Finally, the JSF will not communicate with legacy aircraft. The US is planning to handle this with a MADL (the stealthy communications system installed on the JSF) on something like a business jet that will be well behind the combat zone, but again, any other nation operating the plane will not have this capability.

If I were a nation looking at operating the aircraft under these circumstances *cough* Israel *cough*, I’d be very concerned.

Solid-State Laser Programs Advance to High-Power Tests

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HELLADS

Textron “ThinZag”

Hellads In B-1 Bay

Aviation Week had a cover story, and 3 articles on lasers, and it looks like the signs are in that chemical lasers, which has been the next big thing for battlefield applications are on the way out, because they rely on toxic and expensive chemicals that are remarkably unfriendly to battlefield conditions.

One of the issues for solid state lasers has always been that when you have a high power ceramic generating the laser, the cooling tends create thermal shock that can break the material.

The Joint High-Power Solid-State Laser (JHPSSL) program is looking to demonstrate proof of concept models in the next year or so, with outputs in the 100kW, and DARPA is looking at the High-Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (Hellads).

For JHPSSL, there are two contractors and technologies, Northrop Grumman, which gangs the output of 8 or more laser modules, and Textron which uses a single module, and boosts the output with “gain modules”. (Textron’s “ThinZag” concept is the 2nd picture)

The goals of both programs now is efficiency, both in terms of gross power-in/power out ratios, and beam quality, which effects beam quality at a distance.

DARPA appears to be ahead in terms of developing a modestly sized laser that can fitted to existing platforms. (bottom picture is a theoretical system in a B-1 Weapons bay)

HELLADS is being developed by General Atomics, and the concept is described as a “liquid laser”, where the amplification disks are immersed in a coolant to avoid thermal shock issues.

Further, the DARPA is developing with Raytheon a electronically scanned optical array under a separate program, where they are electronically steering the fiber optic inputs from multiple lasers (7 lasers are shown being combined in the top picture).

Because the USAF Thinks That There No Other Needs But Them

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So the boys in blue, despite officially eschewing a supersonic aircraft for their Next Generation Bomber, and canceling the Blackswift hypersonic demonstrator, are still looking for something that flies faster than Mach 1 and carries bombs. (paid subscription required)

If you’re confused, that’s what happens when you look at Air Force procurement programs recently. As Bill Sweetman notes, when talking about USAF procurement, “If your track record is Ishtar and Howard the Duck, and you tell me that you’ve got something that beats Gone With The Wind and Star Wars, you are going to have to prove it with more than a PowerPoint, or ‘trust me, but it’s secret.’“

They are looking at a tailless supersonic design, which would achieve the requisite broadband stealth, only, no one has gotten a tailless design to fly at supersonic speeds.

Basically, they are looking at advanced applications of fluidics for both the serpentine air inlets and the control systems.

Considering the drains of Iraq, Afghanistan, and now the US economy, and the complete lack of utility on the highest tech desires of the USAF, they have to smoking something pretty powerful.

Matt Taibbi is a National Treasure

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And his devastating take-down of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is one of many jewels that drip from his mouth.

A sample:

My initial answer to that is that Friedman’s language choices over the years have been highly revealing: When a man who thinks you need to break a vase to get the water out of it starts arguing that you need to invade a country in order to change the minds of its people, you might want to start paying attention to how his approach to the vase problem worked out.

Brilliant.

On Centrism

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Words I never sought that I would say, but this is a great editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

Thomas Frank calls centrism a “chump’s game”, and notes that the “triangulation” of Bill Clinton and his ilk did nothing but allow the radical right wing to move the “center” further right.

Mr. Frank is right, and here is my favorite bit:

And centrism’s achievements? Well, there’s Nafta, which proved Democrats could stand up to labor. There’s the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. There’s the Iraq war resolution, approved by numerous Democrats in brave defiance of their party’s left. Triumphs all.

Histories of conservatism’s rise, on the other hand, often emphasize that movement’s adherence to principle regardless of changing public attitudes. Conservatives pressed laissez-faire through good times and bad, soldiering on even in years when suggesting that America was a “center-right nation” would have made one an instant laughingstock.

Giving the Fed What For

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An exchange between freshman Congressman Alan Grayson and Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn, where the distinguished gentleman from Florida points out the Fed is spending around $4000.00 (actually, it total, it’s closer to $20,000.00 at this point when other programs are rolled in) of taxpayer money for every man, woman, and child in the US, and refusing to provide details.

The Fed is completely out of control, and has gone native, and believes that the financial industry is the economy, and Grayson shows just how corrupt the whole process has become in this exchange.

H/T The Washington Independent.