H/t Pundit Kitchen
Year: 2009
60……Until Leiberman Knifes Everyone Again……
We now have reports that Reid and Obama have managed to cajole Senator Ben Nelson into not filibustering the helathcare bill:
Senate Democratic leaders achieved a breakthrough Saturday in the drive for health overhaul legislation, securing the 60 votes needed to ensure passage after a late-night deal on abortion coverage locked in the support of Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson.
The bill is at best marginally better than what we have now, it might be a bit worse, since the mandate in a monopoly situation is a disaster, and the abortion language allows states to forbid insurance companies to cover abortions.
Let’s be clear, insurance companies don’t customize their plans unless forced to, and over the next few years, this will have the effect of eliminating abortion from insurance coverage, as NOW notes:
Statement of Terry O’Neill, NOW President
December 19, 2009
The so-called health care reform bill now before the Senate, with the addition of Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Manager’s Amendment, amounts to a health insurance bill for half the population and a sweeping anti-abortion law for the rest of us. And by the way, it’s the rest of us who voted the current leadership into both houses of Congress.
The National Organization for Women is outraged that Senate leadership would cave in to Sen. Ben Nelson, offering a compromise that amounts to a Stupak-like ban on insurance coverage for abortion care. Right-wing ideologues like Nelson and the Catholic Bishops may not understand this, but abortion is health care. And health care reform is not true reform if it denies women coverage for the full range of reproductive health services.
We call on all senators who consider themselves friends of women’s rights to reject the Manager’s Amendment, and if it remains, to defeat this cruelly over-compromised legislation.
###
I’ll still be calling my Senators, and asking them to vote against the bill and against cloture.
DC Same-Sex Marriage Bill Law……Sort Of
Mayor Adrian Fenty has signed the bill, but there is still a 60 day Congressional review period, because DC citizens don’t have full civil rights more generally, and I think that you will see a concerted effort by the ‘Phants/Blue Dogs/Closet cases, and other various bigots in Congress to repeal this.
Economists Should Not Do Rap
Ever!!!!
That being said, this is a pretty good short (9:11) video on the relative merits of Keyenes and Hayek.
H/t naked capitalism
Barack Obama’s Base
Click for full size, and go to his store and buy his stuff.
Likely Record Snow Today
Click for full size
Apologies for the crappy cell phone camera pic
Well, we’re getting a lot of snow here, it’s still coming down, and the estimate is that it will be in the range of 18-24 inches when all is said and done should beat the December record of 11½ inches in a single day and 14 inches in a 2-day storm, and may actually break the all-time record set in February 2003 in the North American blizzard of 2003 of 28.2 inches if it exceeds what the weatherman are reporting by a bit.
We still have not seen a snow plow on my street, though it has seen the more heavily traveled streets in the area.
Snow is expected to continue until tapering off sometime tomorrow.
[on edit]Not a big deal for me, but with 1 week left to go before American Greed and Conspicuous Consumption day, it looks like this will hammer retailers, because for much of the Eastern seaboard, this weekend is done, and there may still be a lot of closings, etc. on Monday.
Raytheon Looks to Adapt AIM-9X for Air to Ground Applications
They have conducted tests, and have successfully intercepted a high-speed “cigarette boat”, which simulates a drug running boat.
The idea here is that if an aircraft encounters a ground target while only armed for air-to-air, it could use the Sidewinder to take out the target.
Me, I’m wondering why they don’t just use the cannon.
One interesting bit here is that the F-22 crash 9 months ago might have been a part of this test, as it was reported that the smaller side bay doors were open at the time of the incident.
And the Tanker Saga Continues………
[On Edit] Here is some Airbus Tanker Pr0n
OK, we are in a period of some uncertainty in terms of the much delayed US Air Force tanker contract.
Basically, it all comes down to how the USAF will evaluate the bids.
If it simply says that that the cheapest plane that meets the specs wins, the the Boeing 767 wins, but if it includes total capability, basically dollars per pound of fuel offloaded at a giving distance from the airbase, then the Airbus A330 wins, because it is significantly larger and more capable, as well as being able to simultaneously carry cargo and fuel planes.
It appears that the request for proposals (RFP) is leaning in the former direction, because EADS/Northrop Grumman is threatening a no-bid, which would have Boeing doing the Air Force like a drunk Republican at a gay bar. (see also here)
EADS/Northrop Grumman has reportedly told the Pentagon that it does not intend to bid if the RFP remains the same as it did in the draft, though this seen as a ploy to pressure the USAF to change the requirements (paid subscription required), and Air Force Secretary Michael Donley has called their bluff, saying that there will be no major changes.
I think that there is a bit of a game of chicken going on, and Representative John Murtha, chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, is saying that the tanker bid “must” have a competition, implying that he may use the appropriations process to require multiple bidders which adds yet more drama to the entire process.
A Followup on the Iranian Lesbian Pr0n Story
Now that I’ve had about 15 minutes to think of it, the accusation that the Iranians are hacking into the signals is a tacit admission by the US military drones are secretly overflying sovereign Iranian territory.
Fighting Terrorism With Lesbian Pr0n
The Wall Street Journal has a bomb shell of s story.
It appears that insurgents in Afghanistan have hacked into the video feeds of US drones:
Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.
Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.
(link to SkyGrapper software mine)
I am surprised by this. Not so much by the idea that anyone in a situation to be surveilled and attacked by the US might attempt to use SIGINT to defend themselves, that it just basic common sense, but by the fact that the US military has been using an unencrypted feed to transmit data.
And, of course, we have the accusation that it was Iran who actually hacked the feeds, or developed the method to hack the feeds, because, much like in the case of the the Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFP) used by insurgents in Iraq, it is claimed that only the Iranians have the technical know-how to use such a system.
Of course, in the case of the EFPs, this accusation relied on a number of lies, in particular the idea that EFP construction was so technically challenging that only the Iranians could do it, despite the fact that the IRA was using EFPs in Ireland over 30 years ago, and that they actually discovered workshops where IEDs were manufactured…………It turns out all you need to make an EFP is a simple lathe and some copper.
The idea that once someone discovered the video feeds were unencrypted, and my guess would be that this has been known since the Kosovo campaign, because the Serbs were typically all over this kind of stuff.
In any case, the military is now claiming that this breach has been fixed, implying that encryption has been added.
I’m wondering what took so long. The satellite TV providers have been encrypting their signals with minimal computational overhead for decades.
Of course, I have an improvement on this idea, and it involves lesbian pr0n. (You were wondering when we would be getting to the pr0n, weren’t you)
In addition to using encryption, the video feed should use steganography to embed the signal inside an unencrypted non-tactical video feed.
The unencrypted video should be lesbian pr0n,* because the then the insurgents would in order to extract the true signal, be forced to watch nekkid women (Oh my God, tits!) deriving sexual satisfaction (Oh my God, female orgasm!) without benefit of a penis (Oh my God…………You get the idea), and it just screws with their heads (both upper and lower).
One of the reasons for the pr0n,† is because any relatively competent state actor would be able to decrypt a video feed in a relatively short period of time by gang tackling the signal with a video game based massively parallel super-computer.
*It was actually Bill Volk who made the suggestion.
†Beside the fact that I am a smart ass.
There Are Things Worse than Death
The Star Wars holiday special.
I actually saw this when it came out in 1978 or so **shudder**, so I’ve not watched this its entirety, just skipped through to ensure that it’s not pr0n.
Warning: May cause bleeding of the eyes, ears, nose, rectum, and neighbors.
Cool Proto Punk
Click for full size
Picture
Video
The band is Death, it was the Hackney brothers Bobby,Hackney, and Dannis.
I’m particularly surprised because I saw early punk as a pretty lily white phenomenon, and these guys are black from Detroit.
My Image of Punk is that it came from the UK, California, and New York, as personified by the Sex Pistols, the Dead Kennedys, and the Ramones.
You can get a cliff notes version of their career in this New York Times review of the recent Renaissance that the band has been experiencing.
In their first incarnation, their recption by local crowds was less than enthusiastic:
Death began playing at cabarets and garage parties on Detroit’s predominantly African-American east side, but were met with reactions ranging from confusion to derision. “We were ridiculed because at the time everybody in our community was listening to the Philadelphia sound, Earth, Wind & Fire, the Isley Brothers,” Bobby said. “People thought we were doing some weird stuff. We were pretty aggressive about playing rock ’n’ roll because there were so many voices around us trying to get us to abandon it.”
It’s a fascinating bit of musical history.
It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!!
And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.
- RockBridge Commercial Bank, Atlanta, GA
- Peoples First Community Bank, Panama City, FL
- Citizens State Bank, New Baltimore, MI
- New South Federal Savings Bank, Irondale, AL
- Independent Bankers’ Bank, Springfield, IL*
- Imperial Capital Bank, La Jolla, CA
- First Federal Bank of California, F.S.B., Santa Monica, CA
*I think that my parents had an account there in the mid-1980s, when my step-mother was dean at the University of Illinois at Springfield.
Obama Gets Revolt from the Faithful on Healthcare
Which is not particularly surprising, as his behavior has been pretty revolting on healthcare.
It turns out that OFA, originally “Obama for America,” and now “Organizing for America,” just called for a phone bank to support the Nelson/Lieberman healthcare reform sellout bill, and the base decided that they had to wash their hair:
On Wednesday morning, Organizing for America, as Obama’s reconstituted campaign organization is now known, e-mailed its list of 13 million Obama supporters asking them to “call your senators now and help us ‘ring in reform.’”
The campaign yielded 150,000 calls — less than half the number of a similar effort in October — and it prompted a backlash among online and local activists who had logged countless volunteer supporting Obama’s campaign and legislative agenda, but who felt betrayed by recent Democratic concessions in the health-care reform fight.
………
………while some OFA subscribers replied directly to the call-to-action e-mail with angry messages and others asked to be removed from the list entirely.
(emphasis mine)
I had myself removed from the OFA mailing list some months ago, and I do not regret this at all.
Additionally, the latest This Research 2000/Progressive Change Campaign Committee/Democracy for AmericaPoll shows that the public overwhelming opposes the personal mandates in the bill if there is no public option.
Respondents said that they supported a public option 59% to 31%, opposed a madate without a public option 33% to 56%, and that Obama didn’t fight Lieberman hard enough: 63% to 29%.
What a surprise. Hoocoodanode that the American public would object to a tax on breathing with the proceeds going to insurance company executive bonuses?
The real problem here is not that the bill sucks, the problem is that it’s increasingly obvious, as Senator Russ Feingold notes, that Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel thought that forcing people to buy overpriced insurance and overpriced pharmaceuticals was a good way to keep those industries from donating to Republicans, the average citizen be damned:
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.
“This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,” said Feingold. “I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect.”
It seems that Obama’s fetish with signing a bill with “healthcare reform” on it, to the exclusion of any principles, or the need to actually make things better, so he could have a trophy on the wall has bitten him on the butt.
DeForest Kelly put it best when he said, “It’s not enough! You didn’t care as long as you could hang your trophy on the wall. Well, it’s not on it, Captain Mr President, it’s in it.”
Stephen Colbert, Civil Libertarian
As I’ve said before, when the most cogent critiques of the excesses of our society come from comedians, we are in serious trouble:
Marcy Wheeler Captures Obamacare in a Nutshell
She draws analogies to Halliburton, and says that the health care bill, “would legally require a portion of Americans to pay more than 20% of the fruits of their labor to a private corporation in exchange for 70% of their health care costs.”
She is completely correct.
Go and read it.
Seriously, just go and read it.
Barack Obama: Hating te Gay Since 2007*
Yes, the group most likely to be thrown under a bus by Barack Obama, the LGBT community, just got thrown under the bus again going through back-flips to defy a Federal Judge’s order on this:
Because she is a federal employee, Golinski’s benefits are overseen by the Office of Personnel Management, which effectively serves as the human resources department for about 1.9 million federal workers nationwide. Golinski’s insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, declined to provide health benefits for her legal spouse, Amy Cunninghis, but ninth circuit chief judge Alex Kozinski said that violated the court’s guarantee of equal employment opportunity and that same-sex spouses were entitled to benefits under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan.
OPM attorneys consulted with the Department of Justice on this case, and the key to the case, according to the OPM official, was that Kozinski was presiding over an administrative proceeding that’s an internal employee grievance procedure — he was not serving in his official capacity as a ninth circuit judge.
I suppose that he’s better for Gays than the Christo-Fascist right, which was actively working for a death penalty for gays in Uganda until Rachael Maddow outed their murderous efforts, and that he figures that the LGBT community knows that it has no where else to go, but such a calculus is repugnant, immoral, and evil.
Let me quote Joseph Nye Welch:
Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
I support Howard Dean for President in 2012…………………Hell I support anyone who opposes Barack Obama in the primaries† in 2012.
*The Donnie McClurkin episode.
†This offer does not apply to Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, or Paris Glendenning. Note that side effects of an endorsement from Matthew Saroff can include:
- Losing elections
- Voting irregularities
- An extremely hostile press corps
- Embarrassing Youtube clips
Do not operate a political campaign under the influence of a Matthew Saroff endorsement, and avoid heavy consumption of alcohol.
Bankers Offer to Overpay on UK Bonus Tax
No, really, I am completely serious:
Some of the most senior bankers in Britain are planning to convince the Treasury to drop the new 50% tax on bonuses by dangling the prospect of a combined contribution to the exchequer of £2bn. The promise of the boost to Britain’s depleted coffers has been made in recent days and is almost four times the £550m Alistair Darling has said he intends to raise through his payroll tax on bonuses. The Chancellor has been met with anger in the City since he announced the one-off tax in his pre-budget report last week and been warned of a mass exodus of high-flying bankers to countries with a less punitive tax regime.
(emphasis mine)
I don’t know what is going on here, but when Britain’s own little vampire squids wrapped around the face of humanity,* decide that it’s time to overpay their taxes by a factor of 4, something very hinky going on.
Somewhere in these bonus pools that Chancellor Darling wants to tax is something bad….Something Really, Really, Really, Really bad.
We are talking something murder-for-hire and laundering drug money through child prostitutes bad. Something is rotten in the Street City,† and they, whoever exactly they are, very badly want it covered up.
*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm Goldman Sachs, The Great American Bubble Machine.
†The UK equivalent of Wall Street. Corrected my error on edit.
GM’s to Shut Down Saab Auto
Which is distinct from the aviation company, having been sold off to GM some years ago. It appears that the GM and bidder, Danish company Spyker, could not close the deal, and so it will be shut down.
I’m not sure what queered the potential deal, but I think that GM’s turnabout on Opel may make any potential investor leery of attempting to buy a brand from them.
After all, the “try to sell a division, take state aid to facilitate that sale, and then turn around and not sell and keep the aid,” 2-step does not make negotiating partners confident.
It’s a pity. It was something different in the auto industry.
Economics Update
Well, someone sliced and diced the numbers, and the unemployment picture continues to improve, with unemployment dropping in 36 States in November, though this U3, and not the more expansive, and to my mind more accurate U6.
We are also seeing a marked improvement in German business confidence this month.
In real estate, we have another shoe dropping, with Moody’s Investors Service stating its intend to review $143 billion in residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS) with an eye toward downgrading them, because their loss rates have continued to climb.
In currency and energy, the reversed the past few days’ course, with oil rising, and the dollar weakening, but these may just be traders unwinding positions that they accumulated over the past week.