Seriously, for only $50.00, people in the Kansas City area can get someone to take care of their pets while they go to heaven.
He’s an atheist, so there is no risk of him being taken too.
I wonder how much he made.
Makes me think of the Depeche Mode song, Blasphemous Rumor.
Because it appears to be a remarkable tool for heckling people.
I’m logged in, and I can search for stuff, but it appears that a lot of people who use it find a lot of utility that I simply miss.
Case in point: Pete Hoekstra (R-Clueless) got today’s talking point, which was that being a Republican in the current Congress was a lot like the Iranian protesters being beaten and shot:
Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House.
Great googly moogly, it’s stupid, and there are hundreds of parodies out there, including a blog which has LOLZed some of the tweets:
So, we have the inflation numbers for May, and the CPI was up 0.1% over April, and down 1.3% year over year, the biggest price decline since April, 1950.
The deflation would have been worse, but for the ramp up in retail gasoline prices, which continues on its tear, with prices having risen for 50 straight days.
In the mean time, banking is getting interesting, with S&P cutting ratings on 18 major banks, including Wells Fargo, Capital One, BB&T.
Additionally, you have credit default swaps (CDS) have shown their largest 3 day in over 3 months, which indicates that there is a belief that the risks of default on corporate bonds is getting worse.
The fact that treasuries have staged a mini-rally, with prices up and yields down, is either a measure of concern about corporate bonds, or relief about the low inflation numbers, I’m not sure which.
Real estate is full of mixed signals. Mortgage applications fell to a 7 month low, largely on the relatively high interest rates, but mortgage bond yields have been falling for a week, which would point toward lower rates in the future.
The low inflation is perceived, to be a good marker for recovery, which pushed the dollar down, because of less demand for the $US safe haven.
Oil is getting just plain flaky. It finished the day up, to $71.03/bbl, though it dropped like a stone earlier in the day following news that gasoline stockpiles rose by 3.4 million bbl this week.
I’m not certain where oil is going, but the recent volatility seems to indicate that it is going somewhere in the near term, probably up.
So, Obama is extending ‘some’ federal benefits to gay partners, and as Pam Spaulding notes, it’s awfully meaningless and ill conceived.
First, as is noted in the New York Times, but buried in the last ‘graph, it’s not intended to be meaningful change:
But administration officials said the timing of the announcement was intended to help contain the growing furor among gay rights groups. Several gay donors withdrew their sponsorship of a Democratic National Committee fund-raising event next week, where Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is scheduled to speak.
Further, it’s not even an executive order, but an administrative memorandum, so it expires when he leaves office.
It also does not cover health benefits, so what is left to cover? The only thing that comes to mind is relocation benefits.
And they are leaking the reasons to make clear that people don’t think that this is the start of a trend to support gay rights, it’s just a ploy to appease people before a fundraiser.
LBTG’s of America, welcome to under the bus, where supporters of government transparency, accountability for war crimes and torture for Bush and His Evil Minions™, and meaningful reform of the financial system were thrown months ago.
It’s not particularly comfortable here, and now it’s getting very crowded.
Yep, the Obama administration, and they are refusing to release visitor logs to the press:
The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn’t have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.
Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com’s request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.
**sigh**
And she has now testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the US Attorney firing scandal, so if she can be shown to have lied, or if she let something slip, it’s possible that this ball of string could unravel.
I’d give it about a 1 in 15 chance of working, but it would be nice if she help put Karl Rove in jail.
So the details of Obama’s regulatory plans for finance are leaking out, and the picture is not good.
The New York Times makes a big deal about how all the stake-holders were brought in and given a voice:
President Obama’s plan to reshape financial regulation, which he will unveil on Wednesday, is the product of weeks of meetings among government officials, financial experts, lawmakers, industry executives and lobbyists, many of whom were invited to help the White House draft the proposal.
…
In the last two weeks alone, the administration has heard from top executives from Goldman Sachs, MetLife, Allstate, JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Barclays, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Travelers, Prudential and Wells Fargo, among others. Administration officials also discussed the president’s plan with the top lobbyists at major financial trade associations in Washington.
So we ave the wrong and incompetent (financial experts), and the criminal and corrupt (industry executives and lobbyists) brought into the big tent in order to make one big happy family on the legislation.
As a result, they get very little right, they just rearrange the deck chairs, giving the Federal Reserve, the least accountable and most culpable of the banking regulators an expanded role, and create a “council of regulators,” which will serve to do nothing. It will be where meaningful regulation goes to die.
We already have a model for regulation that works: Roosevelt’s regulatory regime set up during the Depression.
It worked until the mid-1970s when Jimmy Carter started, and Ronald Reagan pushed to excess regulation.
About the only rule you need to add to all that is the rule that any new financial instrument is illegal until approved by a regulatory agency.
People may complain that this curtails “innovation,” but “innovation” is what got us here.
United States Senator John Ensign (R-NV), who screwed around on his wife with the wife of a staffer of his, and now appears to be admitting the affair only because his former staffer is trying to blackmail him.
Note that Ensign was a member of “Promise Keepers”, and called for Larry Craig to resign after his peccadilloes.
It’s got the Human Rights Campaign up in arms, finally.
They’ve been a captive of the Obama administration for some time, and it’s nice that they have found some guts.
What’s more it looks like people are bailing from the DNC’s very high profile $1000 a person gay fundraiser as a result.
Additionally, the New York Times blasted Obama on his call to defend the law, noting that Obama’s assertion that the DoJ was compelled to defend the statute is simply not true.
Because the judge dismissed the case over control of the New York State Senate, saying that the court, “shouldn’t intervene.”
So now, the question is, “Who blinks first.”
In a situation like this, I’d bet on the Democrats blinking first, because, well, they are Democrats.
Damn mess, it is.
It’s a day for mixed economic news, with credit card defaults rise hitting a record in May, which obviously bodes ill for consumer spending
On less personal metrics, Los Angeles and Long Beach port traffic was up over April, though it was still down year over year, and housing starts and housing permits jumped though much of this activity may simply be builders trying to beat the $8000 first time home buyer tax credit before it expires at the end of November.
Additionally, it looks like the financial markets are moving toward some instability, as the VIX, an index of market volatility, has moved above 30, which indicates a bumpy ride, and possibly a correction, in the markets.
Inflation is muted on both sides of the Atlantic, with last with wholesale prices inflation hitting only 0.2% in May, and inflation in the Euro Zone posting a 0% rate.
Meanwhile, continued comments by Russia about moving to an alternative reserve currency to the dollar pushed the dollar down, and that, along with the housing numbers, drove crude oil up for most of the day, though it settled down $0.15/bbl, basically treading water.
[late update]
US industrial output fell 1.1% in May, and the capacity utilization rate fell to 68.3%, the lowest number since records started being kept in 1967.
The Swedes have a society that I envy in a number of ways.
A social safety net, a policy of making contraception to teens 15 and above, and the latest case, the requirement that, “Sex education should form part of the curriculum for all adults attending Swedish for Immigrants (SFI) classes,” according to an official report given to the Minister for Health and Social Affairs.
This is a good policy. The idea of teaching people who may have come from very sexually repressive societies things like human sexuality, that clitoridectomy is wrong, and that homosexuality isn’t wrong, that women have the right to refuse sex to their husbands, contraception, etc.
Here is the part that had me spewing at my screen, though:
Milton said he thought it would be unnecessary for people from functioning democracies to sit through classes on sex education. He added however that finding a practical solution did not fall under his remit.
“Clearly people from the UK, US or Canada, for example, know these things already. But it can be sorted out on a case by case basis. It’s something that can be worked out locally,” he said.
While I cannot speak to the sexuality and sexual mores of either the Canadians or British, notwithstanding the, “no sex please, we’re British,” jokes, I find the idea that the United States, with the highest incidence of teen pregnancy, partner murder, etc. is somehow sexually enlightened as a society to be completely unsupported by reality.
Just ask Briston Palin.
Were US sexual mores more honest, and less punitive, we would be a far better place to live.
The House Ways and Means Committee is considering generating additional $37 billion in additional revenue by removing the deductiblity of direct to consumer advertising for prescription drugs.
The Chairman, Charles Rengel is talking about it favorably, and I think it does good on a number of levels:
Senator Hiram Monserrate, he’s the one who slashed his girlfriend’s face, not the one who took thousands of dollars of illegal campaign contributions and laundered money
, has returned to caucusing with the Democrats, because the old Dem Senate leader has been replaced.
So, it’s a 31-31 tie, and there is no Lieutenant Governor to break the impasse, that was Paterson pre-Eliot Spitzer, and quorum is 32, and the Dems are refusing to enter the chamber.
This is also in court, and the judge is looking for a compromise here, and so is refusing to rule, but he’s being optimistic. He’s going to have to rule.
Well, if you are looking for “green shoots”, the New York Fed Empire State Manufacturing Survey is not one of them, they got worse (see picture).
Additionally, the NAHB Builder Confidence fell a bit in June, from 16 to 15, with 50 being neutral, so that remains awful.
When one considers that delinquencies on commercial mortgage backed securities broke 2%, this is a state of mind that accurately reflects the reality out there.
Still, another measure of consumer confidence, this one from the University of Michigan, , which is marginally better, but still well below the 10 year average of 88.2.
We also have two relatively well known business have filed for bankruptcy reorganization, Six Flags amusement parks and the Extended Stay hotel chain.
Meanwhile, in Ireland, deflation has hit an annual rate of -4.7%, which is not surprising. There are a lot fewer dollars (Euros) chasing goods there, now that their bubble has popped.
Still, it appears that foreign investors are more confident about the future on a global level, as they have cut back on purchases of long term US securities, as the flight to safety slowed/reversed.
Meanwhile, we are starting to see some inflation from the recovery in oil prices, with import prices rising 1.3%, largely on oil, though they are down by 17.6% (!) year over year.
This has driven the price of retail gasoline up again, and are now up 63% for the year, though crude oil fell today.
The dollar was up, largely on statements by Russia that it should remain the world’s reserve currency.
I went up to New York at noon on Friday, to be up in time for Shabbos for my nephew Shlomo’s wedding to Shira, and juxtaposed with that, the car charger for my Palm® Centro™ went South, and first thing Monday morning headed back to Baltimore, heading directly to work.
The wedding, held Sunday evening, was a lot of fun, with lots of (non-mixed) dancing, though, as always, my experience with very Orthodox life events, particularly those that are done to New York standards, is that I feel a bit like I’m in a room full of aliens.
As Shlomo hails from Memphis, the band rolled out an Elvis impersonator at one point.
Steve Clemons, who knows about this stuff, has been talking to a number of his sources about what is going on in Iran, and that there is a real possibility of political assassination on both sides, along with levels of violence not seen since the early days of the Islamic revolution there.
Meanwhile, the Guardian is reporting that there are over 100,000 protesting the election in Terhran, despite it being banned by the Interior Ministry and that Iran’s “Supreme Leader”, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has now ordered an investigation into allegations of vote fraud, which seems to be quite a climb down for him, as he certified Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory only hours after the polls closed, as opposed to the 3 day period normally required.
There are some pretty good indications of vote fraud, at least according to Juan Cole.
He thinks that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is in control of the Interior Ministry, massively juiced his vote at the expense of his nearest rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi.
Cole’s argument, and I find it persuasive, is that the vote tallies are almost completely lacking the regional, ethnic, and class divides that have heretofore been a fixture in Iranian elections.
The results appear to be a crude and hurried fraud, which may very well because clerical authorities expected Ahmadinejad to win outright, and were caught flat-footed.
More defense contractor puffery, but it appears that some countries have expressed a significant interest in the Silent Eagel low observability program, most notably South Korea.
Of interest is the fact that Boeing has some real concerns about the US Government export license process being used to sabotage their sales process:
As for the F-15SE versus F-35 on frontal stealth, Jones says what Boeing is looking for is an assurance from the U.S. government that all competitors will be set at the same level of RCS reduction. Let the battle begin.
The translation here is that they are concerned that the JSF will be allowed for export at levels of stealth that the F-15SE would not be, because the USAF has no interest in the program, and doesn’t want it competing with the F-35.
Basically, an Obama DoJ appointee made motions in a court case challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, and while I guess that there is an obligation for them to defend statute, the filing invoked pedophilia, called gays freeloaders, and generally invoked every bigoted right-wing talking point out there.
On the stump, he condemned DOMA.
Even better, today is the 42nd anniversary of Loving v. Virginia.
I would not hold my breath on a repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
I told you so after the whole Donnie McClurkin thing.
