Yet another oil rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico.
Thankfully no fatalities.
Year: 2010
One Benefit of Dodd-Frank
It expands the jurisdiction of the SEC with regard to the malfeasance and misfeasance of the ratings agencies by allowing them to take actions that occurred in other countries:
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said it plans to use new financial laws to pursue credit-rating fraud initiated overseas after dropping a case against Moody’s Corp. amid uncertainty over its authority.
The SEC’s investigation found that a Moody’s ratings committee based in Europe refused to lower inflated grades on almost $1 billion of debt in 2007, the agency said in a report released yesterday. The committee declined to correct errors produced by a flawed ratings model out of concern for the firm’s reputation, the SEC report said.
“Uncertainty regarding a jurisdictional nexus between the U.S. and the relevant ratings conduct” led the SEC to drop the probe, the agency said in the report. That uncertainty was removed by the Dodd-Frank law, enacted in July, which clarifies the SEC’s power to sue for misconduct that has a substantial effect within the U.S., the report said.
Of course, a better alternative would be to change the laws that require the ratings agencies in the first place, as they have been a complete failure.
Another Reason to Fix IP Law
I thought that I did a good job of following patent law, but I was unaware that it is illegal, or more accurately a civil tort, for a company to claim a patent after it has expired.
So, if I were to get patent number 867-5309, someone could sue me for anticompetitive behavior if I were to continue to claim that my product were still protected.
Well, recent court cases have vastly expanded the law, taking this from a $500.00 award to a $500.00 award per offense, which means that it applies to each product shipped:
Marking a tube of toothpaste or paper cup with a patent that is out of date or doesn’t exist has been against the law for years. It is considered anticompetitive. Until late last year, the most a violator had to worry about was paying a $500 penalty for misleading the public.
But in December, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington ruled that defendants could be held responsible for up to $500 per offense.
DocumentLawyers for product manufacturers now fear clients are liable for up to $500 for every tube of mascara or box of garbage bags marked with an expired patent—an error that turns out to be quite common.
Now, I’m sure that the holders of patents will be lobbying Congress to fix this.
Call your Representative, and tell him, that absent meaningful change, which rolling back the expansion of patents (discovered genes, species, software, business plans, tax deductions, etc.) that have perverted the purpose of Patents in the past few decades.
Stricter rules on what is, and is not, “obvious”, as well as changes to make it harder for patent trolls would help too.
Google Bomb Time
PAYPAL IS THE WORST COMPANY IN THE WORLD
You know, it would help a lot if maybe, since they actually are a bank, that someone would actually regulate them as such.
Your Moment of Zen
Click for full size
He’s running on the Bad Hair Party ticket
Well, Jim Trafficant has been certified as a candidate for Congress.
He got enough signatures.
He is running as an independent.
Beam me up Scotty.*
It should make for an interesting campaign in 17th district this year.
*Please, JFGI.
Because Lying to the American Public is Post Partisan
I didn’t follow the commentary after Obama’s speech, hell, I didn’t follow the speech, I was busy driving back home to help out with a family emergency* but Rachel Maddow nails it:
“And to to have in this speech, as combat operations are ending, to have, as you point out Keith, the president not only not addressing the circumstances in which he we went to war, but these kind words for President Bush, describing his commitment to our security, despite the recklessness with which President Bush discarded that national security in favor of this war of choice, which only diminished our security, and is responsible probably for the Afghanistan war still going on today, for the depths of people who have died in Afghanistan after the time, after which that war would have ended had we not gone to Iraq, not to mention all of the people who died in Iraq,” Maddow continued.
“To talk about him having a demonstrated commitment to our security, having started this war on the terms on which he started it, — I mean, it’s beyond restraint from President Obama and anyone in the pro-Iraq war, pro-Bush camp who doesn’t feel like they’ve been given the greatest political present they never deserved was not listening to this speech,” she concluded.
I understand that Obama is not big into confronting people on wrongdoing, and I understand that he wants to look forward, not back, but he lied.
He sat in the oval office, and he lied through his teeth, because he is such conflict averse that he has to praise George W. Bush.
It wasn’t enough to not say anything, he felt compelled to lie to please people who will always hate him.
It’s truly pathological.
*Wife and kids are fine, but there are some health issues amongst the extended family.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?!?
Some guy straps suspicious canisters to his chest and takes hostages at the headquarters for the Discovery Channel in Silver Spring, MD, because he does not like their programming?
The police fatally shot him, which is an unsurprising development.
Even less surprising is that his hosting service pulled his web page, (good) and replaced it with an add for their services (tacky).
There is a lot of “te crazy” out there this summer.
Not Enough Bullets: CEO Pay Disclosure Edition
What Cee Lo Green Said (NSFW)
It looks like the overpaid CEOs have decided that telling shareholders just how overpaid they are is an unreasonable burden:
US companies face a “logistical nightmare” from a new rule forcing them to disclose the ratio between their chief executive’s pay package and that of the typical employee, lawyers have warned.
The mandatory disclosure will provide ammunition for activists seeking to target perceived examples of excessive pay and perks. The law taps into public anger at the increasing disparity between the faltering incomes of middle America and the largely recession-proof multimillion-dollar remuneration of the typical corporate chief.
S&P 500 chief executives last year received median pay packages of $7.5m, according to executive compensation research firm Equilar. By comparison, official statistics show the average private sector employee was paid just over $40,000.
If you cannot determine the number of employees, and your total payroll (total payroll $/number of employees=average pay) in under 10 minutes, then you aren’t doing your f^%$ing job.
Yes, I know that the actual number is the median salary, so that should only take 15 minutes.
The real problem is not the ratio, it’s that they don’t want the shareholders, who, you know, actually own the damn company, to know how much they are getting paid.
It’s f%$#s like this that make me say to people, “If you plan on going postal, take out upper management first.”
It’s Over in Alaska
This actually improves the chances of the Democratic candidate, Sitka Mayor Scott McAdams, from “snowballs chance in hell” to long shot candidate.
Your Moment of Geek
Sometimes Someone Just Nails It
Case in point, whoever coined the term “Whitestock” for the Glenn Beck hate-a-thong, and Driftglass for riffing on the Woodstock logo.
Truth be told, not only did I miss the broadcast of Whitestock, but I am trying to avoid all rebroadcasts and Youtubes of same.
Mission Accomplished Lite
I listened to the speech on the road (long story), so I had to pay attention, as opposed to taking notes, and what I discovered was that I really don’t like listening to him, while he proclaims that maintenance of tens of thousands of troops, and permanent and extensive bases, somehow mean that the war is over.
Meh.
Someone Has a Clue
Specifically, Laura Tyson, who is calling for another round of stimulus.
Of course, you can find a lot of people calling for another round of stimulus, but what makes Ms. Tyson different from people like Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman, and Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is the fact that people at the White House actually listen to her, she is a member of the White House’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
Of course, that paragraph raises a question for me: Why is the White House studiously freezing out people like Nobel Prize winning economists Krugman and Stiglitz?
It would seem to me that these are the sort of people one should listen to.
The Term is Ethnic Cleansing
2 Words Left Unsaid
Rachel Maddow talks about the housing situation in New Orleans, and makes the point that the elimination of much of the subsidized housing for the poor was intended to reduce the availability of housing for the poor, and generally black, residents of the Crescent City.
John Aravosis references Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine,” but there is a far uglier term for this: Ethnic cleansing.
Economics Update
The lede has to be the ADP report showing that private employers cut 10,000 jobs in August.
Obviously, we will get the official numbers from the Feds on Friday.
On the other hand, manufacturing grew more than expected in August.
It’s kind of a mixed bag news day, with consumer spending increasing, but real incomes fell for the first time in over 6 months and the Conference Board’s consumer confidence beat estimates.
I’m not sure exactly what they are spending money on though, because car sales had the weakest August in 27 years, which would imply an aversion to big ticket purchases.
In real estate, the Case-Shiller home price index rose in June, though that’s probably more a result of the now-expired tax credit than anything else, mortgage applications rose slightly, though, unsurprisingly, more so for refinance than it did for home purchases, and construction spending was significantly lower than estimates.
In the “these are real lives that are being f%$#ed with” category, bankruptcy filings fell in August, though they still remain at a near 5 years high.
Finally, Canada’s economy slowed significantly in the 2nd quarter.
Domestic Terrorism
Some terrorist torched construction equipment at the sight of the future mosque in Murfreesboro, TN, and when parishioners came by to survey the damage, someone took shots at them.
What should happen right now is that the FBI and ATF should flooding the zone and go full patriot act on anyone they catch.
It’s what Clinton should have done on the abortion clinic bombers who later became assassins, because arresting white folks for terrorism is icky, and besides, Barack Obama is afraid that people will think that he is a Muslim if he goes after white terrorists.
Doubling Down on the Stupid
It’s one of Barack Obama’s Stupid Minions™, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan said on the Sunday talk shows that a renewal of the new home buyer tax credit might be coming back.
This is unbelievably stupid on a number of levels. First people who are considering buying homes will hold off, waiting for the tax credit, second, it’s really bad policy, that cost taxpayers something like $80K for each additional home sold.
Now there have been tepid denials from HUD, but this sort of crap should not be happening.
Great Googly Moogly.
H/t Atrios.
We Are F%$#ing Doomed
Thanks, Barry!
The latest Gallup poll is out with the generic Congressional ballot, and Republicans have a 10% lead, the highest since Gallup started running this poll in 1942!
You know, continuing with Bush’s Kangaroo courts and surveillance state, selling out homeowners to banks, and ranting against your party are working really well, aren’t they?
If we don’t end up with Boehner as speaker, I would be very surprised.
[on edit]
It’s worse than I thought. It’s not a daily tracking pool, it’s a weekly.
At this rate, we will lose the Senate too.
The Best Critique, and the Best Path Forward, I’ve Yet Seen on Obama
Ian Welsh has a must read essay.
What he suggests that Obama could have done without having to consult Congress at all:
- Start negotiations with a maximalist position, as opposed the current mode of giving the store away before anyone sits down.
- Ending the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell discharges
- Not made the HAMP a fraud perpetrated against desperate home owners.
- Halting the Kangaroo courts at Gitmo.
- Not starting the cat food commission after Congress voted it down.
Going forward, he suggests that Obama use the authority granted him under the Federal Reserve act, which allows him to remove governors for cause and recess appoint their replacements, and take the the distressed debt that the FED holds, and sell it.
This would force the banks to mark their own assets to the now established market value, which makes them insolvent, and which would mean that FDIC and related agencies could nationalize them.
I like this last one, but it ain’t never gonna happen.
Go read the article though, it’s very good.
Matt Taibbi has a Point
I would have invoked Der Stürmer, and encouraged invocations of Godwin’s law, but Matt Taibbi is right, Fox News, and their fellow travellers are much closer to Radio Rwanda than they are to Julius Streicher’s oervre:
A lot of Tea Party anger is driven by real local issues — where I live in central Jersey, for instance, there are a lot of pissed-off white people crowing over a nutty state supreme court case in which a Central American drunk driver got off because cops didn’t explain the consequences of refusing a breathalyzer in his native Spanish. But without the constant reinforcement of national 24-hour media, which has taken these isolated cases and presented them as a coast-to-coast massive conspiracy, the rage over stories like this would never reach the levels we’re seeing.
In fact if you follow Fox News and the Limbaugh/Hannity afternoon radio crew, this summer’s blowout has almost seemed like an intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts “warning” Hutus that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in “self-defense.” A sample of some of the stuff we’ve seen and heard on the air this year:
- On July 12, Glenn Beck implied that the Obama government was going to aid the New Black Panther Party in starting a race war, with the ultimate aim of killing white babies. “They want a race war. We must be peaceful people. They are going to poke, and poke, and poke, and our government is going to stand by and let them do it.” He also said that “we must take the role of Martin Luther King, because I do not believe that Martin Luther King believed in, ‘Kill all white babies.'”
- CNN contributor and Redstate.com writer Erick Erickson, on the Panther mess: “Republican candidates nationwide should seize on this issue. The Democrats are giving a pass to radicals who advocate killing white kids in the name of racial justice and who try to block voters from the polls.”
- On July 6, the Washington Times columnist J. Christian Adams wrote an editorial insisting that “top [Obama] appointees have allowed and even encouraged race-based enforcement as either tacit or open policy,” marking one of what would become many assertions by commentators that the Obama administration was no longer interested in protecting the rights of white people. “The Bush Civil Rights Division was willing to protect all Americans from racial discrimination,” Adams wrote. “During the Obama years, the Holder years, only some Americans will be protected.”
- July 12: Rush Limbaugh says Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder “protect and represent” the New Black Panther party.
- July 28: Rush says Supreme Court decision on 1070 strips Arizonans of their rights to defend themselves against an “invasion”: “I guess the judge is saying it’s not in the public interest for Arizona to try to defend itself from an invasion. I don’t know how you look at this with any sort of common sense and come to the ruling this woman came to.” That same day, Rush says this: “Muslim terrorists are going to have a field day in Arizona. You cannot ask them where they’re from. You cannot even act like we know where they’re from. You cannot ask them for their papers. We can ask you for yours. Not them.”
- July 29: The Washington Times asks “Should Arizona Secede?” and says the Supreme Court “is unilaterally disarming the people of Arizona in the face of a dangerous enemy” with the aim of creating a “socialist superstate.” The paper writes: “The choice is becoming starkly apparent: devolution or dissolution.”
- July 29, Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy continues the Radio Rwanda theme, saying, “If the feds won’t protect the people and Governor Brewer can’t protect her citizens, what are the people of Arizona supposed to do?”
There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.
(emphasis mine)
There are some deeply evil people out there who are looking to leverage bigotry, racism, and fear for their own profit and power.
Taibbi calls for a boycott, saying that he’d, “Like to see at least one firm get blown out of business as a consequence of financially supporting the network that is telling America that its black president wants to kill white babies,” but he misses a part of the dynamic with his call to action: It isn’t that Fox News, and probably the rest of the media outlets, are driven by cynical economic or political goals, it’s that many of them, are bed wetting cowards like Roger Ailes, and they truly live their lives in terror.
As to the politicians stoking this matter, it’s pretty clear that they (Newt) are looking at this through the prism of political advantage though.
I won’t muse on the mental processes of Sarah Palin, that way lies me huddled on the floor, covered in mayonnaise, and gibbering, “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”