Month: February 2011

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!!

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And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

  1. Habersham Bank, Clarkesville, GA
  2. Citizens Bank of Effingham, Springfield, GA
  3. Charter Oak Bank, Napa, CA
  4. San Luis Trust Bank, FSB, San Luis Obispo, CA ⇐ I missed this one last night.

Full FDIC list

And here are the credit union closings:

  1. Family First Federal Credit Union, Orem, UT

Full NCUA list

So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

And since it’s early in the year, here is a detail of the first few weeks:

This year is shaping up a LOT like last year so far.  It’s a bit early to be definitive, but it does look like bank failures are tracking ahead of what we saw at this point last year.

Not Enough Bullets

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So, BP is whining because it thinks that Ken Feinberg’s slow walking of meager settlements is too generous:

In the eight months since Kenneth R. Feinberg took over the $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, he has been attacked by many of those filing claims and by coastal state politicians who argue that the process is opaque, arbitrary and slow. Many of them have also argued that Mr. Feinberg’s recently published estimates of future damage to those in the gulf are too optimistic, and thus his offer of compensation in a final settlement is too low.

Now he is getting complaints from another quarter: BP.

The oil giant is arguing that if anything, Mr. Feinberg’s proposed settlements are too generous. The planned payments far exceed the extent of likely future damages because they overstate the potential for future losses, the company insists in a strongly worded 24-page document that was posted on the fund’s Web site Thursday morning.

And after that, BP murdered its parents, and asked for mercy because it was an orphan.

Heck of a Job Boehner

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As part of their continuing resolution, the GOP have voted to defund planned parenthood, the healthcare law, gutting the social security administration, and forbidding the EPA from regulating mercury pollution.

This was all pretty standard. Obama has threatened a veto, and Reid has said that it will never see the light of day, so they can get in their votes, and not see much blowback.

What surprises me though is that they lost on a vote to defund the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB):

Sixty House Republicans joined with every Democrat to beat back an anti-union amendment on Thursday that would have defunded the National Labor Relations Board, a New Deal-era independent agency that arbitrates labor disputes. The sixty defections come as the Midwest GOP governors in Wisconsin and Ohio are launching direct assaults on public employee unions.

Nine high-ranking Republican members of the Education and the Workforce Committee broke with their party to support the agency, including the chairman, Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.). GOP hostility toward organized labor is not a new phenomenon, but the hostility has intensified since Republicans took control of the House; the party went so far as to rename what had been called the Education and Labor Committee, replacing “labor” with “the workforce.”

The fact that, “piling up losses in a chamber where the majority party typically rules with an iron fist,” is telling.

The Republican Party has been anti-union since Abraham Lincoln.  Support for organized labor one of the things that (used to) distinguish between conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans.

Still the fact that Boehner, and  Cantor could not successfully whip the vote on this is telling.

Boehner is clearly the weakest house speaker in decades, possibly since Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neil 1981-3.

My guess is that the nut job in Wisconsin is spooking some of the Republicans in Wisconsin, and neighboring, states.

Wisconsin is beginning to look a lot like MacArthur’s assault on the bonus army, and some people on the ‘Phant side realize that this will not end well.

Judge Who Accepted Bribes to Jail Children is Convicted

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Mark Ciavarella, Jr. who took kickbacks from private prisons to sentence children to confinement, has been found guilty of racketeering, money-laundering conspiracy, fraud and filing false income tax returns, though not of bribery:

A federal jury on Friday found a former Pennsylvania judge guilty in a so-called kids-for-cash scheme, in which he took money in exchange for sending juvenile offenders to for-profit detention centers.

………

The jury found him not guilty, however, of seven counts of extortion and 10 counts of bribery.

The former judge faces a maximum sentence of 157 years in prison. The jury also ruled he must forfeit $997,600.

I think that the jury felt that they had to find proof that he would not have sent these kids away if he hadn’t been paid, i.e. what was in his head at the time, which is impossible.

Maybe I’m a bit old fashioned, but the fact that hid the money, that whole money laundering and racketeering bit, is pretty good evidence that he knew what he was doing is illegal, but I wasn’t in the court room.

Here is hoping that the judge sentences him to the max.  What Ciavarella did was truly beneath contempt.

Wisconsin Seems Even More Like Egypt Now……

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So, we are seeing huge, and growing, protests, with a teacher sickout to attend the protests growing, it has now shuttered both the Madison and Milwaukee school systems, and the Democrats in the state Senate have left the state, to prevent quorum for voting on the bill, while, in a bit of traditional religious silliness, religious leaders are offering sanctuary for them if they return to the state:

Religious leaders in Illinois and Wisconsin are offering sanctuary to Wisconsin Democrats as they boycott a vote on a Republican bill that would strip public workers of nearly all their collective bargaining rights.

Actually though the most surprising development is that Barack Obama has actually felt the need to make a declarative statement on all this, as opposed to trying to make nice, and split the difference, calling it an, “assault on unions.”

What, Obama isn’t trying to split the difference and being hopey-changey?  That’s like a f%$#ing sign of the f%$#ing apocalypse.

It would be nice if we would see some more of this, because the Republicans aren’t getting any more reasonable in response to his standard modus operandi.

Just Who, and What, Is Raymond Davis

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He’s currently being investigated for a double murder in Lahore, Pakistan, and the US government is claiming that he has diplomatic immunity, and so must be released.

There are a number of peculiarities here. As constitutional lawyer
Scott Horton notes, the issuance of a diplomatic passport does not convey diplomatic immunity, the host country formally recognize and accept their diplomatic status.

Also, it’s unclear if he was a diplomatic or a consular officer and if the latter, then the charge, double murder, would certainly not be covered by any immunity.

In fact, immunity might not apply in either case, since the Vienna convention does not apply to serious crimes, like, for example, murder.

Additionally, thanks Dave Lindorff of Eurasia review for this, it appears that Mr. Davis was not a consular or embassy employee, but rather the employee of a defunct security firm, Hyperion Protective Consultants, LLC, which makes his status even more suspicious.

Also, when caught, he had at least two guns in his car, a number of cell phones and batteries, and a telescope.

Linhoff also reports that the two Pakistanis were shot in the back, and that he has received reports that they were not just two guys on a motorbike, but in fact operatives of Pakistan’s security service, the ISI.

Given the circumstances, and the fact that a heavily armed strike team in the SUV rushing from the US consulate to try to snatch him from police immediately following the incident, and running down and killing a person in the process, I would be inclined to believe that whatever he was doing there had nothing to do with diplomacy.

One interesting factoid in all of this is that his arrest has corresponded to an unusual lull in drone strikes, which would be consistent with his having a senior managerial role in those operations:

A mysterious halt to U.S Predator strikes on Pakistan after the Raymond Davis incident in Lahore has led to intense speculation the American “diplomat” was connected to the Drone program even as Washington and Islamabad are going eyeball-to-eyeball over his status.

Davis, 36, was apprehended by Pakistani police after he shot dead two Pakistanis on a busy Lahore thoroughfare on January 27, four days after the last drone U.S Drone strike in Pakistan. There has not been a single strike in the 25 days since then, making it the third-longest period of inactivity since the U.S ramped up the Predator program to take out terrorists infesting Pakistan’s frontier regions, according to Long War Journal (LWJ), a blog that tracks U.S Predator attacks.

Speculation is now rife that Davis was somehow connected to the Predator program since he was reportedly carrying a GPS, telescope, camera and assorted equipment not usually associated with thoroughbred diplomats. Pakistani authorities have also accused him of unauthorized travels to the Frontier region and being in touch with extremist elements in Waziristan, which suggests he might have been coordinating the attacks with U.S moles in the region.

While Davis claimed that he shot the two Pakistanis in self-defense when they were trying to rob him, some reports have said they were ISI tails assigned to follow him because the Pakistani intelligence felt he had crossed certain unspecified “red lines.” Those red lines may have involved discovering the Pakistani establishment’s links with terrorists group, a pursuit which led to the death of Wall Street Journalist Danny Pearl.

I’m thinking that Hyperion Protective Consultants, LLC, is about as real as Brewster-Jennings was for Valerie Plame, and that he works for the CIA, some other TLA (three letter agency), or a contractor hired by some arm of the US government.

It would explain why heads have been exploding at Foggy Bottom (State), and probably Langley (CIA) as well, for the past few weeks.

Nothing to See Here, Move Along…

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The National Academy of Sciences has reviewed the FBI’s forensic claims regarding Bruce Ivins and the Anthrax mailing investigation, and has politely called bullsh%$ on this:

The National Academy of Sciences is just out with a 190-page review [1] of the forensic science behind the FBI’s investigation of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks. The takeaway: Some of the evidence cited to identify Army microbiologist Bruce E. Ivins as the perpetrator isn’t as conclusive as the FBI has claimed.

In particular, the panel of experts said it “did not definitively demonstrate” that the source of the anthrax was spores taken from a flask controlled by Ivins, a microbiologist who did vaccine research at the U.S. Army Institute for Medical Research of Infection Diseases in Maryland. Nor did scientific data generated for the FBI “rule out other sources” for the anthrax, the panel’s report says.

Considering the record on the investigation, the you can review their tactics to the prior “person of interest” in this situation (Stephen Hatfill, who was exonerated and received a cash settlement) and be rather surprised that he didn’t top himself as well.

Unsurprising News of the Day

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Bernie Madoff is now saying that the banks were complicit or willfully blind with regard to his Ponzi scheme:

In his first interview for publication since his arrest in December 2008, Mr. Madoff — looking noticeably thinner and rumpled in khaki prison garb — maintained that family members knew nothing about his crimes.

But during a private two-hour interview in a visitor room here on Tuesday, and in earlier e-mail exchanges, he asserted that unidentified banks and hedge funds were somehow “complicit” in his elaborate fraud, an about-face from earlier claims that he was the only person involved.

………

In many ways, however, Mr. Madoff seemed unchanged. He spoke with great intensity and fluency about his dealings with various banks and hedge funds, pointing to their “willful blindness” and their failure to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information available to them.

“They had to know,” Mr. Madoff said. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’ ”

There’s a surprise.

The banks generated big fees by sending their customers to someone that they thought might not be on the up and up, and “surprise”, they made a point of not turning over the rocks?

Why is only Bernie going to jail?

How Is Wisconsin Like Egypt?

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You know, I’m not entirely sure how they are alike, but recently elected wingnut governor Scott Walker looks like he might be joining Hosni Mubarak is some form of internal exile soon.

You see, in his new budget, he proposed completely gutting the right of public sector employees to unionize, forbidding unions from requiring that dues be paid, forbidding them from negotiating about pensions, healthcare, or even asking for a pay hike above that of inflation, and requiring an annual recertification vote.

He then followed this up with a threat to use the national guard against strikers, and there were somewhere between 10 and 30 thousand protesters in the capital, Madison.

We are already hearing calls for Walker to be recalled, but state law requires that a year follow his swearing in before petitions can be turned in, so that’s off the table for about 10½ more months.

Because it Pisses off Democrats. That’s why.

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Medicare fraudster, and Florida governor, Rick Scott has decided to cancel a high speed rail project between Orlando and Tampa Florida:

Florida’s congressional delegation, state officials and Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer are pushing back against Gov. Rick Scott’s decision Wednesday to reject $2.4 billion in federal stimulus money to build a high-speed train between Orlando and Tampa.

“This is a century-type decision that needs to be vetted,” Dyer said. “I don’t think it was given a fair hearing.”

U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood intends to meet either in person or by phone Friday with Florida elected officials, likely including Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and Reps. John Mica, R-Winter Park, and Corrine Brown, D-Jacksonville, to discuss ways of keeping the project alive even as California, New York and Washington state offered to take some of the money.

And some officials were bitterly critical of Scott for pulling the plug even before bids had gone out to build the 84-mile system. Eight consortia of companies from 11 countries had indicated they would be willing to put up some or all of the state’s $280 million share of the project, while the bid terms would have required them to absorb cost overruns and any operating losses for 20 years.

So, let’s look at this, it would:

  • Cost the state little or no money.
  • Losses and cost overruns are someone else’s problem.
  • Disney wanted it for their Disney World Theme park.
  • It would have created 23,000 construction jobs.

So, why did he cancel it?  Because in so doing, he’s pissing off Democrats and liberals.

When looking at Republican policy making, one needs to realize that there is an imperative, pissing off Democrats, that frequently subordinates good policy, and sometimes even good politics.

Basically, Republicans are dicks.

No, they aren’t dicks, a dick has a head.

The Only Answer is that Some People Are Above the Law

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The great Matt Taibbi Asks, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?,” and he doesn’t have an answer per se, but he does explain the consequences of the fact that the banksters are untouchable:

The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don’t feel real; you don’t see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They’re crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let’s steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They’re attacking the very definition of property — which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone’s claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality.

This is the America that we live in, and Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner like it that way.

It really is a pity that the other side is so thoroughly contemptible, because there appears to be no good option.

Read the whole thing.

Just When You Thought that Republicans Could Not Get Any More Evil…

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Republicans in South Dakata are pushing a law to legalize the murder of abortion providers:

A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state’s GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.

Jeebus.

I don’t mean to state the obvious, but it’s pretty clear that there no middle ground here to negotiate. You would sooner get meaningful consensus from Osama bin Laden.

Props to Obama on Generic Drugs

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Obama’s budget achieves a fair amount of costs savings by shortening the exclusivity period for drugs and ending payments from big pharma to generic drug manufacturers not to manufacture their drugs:

Big pharmaceutical companies could face increased competition from generic drugmakers under two proposals put forth by the Obama administration on Monday despite earlier savings extracted from drugmakers as part of last year’s healthcare law.

President Barack Obama, as part of his 2012 budget proposal, called for cutting the number of years drugmakers could exclusively market brand-name biologic drugs to 7 years from 12.

He also set his sights on ending controversial “pay-for-delay” deals that affect traditional, chemical drugs by giving the U.S. Federal Trade Commission power to block them. Under such pacts, brand-name and generic drugmakers settle patent challenges with payoffs that delay lower-cost rivals from reaching the market.

I’d feel a little bit better about this if he also wasn’t cutting home heating aid to the poor in the same budget though.

Not Enough Bullets

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No, but apparently we look like a bitch


This episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the letter “B”, as in bullet, and banker …

So, Citi’s CEO, the incomparably incompetent Vikram Pandit, is saying that if if regulators reign in debit card fees, they will have to stick it to poor people:

U.S. banks may cut their services to the poorest Americans as a result of new U.S. financial regulations, including federal caps on debit card processing fees, Citigroup Chief Executive Vikram Pandit said Tuesday.

New U.S. laws, including the Dodd-Frank financial regulation act passed last year, “will change banking,” Pandit said in prepared remarks due to be delivered at an investors’ conference in New York Tuesday.

This makes me want to go all Samuel L. Jackson/Pulp Fiction on his ass …… OK, I want to go all Samuel L. Jackson/Pulp Fiction on his ass dressed in an Elmo suit, but that last bit is just me …… Or at least I think (hope) that the last bit is just me.

Let’s be clear here the debit card fees are a fee levied disproportionately on the poor, and he’s saying that if he can’t f%$# the poor like a bitch, then he won’t serve them?

This guy has a job because he f%$#ed so badly no one wants to take his job, because they would have to fix his mess, and so he, and the whole rotten bank, live off of TARP money, back door Treasury Department subsidies, and the largess of “Helicopter” Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve, and he has the nerve to suggest that he is anything but a leech at the public tit.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

Shirley Sharrod Finally Sues Andrew Breitbart

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About damn time:

Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod has filed a lawsuit against conservative firebrand and web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. The suit stems from the notorious video Breitbart posted online last year, showing an out-of-context excerpt from a speech Sherrod gave to the NAACP Freedom Fund in March 2010. The clip suggested she had used her position at the Department of Agriculture to discriminate against white farmers. The media devoured the Breitbart’s version of story so voraciously that the NAACP denounced Sherrod and the Obama administration fired her. The charge was, in fact, entirely untrue.

Sherrod argues in the lawsuit that the clip “damaged her reputation and prevented her from continuing her work.” Breitbart, meanwhile, denounced the suit, saying he “categorically rejects the transparent effort to chill his constitutionally protected free speech.”

Let’s be clear, as a public official at the time, Shirley Sharrod has a very high burden of proof, so I do not know her chances of prevailing, but even if she wins, it is highly unlikely that she will get anything unless she takes action in advance to ensure that the real assets of his operations are secure.

His real assets would walk out of his office tommorow, on a memory stick, we are talking about things like his subscriber database, so if I were her lawyer, I would suggest that she move to have the court appoint a special master to oversee this data, to ensure that it doesn’t walk out the door.

Then again, I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, Dammit.*

*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

God Bless The Onion

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Don’t be drinking anything when you read the rest of This:

U.S. Authorities Can’t Really Fault Al-Qaeda For Deadly Bombing Of Carnival Cruise Ship
‘Those Things Represent Everything That’s Wrong With America,’ Officials Say

February 9, 2011 | ISSUE 47•06

WASHINGTON—Following Monday’s deadly terrorist attack on a Carnival Cruise Line ship, U.S. officials have had difficulty issuing a stern condemnation of the incident, saying that while any act of terrorism is inexcusable, they couldn’t completely blame al-Qaeda for wanting to blow up what is essentially a giant, floating symbol of everything that is truly god-awful about America.

………

OMFSM, this is funny!

Vasimr Electric Propulsion System Heading Out to ISS

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NASA will be sending the variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket (Vasimr) up to the International Space Station (Paid subscription required) for tests and validation. (Earlier posts)

It’s expected to put out about 5.7 Netwons, about a pound, with an ISP (fuel economy) of somewhere between 10 and 30 times that of chemical propellants.

While a pound does not seem like much thrust, it’s more than enough for station keeping and orbital, or for that matter interplanetary, maneuvering, as you can get the thrust for months, rather than hours, and compared to other electric thrusters systems, like the ion drive used on the Dawn Probe, it provides a lot more thrust. (Dawn has a thrust of only 90mN, about 1/50 that of the Vasimr).