Month: October 2011

It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Guy

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What part of “unprovoked assault” don’t you get?

It turns out that Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, who achieved his 15 minutes of fame because of his going postal on protestors with pepper spray, is now facing disciplinary charges:

A New York police commander who pepper-sprayed protesters during the opening days of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations last month faces an internal disciplinary charge that could cost him 10 vacation days, the police said Tuesday.

The commander, Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, has been given a so-called command discipline, according to a law enforcement official. Officials said investigators found that the inspector ran afoul of Police Department rules for the use of the spray. The department’s patrol guide, its policy manual, says pepper spray should be used primarily to arrest a suspect who is resisting arrest, or for protection; it does allow for its use in “disorder control,” but only by officers with special training.

The Internal Affairs Bureau reviewed the episode and found that Inspector Bologna “used pepper spray outside departmental guidelines,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. He declined to elaborate.

The inspector can accept the charge and plead guilty, or he can opt for a departmental trial. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly is the ultimate arbiter of punishment in such matters and has wide leeway in his decisions.

This is a nice start, but this was assault and battery under color of his badge.

DA Vance should be bringing this before a grand jury.

Goldman May Drop Bank Status ………

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At least until the next time that they need to be bailed out by the Treasury and Federal Reserve.

It seems that they don’t like the Volker rule:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Morgan Stanley may consider dropping their status as bank holding companies to avoid expenses tied to the Volcker rule, said David Hilder, an analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group LLP.

The rule in its current form would impose costs on lenders and drive capital to non-bank market makers, causing the two New York-based firms to consider whether to stop being banks, Hilder said in a note yesterday, when four regulatory agencies issued a 298-page draft of the rule for public comment.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were the biggest U.S. securities firms before they converted to bank holding companies after the September 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Both became subject to regulation by the Federal Reserve and won access to central bank programs such as the discount window, which are designed to protect deposit-taking banks.

“The regulators have proposed a massive new compliance burden on banks to prove that their market-making activities are just that, and not proprietary trading in disguise,” wrote Hilder, who’s based in New York. “If these regulations are adopted in anything close to their proposed form, there will be large additional costs imposed on banks as market-makers that will not apply to market-makers not owned by banks.”

Does anyone think that the Vampire Squid isn’t going to get bailed out when they f%$# themselves up again?

Oh Sh%$!!!!

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They’ve found radiation spikes in Tokyo neighborhoods:

An extraordinarily high level of radiation was detected in one spot in a central Tokyo residential district Thursday, prompting the local government to cordon off the small area, local officials said.

Radiation levels were higher in Tokyo’s Setagaya ward than in the evacuation area around the badly damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, according to ward Mayor Nobuto Hosaka.

“We are shocked to see such high radiation level was detected in our neighborhood. We cannot leave it as is,” Hosaka told reporters.

And it’s not just Tokyo, as authorities “detected 40,200 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram of sediment collected from one part of a roadside ditch,” over 8x the limit for rice fields.

H/t Barry Ritholtz, who also notes the following:

The Japanese government’s response? To stop testing for plutonium, and to tell people they shouldn’t use geiger counters to test for themselves.

The Japanese government has been caught blatantly under-reporting radiation levels in general, and Japanese professors are starting to fear for Japan’s future.

I’m feeling so much better now.

Banks are Demolishing Homes Now

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Yes, it’s central Cleveland, but it’s happening elsewhere, and with a real turn around in house prices years away, this will spread:

Cleveland — The sight of excavators tearing down vacant buildings has become common in this foreclosure-ravaged city, where the housing crisis hit early and hard. But the story behind the recent wave of demolitions is novel — and cities around the country are taking notice.

A handful of the nation’s largest banks have begun giving away scores of properties that are abandoned or otherwise at risk of languishing indefinitely and further dragging down already depressed neighborhoods.

The banks have even been footing the bill for the demolitions — as much as $7,500 a pop. Four years into the housing crisis, the ongoing expense of upkeep and taxes, along with costly code violations and the price of marketing the properties, has saddled banks with a heavy burden. It often has become cheaper to knock down decaying homes no one wants.

The thing is that as bad as it is in the cities, when this happens in the suburbs, and the lifestyle in the far suburbs is not sustainable, there won’t be the any sort of useful application for the abandoned land, the article mentions land banks creating things like common spaces and community gardens, are just going to sit and decay.

It will be like some suburban Cyberpunk novel.

The First Shoe Drops for Obama Care

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The Obama administration just shut down the CLASS long term health insurance program:

A long-term disability care program shepherded into the U.S. health overhaul by Senator Edward Kennedy before his death was canceled as financially unsustainable by health secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Republicans opposed the so-called Class Act that created the program. It will be indefinitely suspended, Sebelius said today in a statement, because the program isn’t likely to generate enough revenue to pay for its benefits.

Democrats led by Kennedy created the plan to help people disabled by illness or accident. By paying premiums while employed, beneficiaries would be eligible after five years for at least $50 a day toward health and support services provided at home. The program was billed as paying for itself.

“I do not see a viable path forward for Class implementation at this time,” Sebelius said in a letter to congressional leaders.

Republicans celebrated the program’s demise, calling it misguided policy used as a financial gimmick to reduce cost estimates of the health law. At the time, the Congressional Budget Office subtracted $70 billion from the cost of the law thanks to Class — which stands for Community Living Assistance Services and Supports — contributing to $143 billion in total savings, because the program’s premiums would exceed benefits over its first decade.

This is what happens when you try to create a program that accommodates the sources of the problem (insurance companies and for-profit healthcare), because you lack the courage, and quite frankly the interest, in actually fixing the system, as opposed to just slapping the label “Healthcare Reform” on half measures.

The fact that this will add $70 billion over the next ten years to the cost of healthcare reform will lend credence to Republican attacks in the 2012 campaign season.

This is why half measures, particularly when they did not serve to secure meaningful bipartisan support, create more than just bad policy, they create bad politics.

About Time…

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It look like Prosecutors have finally gotten the guts to prosecute a bishop for concealing child abuse:

The first U.S. bishop criminally charged with sheltering an abusive clergyman has been accused of failing to protect children after he and his diocese waited five months to tell police about hundreds of images of child pornography discovered on a priest’s computer, authorities said.

Bishop Robert Finn and the Kansas City-St. Joseph Catholic Diocese have pleaded not guilty on one count each of failing to report suspected child abuse, officials said Friday.

Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said Finn and the diocese were required under state law to report the discovery to police because the images gave them reason to believe a child had been abused.

“Now that the grand jury investigation has resulted in this indictment, my office will pursue this case vigorously,” Baker said. “I want to ensure there are no future failures to report resulting in other unsuspecting victims.”

The indictment, handed down Oct. 6 but sealed because Finn was out of the country, says the bishop failed to report suspicions against the priest from Dec. 16, 2010, when the photos were discovered, to May 11, 2011, when the diocese turned them over to police.

Finn denied any wrongdoing in a statement Friday and said he had begun work to overhaul the diocese’s reporting policies and act on key findings of a diocese-commissioned investigation into its practices.

“Today, the Jackson County Prosecutor issued these charges against me personally and against the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph,” said Finn, who officials said was not under arrest. “For our part, we will meet these announcements with a steady resolve and a vigorous defense.”

Finn faces a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $1,000 fine if convicted of the misdemeanor. The diocese also faces a $1,000 fine.

Maybe if some of these guys at the top start seeing the inside of the jail cell, they will stop aiding and abetting sexual abuse among their ranks.

Oh For F%$#’s Sake!!!!

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Obama is sending troops to Uganda:

President Obama is sending about 100 special forces troops to central Africa to help target the leadership of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a notorious militia that has been raping and pillaging in the remote jungles of northern Uganda and neighboring countries for more than two decades.

The first team of armed advisors arrived in Uganda on Wednesday. Over the next month, the remaining U.S. troops, most of them Army Green Berets, will be sent to Uganda and surrounding countries, including South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Congo.

In a letter notifying Congress on Friday, Obama said the goal of the U.S. mission was to assist regional African forces in removing “from the battlefield” the militia’s leader, self-declared prophet Joseph Kony. But the U.S. troops will not fight unless fired upon, the letter said.

A militia known for forcing abducted children to fight and for mutilating its victims, the Lord’s Resistance Army has long been condemned by the U.S. and human rights organizations for atrocities against civilians.

Not only are we going into a yet another counter-insurgency, but we are going on a Mohamed Farrah Aidid style bug hunt.

When Obama said that he was opposed to “Stupid Wars” in 2003, what he neglected to say was that he doesn’t believe that any wars are “stupid”.

Here’s a Surprise…

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It turns out that the US Marines are manufacturing statistics to falsely represent the safety of the V-22 Osprey:

It’s an aircraft with a reputation for falling from the sky. But on at least one occasion, the U.S. military’s controversial V-22 Osprey tiltrotor — a hybrid transport that takes off like a helicopter and cruises like an airplane, thanks to its rotating engine nacelles — did just the opposite. It flew upward, out of control of its pilots.

On March 27, 2006, at a Marine Corps air base in New River, North Carolina, an MV-22 assigned to Medium Tiltrotor Training Squadron 204 experienced an unplanned surge in engine power as the three-man crew was preparing for a flight. “That caused the aircraft to inadvertently lift off the deck approximately 30 feet,” Marine spokesman Maj. Shawn Haney explained. “It came back down … there was major damage sustained to the right wing and the right engine.”

………

Yet the Marines and the Naval Safety Center ultimately decided that the Osprey’s dangerous joyride didn’t count as a serious flying accident, known in Pentagon parlance as a “Class A flight mishap.” The reason, said Capt. Brian Block, a Marine spokesman: The aircraft wasn’t supposed to take off just then; therefore, it’s not a flight problem. If a V-22 suffers damage while preparing to launch or after landing, or if the crew does not explicitly command the aircraft to take off but it does anyways, then the accident doesn’t count as a flight accident.

“No intent for flight existed,” he told Danger Room. “As such, it is not included in calculating the Class A flight mishap rate.”

It’s not the only seemingly serious accident that the Marines neglected to include in its tally of flight mishaps for the Osprey. A review of press reports, analysts’ studies and military records turns up 10 or more potentially serious mishaps in the last decade of V-22 testing and operations. At least three — and quite possibly more — could be considered Class A flight mishaps, if not for pending investigations, the “intent for flight” loophole and possible under-reporting of repair costs.

………

The Marines boast that the Osprey is the “safest tactical rotorcraft within the U.S. Marine Corps” over the last decade, in the words of Lt. Col. Jason Holden, the V-22 plans officer at Marine Corps headquarters in Virginia. By the official reckoning of the Marine Corps and the Naval Safety Center, the V-22 has a Class A flight mishap rate of 1.28 per 100,000 flight hours over the last 10 years, compared to a Class A flight mishap rate of 2.6 per 100,000 flight hours for all Marine aircraft over the same period.

But the Marines have given all sorts of reasons not to trust that official rate.

The Marines are so vested in the success of the V-22, that they cannot be trusted to manage the program.

The fact that the Marine Corps feels compelled to go to these lengths is an indication that the Osprey is not performing as promised.

Just Desserts

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Phill Klein, the virulently anti-abortion former Kansas Attorney General, has been under investigation by the Kansas bar for leaking confidential medical records in order to harass abortion providers and abortion recipients.

Well, the disciplinary board has now recommended that his license to practice law be permanently suspended:

A Kansas disciplinary panel said Thursday that former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline should be indefinitely suspended from practicing law in the state because of the “dishonest and selfish” way he pursued abortion clinics.

The recommendation of the attorney disciplinary board culminates a turbulent six-year period in which Kline — as attorney general and later Johnson County district attorney — presided over investigations of the late George Tiller’s abortion clinic in Wichita and Planned Parenthood in Overland Park.

I’m not sure if this is a disbarment, or just one step short of this.

In any case, I wouldn’t worry about Mr. Kline. I’m sure that the VWRC will find him something remunerative to him, because, unlike Democrats, the wingers take care of their own.

Maddow notes that Jerry Fallwell’s phony school has already given him a professorship.

Occupy Wall Street Stays at Zuccotti Park

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At least for now, but there were arrests, including, according to Olbermann, at least one arrest for being run over by a police vehicle. (Yep, you got that right)

He was arrested with enough force to require his hospitalization.

Here is the kicker:

The man on the ground has been identified as 32-year-old Ari Douglas, a legal observer at the Occupy Wall Street protests for the National Lawyer’s Guild. The video appears to show a police officer running over Mr. Douglas’ leg with a scooter.

First the viral video of the senior New York policeman (white shirt, lieutenant, at least) pepper spraying without provocation, and now we have this.

We also have two cases of what appears to be two unprovoked assaults on protesters, again by white shirt cops.

Seriously, these guys are going to make the Occupy Wall Street more popular than The Beatles:

10 Percent of the Chinese Economy?

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It turns out that much of the lending to small businesses in China is done by loan sharks, because the official banks prefer to lend to large state owned enterprises.

That’s not shocking. Official Chinese societal structures have always been for the benefit of the few over the many.

That being said, a throw away line in a New York Times article is truly shocking:

Such illegal lending amounts to about $630 billion a year, or the equivalent of about 10 percent of China’s gross domestic product, according to estimates by the investment bank UBS.

10%?  10% of the f%$#ing Chinese economy is loan sharking???????

When the bubble bursts in China, and there is a bubble in China, it’s going to be incredibly ugly.

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!!

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

  1. Piedmont Community Bank, Gray, GA
  2. Blue Ridge Savings Bank, Inc., Asheville, NC
  3. First State Bank, Cranford, NJ
  4. Country Bank, Aledo, IL

Full FDIC list

Busy week. 4 Banks.

Right not, this is in a path for 101 bank closures, but my guess is that it will be just under 100, because they don’t want to break 3 figures.

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

Heard About the Shooting at the Salon In California?

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Click for full size


See the License Plate Frame?

Normally, I don’t say anything about such things, but then a friend pointed out the license plate frame on the shooter’s truck. (See the join the tea party dot us URL?)

From reports, this is not a politically motivated shooting, and I have no reason to believe that it is.

That being said, what is clear is that there are a lot of teabaggers with easy access to firearms and a few screws loose, and there are a lot of people out there who are giving encouragement for them to go postal (Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly), and the fact that a few of them are going do decide to do very bad things as a result is more probable than just possible.

H/t Hedgehog at SP.

Scientist Poke Holes in FBI’s Anthrax Mailer ID

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And they are doing this in a peer reviewed journal:

A decade after wisps of anthrax sent through the mail killed 5 people, sickened 17 others and terrorized the nation, biologists and chemists still disagree on whether federal investigators got the right man and whether the F.B.I.’s long inquiry brushed aside important clues.

Now, three scientists argue that distinctive chemicals found in the dried anthrax spores — including the unexpected presence of tin — point to a high degree of manufacturing skill, contrary to federal reassurances that the attack germs were unsophisticated. The scientists make their case in a coming issue of the Journal of Bioterrorism & Biodefense.

F.B.I. documents reviewed by The New York Times show that bureau scientists focused on tin early in their eight-year investigation, calling it an “element of interest” and a potentially critical clue to the criminal case. They later dropped their lengthy inquiry, never mentioned tin publicly and never offered any detailed account of how they thought the powder had been made.

The new paper raises the prospect — for the first time in a serious scientific forum — that the Army biodefense expert identified by the F.B.I. as the perpetrator, Bruce E. Ivins, had help in obtaining his germ weapons or conceivably was innocent of the crime.

Both the chairwoman of a National Academy of Science panel that spent a year and a half reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work and the director of a new review by the Government Accountability Office said the paper raised important questions that should be addressed.

…………

In its report last February, the National Academy of Sciences panel sharply criticized some of the F.B.I.’s scientific work, saying the genetic link between the attack anthrax and a supply in Dr. Ivins’s lab was “not as conclusive” as the bureau asserted.

If the authors of the new paper are correct about the silicon-tin coating, it appears likely that Dr. Ivins could not have made the anthrax powder alone with the equipment he possessed, as the F.B.I. maintains. That would mean either that he got the powder from elsewhere or that he was not the perpetrator.

The FBI hasn’t covered itself in glory,

Their behavior towards their first “person of interest”, Steven Hatfill, as well as their behavior toward Bruce Ivins, seemed to be geared more toward driving their subjects to self destruction than to any finding of fact. (They went after Ivins’ counselor, for example).

The bottom line here is that there is a lot of highly classified information that was not subject to review for this article, and a continued insistence on the part of the DoJ merely serves to reinforce the people who believe that the FBI did not find the right guy.