Republicans Are So F%$#ing Classy

Wouldn't you know it, "Jesse Kelly, the ex-Marine Tea Partyer who challenged Gabrielle Giffords," is looking into the possibility of gearing up for a special election:

Kelly, if you don't already know, has been taking heat since Giffords' shooting for sponsoring a campaign event last year in which supporters joined him in shooting a "fully automatic M-16." "Get on target for November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office," the event's announcement read.

It's true that the M-16 event had no direct connection with Giffords' shooting, and claims that it indirectly helped create a "climate" conducive to the shooting are dubious at best. Still, to many people, Kelly is now best known as the guy who encouraged supporters to shoot M-16s in the name of defeating a member of Congress who was, several months later, nearly shot to death. Politically, the association is toxic, and Kelly faces a formidable -- maybe impossible -- task in repairing the damage.

Thus, stories about him quietly looking into whether there might soon be a special election for Giffords' seat are particularly damaging for him. Sure, the inquiry his campaign apparently made wasn't actually that unreasonable. There were, after all, reports earlier this week that Arizona state law requires that Giffords' seat be declared vacant if she's incapacitated for more than 90 days. All Kelly may have done is make a discreet inquiry about whether this is true. (It isn't; only the House itself can declare a seat vacant.) But, especially in the wake of the M-16 controversy, it looks terrible for Kelly to be seen making political calculations right now.

Actually, it doesn't look terrible.

It's par for the course for the 'Phants.  It took them about 12 hours to politicize 911, after all.

Love is Tough

A hickey triggered a stroke for a woman in New Zealand.

Luckily, she recovered after a regime with treatment with anti-coagulants.

<Facepalm>

Cindy Gertz, the US Treasury official responsible for trying to prevent foreclosures, just praised the mortgage servicers for their efforts at preventing forecolsures:

An Obama administration housing official on Wednesday defended mortgage servicing companies, just one day after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the industry needs an overhaul.

Cindy Gertz, director of operations at the Treasury Department's Homeownership Preservation Office, said mortgage servicers--firms which collect loan payments--have hired tens of thousands of extra staff to work with a crush of struggling borrowers who are trying to renegotiate the terms of their mortgages.

"I think tremendous progress has been made," Gertz told a group of bankers at a conference organized by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Gertz, a former executive at mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac, did acknowledge that the process is not complete.

This is kind of like saying that IV drug users who share needles have been helpful in the fights against AIDS.

The only explanation for the fact that a Google News search of the name does not reveal the phrase, "Spending more time with her family," is that this is what her boss, Tim "Eddie Haskell" Geithner, and his boss, Barack Obama, actually believe that loan servicers acting in bad faith are a necessary to protect our banking system.

My Bad……

I've had a busy month, just look at my posting volume, so I missed the first two bank failure Fridays.

There were two bank failures on the 7^th, and one on the 14^th, and there have been no credit union failures this far

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

1. First Commercial Bank of Florida, Orlando, FL
2. Legacy Bank, Scottsdale, AZ
3. Oglethorpe Bank, Brunswick, GA

Full FDIC list

So, here is the my new, improved graph pr0n with trendline (FDIC only).

I've dropped the trend line, and replaced it with two line graphs, for 2010 & 2011, so we can see how they compare.



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



Note that we are seeing a calendar artifact here. The first Friday of 2011 was January 1, when the banks were all closed, and the FDIC would not be closing anyone, while the first Friday of 2011 was the 7^th, and so very much a business day for the FDIC.

We should see a better comparison of activity by early February, when trends become more visible.

It's Jobless Thursday

Initial claims for unemployment benefits fell to 404,000 last week, better than forecast, but still about 25K more than what is needed for the start of a meaningful recovery, and the less volatile 4-week moving average dropped 4,000 to 411,750, with continuing claims dropping 26K to 3.86 million, though the total number of people getting benefits, despite the fact that the "99ers" have run out of benefits, rose by more than 400K to 9.61 million.

In related news, manufacturing employment grew for the first time in more than a decade.

Remember Always that the Cossacks Work for the Czar

Go to the very gifted cartoonist's website for a full size image, and buy some of his stuff

So when a political appointee of Barack Obama's decides to use the King holiday to say that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have supported the never-ending war in Afghanistan, because it is somehow or other a "just war":

Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, posed that question at today’s Pentagon commemoration of King’s legacy.

In the final year of his life, King became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Johnson told a packed auditorium. However, he added, today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.

“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” he said.

I understand that Mr. Johnson knew Dr. King, and went to school with his son, but seriously, using Dr. King to pimp the war in Afghanistan is so deeply appalling that it buggers the mind.

It is absolutely ludicrous when juxtaposed with the before and after pictures of Tarok Kolache.

Winning Hearts and Minds…

This is your village

This is your village after the US military "saves it"

Any questions?

Because of activities by the Taliban in Tarok Kolache in Afghanistan, they basically occupied it, the US obliterated it with over 25 tons of munitions, but that's OK, because it's not like the Afghans are people deserving of consideration:

As [Petraeus Hagiographer and all-around toady Paula] Broadwell tells it, the villagers understood that the United States needed to destroy their homes — except when they don’t. One villager “in a fit of theatrics had accused Flynn of ruining his life after the demolition.”

An adviser to Hamid Karzai said that the 1-320th “caused unreasonable damage to homes and orchards and displaced a number of people.” Flynn has held “reconstruction shuras” with the villagers and begun compensating villagers for their property losses, but so far the reconstruction has barely begun, three months after the destruction.

“Sure they are pissed about the loss of their mud huts,” Broadwell wrote on Facebook, “but that is why the BUILD story is important here.”

Seriously, they live in mud huts, why should we care what the f%$# they think?

More seriously, this is the endgame of a failed colonial adventure, and I think that anyone with half a brain, including David "I want that 5^th Star, Bitches" Petraeus, and Barack Obama, but the general is too interested in his career, and the President is too afraid of the Republicans calling him names, so the insanity continues.

The Vampire Squid Has Conquered Time Itself

As if nearly destroying the world wasn't enough, when Goldman Sachs became a bank holding company, allowing it to get billions in Federal Reserve bailouts, it moved its fiscal year from starting on December 1 to January 1, as regulations required, and then it disappeared the missing month of December, 2008, and loaded the "orphan month" with huge losses as well as huge bonuses to its employees that basically went down the memory hole"

As a result, some great information gets missed, and is that much harder for the rest of us to find. For instance, the main news in the story is this:

Nearly 36 million stock options were granted to employees in December 2008 — 10 times the amount issued the previous year — when the stock was trading at $78.78. Since those uncertain days, Goldman’s business has roared back and its share price has more than doubled, closing on Tuesday at nearly $175.

The story goes on to detail the dates at which the options can be exercised. But there’s much more to be said on this matter. For one thing, the monster option grant took place during Goldman’s notorious orphan month, meaning that it would never appear in an annual report. And for another thing, it was very expensive even at the time.

……

Remember that December 2008, when Goldman made these grants, was the worst month in the company’s history: it lost $1.3 billion, and was mired in the depths of the financial crisis. Yet many partners will have received stock and options awards that month which are worth hefty eight-figure sums today. Not bad for a month’s work.

(emphasis mine)

I cannot see this as anything but a deliberate attempt to loot the company at the expense of the share holders.

Why these ratf%$#s aren't under criminal investigation is beyond me.

Alan Grayson for President in 2012

If you don't believe it now, just wait until Obama tries to sell gutting Social Security and Medicare in his State of the Union speech.

I could be wrong, and if I am, I will issue a correction, but I think that it is clear that embracing right wing talking points is more important to Barack Obama than is good policy, and driving the "first stake through the heart of Social Security" is clearly seen as a big plum by Obama and most of his administration.

We will know one way or the other in 5½ days.

Obama is a Dick Cheney Wet Dream

Sorry for the mental image, but Dick Cheney is now saying that he likes Obama's policies on war, illegal wiretaps, and torture:

In the early months of Obama's presidency, the American Right did to him what they do to every Democratic politician: they accused him of being soft on defense (specifically "soft on Terror") and leaving the nation weak and vulnerable to attack. But that tactic quickly became untenable as everyone (other than his hardest-core followers) was forced to acknowledge that Obama was embracing and even expanding -- rather than reversing -- the core Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism. As a result, leading right-wing figures began lavishing Obama with praise -- and claiming vindication -- based on Obama's switch from harsh critic of those policies (as a candidate) to their leading advocate (once in power).

So the overbearing security state, in which the President or his designees, can detain you forever without trial and torture you, while tapping all of our phones, is now the new normal, and Cheney and his ilk are ecstatic, because they now know that there will be no prosecutions.

Thanks a lot, Barry.  You must have been the worst constitutional law professor ever.

Bishop John Shelby Spong Is Right…

He asks the question, "Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?" (See here)

My answer is "yes", and that you could also add bigotry to that list, as evidenced by the Governor of (where else) Alabama, who, while declaring that he was colorblind, said that, "So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister," though to be fair, he Robert Bentley has since apologized, though with the classic, "I'm sorry if I offended anyone," apology, which actually puts the onus on those who object.

There are people who use religion to fulfill a basic spiritual need, but I think that there are a lot more people who find it useful way to feel better than other people.

Why a Carbon Tax is Superior to Cap and Trade

In either case, the consumer pays for it, but a carbon tax can go to things like government programs (Or, if you are of that ilk, per person rebates that favor the less well off), while carbon trading enriches polluters, the Vampire Squids of the world, and people who game the system for personal profit:

The European Commission suspended trading in greenhouse gas emissions permits on Wednesday for at least a week after the theft of permits worth millions of euros via online attacks.

The Emissions Trading System was a target of “recurring security breaches” over the last two months, the commission, the executive agency of the European Union, announced on its Web site Wednesday.

The commission said it needed to shut the system down until at least Jan. 26 because “incidents over the last weeks have underlined the urgent need” for enhanced security measures.

The attacks raised new questions about the viability of Europe’s main tool to combat a rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The stolen permits are part of Europe’s effort to cap the amount of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, that companies may emit each year. Europe’s system is the world’s largest market for greenhouse gas emissions credits.

The only advantage to carbon trading is that it gives politicians the ability to give another revenue stream to their classmates from Ivy League/Oxbridge/Sorbonne/Etc. who work in investment banks.

It's a giveaway to the investment banker, and an invitation to fraud, the case of hydroelectric plants in China without transmission lines to accumulate credits being just one such example.

Don't Let the Door Hit Your Ass on the Way Out, Joey

Joe Lieberman makes his retirement official:

Referring to Mr. Lieberman’s plan to forgo re-election, Bill Curry, a prominent Democrat who served with Mr. Lieberman in the State Senate, said, “It’s the first thing he’s done in 10 years to make Connecticut Democrats completely happy.”

I don't really have much to add to this, except for the fact that Ezra Klein has clearly been assimilated by the Beltway Borg^™, and has become yet another thought free spewer of conventional DC wisdom, since he is wondering if Joe Lieberman is some sort of Democratic Hero:

That [Obama's disgraceful lobbying on behalf of Lieberman to keep his seat and seniority] kept Lieberman in the fold, and after Arlen Specter switched parties and Al Franken won his election, gave Democrats the 60 votes they needed to break a Republican filibuster against health-care reform. Lieberman's behavior during the debate was often erratic and seemingly unprincipled. Among other things, he skipped the meetings where Democrats were trying to work out a compromise on the public option, and then he killed the Medicare buy-in proposal they'd developed -- despite endorsing that exact proposal months before. In doing so, he doomed a great piece of policy, and by doing it at the last minute, endangered the rest of the bill, too. But the reality is that the legislation simply wouldn't have passed without his vote. And after extracting his pound of flesh, he voted "aye."

This ignores the fact that the Democrats really had 60 votes for only a few weeks, because Ted Kennedy was busy dying, and the displays of narcissism, petulance, self importance, and wounded pride that made Lieberman determined to inflict as much damage as possible while keeping his committee chairmanship.

If Lieberman could have found a way to vote "No", and keep his position, he would have, because he was all about petty vengeance.

3 Minutes of Anthony Weiner

He gives a "half time update" of the Republican repeal efforts.

You can tell that he once roomed with Jon Stewart, and he is now on my list of, "People I Do Not Want to Piss Off".

Domestic Terrorism in Spokane

I'm not sure why the press isn't covering this, but someone planted a relatively sophisticated road-side bomb along the route of the Spokane Martin Luther King Day parade:

A backpack found along the route of the Martin Luther King Jr. march in Spokane contained a bomb "capable of inflicting multiple casualties," the FBI said Tuesday, describing the case as "domestic terrorism."

The FBI said the Swiss Army-brand backpack was found about 9:25 a.m. PST on Monday on a bench at the northeast corner of North Washington Street and West Main Avenue in downtown Spokane.

In an interview on msnbc cable's "The Rachel Maddow Show," Spokesman-Review reporter Thomas Clouse said confidential sources told him that the device was equipped with a remote control detonator and contained shrapnel.

There are two things that are very concerning here:

• The FBI is being very loquacious about this, and I don't mean, "FBI is offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of people responsible for placing the device." Considering how legendary the FBI is about keeping its cards close to its chest, this implies that they are very spooked by this.
• Spokane is smack dab in the middle of any number of any number of white supremacist encampments, and has already seen Aryan Nation inspired bombings and robberies.

I think that the FBI has some intel indicating that more than one person has some sort of ongoing plans for a series of actions.

What is odd here is that Maddow seems to be the only national media figure who is paying any attention.

What the F$#@ is Wrong With Barry?

He just penned an OP/ED in the Wall Street Journal, saying that the big problem in our economy is too much regulation:

From child labor laws to the Clean Air Act to our most recent strictures against hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies, we have, from time to time, embraced common sense rules of the road that strengthen our country without unduly interfering with the pursuit of progress and the growth of our economy.

Sometimes, those rules have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs. At other times, we have failed to meet our basic responsibility to protect the public interest, leading to disastrous consequences. Such was the case in the run-up to the financial crisis from which we are still recovering. There, a lack of proper oversight and transparency nearly led to the collapse of the financial markets and a full-scale Depression.

Well, at least he is not talking about repealing the Clean Air Act or child labor laws, Yet,, but when juxtaposed with his executive order calling for our regulations to become even more friendly to companies that rob us and pollute our environment. (full text after break)

I guess we had better be the change that we are looking for, because Barack H. Obama is way too interested in sucking up to the people who wrecked this country, like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.

I am not looking forward to his State of the Union Address, because you can be sure that he will have some sort of initiative that further betray the people who voted for him.

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release                                               January 18, 2011

Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review - Executive Order

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to improve regulation and regulatory review, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. General Principles of Regulation. (a) Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation. It must be based on the best available science. It must allow for public participation and an open exchange of ideas. It must promote predictability and reduce uncertainty. It must identify and use the best, most innovative, and least burdensome tools for achieving regulatory ends. It must take into account benefits and costs, both quantitative and qualitative. It must ensure that regulations are accessible, consistent, written in plain language, and easy to understand. It must measure, and seek to improve, the actual results of regulatory requirements.

(b) This order is supplemental to and reaffirms the principles, structures, and definitions governing contemporary regulatory review that were established in Executive Order 12866 of September 30, 1993. As stated in that Executive Order and to the extent permitted by law, each agency must, among other things: (1) propose or adopt a regulation only upon a reasoned determination that its benefits justify its costs (recognizing that some benefits and costs are difficult to quantify); (2) tailor its regulations to impose the least burden on society, consistent with obtaining regulatory objectives, taking into account, among other things, and to the extent practicable, the costs of cumulative regulations; (3) select, in choosing among alternative regulatory approaches, those approaches that maximize net benefits (including potential economic, environmental, public health and safety, and other advantages; distributive impacts; and equity); (4) to the extent feasible, specify performance objectives, rather than specifying the behavior or manner of compliance that regulated entities must adopt; and (5) identify and assess available alternatives to direct regulation, including providing economic incentives to encourage the desired behavior, such as user fees or marketable permits, or providing information upon which choices can be made by the public.

(c) In applying these principles, each agency is directed to use the best available techniques to quantify anticipated

present and future benefits and costs as accurately as possible. Where appropriate and permitted by law, each agency may consider (and discuss qualitatively) values that are difficult or impossible to quantify, including equity, human dignity, fairness, and distributive impacts.

Sec. 2. Public Participation. (a) Regulations shall be adopted through a process that involves public participation. To that end, regulations shall be based, to the extent feasible and consistent with law, on the open exchange of information and perspectives among State, local, and tribal officials, experts in relevant disciplines, affected stakeholders in the private sector, and the public as a whole.

(b) To promote that open exchange, each agency, consistent with Executive Order 12866 and other applicable legal requirements, shall endeavor to provide the public with an opportunity to participate in the regulatory process. To the extent feasible and permitted by law, each agency shall afford the public a meaningful opportunity to comment through the Internet on any proposed regulation, with a comment period that should generally be at least 60 days. To the extent feasible and permitted by law, each agency shall also provide, for both proposed and final rules, timely online access to the rulemaking docket on regulations.gov, including relevant scientific and technical findings, in an open format that can be easily searched and downloaded. For proposed rules, such access shall include, to the extent feasible and permitted by law, an opportunity for public comment on all pertinent parts of the rulemaking docket, including relevant scientific and technical findings.

(c) Before issuing a notice of proposed rulemaking, each agency, where feasible and appropriate, shall seek the views of those who are likely to be affected, including those who are likely to benefit from and those who are potentially subject to such rulemaking.

Sec. 3. Integration and Innovation. Some sectors and industries face a significant number of regulatory requirements, some of which may be redundant, inconsistent, or overlapping. Greater coordination across agencies could reduce these requirements, thus reducing costs and simplifying and harmonizing rules. In developing regulatory actions and identifying appropriate approaches, each agency shall attempt to promote such coordination, simplification, and harmonization. Each agency shall also seek to identify, as appropriate, means to achieve regulatory goals that are designed to promote innovation.

Sec. 4. Flexible Approaches. Where relevant, feasible, and consistent with regulatory objectives, and to the extent permitted by law, each agency shall identify and consider regulatory approaches that reduce burdens and maintain flexibility and freedom of choice for the public. These approaches include warnings, appropriate default rules, and disclosure requirements as well as provision of information to the public in a form that is clear and intelligible.

Sec. 5. Science. Consistent with the President's Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies,

"Scientific Integrity" (March 9, 2009), and its implementing guidance, each agency shall ensure the objectivity of any scientific and technological information and processes used to support the agency's regulatory actions.

Sec. 6. Retrospective Analyses of Existing Rules. (a) To facilitate the periodic review of existing significant regulations, agencies shall consider how best to promote retrospective analysis of rules that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, and to modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them in accordance with what has been learned. Such retrospective analyses, including supporting data, should be released online whenever possible.

(b) Within 120 days of the date of this order, each agency shall develop and submit to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs a preliminary plan, consistent with law and its resources and regulatory priorities, under which the agency will periodically review its existing significant regulations to determine whether any such regulations should be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed so as to make the agency's regulatory program more effective or less burdensome in achieving the regulatory objectives.

Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) For purposes of this order, "agency" shall have the meaning set forth in section 3(b) of Executive Order 12866.

(b) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) authority granted by law to a department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(c) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(d) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

BARACK OBAMA

THE WHITE HOUSE,
January 18, 2011.

All I Want for Christmas*…

Is for the rumors to be true, and for that ratf%$# Joe Lieberman not to seek reelection in 2012 to be true:

Amid growing speculation that he will not seek re-election in 2012, U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman's office said Tuesday afternoon that the Democrat-turned-independent will announce his intentions in Stamford Wednesday.

"You can bet the farm" that Lieberman won't seek a fifth term in 2012, said a Democratic insider who is close to the 22-year Senate veteran. But neither Lieberman nor his Senate office would confirm that.

Please, oh please let this be true.

^*OK, I don't do Christmas, I am a Jew, and I have no intention of having my circumcision reversed. It's a metaphor, dammit!

Un-Dirty-Word-Believable

The roof is on fire…

Have you heard the one about the guy who passed the bar exam in Ohio, but was denied his law license on moral grounds because he had accumulated too much debt going to law school?

Yeah, well, it ain't funny:

Wow. Guy goes to law school, guy racks up a huge amount of debt, guy has no idea how he’ll pay off his debts. Sound familiar? Okay, here’s the twist: the guy failed the “character and fitness” component of the Ohio bar because he has no plan to pay off his loans.

What the hell kind of legal education system are we running where we charge people more than they can afford to get a legal education, and then prevent them from being lawyers because they can’t pay off their debts?

Because it’s not like Hassan Jonathan Griffin was in a particularly unique situation when he went before the Ohio bar. A year and a half ago, we wrote about a man who was dinged on his character and fitness review because he was $400,000 in debt. That’s an extraordinary case. Hassan Jonathan Griffin owes around $170,000. He has a part-time job as a public defender. He used to be a stockbroker. He’s got as much a chance of figuring out a way to pay off his loans as most people from the Lost Generation.

The more that we make getting out of a hole impossible for ordinary Americans, the more we make a hollow country that will one day implode.

If this is what America is, then we need to examine what we are, because this is the sort of sh%$ makes me want to play Nero, and fiddle while the whole corrupt place burns.

Running the Numbers

So, some of you might be wondering why we all went on an extended weekend down to Williamsburg, Virginia, despite the fact that it's the off season, and so many of the attractions (see the aforementioned Busch Gardens post) are closed.

Well, about a month ago, we went to computer show, and picked up a new (used) laptop for my daughter, and my wife filled out an entry form, and we got a call for a timeshare (they call it a vacation share) in the area which included their giving us space in one of their vacation condos for 3 days.

We talked about it, and we decided that this would be a lot of fun, and listening to a sales pitch would be well worth it.

We declined their offers, which by the way got sweeter and sweeter as time went on, pleading poverty, which is only half true.

The other half is that I can do basic math in my head, I are a mechanical engineer after all, and their numbers were simply not that good.

Basically, the spaces were set up as townhouses, with two apartments, each being a 2 bedroom with a decent kitchen and living space, nice bedrooms, and a kickass master bathroom, it included a jacuzzi, a separate shower, and a toilet in its own separate room.

The basic offer was around 10 grand, with a down payment of 2-4K with a 6-8 year loan at 7 percent, and around a $500 a year maintenance fee.

All this for a complex that was about 5 miles away from the Colonial Williamsburg Historic Area.

They talk about this, and show how, for decent, and honestly not as good, hotel space, you would be spending $30K over the next 30 years for lodging, and then discuss how this is a prime location that could be swapped for other space.

Well, ignoring opportunity costs, the economic fact that dollars spent today are worth more than dollars spent later, let's look at the numbers.

You get 2 weeks a year, either fixed (the cheap option I describe above), or floating, so you are paying for 2 weeks out of 52.

Let's be charitable, and say that you are paying for ¹⁄₂₅of a year, or ½ a month.

This makes purchase price around $250,000.00 (10+K x 25) and the maintenance fee equivalent to about $1000.00 a month.

Note that this is all in the suburban areas of Williamsburg, where nice houses are well under the price that they asked (annualized) if you are more than 5 blocks from historical area/William and Mary College, and then you have a $1000/month rent maintenance fee.

When you consider the fact that the developer did this on what had been soybean fields at some point in the past 3 or so years, it's certainly a good deal for them.

Obviously for certain people, those who are certain that they will hit the area year after year, and who might want to swap a week with someone in some other location, it might make sense, but for most of us, this is simply not a sensible financial or lifestyle decision.

As for me, I want to vacation in different places, or to visit with family, which makes it even less attractive to me.

Still, I don't mind the 2 or so hours that I spent on the sales pitch, along with having to say "no" to the very earnest sales person, it was worth it for the rest of the weekend, which was a lot of fun.

Things That Make Me Sad

Not only was Michael Steele, AKA the Republican malaprop machine, defeated in his quest for a 2^nd term as head of the RNC, but his replacement is former Wisconsin GOP chairman Reince Priebus, whose name is a pain for me to spell.

It's Morgan Tsvangerai all over again.

I am aware that this sounds shallow, but I don't see Republicans good for much beyond my taking snarky shots at.

Bummer

Busch Gardens is not open yet, so it's shopping and Laser Tag for the kids.

Went to Colonial Williamsburg Today

Click for full size

---

This was a posed shot, but it is rather more true than I would like to think.










The House of Burgesses






The black smith shop






Halberds in the Armory, I thought that they would be pre 1700s, but it appears that I was wrong

So, we went to colonial Williamsburg today.

Even my studiously blase teen (13) daughter enjoyed herself, though she was on her mobile constantly updating her Facebook page.

A good time was had by all.

We are hoping to hit Busch Gardens tomorrow before heading home.

A North Dakota Weather Alert

Not safe for work, but 100% true.

This is Brilliant

Or someone has too much time on their hands.

Or maybe both.

Just Read Krugman

He has an essay on what went wrong with the Euro that is positively brilliant.

Posting from the Road Again

My wife is taking her turn driving on a trip down to Williamsburg for the weekend.

When all is said and done, if you had told me that I would be surfing the net and blogging while on I-95, I would have said that you were completely insane.

The Grauniad* Lambastes Wikileaks for What the Grauniad* Published

Glenn Greenwald details just how ridiculous the ongoing feud between The Guardian and Julian Assange has become, with the paper the paper accusing Assange of endangering lives because of cables that were released by The Guardian itself:

Last week, on January 3, The Guardian published a scathing Op-Ed by James Richardson blaming WikiLeaks for endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe.  Richardson -- a GOP operative, contributor to RedState.com, and a for-hire corporate spokesman -- pointed to a cable published by WikiLeaks in which American diplomats revealed that Tsvangirai, while publicly opposing American sanctions on his country, had privately urged their continuation as a means of weakening the Mugabe regime:  an act likely to be deemed to be treasonous in that country, for obvious reasons.  By publishing this cable, "WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder," Richardson wrote.  He added:  "WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life."

This accusation against WikiLeaks was repeated far and wide.  In The Wall Street Journal, Jamie Kirchick -- the long-time assistant of The New Republic's Marty Peretz -- wrote under this headline:  "Julian Assange's reckless behavior could cost Zimbabwe's leading democrat his life."  Kirchick explained that "the crusading 'anti-secrecy' website released a diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Harare" which exposed Tsvangirai's support for sanctions.  As "a result of the WikiLeaks revelations," Kirchick wrote, the reform leader would likely be charged with treason, and "Mr. Tsvangirai will have someone additional to blame: Julian Assange of WikiLeaks."  The Atlantic's Chris Albon, in his piece entitled "How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe," echoed the same accusation, claiming "WikiLeaks released [this cable] to the world" and that Assange has thus "provided a tyrant with the ammunition to wound, and perhaps kill, any chance for multiparty democracy."  Numerous other outlets predictably mimicked these claims.

There was just one small problem with all of this:  it was totally false.  It wasn't WikiLeaks which chose that cable to be placed into the public domain, nor was it WikiLeaks which first published it.  It was The Guardian that did that.  In early December, that newspaper -- not WikiLeaks -- selected and then published the cable in question.  This fact led The Guardian -- more than a full week after they published Richardson's accusatory column -- to sheepishly add this obscured though extremely embarrassing "clarification" at the end of his column:

• This article was amended on 11 January 2011 to clarify the fact that the 2009 cable referred to in this article was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not as originally implied by WikiLeaks. The photo caption was also amended to reflect this fact.

(emphasis original)

While I find The Guardian to be a top flight paper, this is inexcusable.

I get the impression that Assange is a bit of a jerk, and hard to deal with, but that does not excuse this crap.

^*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It's nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, "The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad."

Tweet of the Day

Link

It's Because He's Black…

No, it's not because he supported McCain in the primaries

No, not Barack Obama, but rather Arizona legislative district 20 Republican Party chairman Anthony Miller, who has been harassed by the teabeggers and has resigned:

A nasty battle between factions of Legislative District 20 Republicans and fears that it could turn violent in the wake of what happened in Tucson on Saturday prompted District Chairman Anthony Miller and several others to resign.

Miller, a 43-year-old Ahwatukee Foothills resident and former campaign worker for U.S. Sen. John McCain, was re-elected to a second one-year term last month. He said
constant verbal attacks after that election and Internet blog posts by some local members with Tea Party ties made him worry about his family's safety.

People are not upset at him because he supported McCain, who, after all demolished J.D. Hayworth in the primary, so he had broad based support from the party.

The problem here is that the Teabaggers think that his skin color clashes with the Arizona Republican Party, though they probably use a 2 word phrase beginning with "uppity".

Vos? Sarah Palin iz a Yid*

When juxtaposed with the phrase, "Don't retreat, reload," this is an unfortunate turn of phrase

So Sarah Palin is now claiming that criticism of her "target map" and her shooting inspired rhetoric is blood libel:

"Vigorous and spirited public debates during elections are among our most cherished traditions," Palin wrote in an early morning post on her Facebook account on Wednesday. "But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible."

(emphasis mine)

<Facepalm>

For those of you unfamiliar with Jewish history, the blood libel is the accusation that Jews use Christian baby's blood to bake their matzohs for Passover.

This fraud was the cause of the deaths of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Jews over the past 200 years.

Needless to say, the idea that anyone who isn't Jewish would use the term for something as meaningless as  criticism over their rhetoric is offensive, ahistorical, narcissistic, and just plain wrong, particularly for someone who is not Jewish.

The level of venality for a non-Jew to use this to condemn people for saying mean things about her simply boggles the mind.  I cannot imagine anyone being so self-centered and inconsiderate to do this, so Sarah Palin must be Jewish.^†

The response to this has been actually been fairly universal.

Months ago, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, The View's resident right winger, called the map despicable months ago.

Additionally, former Bush speech writer turned conservative apostate David Frum, has called her out for unleashing her attack dogs, while National Review nepotism hire Jonah Goldberg, calls the use of the phrase stupid in so many words., and trust me, Jonah Goldberg knows stupid like few others.

Additionally, Jewish Groups, including the ADL, which normally spends it time sucking up to ignorant bigots have condemned the use of the phrase.

Pat Buchanan, though, was true to form, saying that he, "thought it was an excellent statement".

For what it's worth, Joan Walsh's assessment of the statement, that Palin has fatally wounded her Presidential chances, is, I think, completely wrong.

Her analysis misses a basic Republican imperative, to piss off liberals and Democrats any chance they get. Really, when you look at GOP frat boy behavior, it's clear that much of what they do is driven by this petty need.

By pissing off liberals with the "blood libel" comment, she cements her relationship with the movement conservatives and teabaggers, and pissing off Jews, who constitute a minuscule part of the party, is just gravy, because it shows the Talibaptist wing of the Republican party that she is one of them.

That being said, I would still argue that the simplest hypothesis is the one most likely the correct one, and that would be that she is a person suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

^*My best effort at translating "What? Sarah Palin is a Jew?" into transliterated English.
^†I'm not asking for evidence of Todd's circumcision, thankyouverymuch!

I am a Bad Person

Natalie has an audition for a magnet program this morning, and I suggested that she keep the bling to a minimum, so that she does not distract from her performance.

Then I qualified my statement, saying, "Then again, I am an engineer giving fashion advice, which is a lot like Jared Loughner giving gun safety advice."

I am not a good person.

W00t!!!!

The new router has arrived, and after a couple of hours on tech support for my daughter's laptop (a conflict between the Dell supplied software and the router), we are all connected again.

W00t!!!!

Yes

Jack Balkin asks, with the regard to the clearly illegal and punitive pretrial detention of Bradley Manning, "Is the Obama Administration countenancing torture of a US serviceman?"

This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.

On a more substantive note, read Glen Greenwald's essay on how our government, both the Bush and Obama administrations have created an environment of fear to silence dissent:

At the time, I dismissed those concerns as both ill-founded and even slightly paranoid. From a strictly legal standpoint, those concerns were and are ill-founded: WikiLeaks has never even been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime, nor does it do anything different than what major newspapers around the world routinely do, nor has it been formally designated a Terrorist organization, nor -- I believed at the time -- could it ever be so designated. There is not -- and cannot remotely be -- anything illegal about donating to it. Any efforts to retroactively criminalize such donations would be a classic case of an "ex post facto" law unquestionably barred by the Constitution. But from a political perspective, the crux of the fear was probably more prescient than paranoid: within a matter of months, leading right-wing figures were equating WikiLeaks to Al Qaeda, while the Vice President of the U.S. went on Meet the Press and disgustingly called Julian Assange a "terrorist."

But more significant than the legal soundness of this fear was what the fear itself signified. Most of those expressing these concerns were perfectly rational, smart, well-informed American citizens. And yet they were petrified that merely donating money to a non-violent political and journalistic group whose goals they supported would subject them to invasive government scrutiny or, worse, turn them into criminals. A government can guarantee all the political liberties in the world on paper (free speech, free assembly, freedom of association), but if it succeeds in frightening the citizenry out of exercising those rights, they become meaningless.

So much of what the U.S. Government has done over the last decade has been devoted to creating and strengthening this climate of fear. Attacking Iraq under the terrorizing banner of "shock and awe"; disappearing people to secret prisons; abducting them and shipping them to what Newsweek's Jonathan Alter (when advocating this) euphemistically called "our less squeamish allies"; throwing them in cages for years without charges, dressed in orange jumpsuits and shackles; creating a worldwide torture regime; spying on Americans without warrants and asserting the power to arrest them on U.S. soil without charges: all of this had one overarching objective. It was designed to create a climate of repression and intimidation by signaling to the world -- and its own citizens -- that the U.S. was unconstrained by law, by conventions, by morality, or by anything else: the government would do whatever it wanted to anyone it wanted, and those thinking about opposing the U.S. in any way, through means legitimate or illegitimate, should (and would) thus think twice, at least.

We need to remember that the vast bulk of the citizenry in Saddam Hussein's Iraq had no worry of arrest and torture, nor is there that fear in the even more brutal regime in Burma/Myanmar.  These were terror regimes, but the terror was directed at those who challenged the state, and it is now the deliberate policy of our government to do the same, it's just a bit more subtle about it.

Jon Stewart on Tucson

Not funny, but a hell of a lot more thoughtful, and wise, than anything else that I have seen:

Suspected Israeli Spy Released By Saudi Government

The suspect spy was a vulture.

Really, I mean that literally.

It appears that an Israeli academic tagged some vultures with tracking tags, and the Saudis were worried about their potential threat to state security:

A Saudi Arabian prince has announced that a tagged Israeli vulture captured last week and accused of being a Mossad agent will be released, according to ABC News.

The bird was reportedly captured last week by Saudi officials and accused by local media of being part of a "Zionist plot" after it was discovered wearing a GPS tracker labeled Tel Aviv University.

Prince Bandar bin Saud Al Saud dismissed the accusations on Sunday: "These systems are fitted to birds and animals, including marine animals. Most countries use these system, including Saudi Arabia. We have taken delivery of this bird, but we will set it free again after we [have] verified its systems."

When a member of the House of Saud is the voice of sanity, you are doing something very wrong.

God Bless the Rude Pundit

Dear Right-Wingers: You Are All Muslims Now

Just go read this bit of brutal brilliance.

H/t Cthulhuu^* at by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS.

*Yes, I know the spelling.  It's a private joke.

OK, I Don't Have Much to Add on the Assassination and Shooting Spree

Click for full size

---

These are on the days preceding the shooting

But Brad Delong finds a rather alarming data point.

Here are two members of Congress, both Democrats, from the same state, but in the 4 days before the shooting, Gifford's hits on her wiki page skyrocketed.

There are a number of caveats here:

• Even with the delta, the number is pretty small, under 400 hits peak over a 4 day period.
• This could have been triggered by something as innocent as a mass email to constituents.
• It could be one person, obsessively visiting the page.

It could also be:

• The result of some obscure right wing media figure calling her out.
• The result of a small group of people involved in a conspiracy. (Unlikely, this seems to be the archetypal Lone Gunman).

Anyone aware of any event that might support some the more prosaic explanations?

Delay Sentenced to 3 Years in the Slam

Schadenfreude, sweet schadenfreude!

And 10 years probation on money laundering and conspiracy charges.

The only cloud to this silver lining is that his active work on behalf of human traffickers in the Northern Marianas, creating what was for all intents and purpose a consequence free zone for slavery and forced prostitution, is not a part of this sentence.

I may be a bad person for doing a happy dance about this, but then I am a bad person, because I am doing a happy dance.

The desire for retributive justice is something that is a nearly universal human characteristic, and it is only through conquering our baser animal instincts through the application of higher order thought, and empathy, but I guess that I am simply not so evolved.

Needless to say, the fact that I am unevolved will come as no surprise to those who know me well.

Light Posting Through Tuesday, at Least

Events in Meatspace are involved.

Oh My God

I just heard about the shooting in Arizona.

A federal judge murderer, and a Congresswoman in critical condition with a bullet wound to the head.

All I will say right now is don't jump to conclusions yet.

Posted via mobile.

ADP Got it Wrong

Employment in the US rose by just 103,000, and private payrolls rose by just 113,000, with unemployment falling to 9.4%, though over ⅔ of that is because of people becoming discouraged and leaving the workforce.

Obama Wants to Nuke the Whales

MAnother Wikileaks gem, it appears that the Obama administration was preparing to go after the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's tax status to placate the Japanese and their whaling obsession:

Japan and the US proposed to investigate and act against international anti-whaling activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as part of a political deal to reduce whaling in Antarctic waters.

Four confidential cables from the US embassy in Tokyo and the state department in Washington, released by WikiLeaks, show US and Japanese diplomats secretly negotiating a compromise agreement ahead of a key meeting last year of the International Whaling Commission, the body that regulates international whaling.

The American proposal would have forced Japan to reduce the number of whales that Japan killed each year in the Antarctic whale sanctuary in return for the legal right to hunt other whales off its own coasts. In addition, the US proposed to ratify laws that would "guarantee security in the seas" – a reference to acting against groups such as Sea Shepherd that have tried to physically stop whaling.

The US proposal was eventually shot down by Britain and the EU in June 2010, but the cables show that the Sea Shepherd group had become a political embarrassment to Japan after stopping its whaling fleet reaching its annual quota of whale killed for several years.

It simply buggers my mind. What next? Are they going to be biting the heads off of kittens?

Seriously, for all the low expectations that I had for Barack Obama, I didn't expect that they would stun and amaze the way that Bush and His Evil Minions^™ did on a regular basis, but here I am, staring at the screen with an expression on my face resembling that of a cow that just stepped on its own udder.

<Facepalm>

I Knew This in 1968

It has been announced a new study has shown that male circumcision reduces cervical cancer risks for their partners:

Circumcising men can reduce cervical cancer risk in women, a new study shows.

The study involved more than 1,200 HIV-negative, heterosexual couples living in Uganda, where circumcision of male adults is increasingly encouraged as a means of slowing the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Half the men received the surgical procedure at enrollment and the other half were scheduled for circumcision after their participation in the trial ended.

Two years later, the female partners of the men who remained uncircumcised were more likely than the partners of the circumcised men to be infected with human papilloma virus (HPV) types most often associated with cervical cancer.

When I was about 6 years old, I remember discussing the correlation between uncircumcised partners and cervical cancer, though that was prior to the understanding of the correlation between HPV and cervical cancer.

This has been known for something like 100 years.

Jenny McCarthy Can Kiss My Shiny Metal Ass*

Steven Wakefield's now discredited paper in Lancet claiming a tie between autism and vaccines is now more than just a zealot doing bad science.

Brian Deer of the British Medical Journal reveals that it was outright fraud:

In the first part of a special BMJ series, Brian Deer exposes the bogus data behind claims that launched a worldwide scare over the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, and reveals how the appearance of a link with autism was manufactured at a London medical school.

………

Unknown to Mr 11, Wakefield was working on a lawsuit, for which he sought a bowel-brain “syndrome” as its centrepiece. Claiming an undisclosed £150 (€180, $230) an hour through a Norfolk solicitor named Richard Barr, he had been confidentially 8 put on the payroll two years before the paper was published, eventually grossing him £435 643, plus expenses.

(emphasis original)

Now the question is when he goes to jail for fraud, though if I were the prosecutor, I would add felony murder to the bill of indictment as well.

^*Jenny McCarthy is a big antivaxxer.

If Jews Run the Media,They Are Not Competent

Specifically, they report the story of an Agunah (Literally "Chained Woman) and the resulting protests directed at the ex-husband of a woman who refuses to grant here a religious divorce, a "Get", which under Jewish law means that they are still married:

This should have been a good New Year’s for Aharon Friedman, a 34-year-old tax counsel for the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. He spent time with his 3-year-old daughter, and could have been thinking about the influence he will have starting Wednesday, when his boss, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, becomes chairman of the powerful tax-writing committee.

Instead, Mr. Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, finds himself scrutinized in the Jewish press, condemned by important rabbis, and attacked in a YouTube video showing about 200 people protesting outside his Silver Spring, Md., apartment on Dec. 19. They were angered by Mr. Friedman’s refusal to give his wife, Tamar Epstein, 27, a Jewish decree of divorce, known as a get.

What a surprise, a Republican is being a selfish asshole.

While I do understand that he has issues with the custody arrangement, using the get as a way to extract concessions is beneath contempt.

That being said, I am aware of a number of these cases, and while I strongly object to these enforcement of these medieval (actually pre-medieval) religious statutes, I am aware that this happens dozens, if not hundreds of times a year.

What got to me was this paragraph:

Mr. Friedman and Ms. Epstein have been civilly divorced since April and share custody of their daughter, but they are still married according to Jewish law. And without a get neither he nor Ms. Epstein can remarry within the faith. She is considered an agunah, or chained woman.

(emphasis mine)

If the Jews run the New York Times, they are incompetent, because it misses two points:

• First, if Mr. Reiedman gets civilly remarried, and has a child, a likely thing for a 34 year old Orthodox Jew, the child will not be a mamzer, who would be forbidden from marrying other Jews, while any child that Ms. Epstein has will be a mamzer. (3500 year old religious law is such a joy, huh?)
• Second, it is possible for Mr. Friedman to get a rabbinical ruling allowing him to take a 2nd wife, while Ms. Epstein cannot.
• This has been done in some cases where a wife is in a persistent vegetative state, or completely delusional, since a get cannot be granted under those conditions, it requires the knowing receipt of the get by the wife, so permission for a "2^nd" wife has been given with the the "1^st" wife continue to be financially supported by the husband.
• In this case though, a rabbi approving a 2^nd marriage is basically zero.
  

This makes the conditions of the Agunah unjust and unfair to the woman in the conflict. It is not, nor has it ever been, an equal imposition on both spouses, and a small amount of research should have made this unfortunate state of affairs quite clear.

Clearly, I need to contact the local president of my ZOG chapter and pass my complaint up the chain.

J-20 Video Pr0n

What is with those huge landing gear doors?

Yep, someone got some (remarkably high quality) video of the J-20 doing taxi tests.

As an aside, the recent outpouring of "surreptitiously" snapped photos and videos of the new Chinese fighter prototype indicate that this is something that they really want us to see.

Well, If I Had Been Ignored for 2 Years, I'd Quit Too

Paul Volcker, arguably the person in the administration most strongly for enhanced regulation of financial institution, is leaving the administration:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker plans to leave his role as head of a panel of experts advising President Barack Obama on the economy, sources familiar with the decision said on Wednesday.

The departure of Volcker, 83, from the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board is among a series of changes Obama is planning to announce soon.

The decision to leave the board was Volcker's.…

Seeing as how he was generally ignored, and his initiatives, like the Volcker rule were, at best, used as political talking points, it's no wonder.

If I weren't someone with my tongue so far up the banks' rectums that I tasted tonsils (see Summers, Lawrence and Geithner, Timothy), and I were an economic adviser to the Obama administration, I wouldn't have made it past 2 months, much less 2 years.

It's Jobless Thursday

Initial unemployment claims rose by 18,000 to 409,000 last week, though the 4-week moving average fell by 3,500 to 410,750, with continuing claims fell by 47K to 4.103 million, and I can't seem to find the data on extended claims.

In related, and rather surprising news, payroll processor ADP is predicting that private employment increased by 297,000 last month.(!)

If true, this is good news, though I'll wait for the official data tomorrow.

Facebook to Buy Time-Warner in a Multibillion Dollar Stock Deal

Not really, but the obvious parallels between the dot-bomb mania of the late 1990s, and this bit of Vampire Squid^* inspired pump and dump, Goldman Sachs is investing money in, and creating a (completely fictitious) market cap for Facebook of around $50 billion.

Karl Denninger says that it's a scam, and that whoever invests in after Goldman will be left holding the bag, while William Cohan at the New York Times runs the numbers:

Despite the high price of its investment, Goldman sees in Facebook a business bonanza, a nearly perfect nugget of investment-banking opportunities. First, Goldman’s cost of capital is close to zero — as a bank holding company, it can borrow from the Federal Reserve at negligible interest rates — so any capital gain it makes on its venture in Facebook will be sheer profit. Second, Goldman has almost certainly locked up the role of lead manager of the inevitable Facebook initial public offering.

Fees for underwriting public offerings are generally about 7 percent of the value of the stock sold. Facebook could easily sell $2 billion of stock or more, generating fees to Goldman and the other underwriters of at least $140 million. The other benefit for Goldman in leading the public offering — aside from major bragging rights — is that it can use its marketing, sales and distribution muscle to make sure the value of Facebook at the time of the offering exceeds the $50 billion valuation at which Goldman invested.

Goldman has also won from Facebook the right to offer an additional $1.5 billion of the company’s stock to its private-wealth clients. According to The Times, Goldman will be creating a “special purpose vehicle” to sell the stock to its wealthy clients and then will charge them a 4 percent initial fee plus 5 percent of any profits. While on paper it seems that these high rollers would be foolish to invest in Facebook at such a lofty valuation, they will still most certainly feel increased loyalty to Goldman for making such an exclusive opportunity available to them. On top of it all, there is the increased likelihood that Goldman will get to manage a good portion of the $12 billion fortune belonging to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, for yet more fees.

Seriously, we bailed out those contemptible f%$#s for this?!?!?

By way of perspective, DC at the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS noted:

• Facebook is worth more than, Starbucks ($25 billion market cap)
• Facebook is worth more than United, American, Delta, JetBlue, and Southwest Airlines combined (About $32 billion combined market cap)
• Facebook is worth about 25 times more than the New York Times Company
• Facebook is bigger than Target's market cap ($43 billion)
• Facebook is worth about twice as much as Dell ($26.5 billion market cap)
• Facebook is worth more than Viacom, which owns MTV and Comedy Central ($28 billion market cap)
• Facebook is worth more than Campbell Soup and General Mills combined ($34.4 billion combined market cap)
• Facebook is worth more than Boeing ($48.7 billion market cap)
• Facebook is worth five times more than Netflix, the stock darling of 2010 ($9.3 billion market cap)
• Facebook is worth more than Nokia, the world's biggest cellphone company ($39.5 billion market cap)

All this for a company that doesn't really sell anything, and has a revenue stream that is rather opaque.

Facebook is still privately held, which implies that they really don't want people to look under the hood until someone really stupid hands them a lot of money.

^*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

I Love The Onion

Nuclear Bomb Detonates During Rehearsal For 'Spider-Man' Musical

Light Blogging for a While

Our router gave up the ghost, and right now I'm tethering with my cell phone, which means that in about 15 minutes, I will be able to use my phone to iron my shirts.

Verizon is dispatching us a new one.

Damn.

Still, it's good to be home.

When Does Antonin Scalia Start to Wear a White Robe?

He is now saying that absent legislation, there is a private right to discriminate against women:

The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not protect against discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, according to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

In a newly published interview in the legal magazine California Lawyer, Scalia said that while the Constitution does not disallow the passage of legislation outlawing such discrimination, it doesn't itself outlaw that behavior:

Seriously, when then Assistant Attorney General wrote that William Renquist wrote that "A judge who is a "strict constructionist" in constitutional matters will generally not be favorably inclined toward claims of either criminal defendants or civil rights plaintiffs," he wasn't kidding.

A strict constructionist is a judge who prejudges cases to benefit the powerful and corrupt.  They are results based jurists, and the depressing thing is that Scalia is arguably only the 4^th most insane member of the court right now, after Roberts, Alito, and Thomas.

1:40:24 Well Spent

First, an admission: While I saw the first 3 Star Wars movies, that is episode 4, 5, and 6, I only saw Revenge of the Sith among the prequels.

I was visiting my 'Rents in 2007, and as a family thing, we all watched episode 3, and my reaction was a big Meh.

I actually found it a bit more disappointing than Return of the Jedi, which was surprising, since I've seen about 15 minutes of The Phantom Menace in dribs and drabs, the dialogue drives me to change the channel after about 45 seconds.

In any case it gives me the opportunity to review the review of the movie on Red Letter Media, and "Harvey Plinkett" is a genius.

There is some profoundly disturbing humor in the review (3 parts, at link), but this is a cogent and truly intelligent review of The Revenge of the Sith as cinema, and arguably packs more in it's a bit more than an hour and a half than your average college level film course.

This is someone who loves cinema, and can use Citizen Kane (Which he admits is unfair) as well as the first three Star Wars Movies (I call that fair) to show just how poorly done and pedestrian  SW III is.

It is entertaining, even though it is over half as long as the movie being critiques (100 min vs 140 min).

It's delivered in a sort of Ben Steinesque creepy monotone, but that contributes to the enjoyment.

<Facepalm>

Have you heard the latest thing that conservatives are seizing on to accuse Barack Obama of being a godless secret-Muslim socialist Negro?

Well it appears that Barack Obama's speaking positively of the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum, on the seal of the United States since 1792, has given them a new reason to be shrill:

The culture wars have a new battlefield, thanks to a letter this week from the Congressional Prayer Caucus to President Obama. To the religious right, the motto "E Pluribus Unum," which has been part of the fabric of American democracy since it was emblazened on the national seal in 1782, has become a controversial, anti-God statement. See the Congressional Prayer Caucus letter:

http://forbes.house.gov/UploadedFiles/National_Motto_Letter_to_President.pdf

Obama referred, innocently enough, to the motto "E Pluribus Unum" in a recent speech, pointing out that the Latin phrase, first adopted by the Founders, means "out of many, one." This beautiful motto perfectly captures the spirit of pluralistic America, where one country is formed out of many states, and where one people - the American people - are formed from a melting pot of immigrants from all around the world.

Out of many, one. Indeed, the wisdom of the Founders, in enscribing "E Pluribus Unum" on the Great Seal of the United States, can't be questioned.

Or maybe it can. As the above letter shows, to Rep. Michele Bachmann and others on the Congressional Prayer Caucus, Obama's reference to "E Pluribus Unum" borders on unpatriotic. They say he should instead be promoting the motto "In God We Trust," which was adopted as the official national motto at the urging of religious conservatives in 1956, during the McCarthy era and at the height of the Cold War Red Scare.

Well, I get why they object to the phrase E Pluribus Unum. First, it's another hammer to use against a figure that they clearly see as an uppity (*insert epithet here*), and second, the basic idea of E Pluribus Unum is the acceptance is that people who are different from them, either in philosophy, theology, or pigmentation, are legitimate Americans, which fulfills them with horror.

They are really deeply repulsive human beings.

Gee, You Think?!?!?!

After it was revealed that something like ½ of the top flight academic economists have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wall Street, and then enthusiastically endorsed the policies of deregulation and "financial innovation" which lined their patron's pockets, it now appears that the members of the American Economic Association are considering adopting a code of ethics.

Let's see

• Stanford Business Prof. Darrell Duffie wrote a book on Wall Street regulations without mentioning that is on the board of Moody’s
• Laura D’Andrea Tyson, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, business school UC Berkeley, is a director of Morgan Stanley.
• Richard H. Clarida, Columbia: executive vice president at the bond behemoth Pimco
• R. Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School: director of MetLife
• Frederic S. Mishkin, Columbia Business School: high priced consultant to Wall Street Firms
• Martin S. Feldstein, George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University: former board member, American International Group
• Larry Summers
• Larry Summers
• Larry Summers
• Larry Summers

Why would anyone think that economists might need a small dose of ethics?

David Zurawik is the Dumbest Muthahf%$#er on the Face of the Earth

And considering the fact that he is the Baltimore Sun's TV critic, which means that he had to beat out other TV critics, this is a big hurdle to jump.

You see Zurawik was commenting on the fact that former CBS reporter, and former CNN anchor John Roberts, a generally well respected journalist, was moving from CNN to Fox, largely because Fox was willing to base him in the same town as his fiancee.

When all is said and done, I can agree that this was generally a net plus for Fox in terms of journalism, considering the fact that "Biff the Wonderdog" would be an improvement over the likes of Britt Hume, but then he unleashes this corker:

The channel doesn't need more ratings magnets -- it has all of them any cable channel needs right now. What Fox needs to do is continue to add journalistic strength and depth as it did in October with Juan Williams.

Yes, he said that the man who vehemently defended Clarence Thomas against accusations of sexual harassment while not revealing that he himself was accused of sexual harassment is a paragon of Journalist Strength and depth.

This is a guy who had an interview with George W. Bush, and said, on camera, that he prayed for him.

If this is what David Zurawik calls journalist strength and depth, I am Edward F%$#ing Murrow

Deep Thoughts, Lunch Edition

Two thoughts actually,

First, I will have to leave my cell phone in my car when at work, which makeds me feel kind of naked.

Second, one of the guys at the orientation session had the WORST comb over that I have EVER seen in my life.

Matt Taibbi Does it Again

He has a post on his Rolling Stone blog titled, "An Extremely Long Metaphor to Explain Mortgage Chaos."

It's really not long at all, but it concisely nails all the basic points.

Go read it now.

And Still No Prosecutions…

The robosigners at teh banks are currently stamping signatures of a woman who died in 1995 to legal documents.

This is not sloppy paperwork. This is criminal fraud.

We need to see prosecutions, but we won't, because we are committed to looking forward, and not backward, so we will see more fraud, reckless risk taking, and general corruption in our financial system for decades to come.

Thanks, Barry.

And the Insanity Continues

So after a ruinous recession, the economy shrunk by over a fifth, made worse by austerity programs that were intended to maintain a hard peg to the Euro, Estonia's government has finally achieved the desired result, and at the start of the year, Estonia joins the Euro Zone.

Truth be told, the Estonian government set it up such that there was no choice, since it maintained a hard peg to the Euro, and the Deutsch Mark before that, and almost all the loans outstanding are foreign denominated, so there really never was any sort of fiscal or economic sovereignty in the small Baltic Republic.

If anyone expects an improvement in the standards of living as a result of this though, they are very likely to be disappointed.

China Expected to Field First Carrier in 2011

Click for full size

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The Varyag is out of dry dock

It looks like the Chinese will be launching their first carrier this year.

It's made from the hull (no equipment or propulsion when bought as scrap) of the old unfinished Soviet STOBAR aircraft carrier Varyag, and while I doubt that it will ever serve in anything remotely resembling a combat capability, neither did the USS Langley, though it did see service as a seaplane tender.

What is important here is that it means that China will be developing equipment, doctrine, and training for a carrier borne air wing.

Missing the Point Completely

This article notes that Israel appears to have made significant discoveries in offshore natural gas, but that access to foreign markets will be difficult:

Israel can look forward to long-term energy security after the discovery of a huge off-shore natural gas field but obstacles lie ahead in exporting its output, experts said Thursday.

Israel will find it hard to secure foreign buyers as European gas consumption is weakening while competition is stiff in the expanding Asian market, they said.

Texas-based Noble Energy and its Israeli exploration partners described Wednesday the Leviathan prospect -- 130 km (80 miles) off the Mediterranean port of Haifa -- as the world's biggest gas find in the past decade

This misses the reality of the situation.

When one looks at oil exporting nations, with the exception of Norway, the truth is that it does not bring prosperity to the masses, nor does it make for a better society.

Simply put, Israel should not plan to export the gas in any significant quantity.

First, from a defense perspective, the natural gas serves as a way to achieve energy independence in the relatively short term, and exporting the gas diminishes this.

Secondly, natural gas is the raw material for much of the petrochemical industry, and this could be used to establish such an industry in Israel. A focus on exports would serve to subvert the development of this industry and the additional profits, and jobs, that they would create.

Too True

Much like in reality, the when the cops realize that he has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than a few thousand dollars, they realize that they cannot prosecute, just like in real life.

Click picture for full cartoon.

Not Enough Bullets … No Consequences for the Rich Edition

The New York Times has an article on real estate developers who repeatedly fail and default, but continue to attract other people's money to their schemes:

Larry Gluck, the apartment building king whose company defaulted on loans in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, recently bought the Windermere Hotel in Manhattan and Tivoli Towers, a subsidized housing complex in Brooklyn.

Ian Bruce Eichner, who lost two major New York skyscrapers to foreclosure in the early 1990s and defaulted on a $760 million loan for a Las Vegas casino resort in 2008, is working on a plan to rescue One Madison Park, a troubled 50-story condominium project.

Even Harry Macklowe, whose $7 billion gamble on seven Midtown skyscrapers at the top of the market almost cost him his entire empire, is out looking for new deals.

Industry lore has it that New York is one of the toughest, most unforgiving real estate markets in the world. The costs are so high, the unions so ornery, the politicians so demanding and the rivalries so fierce, that one false move invites financial disaster.

But the truth is that there have been surprisingly few career fatalities among New York developers, even though they have lost billions of investor dollars on overpriced real estate and have littered the city with unfinished apartment buildings. While a homeowner who lost a house to foreclosure would find it difficult to borrow for years, developers who defaulted on enormous loans have still been able to attract money.

The reasons, experts say, are that there is still plenty of money floating around and that the market has a very short memory.

“You can always find an investor who’ll put up equity with a guy, unless he’s Attila the Hun,” said Daniel Alpert, managing partner at Westwood Capital, a real estate investment bank.

………

This is the very definition of moral hazard, and when someone does this repeatedly, it is not incompetence, it is fraud.

Time to end the bailouts and start prosecuting.

U.S. Navy Splits the Baby on the LCS Contract

Both Lockheed-Martin's conventional design and Austal's Trimaran got contracts for 10 ships, at $538 million, without mission modules, which means not much in the way of meaningful sensors or weapons.

For a ship that weighs as much as a frigate, but is as lightly armed as a corvette, but has the advantage of being able to change tasks, by swapping out mission modules, going from anti-sub warfare, to anti-surface warfare, counter-min, ISR, etc. if it can find its way to suitably equipped port.

Yes, "It's a dessert topping AND a floor wax!"

Yeah, the idea sounds really stupid to me too.

This is a Classic Case of Deterrence

It appears that the Chinese DF-21 anti-ship ballistic missile is operational, a 900 mile range anti-ship missile, at least according to Admiral Robert Willard, Commander, U.S. Pacific Command.

It's intended to be a carrier killer, and while the capabilities, particularly the targeting, are unclear, but considering that the Pershing II's MARV (MAneuverable Reentry Vehicle) got a roughly 30 m CEP, it will certainly give a CVBG cause to pause.

Even the warhead is nothing more than 150kg of high strength steel descending at 1000 m/s, it will still completely ruing a carrier skipper's day.

There are 2 possibility two possibilities here, either this is an attempt by the Pentagon to hype the Chinese threat, or the Chinese are trying to create an effective no-go zone for the flat-tops by creating uncertainty steps to cut in the missile in an operational posture.

Then again, it might be both.