If a Republican Tells You That the Sky is Blue

Personally confirm this, because his is probably lying.

The latest case is (probably) former GOP golden boy Mark Rubio who was caught lying about his family being expelled from Cuba by Castro:

During his rise to political prominence, Sen. Marco Rubio frequently repeated a compelling version of his family’s history that had special resonance in South Florida. He was the “son of exiles,” he told audiences, Cuban Americans forced off their beloved island after “a thug,” Fidel Castro, took power.

But a review of documents — including naturalization papers and other official records — reveals that the Florida Republican’s account embellishes the facts. The documents show that Rubio’s parents came to the United States and were admitted for permanent residence more than two-and-a-half years before Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban government and took power on New Year’s Day 1959.

The supposed flight of Rubio’s parents has been at the core of the young senator’s political identity, both before and after his stunning tea-party-propelled victory in last year’s Senate election. Rubio — now considered a prospective 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate and a possible future presidential contender — mentions his parents in the second sentence of the official biography on his Senate Web site. It says that Mario and Oriales Rubio “came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover.” And the 40-year-old senator with the boyish smile and prom-king good looks has drawn on the power of that claim to entrance audiences captivated by the rhetorical skills of one of the more dynamic stump speakers in modern American politics.

The real story of his parents’ migration appears to be a more conventional immigrant narrative, a couple who came to the United States seeking a better life. In the year they arrived in Florida, the future Marxist dictator was in Mexico plotting a quixotic return to Cuba.

Rubio’s office confirmed Thursday that his parents arrived in the United States in 1956 but noted that “while they were prepared to live here permanently, they always held out the hope and the option of returning to Cuba if things improved.” They returned to Cuba several times after Castro came to power to “assess the situation with the hope of eventually moving back,” the office said in a statement.

Yeah, right.

In 1956, Castro was in exile in Mexico until December 2.

His "revolution" was little more than a quixotic joke in 1956.

His parents ditched Cuba in 1956 because they did not want to live there any more.

Lame…

Bug Hunt Accomplished…

So Qaddafi is dead:

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the former Libyan strongman who fled into hiding after an armed uprising toppled his regime two months ago, met a violent and vengeful death Thursday in the hands of rebel fighters who stormed his final stronghold in his Mediterranean hometown Surt. At least one of his sons was also killed.

Al Jazeera television showed footage of Colonel Qaddafi, alive but bloody, as he was dragged around by armed men in Surt. The television also broadcast a separate clip of his half-naked torso, with eyes staring vacantly and an apparent gunshot wound to the head, as jubilant fighters fired automatic weapons in the air. A third video, posted on Youtube, showed excited fighters hovering around his lifeless-looking body, posing for photographs and yanking his limp head up and down by the hair.

Conflicting accounts quickly emerged about whether Colonel Qaddafi was executed by his captors, died from gunshot wounds sustained in a firefight, was mortally wounded in a NATO air strike on his escaping convoy or bled to death in an ambulance. But the images broadcast by Al Jazeera punctuated an emphatic and gruesome ending to his four decades as a ruthless and bombastic autocrat who had basked in his reputation as the self-styled king of kings of Africa.

So all that remains for NATO's little colonial enterprise is the looting by multinational oil companies and ………… What else is there in Libya?

Tourism maybe? 

And, of course, money to gotten by looting privatizing state industry, the healthcare system, and education.

Osama Who Ever Is In Charge of al-Qaeda , Take Me Now!!!

MTV is making a casting call for The Real World occupy Wall Street:

MTV has made an industry this year of recycling its vintage content, from Beavis & Butthead to Liquid Television.

Now the network appears to be updating or at least remixing its Real World franchise with a tip of the hat to the Occupy generation.

Casting calls in Los Angeles and New York this week are looking for ...

Is there nothing that our society does not cheapen?

It's Jobless Thursday

And initial claims are again just marginally better,   404,000 down from last week's adjusted 409,000, which is still too damn high.

Actually, it's worse than it sounds, because they adjusted last week's numbers were adjusted up from 405,000, (isn't it always the way?) so it's really a negligible drop.

What's more, continuing claims rose, though emergency claims fell, probably as people hit 99 weeks.

We are not anywhere near a recovery.

On Gilad Shalit

From a purely tactical perspective, the idea that a thousand-to-one prisoner swap makes sense before final status negotiations is stupid.

I'm don't begrudge the actions of his family, and their obvious happiness over the release of Gilad Shalit after 5 years, but I think that this will, in the long run, make things worse, not better.

It strengthens the role of hostage taking, as Hamas has explicitly stated.

I'm not a fan of Benyamin Netanyahu, and perhaps this colors my assessment of these developments, but I see this as a political hail Mary pass^* by the Israeli PM.

Recently, Netanyahu's political popularity has been scraping the bottom of the barrel for some time, witness the tent demonstrations in Israel, and my expectation is that he will call for new elections while whatever popularity boost he had gotten remains.

^*Pun not intended.

Another Stinker of a Bank Deal from

Hoocoodanode that Biden's Kid Would Be a Hero in All This?

Another day, another sell-out deal from Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller and the Obama administration:

Talks between U.S. states and top banks over mortgage abuses are nearing agreement on a major sticking point that has bogged down settlement negotiations for more than a year.

…………

Under the proposed terms of the settlement -- which could total $25 billion -- banks would get broad legal immunity from state lawsuits in exchange for refinancing underwater loans, those mortgages where borrowers owe more than their homes are worth, the sources said.

…………

Banks have been holding out on a multi-billion-dollar settlement because they wanted broader legal immunity than state attorneys general were prepared to offer.

Originally, the states were only considering immunity for shortcuts taken during mortgage servicing and foreclosures, including the so-called "robo-signing" of documents to evict people behind on their mortgages.

In recent days, the state attorneys general agreed to release major banks from claims that they made legal errors when first originating the loans, such as approving loans for borrowers without verifying any income, according to two people familiar with the talks.

In exchange, banks would agree to refinance mortgages for borrowers who are current on their payments but owe more than their homes are currently worth, the sources said.

So, as Biden notes (see vid), they are getting a (pretty lame) deal from a contractor for bad gutters, and he demands to be cleared for the roof and the gutter they put in too.

But, as Yves Smith observes, the relief, such as it is, would only apply to non-securitized mortgages (about 20% of the mortgages), and the banks get to write the deal for the homeowners, meaning more booby traps for the the people who get "relief", and probably a waiver of private liability.

BTW, this likely f%$#s the MBS investors, because without an official investigation of the securitization process, any potential private suit will be hamstrung.

And the Banksters Look to Occupy Greece

Police with Bayonets, Yeah, this is All About Law Enforcement!

No, I'm not joking, the EU has a paramilitary force, the European Gendarmerie Force, and they have allegedly been deployed to Greece:

Did you know that the EU has its own riot police that can operate in any European country but is answerable directly to none of them? No I didn’t either.

They are called the European Gendarmerie Force (Eurogendfor) . They are based in Italy but funded and staffed by six signatory nations who are France, Italy, Holland, Spain, Portugal and Romania. However, according to the Treaty which established Eurogendfor they can operate in any EU country and are available to others who invite them to do so. The country which invites them in is refered to as the ‘Host’.

…………

What does it say if it turns out ot be true that the Greek government has ‘invited’ a quasi military riot police made of personel from other nations to operate in Greece against its own citizens. Greek police not enough? Greek military not willing to crack heads? Got to get some foreigners to do it for you?

What exactly is the difference between Eurogendfor and any other mercenary force? The Greek government could ‘invite’ any private army in. No matter how you view the status of Eurogendfor, the reality is the Greek people did not vote in favour of joining it and certainly were not asked if they wanted foreign quasi military forces to be able to operate in Greece. If this story turns out to be true then it iouwld mean that the greek government that like all governments through history that have lost all legitimacy with its own people, eventually seek military support from outside forces with which to supress its own people. Once you view it like that the word tyranny eventually enters in. And that word has extremely serious consequences.

Let’s take a step back from this. The cuts in Greece are tied up intimately with bailing out French and German banks as well as the Greek owners of Greek banks. The Greek people have been demonstrating against the bail out for months. The Greek government has ignored its people and chosen to do the bidding of the EU elite, the IMF, the ECB and most of all the banks globally.

Now it is alleged that a non-Greek militarized riot force may have arrived to enforce austerity. Whose bidding would they really be doing? Whose interests would they be serving? Could it be the banks? Have the financial class now got their own riot police who they can ship to wherever the locals try to defy them and where the local police cannot be ‘trusted’ to serve the supra-national interests of the banks?

Of course this is not how Eurogendfor is set up. I know that. But is this how it actually works nevertheless?

Obviously at this point, what we have is one blogger (at the link) who has, "checked with friends in Athens," who have confirmed this, so this is not at the level of confirmation, and I don't know anyone in Greece, but there is a history of such actions,^* so the allegations pass my smell test.

^* The history that I know of are the occupations of Latin American nations to extract debt payments in the inter-war years, which prompted Will Rogers to say, following a tour of Latin America, that he knew that he was back in the USA when he didn't see any US Marines.

I Don't Smell a T-Shirt Here

While I agree with the sentiment:



But it doesn't have the ring of, for example, "Stop the looting, and start prosecuting."

OK, This Ain't Good…………

Bank of America is trying to take its Merrill Lynch's dodgy derivatives division and move it to the FDIC insured bank.

Interestingly enough, this has created a conflict between the Federal Reserve (who want to green light this) and the FDIC (who oppose the move):

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. disagree over the transfers, which are being requested by counterparties, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting, said the people. The bank doesn’t believe regulatory approval is needed, said people with knowledge of its position.

Three years after taxpayers rescued some of the biggest U.S. lenders, regulators are grappling with how to protect FDIC- insured bank accounts from risks generated by investment-banking operations. Bank of America, which got a $45 billion bailout during the financial crisis, had $1.04 trillion in deposits as of midyear, ranking it second among U.S. firms.

“The concern is that there is always an enormous temptation to dump the losers on the insured institution,” said William Black, professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a former bank regulator. “We should have fairly tight restrictions on that.”

(Emphasis mine)

Gee, you think? Keeping banks from moving risky investments to federally insured divisions is a bad thing?

Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Bank of America’s long-term credit ratings Sept. 21, cutting both the holding company and the retail bank two notches apiece. The holding company fell to Baa1, the third-lowest investment-grade rank, from A2, while the retail bank declined to A2 from Aa3.
Moody’s Downgrade

The Moody’s downgrade spurred some of Merrill’s partners to ask that contracts be moved to the retail unit, which has a higher credit rating, according to people familiar with the transactions. Transferring derivatives also can help the parent company minimize the collateral it must post on contracts and the potential costs to terminate trades after Moody’s decision, said a person familiar with the matter.

………

Moving derivatives contracts between units of a bank holding company is limited under Section 23A of the Federal Reserve Act, which is designed to prevent a lender’s affiliates from benefiting from its federal subsidy and to protect the bank from excessive risk originating at the non-bank affiliate, said Saule T. Omarova, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law.

“Congress doesn’t want a bank’s FDIC insurance and access to the Fed discount window to somehow benefit an affiliate, so they created a firewall,” Omarova said. The discount window has been open to banks as the lender of last resort since 1914.

………

In 2009, the Fed granted Section 23A exemptions to the banking arms of Ally Financial Inc., HSBC Holdings Plc, Fifth Third Bancorp, ING Groep NV, General Electric Co., Northern Trust Corp., CIT Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., among others, according to letters posted on the Fed’s website.

The central bank terminated exemptions last year for retail-banking units of JPMorgan, Citigroup, Barclays Plc, Royal Bank of Scotland Plc and Deutsche Bank AG. The Fed also ended an exemption for Bank of America in March 2010 and in September of that year approved a new one.

Section 23A “is among the most important tools that U.S. bank regulators have to protect the safety and soundness of U.S. banks,” Scott Alvarez, the Fed’s general counsel, told Congress in March 2008.

If Bank of America is not actually insolvent, they wouldn't be doing this.  This is outright fraud.

What's more, the Federal Reserve is an active accomplice in this .

H/t Naked Capitalism, where Yves Smith notes:

This changes the picture completely. This move reflects either criminal incompetence or abject corruption by the Fed. Even though I’ve expressed my doubts as to whether Dodd Frank resolutions will work, dumping derivatives into depositaries pretty much guarantees a Dodd Frank resolution will fail. Remember the effect of the 2005 bankruptcy law revisions: derivatives counterparties are first in line, they get to grab assets first and leave everyone else to scramble for crumbs. So this move amounts to a direct transfer from derivatives counterparties of Merrill to the taxpayer, via the FDIC, which would have to make depositors whole after derivatives counterparties grabbed collateral. It’s well nigh impossible to have an orderly wind down in this scenario. You have a derivatives counterparty land grab and an abrupt insolvency. Lehman failed over a weekend after JP Morgan grabbed collateral.

But it’s even worse than that. During the savings & loan crisis, the FDIC did not have enough in deposit insurance receipts to pay for the Resolution Trust Corporation wind-down vehicle. It had to get more funding from Congress. This move paves the way for another TARP-style shakedown of taxpayers, this time to save depositors. No Congressman would dare vote against that. This move is Machiavellian, and just plain evil.

(emphasis original)

Evil, incompetent, and convinced of their own Objectivist virtue. Ayn Rands supermen in a nutshell.

God Bless the New Yorker

The October 24 ish.

It Couldn't Happen to a Nicer Guy

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.

Good Advice for Occupy Wall Street

It may seem silly, but if you are going to protest, it's a good idea to smarten up.

If not a suit and tie, at least something with a collar.

Don't look like a bum:

Goldman May Drop Bank Status ………

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?

Deep Thought

OccupySesameStreet is da Bomb!

Oh Sh%$!!!!

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.

Headline of the Day

Manly Arts Festival in Oklahoma City Closes Early for Lack of Interest

H/t Oggie.

Banks are Demolishing Homes Now

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

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.

Surprise…

It looks like the Boeing KC-46 tanker will be delayed.

Of course, the article in the Air Force Times is merely discussing the potential issues that might call delay, but this is pre-sell delays and cost overruns, with an eye toward making sure that the Pentagon and the Congress will bail them out when the inevitable cost overruns and schedule slippage occurs.

H/t ELP.

About Time…

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!!!!

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".

Read Matt Taibbi

Seriously, just read his advice to the Wall Street protesters.

Here's a Surprise…

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

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

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?

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!!!!

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

77. Piedmont Community Bank, Gray, GA
78. Blue Ridge Savings Bank, Inc., Asheville, NC
79. First State Bank, Cranford, NJ
80. 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):

Deep Thought

From my hairy brother on facebook.


I saw this a few years back.

Heard About the Shooting at the Salon In California?

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

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.

The Lesson Here is If You Cheat Investors, Be a White Man

Long prison term, dark face, any questions?

You know why Raj Rajaratnam just got sentenced to 11 years in prison for insider trading:

Fallen hedge fund tycoon Raj Rajaratnam has been sentenced to a record 11 years in prison after his conviction in the biggest Wall Street insider trading case in decades.

Prosecutors had pushed for 25-year sentence after convicting Rajaratnam, 54, in the biggest insider trading investigation ever conducted by US authorities.

Legal experts said that while prosecutors may have been disappointed with the decision, the sentence was still the highest ever given for insider dealing.

The thing to remember here is that this is actually fairly small time by the scale of the financial meltdown, and that he is not white.

I won't believe that there is any sort of meaningful crackdown on the banksters until we see someone who is both white, and at least at the VP level for a major bank.

This is just, "Rounding up the usual suspects."

It's Jobless Thursday

And the initial claims numbers are basically flat, which is still too high for a meaningful recovery, with the 4-weeking moving average and continuing claims numbers falling slightly, but extended and emergency claims rose.

When juxtaposed with the non-farm payroll numbers for September being over 100,000 less than is needed to accommodate natural growth in the labor force, this is not good news.

If They Believe Mayor Bloomberg, They Are Idiots…

He's claiming that the Occupy Wall Street people need to leave Zuccotti Park to allow for cleaning:

The small Manhattan square occupied by anti-Wall Street protestors for almost four weeks will be temporarily cleared for cleaning on Friday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg went to the protest site, where several hundred people are camped out, to explain the move, which would be the first time the demonstrators are asked to leave, the mayor’s office said.

Bloomberg said the owners of the plaza wanted to exercise their duty in cleaning it — and that this was their right, although protestors would be allowed back immediately.

My first question is why did they sell a public park to private owners?

It was not clear whether this signaled an attempt by the city to clear out the protest, which is being held in a privately owned plaza that the owners are obliged to make available to the public.

Holloway promised “protesters will be able to return to the areas that have been cleaned, provided they abide by the rules that Brookfield has established for the park.”

Among new rules posted at the park are a ban on sleeping bags and other camping paraphernalia.

Yeah, like this this isn't an attempt to shut these folks down.

Expect cops to start seriously breaking heads in the next week.

(on edit)

The deadline given by Brookfield is 7:00am EDT (GMT-4) today.

It's the Vampire Squid's World, We Just Live in It

So when Goldman Sachs gets caught helping clients evade taxes, and British authorities hand them a get out of jail free card:

Britain's tax authorities have given Goldman Sachs an unusual and generous Christmas present, leaked documents reveal. In a secret London meeting last December with the head of Revenue, the wealthy Wall Street banking firm was forgiven £10m interest on a failed tax avoidance scheme.

HM Revenue and Customs sources admit privately that the interest-free deal is "a cock-up" by officials, but refuse to say who was responsible.

Documents leaked to Private Eye magazine and published in full by the Guardian record that Britain's top tax official, HMRC's permanent secretary Dave Hartnett, personally shook hands on a secret settlement last December.

Hartnett is due to be questioned on Wednesday by the Commons public accounts committee. The leaked documents suggest that a previous PAC chairman, Edward Leigh, was misled when he was told it was illegal to reveal details of such cases to parliament.

Leaked legal advice from James Eadie QC, which the Guardian also publishes today, says the opposite. Hartnett has discretion to reveal such facts to the parliamentary watchdog, according to the advice.

………

In the 1990s, Goldman set up a company offshore in the British Virgin Islands. This entity, called Goldman Sachs Services Ltd, supposedly employed all of Goldman's London bankers, who were then "seconded" to work there.

The device appears to have been designed to conceal the size of the bonuses. Judge David Williams said in 2009 that it was "a way of keeping information about the GS accounts and payroll out of the public domain and confidential".

Goldman also begrudged paying its share of UK national insurance on the six-figure bonuses. Court judgments disclose that a typical Goldman bonus to a junior banker was £143,000 in 1998, and £191,000 the following year.

The company, along with 21 investment banks and other firms, purchased blueprints for an avoidance scheme called an employee benefit trust (EBT). The bonuses were indirectly invested into elaborate share option schemes.

It took the Revenue until 2005 to demonstrate in court that these EBTs were merely illegitimate tax avoidance devices. The 21 other firms surrendered, and handed over what they owed.

But Goldman Sachs refused to pay its £30.81m bill. Instead the city firm Freshfields and the tax QC David Goldberg fought tooth and nail on Goldman's behalf through the courts. By 2010, according to a public judgment, the unpaid bill with accumulated interest had mounted to £40m.

Seriously, we need to take these muthas down hard.

Deep Thought

On Steve Jobs:


Mat Bors is a genius.

H/t JR at the Stellarparthenon BBS.

God Bless The Onion

President's Approval Rating Soars After Punching Wall Street Banker in Face



And in a related story:

The banker punch may have also been a boon for President Obama's efforts to pass his American Jobs Act. When asked if he still opposed the bill this afternoon, a visibly nervous Republican house majority leader Eric Cantor said, "No no no. I'll pass whatever the President wants. P-p-please don't let him hurt me."

Heh.

Holy Sh%$!!!

Click for full size

---

This is scary

It's rained so hard world wide that ocean levels fell in 2010:

Guest Blogger on Oct 2, 2011 at 12:40 pm
by Barry Saxifrage, via the Vancouver Observer

“The year 2010 was one the worst years in world history for high-impact floods. But just three weeks into the new year, 2011 has already had an entire year’s worth of mega-floods. “ – Meteorologist Jeff Masters

I spend hours a day researching what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls “global weirding”: the destabilization of our weather system fueled by the three million tonnes of fossil fuel pollution we inject into it each hour. So it is a rare day when something shocks me as much as a recent U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) report on last year’s extreme rainfall.

As most locals know from soggy personal experience, our corner of planet Earth since last spring has been a bit wetter and greyer than normal. And next door, our Washington neighbours donned their gum boots and slogged through their fourth wettest year since 1895.

Still, we got off lucky. Very lucky it turns out.

According to this jaw-dropping NASA report, worldwide rainfall and snowfall were so extreme, in so many places last year, that sea levels fell dramatically.

Great googly moogly.

Tweet of the Day

When Michael Hayden Says That You Over Classify…

You have gone way beyond an even remotely sane assessment of the need for secrecy:

Ex-head of the National Security Agency and CIA and retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden said federal agencies need to open up to public and private industry to address cyber threats

As cyber security climbs its way up the priority list after 2011's string of attacks against government and corporate systems, U.S. government agencies and companies struggle to find a happy medium between excessive secrecy and too much disclosure regarding the handling of such issues.

Going one way or the other can have severe repercussions. Excessive secrecy can stifle cyber defense, as too much focus could be placed on an issue that was already resolved elsewhere. If you keep it secret, someone who might know how to fix it cannot do so. Too much disclosure, on the other hand, gives hackers what they need to work around security systems.

This is kind of like Sweeney Todd saying that you are too rough when you give a shave.

OK, Maybe She Has a Chance

Elizabeth Warren's Senate campaign raised $3.15 million in the 3^rd quarter, more than double Wall Street darling Scott Brown's haul of $1.55 million:

 Consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren is off to a quick start when it comes to raising money for her Senate campaign in Massachusetts, with a debut total -- $3.15 million -- that may even out-perform some of the Republican candidates for president.

Warren, who helped set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is a favorite candidate among progressives, announced the impressive third-quarter haul in an email to her supporters Monday. She said that 96% of the contributions came in donations of $100 or less.

Note that, "Most of the money was raised since she formally joined the race for the Democratic nomination in mid-September."

You gotta figure that she's going to get a lot of sweat equity out of her supporters as well.

I think that the primary campaign is basically over, but I still think that Scott Brown, particularly with the enthusiastic backing of the banksters, and what will surely be tepid support from the Wall Street living Democratic establishment *cough* Obama *cough* will be a though nut to crack.

But I am no longer making a prediction about the outcome.

Go Read the Shrill One

Krugman is brilliant today:

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

Go read the rest.

As an aside, the reaction of the 1% does not reflect the positions of people who feel that they truly deserve their prestige and power.

Deep down, they know that they are parasitic frauds, and they are terrified at being exposed.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot … Little Green Footballs?!?!?!

Here is a moment of WTF for you, Charles Johnson of the right wing cesspool Little Green Footballs is calling out the so-called Values Voters summit as a bunch of bigoted haters:

If there’s one right wing event that sums up the reasons why I ran screaming away from these lunatics more than any other, it’s the Values Voter Summit, put on every year by a devil’s brew of extreme religious fanatics preaching virulent hatred against everyone who isn’t them.

At the Values Voter Summit, you’ll find every sick and twisted right wing meme in existence; open racism, white supremacists, theocrats (real ones, who want to literally replace the Constitution with the Bible), creationists, historical revisionists, End Times believers, hard core misogynists, deranged homophobia and bigotry of all kinds. And those are just the speakers.

This year, as in every year, it’s attended by all the major Republican politicians, sucking up to these freaks for the almighty vote — because the haters have a dedicated base of deluded drones. Their votes can make a difference for Republicans, and the hate groups are always trying to force their primitive beliefs on the rest of America. It’s a match made in hell.

If the Republican party base, at least as understood by the Republican Presidential candidates, is too crazy for LGF, we are in a world of hurt.

Deep Thought

I got nothing add here:

Bank Failures over the Past Two Weeks

Yeah, I missed them last week.

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

74. First International Bank, Plano, TX ⇐ This one is from last week, Oct 30, sorry.
75. The RiverBank,Wyoming, MN
76. Sun Security Bank, Ellington, MN

Full FDIC list

It looks like the total for this year will be somewhere around 100, which is awful, but better than 2010.

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

Yom Kippur has Ended

And with something like one third of my metabolism turning back on to process a bowl of pad thai after 2f hours with neither food of fluids, there is no blood going to my brain.

Deep Thought

This is Wicked Cool…

Bioluminescent surfing:



When you surf at night during a red tide, agitate the algae, which produces luminescent wake.

Katz, U R Doin it Rong

It's Jobless Thursday

And initial claims are back above 400,000, with the 4-week moving average rising, though continuing and extended claims fell.

Recovery my ass.

Not Enough Bullets…

What happened in Chicago at the Occupy Wall Street protests there?

Some traders hung out a sign reading, "We are the 1%":

The Occupy Wall Street movement spread to Chicago this week, where protesters have gathered outside the Chicago Board of Trade, the world’s oldest options and futures trading center. Like the protesters in New York and other cities around the country, the group gathered to protest our nation’s growing income inequality, as the top 1 percent of Americans continue to see their incomes rise rapidly and their tax rates fall. The Chicago traders, confronted by the protesters’ “We are the 99 percent” message, crafted their own not-so-subtle reply, hanging signs in eighth-floor windows that said, “We are the 1%“:

I'm sure that these folks will carry their smirks on their faces until they see Madam Gillotine.

H/t Cthulhu.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

The power of wishful thinking

Representative Louise Slaughter has suggested during an interview on Olbermann and she suggested that, because of Clarence Thomas's repeated violation of conflict of interest statutes that his votes might be subject to retroactive recusal.

Rep. Slughter's suggestion as a remedy is just wishful thinking.

There is a remedy, and it's called impeachment, and the idea that Chief Justice Roberts as head of the judicial ethics commission would refer this to the Department of Justice is ludicrous.

More Like George W. Bush Every Day

Barack Obama is now claiming that the legal opinion granting him the authority to assassinate American citizens is a state secret, and so it is not subject to any sort of public scrutiny.

You know, as scary as George Bush was, he was basically a dunce, Barack Obama is a lot of things, but he is not stupid.

This not a fact that I find particularly reassuring:

Why? What justification can there be for President Obama and his lawyers to keep secret what they're asserting is a matter of sound law? This isn't a military secret. It isn't an instance of protecting CIA field assets, or shielding a domestic vulnerability to terrorism from public view. This is an analysis of the power that the Constitution and Congress' post September 11 authorization of military force gives the executive branch. This is a president exploiting official secrecy so that he can claim legal justification for his actions without having to expose his specific reasoning to scrutiny. As the Post put it, "The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi, or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process."

Obama hasn't just set a new precedent about killing Americans without due process. He has done so in a way that deliberately shields from public view the precise nature of the important precedent he has set. It's time for the president who promised to create "a White House that's more transparent and accountable than anything we've seen before" to release the DOJ memo. As David Shipler writes, "The legal questions are far from clearcut, and the country needs to have this difficult discussion." And then there's the fact that "a good many Obama supporters thought that secret legal opinions by the Justice Department -- rationalizing torture and domestic military arrests, for example -- had gone out the door along with the Bush administration," he adds. "But now comes a momentous change in policy with serious implications for the Constitution's restraint on executive power, and Obama refuses to allow his lawyers' arguments to be laid out on the table for the American public to examine." What doesn't he want to get out?

Think about it for a second: This ruling just an evaluations of public court rulings and public statutes, but they have buried this from any sort of public scrutiny.

There can't be any sensitive secrets involved, but they are covering it up.

Something is hinky here.

On Apple.com Today

All Praise Be to God for That Which he Has Granted…

In this case, it's the fact that Sarah Palin has declared that she will not run for President in 2012, which means that I can add her to my list of They Who Must Not Be Named:

Sarah Palin said she won’t seek the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, ending a lengthy and attention-grabbing political flirtation that kept voters and potential rivals guessing while buttressing her public profile.

The former Alaska governor and her party’s 2008 vice presidential nominee -- more recently a reality TV star and cable-news commentator -- said she opted against a White House run because she believed “that at this time I can be more effective in a decisive role to help elect other true public servants to office -- from the nation’s governors, to congressional seats and the presidency.”

Her announcement, in a statement sent to supporters today, removed a major uncertainty surrounding the Republican presidential race while raising questions about how she might use her celebrity and political following to shape the primary.

“I will continue driving the discussion for freedom and free markets, including in the race for president,” Palin’s statement said.

“I will help coordinate strategies to assist in replacing” President Barack Obama, keeping Republican control of the U.S. House and helping her party win a Senate majority, she said.

This means that I never have to write about her, or read about her, again.

While we are at it, let me add the following people to my list:

• John and Kate Gosslin.
• The cast of The Jersey Shore.
• The "Real Housewives" of anywhere.
• Nancy Grace.  (If she flips out on national TV, or is tried for a crime, this is suspended for reasons of schadenfreude)

Actually, let's say that it includes pretty much any reality TV star.

In any case, Sarah is now done.  She's made her bucks off of her 15 minutes of fame, and she was a springboard for Michelle Bachmann to become a viable (?) presidential candidate.  (The Republican Crazy Bitch Babe is the genre that she created.)

Corpulent Candidate Cops Out

Everyone's favorite morbidly obese bully, Chris Christie, will not run for President in 2012.

From my perspective ad a blogger, it's a pity, because the slow revelation to the general public of just who he is would make Rudolph Giuliani's implosion look like a cake walk.

Don't Tell Me I Never Gave You Anything

Here are my pictures from New York. (Click for big honking images)

Most notable was a Broadway disaster so bad that Dick Cheney should be the producer:


And here are the offices of the Gray Lady:


I remember Times Square before it became a Disneyfied version of Blade Runner:




Maybe it's the Eastern European Jewish heritage, Cossacks and all, but I really hate mounted police:

God Bless the Rude Pundit

The Case for Using Predator Drone Strikes Against Wall Street Executives

Brilliant, and once again completely SFW.

H/t Cthulhu.

Things I Never Thought That I Would Say, Number 249

I wish I could have gone to Wall Street today when I was in New York, but there was not enough time.<sup>*

*</sup>I wanted to go to Freedom Zuccotti Park and talk/offer moral support to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Deep Thought

When traveling via bus, bring a travel pack of tissues, in case the bus bathroom is out of toilet paper.

What the Shrill One Said

Yes, Paul Krugman is correct in noting that the US dollar is overvalued, and that the
Chinese Yuan is undervalued.

He only has 800 words, so what should also be noted is that the dollar is not just overvalued versus the Yuan, but versus the whole world, though he does note that the Chinese are deliberately pushing the value of the Yuan in addition.

Since the undervalued Yuan is, at its core, a tariff on Chinese imports, and a subsidy of their exports, it is clear that the sanctions bill in the Senate is justified.

That being said, there are also structural issues that overvalue the US dollar, to the advantage of Wall Street and the disadvantage of Main Street (Hence Robert Rubin's^* full throated support of a "strong dollar policy when he was SecTreas), and these need to be addressed as well.

^*Why is this corrupt ratf%$# not under criminal investigation?

I'm Heading for New York City

And then onto Monsey, NY.

My mother-in-law is moving to Baltimore, but spending the next month or so in Memphis while her apartment comes open, so I am ferrying her car down.

Against my wife's better advice, I will be using the "avoid tolls" option on the route on Google Maps, which avoids most but all, of the tolls, and doesn't have me doing it all on interstates

Interstate highways are boring.


View Larger Map

(On Edit)
I'm taking Bolt Bus, which has WiFi and power outlets.  Kewl.

Huh, I Missed This

Last Friday was International Blasphemy Rights Day.

As I have always considered the right to blaspheme to be among the most basic of human rights, I should have made note of this.

Oh, Now I Get It!!!!!!

It seems like ir was just earlier this evening, I was wondering what political calculus could be driving numerous states Attorneys General to walk away from the so-called "50 State Deal" on "Robosigning".  (Wait, it was just earlier this evening)

Well, now we know why.  The New York Times just described the recent transition of New York AG Schneiderman from a very (for New York, anyway) low key Attorney General to Political superstar:

The other day, in his office down on Wall Street, Eric T. Schneiderman owned up to an awkward truth.

Until fairly recently, he acknowledged, if you had asked the average passer-by to name New York’s attorney general, you might have gotten a mystified “Huh?” or the answer that it was Andrew M. Cuomo (the governor who used to have the job) or Eliot Spitzer (the disgraced former governor who had it before that), rather than the correct response: Mr. Schneiderman.

In the eight months since he has assumed the office, the emphatically unglamorous Mr. Schneiderman has maintained a low profile for the state’s top law-enforcement officer, charting a busy but anonymous course between Spitzerian aggression and Cuomoesque charm. Even his own press aide, Danny Kanner, recently confessed that, before this summer, his own parents did not know who Mr. Schneiderman was. “And I’m their kid; I work for the guy,” Mr. Kanner said.

But then came August, when Mr. Schneiderman, 56, rejected a proposed nationwide settlement releasing some of the country’s biggest banks from a lawsuit brought by the states claiming misconduct in the mortgage markets. Almost overnight, he found his own name mentioned in a series of laudatory articles in publications as varied as Rolling Stone, The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and the Web site Gawker.

Adding fuel to the profile-raising fire were the phone calls Mr. Schneiderman received this summer from officials in the Obama administration who pressured him to smarten up and join his counterparts in other states in settling the case. There were reports that a Federal Reserve official, Kathryn S. Wylde, had harangued him in public for his stubbornness (at the funeral for Hugh L. Carey, the former New York governor, no less). At the end of August, an unrepentant Mr. Schneiderman was kicked off the executive committee of attorneys general in charge of the case by its leader, Tom Miller, the attorney general of Iowa.

The cynic in me wonders if perhaps the fact that the flood of adoring correspondence was accompanied by, "Small tsunami of campaign donations," might have something to do with the increasing numbers of Attorneys General who are balking at signing an agreement exchanging a token payment for immunity for the banksters.

If Only They Could both Lose………

It's a battle between an insurance company and a pharmaceutical company over a drug that probably doesn't work but has a lot of fans:

Blue Shield of California will no longer pay for the use of the drug Avastin to treat breast cancer, a sign that support for the widely debated and expensive treatment may be eroding among health plans.

Blue Shield, with 3.2 million members, is apparently the first large insurance company to end payments since a federal advisory committee unanimously recommended in June that the Food and Drug Administration rescind Avastin’s approval as a treatment for breast cancer, saying the drug did not really help patients.

The F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, has not made a final decision, so Avastin retains its approval for now.

Because it is an emotional and politically contentious issue, with some women saying the drug is keeping them alive, many insurers have said they will wait until a final decision from the F.D.A. before re-evaluating their coverage policies. And Medicare has indicated it will continue paying for the drug even if the F.D.A. revokes the approval.

Until people realize that there is not a problem with the cost of prescription drugs because the real problem is the price of drugs, and so private solutions to innovation, with the associated exclusivity provisions, are the problem, not the solution.

The President Murders an American Citizen

One of the flat out most disturbing thing that Barack Obama has done is to claim that he has an absolute right to murder anyone, anywhere, any time based on his unilateral declaration that it is in the interest of national security.

Most recently, this was shown in the murder of Anwar al-Awlaki.

This was an extrajudicial killing with the only evidence made public being that he "inspired" people to wage war against us.

I really don't have the words to describe just how awful this is, but the Rude Pundit does. (and the essay is completely safe for work as well)

Just go read him.

I'm just thankful that I live in Maryland, where my vote for President does not matter in 2012, so I won't.<sup>*

*</sup>No, I won't vote Republican, I just won't cast a ballot for President, or I'll write in Howard Dean.

Pass the Popcorn, Mortgage Fraud Edition

And another shoe drops, as California leaving the 50 state mortgage deal, claiming that it's too bank friendly, joining New York, Delaware, Minnesota, and Massachusetts (link) in objecting to the blanket grants of immunity proposed:

California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris will no longer take part in a national foreclosure probe of some of the nation's biggest banks, which are accused of pervasive misconduct in dealing with troubled homeowners.

Harris removed herself from talks by a coalition of state attorneys general and federal agencies investigating abusive foreclosure practices because the nation's five largest mortgage servicers were not offering California homeowners relief commensurate to what people in the state had suffered, Harris told The Times on Friday.

The big banks were also demanding to be granted overly broad immunity from legal claims that could potentially derail further investigations into Wall Street's role in the mortgage meltdown, Harris said.

“It has been  a process of negotiating and sitting at a table in good faith, but ultimately I have decided that we have to go our own course and take an independent path. And that decision is because we need to bring relief to Californians that is equal to the pain California experienced, and what is being negotiated now is insufficient," Harris told The Times in an interview.

Harris delivered the news in a letter sent Friday to Iowa Atty. Gen. Tom Miller, who has been leading the 50-state coalition.

Here are some other interesting bits:

The removal of California from the discussions is a major blow to fraying efforts by the coalition, which has been trying to strike a settlement deal with the big banks for months. The move by Harris to reject the settlement talks is also a key departure from efforts by the Obama administration, which has been pushing for a fast resolution to the so-called robo-signing scandal that erupted last year.

Just so you know, "Pushing for a fast resolution," translates to, "Throwing lawbreakers another get out of jail free card," because the Banksters are Obama's real base.

“This whole concept of a settlement on foreclosure abuse is probably dead,” said Christopher Whalen, the founder of Institutional Risk Analytics. “Nobody in their right mind is going to opt into a settlement right now.”

So one would hope.  Neither the Obama administration, nor their corrupt lackey Iowa Attorney Gen. Tom Miller have had the slightest interest in pursuing any allegations or real wrongdoing against big banks.

I'm not sure what is motivating the AGs to bail on what would be a win-win for them, they get to "wave the bloody shirt" of some sort of settlement payments while insuring their own access to Wall Street campaign donations, but it appears that either they think that the political calculus is changing, or they just want to do the right thing.

Not Enough Bullets…

The SEC has ruled that Congressmen, their staffers, and executive branch members are free to commit insider trading with impunity:

When you buy and sell stocks based on secrets you learned at the office, it could be insider trading.

But when a United States Senator does it, it's probably perfectly legal.

That's because the SEC has largely determined that trading stocks based on advance knowledge of action in Congress is not insider trading.

If anything, it's "outsider" trading — buying and selling shares based on knowledge of an outside force that's about to hit a company's share value.

Think of it like a trader who sees a satellite image of a hurricane bearing down on an oil rig — and shorts the oil company’s stock in expectation of the damage.

Except in the case of Capitol Hill, the members of Congress can be both the trader and the hurricane — buying and selling shares in expectation of the effect that their own action has on the company’s stock price.

Some critics say that's probably going on a lot on Capitol Hill — although they don't have any direct proof.

“It’s really quite outrageous,” said Craig Holman, the legislative representative for Public Citizen. “If you just take a look at the statistics, members of Congress are either geniuses when it comes to stock trading or they are in fact trading off of some of this insider information.”

A pair of recent academic studies found that House members beat the market in their personal stock trading by about 6 percent, and Senators beat the market by about 10 percent.

Just when you thought that Washington could not get any more corrupt.

God Bless The Onion

Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What's Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions

Occupy Wall Street Heats Up

First, we are now seeing support from unions and local civil society groups:

The “Occupy Wall Street” protests, now entering their third week, are poised to get a whole lot bigger than its core of 200 to 300 people, potentially even exceeding the protesters original goals of 20,000 demonstrators, thanks to recent pledges of support from some of New York City’s largest labor unions and community groups.

On Tuesday, over 700 uniformed pilots, members of the Air Line Pilots Association, took to the streets outside of Wall Street demanding better pay.

…………

The other eight organizations expected to join in the October 5 rally, based on its Facebook page, are United NY, Strong Economy for All Coalition, Working Families Party, VOCAL-NY, Community Voices Heard, Alliance for Quality Education, New York Communities for Change, Coalition for the Homeless, which have a collective membership of over 1 million.

Additionally, since the video of a New York City deputy inspector Anthony Bologna going crazy with pepper spray on protesters went viral, the protesters are actually getting some ink in the American press. (Google news shows more coverage overseas than in the US)

Additionally, they finally had a mass protest, and related mass arrests, on the Brooklyn Bridge.

If the protesters, or their new supporters, can manage to get their sh%$ together, and leverage their recent US media coverage, we might actually have a real a voice for stopping the looting and starting prosecuting.

Like I Said, the Manchurian Democrat

Click for full size

---

Democrats are not feeling the audacity


But the Republicans are all fired up

In 2008, Barack Obama convinced millions of young voters to enthusiastically vote for him.

Between 2009 and now, he has convinced these same folks that they and their votes do not matter:

In thinking about the 2012 presidential election, 45% of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic say they are more enthusiastic about voting than usual, while nearly as many, 44%, are less enthusiastic. This is in sharp contrast to 2008 and, to a lesser extent, 2004, when the great majority of Democrats expressed heightened enthusiasm about voting.

The most depressing thing about all of this that it's likely that a lot of the new voters who came into the process are now likely to be apathetic for  years.

We know what happens when the only reason that people are given to vote Democratic is "The Republicans are Scary".  Just look at John Kerry's 2004 run, and I think that the Dems are progressively making this their only talking point, particularly if Obama gets his way and manages to gut cut Medicare and Medicaid.

H/t Americablog.

Hoocoodanode? Monsanto Edition

It turns out that what Montsanto thought was a win-win, it use of genes to create Roundup resistant crops, allowing it to make money on both the crops, and on the increased sales of its popular herbicide has had a not-unexpected side effect.

It seems that with Roundup Ready^® ready crops, farmers soak their fields in the herbicide, and so now we are seeing an explosion of herbicide resistant weeds:“Superweeds” are plaguing high-tech Monsanto crops in southern US states, driving farmers to use more herbicides, return to conventional crops or even abandon their farms.

How has this happened? Farmers over-relied on Monsanto’s revolutionary and controversial combination of a single “round up” herbicide and a high-tech seed with a built-in resistance to glyphosate, scientists say.

Today, 100,000 acres in Georgia are severely infested with pigweed and 29 counties have now confirmed resistance to glyphosate, according to weed specialist Stanley Culpepper from the University of Georgia.

“Farmers are taking this threat very seriously. It took us two years to make them understand how serious it was. But once they understood, they started taking a very aggressive approach to the weed,” Culpepper told FRANCE 24.

“Just to illustrate how aggressive we are, last year we hand-weeded 45% of our severely infested fields,” said Culpepper, adding that the fight involved “spending a lot of money.”

In 2007, 10,000 acres of land were abandoned in Macon country, the epicentre of the superweed explosion, North Carolina State University’s Alan York told local media.

Imagine that.  It's so bad, that farmers are abandoning land.

The problem here is that the rulings changing the patent laws over the past few decades, which allow the patenting of genes and species, have made the seed business so lucrative that companies like Monsanto are inclined to skip appropriate testing in the rush to market.

The solution is, in addition to stricter regulation, is to remove the IP protections to genes and species, which will remove much of the incentive to cheat.