I’m all for ambition and entrepreneurship. After all, they are supposedly what “Makes America Great”. But occasionally maybe we should step back for a reality check.
For example, do we really want our government buying ammunition from freshly-minted con artists?
“MIAMI - A Miami Beach man says he is not guilty of defrauding the Pentagon under a contract he had to supply ammunition to forces in Afghanistan.
Twenty-two-year-old Efraim Diveroli entered the plea Monday in Miami federal court. Diveroli remains free on bail.
Prosecutors say Diveroli’s company, AEY Inc., provided banned Chinese-made ammunition to forces in Afghanistan and claimed it came from Albania. Read more
This would be the same Medicare Advantage that supposedly harnesses the power of the free market to operate more efficiently, yet still requires sizeable subsidies because it costs considerably more per person than good ’ol big government Medicare. What’s at issue here is cutting those subsidies so that private Medicare costs only a little bit more than standard Medicare instead of the whole lot more that it costs now.
But that’s not in the cards. Forcing private insurers to operate as efficiently as the federal government is apparently asking too much of the GOP’s free market acolytes. Better to cut doctors’ fees instead. Read more
Krugman has good perspective on Bear, Stearns (“If you can keep your head when all about you / are losing theirs and blaming it on you…”)
When push comes to shove, financial officials — rightly — aren’t willing to run the risk that losses on bad loans will cripple the financial system and take the real economy down with it.
Which is actually re-assuring to me; I don’t live in the financial economy at all; I live in the real economy.
Consider what happened last Friday, when the Federal Reserve rushed to the aid of Bear Stearns.
Nobody expects an investment bank to be a charitable institution, but Bear has a particularly nasty reputation. As Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times reminds us, Bear “has often operated in the gray areas of Wall Street and with an aggressive, brass-knuckles approach.”
Bear was a major promoter of the most questionable subprime lenders. It lured customers into two of its own hedge funds that were among the first to go bust in the current crisis. And it’s a bad financial citizen: the last time the Fed tried to contain a financial crisis, after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, Bear refused to participate in the rescue operation.
Bear, in other words, deserved to be allowed to fail — both on the merits and to teach Wall Street not to expect someone else to clean up its messes.
So, Bear got culled and devoured by JP Morgan (much as Spitzer may gotten culled). Interesting.
But the Fed rode to Bear’s rescue anyway, fearing that the collapse of a major investment bank would cause panic in the markets and wreak havoc with the wider economy. Fed officials knew that they were doing a bad thing, but believed that the alternative would be even worse.
As Bear goes, so will go the rest of the financial system. And if history is any guide, the coming taxpayer-financed bailout will end up costing a lot of money.
Part of me says fine! I don’t have any! Then again, I’m not (yet) able to grow all my food on my eighth of any acre, so not having “any” means only having a small amount…
[T]he big bailout is coming. The only question is how well it will be managed.
As I said, the important thing is to bail out the system, not the people who got us into this mess. That means cleaning out the shareholders in failed institutions, making bondholders take a haircut, and canceling the stock options of executives who got rich playing heads I win, tails you lose.
According to late reports on Sunday, JPMorgan Chase will buy Bear for a pittance. That’s an O.K. resolution for this case — but not a model for the much bigger bailout to come. Looking ahead, we probably need something similar to the Resolution Trust Corporation, which took over bankrupt savings and loan institutions and sold off their assets to reimburse taxpayers. And we need it quickly: things are falling apart as you read this.
But who, exactly, do we trust to put things back together? Read more
It’s a busy weekend for me, but I hope folks get a chance to check out what sounds like a Most Excellent book about religion in America today. Posner looks to have done some great research, and the Alternet excerpt is especially useful, on this day when ’religious voters’ in the Black community are on the verge of handing Obama a needed victory. “And what does it profit a man to gain the whole world…” heh.
nside the Trinity Christian Church in Irving, Texas, a crowd starts gathering in the afternoon for a Victory Healing and Miracle Service that is to begin at 7 p.m. that evening. People have traveled from as far away as Ohio and Arkansas and Georgia to participate. Most are waiting in the perimeter lobby of the church, camping out with pillows and Bibles, ordering pizza, and waiting for an event that has been hyped on Christian television for months. I approach one woman, an African American member of televangelist Rod Parsley’s World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio. Judging from her clothes, the woman could scarcely afford the plane ticket she bought to see a performance of the preaching phenomenon whose services she can attend three times a week at home in Columbus. She’s almost in a trance, barely able to focus on me or what I am asking her, and she brushes me aside as I inquire about her journey. Read more
A governmental audit of the Ronald Reagan presidential library and museum has failed to account for 80,000 to 100,000 items of White House memorabilia. Auditors the disapperances from the complex in Simi Valley, near Los Angeles, indicated the “near universal” breakdown of security.
The head of the federal agency investigating Karl Rove’s White House political operation is facing allegations that he improperly deleted computer files during another probe, using a private computer-help company, Geeks on Call.
Scott Bloch runs the Office of Special Counsel, an agency charged with protecting government whistleblowers and enforcing a ban on federal employees engaging in partisan political activity. Mr. Bloch’s agency is looking into whether Mr. Rove and other White House officials used government agencies to help re-elect Republicans in 2006.
At the same time, Mr. Bloch has himself been under investigation since 2005. At the direction of the White House, the federal Office of Personnel Management’s inspector general is looking into claims that Mr. Bloch improperly retaliated against employees and dismissed whistleblower cases without adequate examination.
Recently, investigators learned that Mr. Bloch erased all the files on his office personal computer late last year. They are now trying to determine whether the deletions were improper or part of a cover-up, lawyers close to the case said.
So, to recap: Karl Rove is accused of retaliating against employees and then illegally deleting the evidence. The man in charge of investigating him is accused of retaliating against employees and then deleting evidence.
The response, the world leaders portrayed in Austin Powers gasped in disbelief. Hell, when I watched it I thought to myself, “now that’s a lot of money.”
But that is nothing in this age of Bush Administration spending. Now, in the Global War On Terror, a request for supplemental appropriations in the amount of $190 Billion is par. Read more
Once, His Lordship the Grey One put up a post comparing stats for his Mighty Blue Implement of Power and that of some Potter fanzine site. The difference was truly Awesome, and the Potterites showed what “dedication” and “popularity” really look like in online communities/causes. In that spirit, I offer the following. Do read the whole thing:
The results suggest a startling conclusion: On average, companies generated roughly $28 in earmark revenue for every dollar they spent lobbying. And those at the very top did far better than the average: More than 20 companies pulled in $100 or more for every dollar spent. Read more
I’m sure you’ve probably seen this disgusting story about next year’s destination for The Internation Male Leather Circuit party embassy in Iraq, but one part caught my eye. I’m going to be angry like the Grey One today I think, and frame anything like this in the following: “…and Harry and Nancy think you should pay for this!” Isn’t war grand?
The residence of the U.S. ambassador to Iraq will be 16,000 square feet. The deputy chief of mission in Iraq will have a “cozy cottage” measuring 9,500 square feet.
I have said it before: your Masters don’t live like you do. Theirs is another world, a quite secure bubble filled with Byzantine imaginations and debauched practices, opulent, decadent, utterly corrupt- and they didn’t really pay for any of it.
You did. I’m glad the Democratic Leadership is getting ready to give them some more of our our grandchildren’s money.
Excerpts from Robert Draper’s new Bush biography, “Dead Certain” - to be released today - show just where the President’s mind probably has been all along:
Worth an estimated $21 million (£10.5 million) - made mostly before he took office in 2000 - he said that to begin with, “I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers. I don’t know what my dad gets - it’s more than 50-75 thousand dollars per speech.” He also noted: “Clinton’s making a lot of money.” Read more
I took a jog around presidential candidate websites to see how they were responding publicly to the public’s dismay/astonishment over what happened 2 years ago and what hasn’t happened (in terms of Gulf Coast relief and recovery) since. (the photo of Bush and McCain holding cake above was taken not long after the levees breached in New Orleans and people were drowning).
The re-building of New Orleans and the Gulf region could have been a boon to the U.S. economy with one of the biggest public works projects in American history. New homes could have been built and bought at a time when the real estate industry needs help. New Orleans could have been a shining example of American industy, ingenuity and science as a sparkling clean, safe and energy-efficient metropolis rose from Katrina’s ashes.
That hasn’t happened. Yet. Instead, President Bush proposes $200 billion for Iraq spending while local police are running low on ammunition to protect folks here at home. Read more
hrough April 2006, DOD has reported about $273 billion in incremental costs for GWOT-related operations overseas—costs that would not otherwise have been incurred. DOD’s reported GWOT costs and appropriated amounts differ generally because DOD’s cost reporting does not capture some items such as intelligence and Army modular force transformation. Also, DOD has not yet used funding made available for multiple years, such as procurement and military construction. GAO’s prior work found numerous problems with DOD’s processes for recording and reporting GWOT costs, including long-standing deficiencies in DOD’s financial management systems and business processes, the use of estimates instead of actual cost data, and the lack of adequate supporting documentation. As a result, neither DOD nor the Congress reliably know how much the war is costing and how appropriated funds are being used or have historical data useful in considering future funding needs. Read more
Read this AP report at the commie-pinko forbes.com site and tell me again why the Republicans are considered the law-and-order, fiscally responsible, small-government party.
Every attempt at whistleblowing on Iraq War fraud is thwarted, including literally torturing the whistleblowers.
In economics studies you learn the terms ’cash cow’ and corporate takeover, and that is what I see happening in the treatment of this country by the cabal in the White House. We are seeing America’s assets stripped away to support the criminal group that has taken over.
Of course, there is no appearance, and no occurrence, of public interest there. Read more
[Welcome National Review readers. The password is still “specimen jar.” Oh, you won’t be returning here to apologize? That’s okay, we didn’t expect you to.]
So, it turns out, according to billing records from the lobby shop he worked for, Fred Thompson did do lobbying work for that pro-choice organization in the early nineties, just as Judith DeSarno claimed he had, complete with minutes of an executive board meeting discussing his work, and her memeories of a lunch at which “Fred” amusingly acted out a death scene from his latest film, which DeSarno remembered having involved cowboys. Read more
In a speech on March 26, 2007, in front of a group of beef farmers President Bush took time to complain about the “other white meat.” Not in our meals, but in the Congressional spending diet. Regarding the Iraq War emergency supplemental bill passed by the House of Representatives the prior week, the President said:
“The House bill would add billions of dollars in domestic spending that is completely unrelated to the War… . These may be emergencies; they may be problems, but they can be addressed in the normal course of business. They don’t need to be added on to a bill that is supporting our troops.”
Given the incredible amount of what is called “pork,” or “earmarks” in prior emergency supplemental bills for the Iraq War which our President signed, why then was the Democratic supplemental unfit for presidential consumption? So unpalatable that a veto was required?
Absent some kind of executive epiphany, it wasn’t the earmarks. Read more
The present executive branch has been spectacularly ill managed. One of the huge offenses was recently discovered at Walter Reed, where veterans have been disserved by turning over their care to contract employees.
Today we have news that mail had gone undelivered to the veterans there for as much as a year, by contract employees. A commenter at Eschaton guessed that the mail was addressed in English, which was the problem.
It seems that the CIA has discovered a threat, which it is set up to do. Betcha thought I was going to say that its was those durned illegals working inside the government that were a threat to our security. Nope. It is the Homeland Security Department, using contract employees who are costing us huge amounts that threaten the budget further. Read more
Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh paints Paul Wolfowitz as a noble dreamer:
By most accounts, Wolfowitz is a genteel, brilliant figure who as a young idealist fell “in love with political greatness,” says a friend from his days in the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, Charles Fairbanks. If Wolfowitz has a fatal flaw, it’s an obsession with One Big Idea that would set the world right.
Sports are not of any great interest to me, and I’ve barely noticed all the doping scandals because I don’t read those pages. But I had to admire the attitude of GOP Rep. Davis of Virginia who had the chair of the House Committee on Government Reform, with oversight of the steroid use in baseball. He was using that position to declare that a group including George Soros shouldn’t be allowed to purchase the “Nats” from Major League Baseball.
Moreover, Davis had a favorite, just happening to be a big Republican fundraiser - Fred Malek. Such reasoned arguments as that Soros is a supporter of legalization of marijuana and so shouldn’t be involved with sports, or that Soros has partisan intentions in use of his earnings, kind of pale when you see what the real basis of these efforts has to be. His buddy wants him to use his influence to be a spoiler of an otherwise aboveboard purchase attempt. Read more
They did not credit me for the template, even though the template explicitly requested credit.
They used my own unmodified imagery, specifically for the “Contacting John McCain” table.
As if #2 wasn’t bad enough, the McCain crew is actually pulling their image directly from my server on each page load. So every time someone visits the McCain MySpace page, my bandwidth is being used to deliver part of the page! Bad McCain!
Sucking up other’s bandwidth. Typical Republican, wouldn’t you say? Read more
Sometimes we’re as bad as the mainstream media we criticize, jumping from one Scandal du Jour to the next and then forgetting the one we were so outraged about last week.
Remember back last summer, just before the election in fact (October ’06) there was a settlement in the big trade dispute over lumber products between the US and Canada? And the upshot was that a big chunk of $Cn were to be handed out to three groups: Habitat for Humanity, something called the American Forest Foundation, and a newly-to-be-created group called “United States Endowment for Forestry and Communities Inc”?
We were still a tad suspicious but snooping around seemed to indicate that the USEfFaCI (you will I trust forgive me for acronymizing that rather unwieldy name) was to be run by a Mississippi fellow who not only had extensive experience in lumber but was, or at least had been at one point, enough of a Democrat to run for governor of the state on that party’s ticket?
So today I ran across an old bookmark of the story released at the time from the US Trade Representative’s office and decided to see how the USEfFaCI was coming along.
They aren’t. At least not that I can find. Not only does no website exist, they apparently haven’t even bought the name to use as a placeholder until they get a site built. (Yeah, just for the record, I know how to both register a URL and build a website. I also work cheap. They should give me a call.) But anyway… Read more
Great diary over at the House of Orange which goes to explaining why BushGonzoCo was so anxious to sack US Attorney Lam before she got close to investigating US Rep. Jerry Lewis. Yes, military contractors, looting, war profiteering, hedge funds and the trend to shifting ownership of these companies overseas out of US regulatory/investigative range is involved, but I guarantee this is the most coherent story involving those terms you are likely to read today. Read more
At left you see the end result. Here’s