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Current or Currently Old Issues:
ground zero mosquerade:
I really should have known that FOX News was funding Cordoba House. The guys running the conservative movement must be some kinda jedis to get away with the shit they do.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-08-24 23:14:09 CST |
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"The person in whose hands America had placed its hopes for finance reform was someone who once sang furniture jingles onstage with Lloyd Blankfein.":
... the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which allowed investment banks, insurance companies and commercial banks to merge, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which exempted the entire derivatives market from federal regulation. Together, these two laws transformed Wall Street into a giant casino, allowing commercial banks to act like high-risk hedge funds, with a whole new galaxy of derivative bets to lay action on. In fact, the laws made Wall Street even crazier than a casino, because in a casino you have to put up actual money to make bets. But thanks to deregulation, financial companies like AIG could bet billions, if not trillions, without having any money at all to back up their gambles.
Dodd-Frank was never going to be a meaningful reform unless these two fateful Clinton-era laws - commercial banks gambling with taxpayer money, and unregulated derivatives being traded in the dark - were reversed. The story of how the last real shot at reining in Wall Street got routed tells you everything you need to know about how, and on whose behalf, our government works.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-08-10 16:42:38 CST |
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and you can too:
CEPR has built a neat toy that does a nice job of showing that the policies politicians and talk heads usually suggest to cut long term deficits tend to impact them about as much as a dump in the ocean.
Playing around with it I reduced the projected national debt in 2020 to 33% of GDP down from it's present 60%, but only by modeling my policy proposals on those of some crazy, unmentionable loon who can't be taken seriously: the fed buys and holds $2 trillion in debt; end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; reduce the nuclear stockpile; reduce conventional forces; delay osprey, jsf, other military hardware boondoggles; improve efficiency of military infrastructure per CBO suggestions; impose carbon tax; implement public healthcare option; allow medicare to haggle over drug prices; allow medicare recipients to shop over the border for providers; extend payroll taxes up to 90% of earnings; increase infrastructure, research, education funding by 1% (were it not for this it was down to 24% of GDP); impose small tax on speculative trading; expire bush tax cuts (income and estate); and convert the mortgage deduction/reduce home ownership subsidies for high income earners.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-30 11:27:22 CST |
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and always twirling, twirling towards freedom!:
Ellsberg: For instance, the Obama administration is criminalizing and prosecuting whistleblowers to punish them for uncovering scandals within the federal government …
SPIEGEL ONLINE: … Such as the arrest, confirmed this week, of an Army intelligence analyst for leaking the "Collateral Murder" video of a deadly US helicopter attack in Iraq, which was later posted online at WikiLeaks.
Ellsberg: Also, the recent US indictment of Thomas Drake.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Drake was a former senior official with the National Security Agency (NSA) who provided reporters with information about failures at the NSA.
Ellsberg: For Obama to indict and prosecute Drake now, for acts undertaken and investigated during the Bush administration, is to do precisely what Obama said he did not mean to do -- "look backward."
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-11 18:31:43 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-11 18:15:32 CST |
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Government still authorizing BP to decide who can see what:
I guess he figured out whose ass to kick: the media's. What was once 1,000 barrels a day, and then became 5,000 under scrutiny by scientists, is now 40,000.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-11 17:01:01 CST |
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the deficit, solved!:
The CBO projects deficits of about half a trillion from 2012 to 2020, a little under 3% of GDP a year. Simply allowing medicare to negotiate drug prices, like Obama pledged during the campaign, we could cut non-discretionary spending by some $30 billion a year. With almost inconsequential, extremely conservative defense cuts we could reduce discretionary spending by $100 billion a year. Implementing a likewise inconsequential and conservative austerity program for the incredibly wealthy could pretty easily reduce deficits by another $450 billion a year.
Well, now I'm $80 billion a year in the black, I'm a genius! I haven't even imposed some radical single-payer healthcare program that would bring us more in line with international norms, say, only spending half as much per capita as everybody else, rather than double, that'd probably save a few hundred billion a year more in medicare and medicaid spending.
But whatever, why do something radical when you can do Warren Buffet and his ilk a favor without letting them steal your retirement.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-11 09:16:37 CST |
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iran:
From what I've read the additional sanctions against Iran passed today in the UNSC entailed additional arms sales restrictions and targeted the Revolutionary Guard Corps. In the scheme of things this is of no great consequence unless you suspect that the US is trying to ratchet down on Iran in preparation for a military campaign, in which case this might render them more defenseless to our flying robot armies than they already are.
Iran's deal with Turkey and Brazil was fair enough, but I also gather that Iran did not agree to setting an upper limit on its own uranium enrichment. They need 20% LEU for their medical research reactor, of course, and the idea was to supply it through third parties, but by reserving the right to independently enrich it to those levels the deal didn't really serve to diminish anybody's greatly inflated and grossly exaggerated concerns that they're seeking nuclear weapons.
Were there any indication that the "international community" as such were keen to respect Iran's rights to develop nuclear power it would be hard not to take their refusal to set an upper limit well below otherwise legitimate enrichment levels as some indication of intent to develop nuclear weapons. That's not the world we live in, however, and instead it's just as valid to take it as an indication that they're not going to give up their bargaining position without exchanging it in return for some recognition of their right to develop nuclear power.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-09 19:42:31 CST |
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siege mentalities:
I'm really, I think, getting a little sick of all these cutesy arguments that Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians is worse for Israel than it is for the Palestinians. This Economist piece is better, in that is stresses the additional suffering Israel's blockade has created in Gaza, and how Israel's effort - not unusual historically - to strengthen Hamas' control and influence over Palestinian society is just as sickening and perverse as their earlier, original support for Hamas.
"Hamas is defending Israel," chuckles an Israeli foreign ministry official. ... "The siege is a gift," says a Hamas minister. ...
More damagingly for Gaza’s people, the siege has also allowed for much greater control. Manned by militants from its Ezz al-Din al-Qassam brigades hitherto deployed against Israel, Hamas’s internal security applies the brigades’ blinkered codes to harness society. This has created stability but at the price of a reign of fear. When rival Islamists decried Hamas’s rule in Rafah, the militants stormed the mosque and killed its worshippers. When leftists protested that the tax rises hit a people already burdened by siege, they were hauled to jail. The death penalty has been reinstituted. And insensitive to comparisons with Israel, Hamas’s forces have bulldozed the homes of Gazans who had moved onto former settlement land without authorisation. A thriving political culture has been culled to a one-faction state.
It's a ludicrous exaggeration to call Hamas' control of what little there is for the Palestinians to control a "state", but Israel has put the inmates in charge of the asylum. The United States should break the blockade itself and sever Israel's tacit alliance with Hamas.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-09 08:40:50 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-08 23:02:45 CST |
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fostering financially insane behavior as a backdoor for shoveling more money into the banks:
White, Brent T., Underwater and Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Management of the Housing Crisis (February 2010). Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper No 09-35:
[T]hough more than 34% of U.S. homeowners were underwater on their mortgages by the end of the third quarter of 2009, the strategic default rate was only 2.5% to 3.5% ... this pattern of relatively low default rates compared to the percentage of underwater mortgages has held true almost universally across the hardest hit markets, with the default rate much more closely resembling the unemployment rate than the percent underwater.
...
Millions of homeowners who bought homes in the last five years are in similar situations to Sam and Chris, particularly in the hardest-hit states of California, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona. For example, a homeowner who bought an average home in Miami at the peak would have paid around $355,400. That home would now be worth only $190,00037 and, assuming a 5% down payment, the homeowner would have approximately $140,000 in negative equity. He could save approximately $124,000 by walking away and renting a comparable home. Or, he could stay and take 20 years just to recover lost equity -- all the while throwing away $1300 a month in net savings that he could invest elsewhere. The advantage of walking is even starker for the large percentage of individuals who bought more-expensive-than-average homes in the Miami area -- or in any bubble market for that matter -- in the last five years. Millions of U.S. homeowners could save hundreds of thousands of dollars by strategically defaulting on their mortgages.
Homeowners should be walking away in droves. But they aren’t.
...
It might be tempting to label such underwater homeowners “woodheads"...but labeling such behavior irrational does little to explain its existence. ...
Alarmed by the possibility that foreclosures may reach a tipping point, formal federal policy has aimed to stem the tide of foreclosures through programs designed to "reduce household cash flow problems," such as the Making Home Affordable (MHA) loan modification program and Hope For Homeowners. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that homeowners are unlikely to default on their mortgage if they can "afford" the monthly payment. In other words, federal policy assumes that homeowners are -- for the most part -- not "ruthless" and won’t walk away from their mortgages simply because they have negative equity. Most homeowners walk only when they can no longer afford to stay. As evidence of this fact, only 45% of homeowners would walk even if they had $300,000 in negative equity. This percentage drops to 38% among the subset of individuals who believe it is immoral to strategically default on one’s mortgage (a subset to which 87% of homeowners belong)...
This is not to say that there is a grand scheme to manipulate the emotions of homeowners, or even that the government and other institutions consciously cultivate these emotional constraints on default. But, to be sure, the predominate message of political, social, and economic institutions in the United States has functioned to cultivate fear, shame, and guilt in those who might contemplate foreclosure. ...
At the political level, government spokespersons, including President Obama, have repeatedly emphasized the virtue of homeowners who have acted “responsibly” in "making their payments each month”115 and have lamented the erosion of “our common values" by, for example, those who irresponsibly borrowed beyond their means. The worst criticism has been reserved, however, for those who would walk away from mortgages that they can afford. Typical of such criticism is that of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, who declared in a televised speech: "And let me emphasize, any homeowner who can afford his mortgage payment but chooses to walk away from an underwater property is simply a speculator – and one who is not honoring his obligations."
Paulson's comment is mild, however, compared to the media invective toward those who strategically walk from their mortgages. Such individuals are portrayed as obscene, offensive, and unethical, and likened to deadbeat dads who walk out on their children, or those who would have "given up" and just handed over Europe to the Nazis.
There is similarly no shortage of moralizing about the responsibilities of mortgagors. Typical media messages include: "we need a culture of responsible consumers and homeowners;" "one should always honor financial obligations;" "when you enter into a contract that should mean something;" "there was a time when people felt really bad about not paying back debt," and, "money is more than a matter of numbers. There are ethics involved. Most people feel, or should feel, an obligation to pay their debts." Even sympathy for those who default because of predatory lending is frequently lacking: "We've read too many sob stories in the press about 'predatory lending' -- a rare, misunderstood, and vastly exaggerated phenomenon. It's time for the poster children for irresponsibility to get some face time."
Indeed, a homeowner contemplating a strategic default would be hard pressed to avoid the message that doing so would place them among the most despicable members of society. ...
Moreover, a homeowner who turned to any number of credit counseling agencies would also find little sympathy -- and much moralizing -- should they announce their plan to walk on their "affordable" mortgage. Gail Cunningham of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling declared for example in an interview on NPR: "Walking away from one's home should be the absolute last resort. However desperate a situation might become for a homeowner, that does not relieve us of our responsibilities." Indeed, the uniform message of both governmental and non-profit counseling agencies (which are typically funded at least in significant part by the financial industry) is that "walking away" is not a responsible choice and should be avoided at all costs.
What makes this moral suasion so effective is that major socializing agents in the United States tend to speak with one voice. Thus, when the government, or the credit industry, tells individuals that they have a responsibility to pay their mortgage even if they are seriously underwater, the message is seen as "echoing a deep-seated American belief that one should always honor financial obligations," -- and not as an effort to fix the primary burden of the housing meltdown on homeowners rather than the financial industry or the government. More critically, because the media and non-profit consumer counseling agencies promote the same message, the government and the financial industry need not bear the primary burden of moral suasion -- nor is the message ever identified with those political and economic institutions that have a vested interest in promoting "homeowner responsibility." The message rings true to the ear and, as such, most homeowners question neither the content of the message, nor its source.
Social control of would-be defaulters is not limited to moral suasion, however. Predominate messages regarding foreclosure also frequently employ fear to persuade homeowners that strategic default is a bad choice:
What is real -- and what is very much downplayed by these outfits [like YouWalkAway.com] -- is how completely a foreclosure wrecks your finances. Near term, you might get slammed with a massive tax bill, since forgiven debt can be subject to income tax. Long term, car loans and -- you guessed it -- home loans will be much harder to come by. How's that for walking away? This is the American Dream ended in disaster.
Indeed, almost every media story on those who "walk away from their mortgages" condemns the behavior as immoral and enlists some "expert" to explain that "walking away" is, despite any claims to the contrary, not only immoral but also a devastating event to the homeowner:
A single missed mortgage payment, says MSN Money columnist and credit expert Liz Pulliam Weston, knocks 100 points off your credit score. Every missed payment thereafter compounds the damage. A notice of default typically comes after the third missed payment, delivering a knockout blow to the homeowner's credit. ... The direct effect of any of these outcomes on credit scores is dramatic, and it ripples through every corner of borrowers' financial lives. The former homeowners will be unable to get new credit at reasonable rates, and issuers of their existing credit cards can raise interest rates because they are considered greater risks.
Similar warnings of disaster pervade the information given to homeowners by HUD-approved housing counseling agencies, such as the following from the Anaheim Housing Counseling Agency:
Losing your home can be the worst and most devastating event to you personally, and your credit history. This is a scenario that you don’t want to occur if you can avoid it! Not only will you lose the comfort of your home and your investment, but a Foreclosure will stay pending on your credit history for as long as 10 years. This will jeopardize your ability to qualify for any future home loan purchases, it may affect your ability to access loans for car purchase and other needed purchases, and loan costs are likely to be higher both in fees and interest paid.
As discussed above, fear alone is a powerful motivator. But guilt and fear in combination are even more potent. ... As such, people rarely question apocalyptic descriptions of foreclosure’s consequences.
As explored above, however, there is in fact a huge financial upside to strategic default for seriously underwater homeowners -- an upside that is routinely ignored by the media, credit counseling agencies, and other political and economic institutions in "informing" homeowners about the consequences of default. Moreover, the costs of default are not nearly as extreme as these same institutions typically misrepresent them to be. In reality: homeowners face no risk of a deficiency judgment in many states or for FHA loans regardless of the state; lenders are unlikely to pursue a deficiency judgment even in recourse states because it is economically inefficient to do so; there is no tax liability on "forgiven portions" of home mortgages under current federal tax law in effect until 2012; defaulting on one’s mortgage does not mean that one's other credit lines will be revoked; and most people can expect to recover from the negative impact of foreclosure on their credit score within a few years.
...
Most lenders will, in other words, take full advantage of the asymmetry of norms between lender and homeowner and will use the threat of damaging the borrower’s credit score to bring the homeowner into compliance. Additionally, many lenders will only bargain when the threat of damaging the homeowner’s credit has lost its force and it becomes clear to the lender that foreclosure is imminent absent some accommodation. On a fundamental level, the asymmetry of moral norms for borrowers and market norms for lenders gives lenders an unfair advantage in negotiations related to the enforcement of contractual rights and obligations, including the borrower’s right to exercise the put option. This imbalance is exaggerated by the credit reporting system, which gives lenders the power to threaten borrowers’ human worth and social status by damaging their credit scores -- scores that serve as much as grades for moral character as they do for creditworthiness. The result is a predictable imbalance in which individual homeowners have born a huge and disproportionate burden of the housing collapse.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-08 17:17:57 CST |
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'go back to auschwitz':
I'm not sure how one is supposed to take this seriously. Israeli spokespeople first come out with some heavily edited chunk of audio and say the transmission came from the Mavi Marmara, then they admit they edited it and say it came instead from the Defne Y, but the voice comes in briefly amid transmissions and is never heard from again, the only voice identifying itself as actually belonging to the flotilla makes a perfectly simple statement regarding the illegality of the blockade and their intent to port in Gaza. We're supposed to believe that a) Israel didn't further manipulate the audio in their weird campaign to link the activists to Al Qaeda, and that b) amid all the random chatter going on in the background we somehow know the voice belongs to one of the activists.
They were 75 miles off the coast of the Levant using an open channel, the voice could be any jackass with a radio. It wasn't that long ago that a similarly anonymous voice worked up a wave of hysterical propaganda against Iran, until the Navy finally acknowledged that whoever said "You will explode", it wasn't an Iranian boat but just the random racist noise on VHF.
Etc. etc.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-08 16:45:27 CST |
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letting the chips off the old block fall:
In view of their dedication to both the cause of healthy families and of scientific rigorlessness, we expect the Family Research Council will now begin lobbying to pass laws against heterosexual child rearing, and demand that only lesbian couples be allowed to have children:
Between 1986 and 1992, 154 prospective lesbian mothers volunteered for a study that was designed to follow planned lesbian families from the index children’s conception until they reached adult- hood. Data for the current report were gathered through interviews and questionnaires that were completed by 78 index offspring when they were 10 and 17 years old and through interviews and Child Behav- ior Checklists that were completed by their mothers at corresponding times. The study is ongoing, with a 93% retention rate to date.
...
According to their mothers’ reports, the 17-year-old daugh- ters and sons of lesbian mothers were rated significantly higher in social, school/academic, and total competence and significantly lower in social problems, rule-breaking, aggressive, and externalizing prob- lem behavior than their age-matched counterparts in Achenbach’s nor- mative sample of American youth.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-08 13:17:44 CST |
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the question is, really, what war crimes haven't we committed lately:
If any are left I'm sure we'll get around to them:
Investigation and analysis of US government documents by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) provides evidence indicating that the Bush administration, in the period after Sept. 11, conducted human research and experimentation on prisoners in US custody as part of this monitoring role. Health professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA monitored the interrogations of detainees, collected and analyzed the results of those interrogations, and sought to derive general- izable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations. Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as do- mestic and international law. These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.
...
data collection was required by OMS monitoring guidelines, and a Justice Department memo draws legal conclusions about the permissibility of the techniques based on apparent scientific analysis of the OMS data referenced in the memos.
- Medical personnel were required to monitor all waterboarding practices and collect detailed medical information that was used to design, develop, and deploy subsequent waterboarding procedures;
- Information on the effects of simultaneous versus sequential application of the abusive interrogation techniques on detainees was collected and used to establish the policy for using tactics in combination. These data were gathered through an assessment of the presumed “susceptibility” of the subjects to severe pain;
- Information collected by health professionals on the effects of sleep deprivation on detainees was used to establish EIP sleep deprivation policy.
To demonstrate that their torture techniques were "safe, legal, and effective" the Bush administration is accused of medically experimenting on unwilling human subjects. That is to say, they were torturing people in order to establish a legal defense against charges that they were torturing people. It's fairly perverse.
At least it's been a little while since agents of our government have been caught running sex slave rings... or not.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-08 09:46:30 CST |
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brawk!:
Ioz's response to Rep. Alan Grayson's claim that "the right wingers are not conservatives, they are anarchists" is wholly satisfactory. I would just add that, e.g., while the Spanish Anarchists implemented the Lowden Plan for national healthcare, in so far as their nascent, wartime economy ran on barter rather than currency, it was also free and universal for consumers, as the industrial unions provided for the material needs of the system, including, one must suppose, the chickens.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-07 07:22:25 CST |
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throwing shit at the wall until something sticks:
The amazing thing about this thread on the legality of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip is how utterly inconsistent defenders of the blockade are, even about Israel's own position(s), which, I guess, is at least consistent with Israel's own position(s). But my favorite by far is the terra nullius one. What a hoot.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-03 16:12:46 CST |
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the barry sometimes rots on the shrub:
Poor ole Obama is really taking a lot of shit for his predecessor's mismanagement of the oil sector, which is to say the oil sector's mismanagement of the oil sector. But there's a fair amount of defensive nattering about what the government is supposed to do about the BP oil spill, suggesting that they can't do anything either. Without looking-forward-not-backward to the regulatory capture of the Minerals Management Service and so forth, here's a few things the Administration already should have done:
- It should have give the Presidential Commission subpoena power, and should help get the information local environmental organizations are demanding to the broader scientific, industrial, environmental, regulatory communities and, like, the public. BP has been tight-lipped when it hasn't been outright dishonest - about the size of the spill, about the chemical dispersant, etc. - which can't be helping local industries respond to the disaster, let alone state and local cleanup efforts.
- Revoke their limited liability. The companies involved are legally obligated to maximize profits and shareholder value (which is why BP is wasting money employing temporary workers for photo-ops rather than... work), a limited liability cap of cleanup plus $75 million in damages creates perverse incentives regarding both safety and mitigation. That's an absurd pittance for an industry where BP alone has operating revenues over $200 billion a year, for a disaster likely to wipe out generations of Gulf Coast fishermen. While it's too late for BP to get coverage, they'll just have to serve as a spectacular advertisement for the insurance industry.
- If congress is unwilling or unable to revoke the caps it's hard to see how we could fix the misaligned incentives between the public and private interests at stake without the Administration putting BP under temporary receivership. Simply threatening to do so, actually, would probably be enough to exculpate BP et.al. from their legal obligations to the bottom line.
Threatening new laws is so much handwaving when we haven't enforced the laws we already have, particularly when a good portion of the legislature owe their seats to the industry.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-03 08:39:30 CST |
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oil spills great and small:
Nigeria? Nigeria is, in more than one way, our personal toxic dump, but it's also a convenient place to outsource BP's awful environmental record.
It deserves a big thank you for taking more than a few for the, uh, "team".
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-03 07:11:35 CST |
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maybe they should have sent flowers instead?:
David Frum is extremely frumpy that the folks attempting to break the three year long Israeli blockade of Gaza were delivering... cement,
Israeli ships stopped a flotilla carrying materials that could be used for materials that could be used for war, including cement that Israel maintained could be used to build bunkers... What is [Turkey] doing allowing its nationals to smuggle cement that could build bunkers? ... Rebuilding Hamas' bunkers is not a step toward peace.
This a curious matter over which to fall off one's chair in shrieks of indignant rage - Hamas can barely launch rockets at empty fields, they're not going to catapult whole bunkers across the Erez Crossing - but I nevertheless have to agree with Frum, they shouldn't be trying to deliver cement to Gaza. Anything built with it would just be crushed inevitably back into dust:
On December 27, 2008, Israel launched what it called Operation Cast Lead. ... the fighting destroyed 3,540 housing units in Gaza and 2,870 sustained severe damage ...
... wartime attacks destroyed public and service sector infrastructure, including government buildings, bridges and 57 kilometers of asphalt roads (and other roads), and damaged 107 UNRWA installations, almost 20,000 meters of pipes, four water reservoirs, 11 wells, and sewage networks and pumping stations. ...
... on January 3, the first day of the Israeli ground offensive, Israeli attacks "damaged and put out of commission seven of the 12 electrical power lines that connect Gaza to Israel and Egypt." On January 13, Israeli aircraft bombed a warehouse containing spare parts needed for repairs to the grid that it had recently allowed Gaza's utility, GEDCO, to import ...
The military offensive destroyed 18 schools (including eight kindergartens) and damaged at least 262 other schools. ...
The war destroyed 268 private business establishments in Gaza and damaged another 432 ... 324 factories and workshops were damaged or destroyed during the war...
The construction materials sub-sector was particularly devastated. ... all seven of the factories we examined, every vehicle on factory grounds had been demolished, and many buildings and other pieces of equipment had been damaged or destroyed. A preliminary survey of the damage to Gaza's industrial sector reported in February that the war destroyed or damaged 22 of Gaza's 29 ready-mix concrete factories, causing an "85 percent loss in the sub-sector's potential capacity"...
Israel's military offensive resulted in an estimated $268 million in losses to the agricultural sector. This includes $180 million in direct damage during the war to fruit, grain and vegetable crops, animal production, and infrastructure like greenhouses and farms ... "almost all Gaza's 10,000 smallholder farms suffered damage and many have been completely destroyed"...
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni reportedly stated on January 12, 2009, that "Hamas now understands that when you fire on [Israel's] citizens it responds by going wild, and this is a good thing." Livni said on January 19, 2009, the day after the conflict ended, that "Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent operation, which I demanded." Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai said at a conference on February 2, 2009 that "we have to determine a price tag for every rocket fired into Israel," and recommended that "even if they fire at an open area or into the sea, we must damage their infrastructures and destroy 100 houses."
I would suggest building bunkers next time, though, instead of apartments. It would be much safer.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-02 18:58:15 CST |
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weaponizing the freedom flotilla:
Apparently the IDF snapshots of the weapons tools they discovered on the Mavi Marmara were timestamped between 2003 and 2006. Clearly the Turks had been planning this attack on Israeli soldiers years before Israel established the blockade!
via.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-02 17:21:32 CST |
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staying put:
James Joyner says people who have stopped paying their underwater mortgages but are staying in their homes until they're foreclosed on are
dirtbags, scum, scumbags, stealing from the bank, and deadbeats. James Joyner is a dimwit, a sanctimonious slouch, stealing from the bank, and braindead. By not abandoning their homes until the banks bother to reclaim them the people Joyner is berating are preserving the banks' equity, or whatever will be left of it after home prices finish crashing.
He'd rather they abandon the homes, apparently, so the property can be looted, squatted in, succumb to simple decay, and otherwise be destroyed and rendered a local hazard, pushing neighboring home prices down even further and pushing more mortgages underwater.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-01 21:21:54 CST |
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the unbreakable bond:
So, Israel has effectively engaged in acts of war against Turkey by commandeering a number of Turkish vessels in international waters, nevermind killing a number of Turkish civilians during hostile actions, and taking 6,000 hostages. This is a non-NATO state attacking a NATO ally, "an armed attack against one shall be considered an attack against them all" and all that jazz. I think I'd be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to observe that, legally speaking, Israel has attacked us again.
update: Ok, and less figuratively, they killed another American, "hit by four bullets in the head and one in the chest."
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-01 14:30:45 CST |
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one of these years i'm going to kill you dead for real:
Senior Al Qaeda commander Abu Saeed al-Masri has been killed in recent clashes with Pakistani forces in a Pakistani region near the Afghan border, a security official said on Tuesday.
"He was believed to be among the top leadership of al Qaeda," the senior security official said on condition of anonymity.
Al-Masri, which means Egyptian, was the most senior al Qaeda operative to have been killed in Pakistan's tribal belt since the death of his compatriot, Abu Khabab al-Masri, an Qaeda chemical and biological weapons expert, last month.
Television channels identified the dead man as Mustafa Abu al-Yazid and said he was also known as Abu Saeed al-Masri.
As liaison between the highest of the high command and frontline fighters, No. 3's are vulnerable to capture and death. Two men reputed to hold the position—Abu Zubaydah and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed—were among the first Qaeda leaders captured after the attacks, and were also among the first subjected to "enhanced" CIA interrogation techniques (Abu Zubaydah, his lawyers and some independent experts now say, may not have risen to the third-ranking spot). Another reported No. 3, Abu Faraj al Libi, is with Abu Zubaydah and Mohammed at the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo Bay; and a fourth, Hamza Rabia, is thought to be dead, killed by a CIA drone strike in 2005.
Does Al Qaeda have a new, new No. 3? Last week the Associated Press reported that intelligence officials had fingered Mustafa Abu al-Yazid...
Mr. Yazid was killed on May 22 in a drone attack in North Waziristan, a senior Pakistani intelligence official said on Tuesday. The official said he was in the village of Boya, about 16 miles along a dirt track west from Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan, when the missile struck.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-01 10:14:52 CST |
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the consequences of nostalgia for social movements we never participated in, but totally would have if we'd been born at the right time, dude:
Shit like this is really annoying. John Stossel wants to be able to boycott segregationist businesses and feels that Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an unconstitutional usurpation of his right to not be served: that's what libertarianism is all about he says. Meanwhile liberals are re-enacting the eight day civil war they went through when Hillary handed all the credit for civil rights victories to Johnson and CRA64, except this time they've closed ranks behind Hillary against a greater evil: her position is no longer racist compared to these other racists, or something.
The complaint should be that when the idiot in question said "The free-market competition would have cleaned the clocks" of segregated business he was wrong: segregated businesses were having their clocks cleaned:
With the support of most of Montgomery's 50,000 African Americans, the boycott lasted for 381 days until the local ordinance segregating African-Americans and whites on public buses was lifted. Ninety percent of African Americans in Montgomery took part in the boycotts, which reduced bus revenue by 80%. A federal court ordered Montgomery's buses desegregated in November 1956, and the boycott ended. ...
In many towns, the sit-ins were successful in achieving the desegregation of lunch counters and other public places. Nashville's students attained citywide desegregation in May, 1960, and Greensboro’s Woolworth’s store desegregated its lunch counter several months after its sit-in, on July 26, 1960, serving blacks and whites alike. ...
The most successful previous sit-in started August 19, 1958, when twelve children from the Oklahoma City NAACP Youth Council, led by the mother of two of the children, Clara Luper, began their sit-ins. They were soon successful in desegregating drugstore lunch-counters in three states. That success began a six-year long campaign of successful sit-ins at other segregated lunch counters, restaurants, and cafes in Oklahoma City. ...
And so and so on, takes a second to glance at wikipedia to lift blockquotes to demonstrate that, like, the freely associating bands of do-gooders in the civil rights movement were successful without any intervention by anybody with a monopoly on force. And it continued to happen after the bill passed, for that matter:
After the 1964 professional American Football League season, the AFL All-Star Game had been scheduled for early 1965 in New Orleans' Tulane Stadium. After numerous black players were refused service by a number of New Orleans hotels and businesses, and white cabdrivers refused to carry black passengers, black and white players alike lobbied for a boycott of New Orleans. Under the leadership of Buffalo Bills' players, including Cookie Gilchrist, the players put up a unified front. The game was moved to Houston and its Jeppesen Stadium.
Thank heavens for Title II. When civil rights activists failed it was generally on account of violence from or sanctioned by local governments. Without Title II CRA64 still struck down the local Jim Crow laws under which such violence was authorized. If the rest of CRA64 were enforced by the Federal Government it was just a matter of time before the market - as in national boycotts and, let's call a sit-in a 'disruptive consumer preference' for kicks - made segregated businesses a rare and stark reminder of how ugly America can be, continuing to serve an educational role in an amnestic and ugly nation without actually existing anywhere where there was somebody to refuse service to.
That "if" back there is a big one, I suppose, because the way things worked out Title II was passed, and while it was enforced the rest of CRA64 sat on the back burner. Let's ask someone who was there:
No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn't voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.
Of the ten titles of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, probably only the one concerning public accomodations -- the most bitterly contested section -- has been meaningfully enforced and implemented. Most of the other sections have been deliberately ignored.
...
I'm sure that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Because most white people are so far removed from the life of the average Negro, there has been little to challenge this assumption. Yet Negroes continue to live with racism everyday.
Ain't that the truth.
But OK: Throughout this whole Rand 'Two Last Names' Paul thing liberals seem bent on erasing the victories of the Civil Rights movement against segregation in the free market and handing off all the credit for their hard and bitter and dangerous struggles to a genocidal Democratic President for signing a scrap of paper, while Rand Paul and John Stossel style glibertarians are also erasing those victories, in that they don't seem to have any idea that they ever occurred. This is why I have a hard time caring about the current spat of Texas schoolbook revisionism, I think. The old textbooks clearly weren't any good either.
But why stop at erasing a century of struggle. Maybe we'd be better off without Title II. Maybe by shifting the battles from the shopfront to the court room it undermined the vast grassroots organizational infrastructure of the Civil Rights movement and replaced it with an atomized network of attorneys and talking heads, making us all worse off. I'm kind of shocked that I haven't read anybody make that case yet, actually. Somebody must have. Whatever.
Also, what the fuck? If you want to get your fucking free market on there are a lot better places to start than fucking Title II, jesus tittyfucking christ these people. You've got the entire financial sector sucking on the trillion dollar tits of the public and BP hiding behind the government intervention of limited liability after a multi-billion dollar disaster and everybody in America dumping what passes for their lifestyles into the atmosphere, and what do these stupid fucks do to advance the discussion of their moronic pseudo-philosophy? Let's make it so we have to spend all our free time organizing boycotts against segregationist businesses! Whee!
I blame Rand Paul's namesake. The one, or maybe the other. I'm not sure which.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-05-26 20:43:49 CST |
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scatology:
I tried reading this bit on Obama and Wall Street where all the usual insiders are off the record like usual, but fuckbuckets, every other paragraph reads whatever the hell is convenient into daily market noise like buying and selling stocks is an up to the nanosecond poll of some rich people's gut response to official pronouncements from Washington. It's not enough that these cottage industry unscientific surveys of anonymous quotes are unbearable to read in the first place, one has to listen to the village shaman make pronouncements about the meaning of some trading algorithm's morning constitutional.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-05-24 16:15:29 CST |
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more and better libertarians:
Rand Paul has some problems with Title II of the Civil Rights Act that banned segregation in private businesses that are otherwise open to the public. It's a violation of property and speech rights and blah blah blah, in a free market business must be allowed to refuse to do business. Of course he's being raked over the coals for it. Needlessly I think.
It should have been really easy for Paul to acknowledge that we don't live in the libertarian world he would like, and that revoking Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act wouldn't bring us any closer to living there. In the free society he envisions there would be remedies to discrimination in the marketplace without the force of law - beyond even the historic achievements of the national boycotts and local sit-ins - he could have argued, but that society never existed and doesn't exist and he was elected to help make it possible. But of all the violations of the principles he holds most dear that occur on a routine basis under the ever expanding octopus of the interventionist state, not allowing a national retail chain - one, mind you, that inordinately benefited from enormous public subsidies through state and federal investment in roads and highways and at incredible expense to black communities - to discriminate against minorities has to be about the least significant and least heinous infraction against private property he could imagine, and would be the last scrap of law he would tear apart when his revolution comes, and then only because his vision for the country is one where Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act would no longer be necessary. No, he could have said, I don't agree with Title II, and here's how we're going to build an America that doesn't need it.
Then off to the races he could go about his philosophy and his campaign and spend his time answering questions about the less sensitive topic of how to build a freight system on libertarian principles that captures the positive externalities of more efficient trade while minimizing the negative externalities created by razing black communities into the tarmac and - if Rand Paul acknowledged the problem - pumping vast amounts of pollution into the air.
He even has script writers who could have helped make the point out of 8 second sound bites instead of run on sentences.
But he didn't. So he deserves what he's getting.
update: Has anybody grilled Hillary Clinton like this over her far more onerous opposition to the 14th amendment? I mean, she has a more established history of racism than Paul the Younger here, somebody should really take those comments half as seriously.
update: Well then, "They thought all along that they could call me a libertarian and hang that label around my neck like an albatross, but I'm not a libertarian". I guess that explains that.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-05-20 19:04:52 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2010-05-20 00:42:02 CST |
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picking the horse you rode in on:
Melissa Roddy thinks we need to stay in Afghanistan to protect it from Pakistan:
Much of the current leadership of Afghanistan (including President Hamid Karzai) is actually controlled by [the Pakistani] ISI ... Unfortunately, the US and NATO, who are largely responsible for having empowered corrupt leaders such as the Karzais, Gul Afgha Shirzai and Abdul Rasul Sayaf, did not come to understand this dynamic until fairly recently.
A simple rule of thumb for identifying who should not be governing Afghanistan would be to eliminate from consideration any Afghan leader who was based in Pakistan during the 1980s war against the Soviet Union. Far too many persons fitting that description lost their integrity to ISI influence at that time.
...
the US is not trying to "win" or conquer Afghanistan. The mission of our military is to stabilize the country and assist in reconstruction, with the goal of leaving it strong enough to once again defend itself against the ongoing threat from its neighbor, Pakistan.
Roddy really owes it to her audience to tell us who she thinks we should actually be supporting, since we happen to be supporting these Pakistani agents - never mind their government - that she says we're now at war with. Or for that matter, how we're going to end Pakistani interference in Afghanistan, as by her account the government we are supporting there is run by Pakistan, as are the Taliban that said government is ostensibly fighting. One suspects that there is no one who could control the country in general, since the Pakistani agents are all fighting one another, let alone anybody that meets the requirements of her simple rule of thumb.
The evidence marshalled to support the claim that the US and NATO are suddenly cognizant that they are really actually srsly fighting Pakistan is approximately nil. Granted, we have been asking Pakistan's permission to bomb greater swathes of Pakistan, but they've shockingly turned us down. Normally that wouldn't stop us, but between using their country as a forward operating CIA base for over 30 years and the fact that they've got nukes, we seem to have rather limited alternatives in an unfuckable situation.
And as far as her fuzzy numbers and guilt trips go, it would probably be easier for somebody to do something about over 300,000 preventable child deaths a year in Afghanistan if anybody at all finally conquered the place. The least likely to win that lotto are the natives, and second to them is us. It doesn't matter anymore who it is than it did when the Taliban conquered most of it and aid workers returned and started saving childrens' lives and clearing the ordinance that killed so many of the 400,000 or whatever guesstimate of civilians that died to the conflict in the 90s. You know, before the US chased aid workers out of the country, militarized their efforts, and slapped targets on their backs.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-05-19 21:13:47 CST |
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less rodeo clown more carny capitalism:
Glenn Beck shilling overpriced gold coins at double their melt value to his audience as a safety net against the horrific calamity to come is sort of the perfect metaphor for his entire carnival act.
I suppose it's inevitable that the peasants will leap to the defense of the whole thing and attack Weiner's intervention as communist tyranny. In the free market we have a right to be defrauded by hucksters, the privilege to pay for overpriced commemorative coins as a hedge against a decade or three of rampant hyperinflation. Hell, taking the risk premium in the Beckian universe into account Goldline isn't defrauding Beck's audience, but performing a magnanimous act of charity by selling its gold at all.
It's the kind of market built entirely on the small time information asymmetry cons that a carnie would be proud of.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-05-18 22:29:11 CST |
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always remember! never forget... the extras?:
According to the liberal New York Times a liberal politician running for the Senate has been misrepresenting himself as a Vietnam vet. This shouldn't be too shocking, there are a lot more people who claim to have served in Vietnam than actually did serve in Vietnam. It's not that unusual that they collect benefits for the imagined service, nor that they run for public office on their military record. It's strange, though, that the latter happens. The odds of winning an election are much, much better if you somehow dodged the draft during Vietnam than if you served. The last five presidential elections demonstrated quite clearly the hostile reaction that has been directed at veterans of Vietnam.
That's the fun thing about the Blumenthal story: the delicious irony. Scandal pie always tastes best with irony filling:
Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) had an affair with a part-time staffer named Tracy Jackson, Fox is reporting. Jackson played the role of interviewer for a Souder Web video show ... on the value of abstinence.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-05-18 08:56:07 CST |
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