Ode to Rupert

(Via CJR)

Songstress Jill Sobule sings a cute song about Rupert Murdoch:

(Don't sweat the length, the song is only the first 2:30 minutes.)

She claims to have written it with barely a few hours notice - so I'd say she's got some chops under pressure.

I'd also say her theory is the best one I've heard about why Glenn Beck has a job.

And just in case you were feeling better...

(Via CJR)

If you're like me, you've been reading all the recent happy stories about the economy and wondering if you're being spun.

Well...we are.

Let's go to the chart:

 We're between the crests of loan disasters, between subprime and option ARMs.

You wonder what sort of insanity will follow the detonations CS is forecasting for June 2010.

Pelt of the dog that bit them

(Via CJR)

It's official: the banks believe they can do no wrong. Having quietly captured all the forces that posed a threat - they believe anything they do is somehow defensible.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that banks are lobbying the government to let them buy their own toxic assets under the trillion-dollar Public-Private Investment Program, or PPIP.

[snip]

Here we have a trillion-dollar bailout program (on top of the many other trillion-dollar bailout programs) to get banks out of the deep holes they’ve dug themselves. Not only do they want their, um, dirt shoveled, they want to get paid for shoveling it.

Bailout upon bailout upon bailout.

So, to recap:

We have banks that

• Subsidized the production of subprime loans
  (to the point where FICOs and byzantine equations replaced underwriting because the "right now" profit was all that mattered)
  
• Purchased the majority of the resulting subprime loans
• Repackaged them into Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), securities they sold to investors.
• Insured subprime-laden CDOs using unregulated derivitives like Credit Default Swaps (allowing them to sell these securities to risk averse investors AND allowing them to short the housing market)
• Ran screaming like babies to the Fed - when the CDO tranches they still owned started to implode

And NOW, we not only have these same banks rushing out to buy more of the same toxic assets they demanded bailouts for-

-not only are they asking for government subsidies to buy these toxic assets off other banks, (i.e. "I need this crap off my books. Please pay me to buy someone else's crap.")-

-we actually have banks asking us to subsidize their purchase of their own toxic assets.

Which is insane.

...obviously it sets up an untenable incentive for banks to sell themselves assets at high prices, offloading the risk onto the government, and hoping that somehow, maybe, the economy recovers, people pay off their credit cards enough for the investments to pay off. And if they don’t? So what, the banks are only out 6 percent, and the government eats the rest.

Read Chittum's article (aptly entitled, An Innoculation For Wall Street Outrage Fatigue)


This sh!t's gotta stop.

6 second conversion

(Via TPM)

I don't know how many times this demonstration has to be done, but here is yet another defender of waterboarding changing his tune after experiencing it.

This time around, it's radio host Eric Mueller.

Had I known that it was that bad I wouldn't have done this ...
I don't want to say this: absolutely torture.

Props to the man for putting his nose and mouth where his mouth was - but really: why does anyone still need to learn this lesson?

Projected UI: a sixth sense?

Pattie Maes speaking at TED about some emerging UI tech that looks freaky cool.

Here's the image that made the audience burst into applause:

Yeah, way cool.

Full integration with the products shown in the demo is a pretty big question mark. You wonder if the tech could display its information from scanning existing bar codes, or if they would need some other standard to hook into - but still.

Wild.

Road Witch Project

Ted Dewan had a problem on his street. Too many cars going too fast.

I'm not quite sure how I'd feel about being this man's neighbor - but I don't question his motivation.


Ted Dewan at euroGel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Neighborhoods need regular injections of happenings. Mr. Dewan is clearly happy to supply them.

(H/t Good Experience)

GITMO vs NIMBY? WTF?

Democrats in Senate Block Money to Close Guantánamo
In an abrupt shift, Senate Democratic leaders said they would not provide the $80 million President Obama requested to close the detention center.

[snip]

“Guantánamo makes us less safe,” the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said at a news conference where he laid out the party’s rationale for its decision, which is expected to be voted on this week. “However, this is neither the time nor the bill to deal with this. Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president. We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.”

Okay, someone please tell me that the senate democrats did NOT suddenly realize that closing GITMO meant moving the prisoners somewhere ELSE. I mean, they cannot be that stupid, right? So why all of a sudden have they chosen to adopt the GOP talking point that terrorists will be "released into the United States?"

Nobody's getting released. Prisoners will get moved into maximum security detention centers. As has been pointed out by wiser people than me, we keep plenty of psychos locked up without a lot of bother to their surrounding communities. If there's one thing our country is better than anyone else at - it's locking people up.

Which makes we wish there was a follow up question to this statement from Sen. Reid:

“You can’t put them in prison unless you release them,” he said. “We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”

Seriously - WTF is he even saying? Someone - please make that make sense.

Late edit:

CQ Politics (H/t digby) has the exchange from Sen. Reid's press conference.  Incredibly, someone asked the obvious follow up to Reid's idiocy- here's the exchange (emphasis mine):

REID: I’m saying that the United States Senate, Democrats and Republicans, do not want terrorists to be released in the United States. That’s very clear.

QUESTION: No one’s talking about releasing them. We’re talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States.

REID: Can’t put them in prison unless you release them.

QUESTION: Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit? I mean (OFF-MIKE).

REID: I can’t -- I can’t -- I can’t make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States. I think the majority -- I speak for the majority of the Senate.

He can't be any clearer than that.

If there were any justice in the world, Reid would have been drowned out by a chorus of incredulous laughter as he said that.

Somebody needs to hold his stupid up to the light until Reid screams for mercy.

Google's holodeck memos

We all know Google has a rep for being a cool place to work.

But seriously, can you imagine this exchange occurring in any other company?

(H/t Good Experience)

George Vaillant's longitude

The Atlantic has a great article about George Vaillant and his epic psychological study.

Mr. Vaillant is the director of a study that has been following the lives of 268 men for forty-two years and counting.

Yeah - pretty darn cool.

Vaillant's an interesting subject himself - he summarizes his temperament as that of the second son in the story of a father who:

...on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, “Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.” The other boy runs to him and says, “Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!”

Interesting stuff.

(H/t Good Experience)

Hold the choppers

(via Danger Room)

E's always telling me that there are situations when passive agressive is the most appropriate response.

One situation in which it is definitely not appropriate is when you are the Secretary of Defense and your coastline has been pulverized by a Hurricane.

If we are to believe GQ - Donal Rumsfeld would disagree:

[A] final story of Rumsfeld’s intransigence begins on Wednesday, August 31, 2005. Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—and the same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford, Texas, retreat back to Washington—a White House advance team toured the devastation in an Air Force helicopter.

Noticing that their chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the advance men said to the pilot, “We’re not taking you away from grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?”

“No, sir,” said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida’s Hurlburt Field Air Force base—roughly 200 miles from New Orleans—which contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. “I’m just here because you’re here,” the pilot added. “My whole unit’s sitting back at Hurlburt, wondering why we’re not being used.”

The search-and-rescue helicopters were not being used because Donald Rumsfeld had not yet approved their deployment—even though, as Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, the cigar-chomping commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, would later tell me, “that Wednesday, we needed to evacuate people. The few helicopters we had in there were busy, and we were trying to deploy more.”

In this account, Sec. Rumsfeld is portrayed as not liking the concept of using active duty troops for relief operations.

Pres. Bush actually comes across rather well - certainly more involved than video of his conference calls would suggest.

The next day, three days after landfall, word of disorder in New Orleans had reached a fever pitch. According to sources familiar with the conversation, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff called Rumsfeld that morning and said, “You’re going to need several thousand troops.”

“Well, I disagree,” said the SecDef. “And I’m going to tell the president we don’t need any more than the National Guard.”

The problem was that the Guard deployment (which would eventually reach 15,000 troops) had not arrived—at least not in sufficient numbers, and not where it needed to be. And though much of the chaos was being overstated by the media, the very suggestion of a state of anarchy was enough to dissuade other relief workers from entering the city.

Having only recently come to grips with the roiling disaster, Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning. According to several who were present, the president was agitated. Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked, “Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what’s on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I’m watching? What the hell are you doing?”

Rumsfeld replied by trotting out the ongoing National Guard deployments and suggesting that sending active-duty troops would create “unity of command” issues. Visibly impatient, Bush turned away from Rumsfeld and began to direct his inquiries at Lieutenant General Honoré on the video screen. “From then on, it was a Bush-Honoré dialogue,” remembers another participant. “The president cut Rumsfeld to pieces. I just wish it had happened earlier in the week.”

But still the troops hadn’t arrived. And by Saturday morning, says Honoré, “we had dispersed all of these people across Louisiana. So we needed more troops to go to distribution centers, feed people, and maintain traffic.” That morning Bush convened yet another meeting in the Situation Room. Chertoff was emphatic. “Mr. President,” he said, “if we’re not going to begin to get these troops, we’re not going to be able to get the job done.”

Rumsfeld could see the writing on the wall and had come prepared with a deployment plan in hand. Still, he did not volunteer it. Only when Bush ordered, “Don, do it,” did he acquiesce and send in the troops—a full five days after landfall.

If this is true, Sec. Rumsfeld ranked bureaucratic concerns higher than the civilian lives he swore to protect. Which is beyond disgusting.

I'd be interested in the counterpoint to this story, because the long list of similar stories of his Rumsfeld's bureaucratic mindset suggest this story didn't come out of thin air.

[Also, if this was a true account - I'd give Bush props for standing on his SecDef's head to make something happen, but then this is the same cabinet member that was kept on for another year.]

Calling Dick Cheney's bluff

TPM asks a question that guts the position of the former vice president:

If Torture Stopped In 2004, How Is Obama Endangering Americans By Banning It?

[Former Sen.] Bob Graham is a freak

Okay - so I just watched this bit of the show and you gotta see this.

[I know, I know - I'm tired of politics, too - if you just want to skip to the freaky bits - jump ahead to 1:50 into the clip.]

Bob Graham is OCD. (Or more likely, CDO - because the letters are properly alphabetized)

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Holy Freakage, Batmann!!!

Forget Pelosi, watch Maddow

Pelosi's flap is a sideshow. Sure, she'll get hers, but who gives a sh!t?

THIS is the big deal. Torturing people is (dubiously authorized) to defend America.
Despite this, torture is actually used to retcon a reason to invade Iraq.

Yes, that's been said before - but not with quite as many sources as we're seeing now.

Just watch the first six and a half minutes.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

If that's true (even in part) there are some people who need to go to jail. And some of them used to hold elected office.

Worse than Obama's adoption of Bush policies

Glennzilla pegs perhaps a potentially more enduring and insidious byproduct of Obama's decisions to proceed with military tribunals and conceal evidence of prisoner abuse:

Under Bush, half the country was trained to recite all sorts of dangerous propositions about how important it is to vest The President with all sorts of powers to keep us safe, how vital it is that he keep things secret to protect us from the Terrorists, how we can trust in our leaders to exercise in ways we don't understand because we know he's good at heart.

And now, with Obama, a significant portion of the other half of the country is being trained to recite the same things.

Any Obama supporters who feel the urge to back these reversals because Obama's "their guy" had better think long and hard about what that means.

Jon Stewart's brand of sunshine

...comes with a free bucket of snark.

Pres. Obama, this one's for you:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Moral Kombat
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

(H/t to CJR, natch)

Elizabeth Warren vs Adam Davidson

I was catching up with my Planet Money podcasts and the one from a few weeks ago started out with a contentious exchange between Adam Davidson and Elizabeth Warren and followed it up with Davidson's commentary about how rough that interview had been.

Well, needless to say I went out and found the interview soon as I could. Apparently it was so contentious that NPR posted the raw file on the blog so people could hear the entire thing.

Good thing.

Davidson (Who is partly responsible for me understanding anything about the current mess) comes across like a total jackass. And that's a shame. He's a great reporter - but for some reason he was all cowboy'ed up to wail on Warren from the outset.

I listened to the whole thing just stunned at how completely wrongheaded he sounded and how mindbogglingly brilliant Ms. Warren sounds.

Here's the money quote from the interview:

ELIZABETH WARREN: No no no. [Davidson snickers] We’re now at what — we’re now seven, eight months into this. And it’s the second part of what you said. We can’t do anything about the American family until this crisis is over? This crisis will not be over until the American family begins to recover. [More Davidson sputtering.] This crisis does not exist independently —

DAVIDSON: That’s your crisis.

ELIZABETH WARREN: No it is not my crisis! That is America’s crisis! If people cannot pay their credit card bills [Davidson tries to interrupt] if they cannot pay their mortgages —

DAVIDSON: But you are not in the mainstream of views on this issue. You are not —

ELIZABETH WARREN: What, if they can’t pay their credit card bills the banks are gonna do fine? Who are you looking at?  

Read more.
Listen to the interview

Freak at what short shrift is given to the only person out there stating the obvious:

Namely, this whole mess is only a national mess because it is affecting American families [i.e. those who constitute the Nation].

 If this mess was only affecting banks, it'd be an FDIC problem, or something that the market would handle in the usual bankruptcy/buyout regimen.

This mess has reached out and bit millions of average Americans - and no amount of financial sector groupthink should allow us to forget that.

ARRRRGH!!!

Get off your butts

If you're at all like me, you've got a host of frustrations about how things are going in this country. Yes, we are better off with the current administration than the alternative, but it is becoming clear that relying on the same institutions that failed us so badly is not a recipe for success.

Witness:

• A Democratic president fighting the court-ordered release of photographs showing the abuse of US prisoners.
• Democrats in congress blocking a bill that allowed relief for homeowners via bankruptcy courts
  
• The Democratic-majority congress failing to confirm an OLC nominee who favors (as does the majority of Americans) vigorous investigations of criminal acts of torture?
• Networks refusing to cover the Military Analyst scandal that exposed their willing participation in a DoD-driven PR campaign.
• Government regulators looking the other way so bonuses could be paid to former employees of AIG.
  

Looking at stuff like that - (if you're like me) you say - what the hell can I do?

Having already written my senators and representatives - it's easy to feel powerless.

There's a small thing I did, and it made me feel a bit better.

Like I wasn't just sitting there. I gave some money to Marcy Wheeler.

Marcy's the one who broke the story about KSM getting waterboarded 183 times in one month. She's been all over the missing White House email scandal and the Scooty Libby trial and a ton of other stuff that is just good to know.

And she's an unpaid blogger who does all this while she pays her bills with other jobs.

FireDogLake is asking people to give her cash (the New Organizing Institute is matching donations up to a total of $5,000) so she can hopefully spend more time doing the good work she's been doing all this time.

I know, I sound like one of those letters you habitually throw out.

Fair enough, but it felt real good to support somebody who is doing good. I figured I'd share.

Stating what is obvious [to everyone but Washington]

(Via Glenn Greenwald)

Props to MN's ex-governor. Say what you want about the man, he knows crime when he sees it - and he's got a gift for the soundbite (emphasis mine):

[Jesse] VENTURA:  I don't watch much TV. This year's reading, I covered Bush's life. I covered Guantanamo and a few other subjects. And I'm very disturbed about it. I'm bothered over Guantanamo because it seems we've created our own Hanoi Hilton. We can live with that?  I have a problem. I will criticize President Obama on this level; it's a good thing I'm not president because I would prosecute every person that was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law. 

[CNN's Larry] KING: You were a Navy SEAL.

VENTURA: That's right. I was water boarded, so I know -- at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence -- every one of us was waterboarded. It is torture.

KING: What was it like?

VENTURA:  It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you -- I'll put it to you this way, you give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

Watch the video clip.

It's just so illuminating to see a member of the the media softball club confronted with someone who is unabashedly accusing the Bush administration of criminal conduct. King's running footage of the White House Correspondents dinner, asking if Obama is "likeable" saying "alright already with Bush" - and Ventura just steamrolls him.

Ventura is certainly not the most enlightened politician - but as Glenn points out - he's hardly a bleeding heart from the far-left.

He wants torture prosecuted because it is wrong. Because it is a stain on the country he loved and served.

Hell yeah.

Zelikow Torture Memo Found

(via TPM)

Zelikow told the Senate committee that the memo, which had not previously been found, "has been located in State Department files and is being reviewed for declassification."

The Story of Stuff

http://thestoryofstuff.com/I forget who first recommended watching this video to me. Whoever it was, I apologize it's taken me this long.

This is an anything-but-nuanced discussion of the environmental impact of how we make, sell and dispose of things. Still, the meme it's pushing needs to be pushed.

Just take 20 minutes and you to will have a terrifying realization that the stuff you own is part of an unsustainable process.

Enjoy