FISA Redux: Hon. Walker Throws Down

(Via The Atlantic)

I'll be buggered: Judge Walker ruled against the government in the FISA lawsuit.

The National Security Agency broke the law when it wiretapped two American lawyers working for the El-Haramain Charity Foundation, an influential judge ruled Wednesday.

The government is almost certain to appeal this long-awaited decision, as it touches on subjects ranging from the state secrets privilege to the breadth of President Bush's "Terrorist Surveillance Program."

The ruling is a major victory for civil libertarians, and the first time that the TSP has been declared illegal. The case has bounced back and forth from district court judge Vaughn Walker, the chief judge for federal courts in Northern California, to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected a government motion to dismiss it entirely.

This would be another instance of the government refusing to make a case - and losing because of it.

The odds are not good on appeal - but hey, I didn't think they'd get this far.

Diamonds Are For Burning

Popular Science shows you some freaky chemistry - and nicely expresses their contempt for diamonds at the same time:

I can’t stand diamonds. No, really, they just tick me off, because nearly everything about them is a lie. Diamonds are neither rare nor intrinsically valuable nor uniquely romantic. Those are ideas invented by the diamond industry. And no, despite what the ads tell you, diamonds are not forever.

(H/t Felix Salmon)

Playing Soldier

God speaks to Hutaree: "Don't Drag Me Into Your Crap"

Watching the Hutaree arrests play out in the media, you can see people are struggling to understand what these folks were up to.

I'd accept these guys could organize a lethal ambush and perhaps detonate a bomb. Fair enough. Arrest them. But stop selling them to me as WMD-wielding soldiers of Armageddon. Watch the videos of these folks and you'll see them imitating the tactics of special forces - badly. They awkwardly go through the motions of a peel off maneuver ("We saw this on TV!") and take cover to return fire over the roof of a civilian vehicle.

They are playing war.

And every media outlet is trying to answer the question "Who are these guys?"

I'd argue this is the wrong question.

You have the feds laying claim to informers and the leader's ex-wife going to the press.

Then you have the rush of other militia members disassociating themselves from the Hutaree.

The Detroit News is reporting stuff like this:

A member of the controversial Michigan Militia said Sunday that the Hutaree is a nationwide organization with an ardent following in Adrian, 10 miles from the Ohio border just west of Detroit. "Their philosophy and ours differ in many ways, so we don't do a whole lot with them. They are too extreme or radical for us," said Jim Gulliksen, coordinator of the Lenaway Volunteer Michigan Militia with membership of about a dozen in the Adrian area. "I just kind of got a bad feeling about the group and we did not want to associate with them. They are a little too paranoid for me.

Then this guy weighs in:

Mike Lackomar of Michiganmilitia.com said he heard from other militia members that the FBI targeted the Hutaree after its members made threats of violence against Islamic organizations. Lackomar said the members of the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia and Michiganmilitia.com weren't arrested.

"Last night and into today (Sunday), the FBI conducted a raid against homes belonging to the Hutaree. They are a religious cult. They are not part of our militia community," Lackomar said.

CNN is also quoting Lackomar as saying the Hutaree are "really a fringe group outside of anything we do...more of a private army or a terrorist organization or really just a criminal organization."

I doubt either of these other militia guys supported the Hutaree's brand of crazy, but let's remember that when the Feds pounced - Lackomar claims the Hutaree called his group looking for help. They knew how to get in touch - and believed that the Michigan Militia would help. If Michigan Militia really went out of their way to avoid the Hutaree, you'd think they wouldn't have gotten the call.

I'm not looking for a wider Federal dragnet - I just think this is symptomatic of people with a shared subculture. These guys know each other because they're in the same area and they all like to play soldier in the woods.

It is very easy to get lost in the Hutaree's motivations & those of the rest of the militia movement.

My guess is less granular:

These guys like to play soldier in the woods.

That will get you started. But this is a fairly intense hobby. You buy weapons & gear and march around on training exercises.

In the normal run of things - this is a completely unnecessary skillset. It doesn't help you with your job, and it doesn't help you feed your family. It is expensive and can be physically demanding.

You need a reason to spend hours lugging around gear and learning how to fight - and to keep coming back.

There's plenty of other hobbies that involve guns and the outdoors. It's going to take something extra to get you to buy gear, lug it around, follow orders, and play war. You need an excuse, and there's a shortage of good ones.

We're re-enactors

That's about it. And it requires a historical and anachronistic outlook.

Once you suit up with modern gear, your every rationalization is going to distance you from most people:

We're getting ready in case of war...in case our country needs us

We're training in case our government collapses....

You need an excuse - and those are better than "I like to play soldier."

Once you buy into that line of reasoning, it only takes a few run ins with local law enforcment to to get to:

The government doesn't like us. They want to stop us from doing this.

The government SHOULD collapse, so we need to be ready...

I'd argue the only thing you need for the last big leap: We're going to MAKE the government collapse is a charismatic and power hungry individual. They may have no power in any other aspect of their lives - but in the woods, playing soldier - they are king.

In the normal run of things - this person would just be the most gung ho, who exhorts their followers to do more, to follow their example. But you get an individual who is hooked on controlling others - on being the big man... you're going to have problems. They start isolating their group, making wilder and wilder claims and pretty soon you have a group that believes they are the defenders of truth and the world needs to learn a lesson.

Put God in the mix and you have a recipe to easily define the world, minimize mortal threats and solidify the leader's control. We are righteous. They are not. They are less than we are.

Jonestown, Waco, and pretty much every suicide cult you've ever heard of has that leader who uses adversity to create unity. Leaders who will invent an enemy as a means of controlling the group. In the fortunate majority of cases - groups like this talk tough, get their kicks out of pretending, and eventually move on to other pastimes.

But then you have that exception- where somebody drunk on their own hype finds willing followers.... and we end up with yet another group of misfits being introduced to the world following a federal raid.

I'd argue their specific ideology isn't a cause - it's just a symptom. A tactic used by their leader to their own end.

We can be thankful nobody died this time.

Seattle? Are You Sh!tting Me?

Before we go any further, I need to ask you to set down any beverages or sharp objects.

Are you sitting comfortably? Good.

Read the following sentence from CBS news:

Three Seattle police officers were justified when they used a stun gun on a pregnant mother who refused to sign a traffic ticket, a federal appeals court ruled Friday in a case that prompted an incredulous dissent.

Got that?

Assuming the original stop was legit - the police should have given this woman her ticket - and moved on.

Now, The Agitator would like to add a few observations:

...the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that three Seattle police officers were justified in using a taser three times on a pregnant woman for resisting arrest. The woman had been pulled over for going 32 mph in a school zone. She insisted it was the car ahead of her that was speeding, and refused to sign the ticket. That’s when they tased her.

The problem is that under Washington law, (a) you aren’t required to sign a traffic ticket, (b) speeding isn’t an arrestable offense, and (c) you can’t be arrested for resisting an unlawful arrest.

So the woman was completely within her rights. Yet asserting those rights got her the business end of a stun gun. Three times. And two of the three federal appellate judges to hear the case see nothing wrong with that.

The lone dissenting opinion by Judge Berzon pointed out that the majority opinion (holding that the woman had obstructed the officers) used an argument the police officers hadn't even made.


Seriously.... What. The. F#$k.

The Mismeasure of Meat

(Via CJR)

Here's a nice example of how the message of science gets lost in translation.

For the last four years, media outlets such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Fox News have repeatedly cited a United Nations study which found that livestock production is responsible for about 18 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions—a larger share than comes from all planes, trains, and automobiles combined.

Last week, news outlets revisited those claims, following a talk delivered by Dr. Frank Mitloehner, an animal scientist based at UC Davis, at an American Chemical Society meeting last Monday. Mitloehner criticized the conclusions of a 2006 report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” The study’s assertion that meat (including eggs, dairy, and other animal protein) production is responsible for more greenhouse-gas emissions globally than the transportation industry is certainly untenable, and likely false, he said.

The problem Mitloehner highlighted is that the FAO performed what’s called a full “lifecycle analysis” for the livestock industry. In other words, it added up emissions from things like fertilizer production and land-use change in addition to those from cow burps and manure. It did not do the same for the transportation industry, however, tabulating the emissions from fossil-fuel combustion, but not from automobile manufacturing or road construction, for instance. Mitloehner has spent the last week explaining to reporters that this led to a classic apples-to-oranges comparison between the two sectors. In one of the first news articles on the subject, the FAO substantiated this criticism, saying that its comparison was indeed flawed.

Okay, so a new study reveals flaws in an old study - so what?

Well, critics of global warming now use this relatively benign correction to make all kinds of groundless assertions:

Eat less meat, reduce Global Warming - or Not Fox News

Meat, dairy diet not tied to global warming Washington Times

And to be fair, prior to these howlers - you had a press community who uncritically accepted that global livestock produce more greenhouse gas than global vehicle emissions. Which is to say how come this earlier assertion wasn't made to show its work? Simply asking the FAO where they got their numbers might have helped. They might have said something like what they're saying now:

“I must say honestly that he has a point – we factored in everything for meat emissions, and we didn’t do the same thing with transport, we just used the figure from the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change],” FAO livestock policy officer Pierre Gerber, a co-author of “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” told the BBC.

Honestly, would that have been so hard?

EFP = WMD? WTF?

According to the press release, the Michigan militiamen who were just arrested face a count of attempting to kill local law enforcement officers using improvised explosives "with Explosively Formed Projectiles" which "constitute weapons of mass destruction."

Now, I've always thought that the definition of WMD was pretty stupid - putting chlorine gas and thermonuclear warheads in the same category makes for a pretty meaningless category - but this latest usage needs a bit more explanation.

An IED designed to punch through armor is now a WMD? By that standard we've found WMD in Iraq - and I'm pretty sure that would be news to the rest of the world. I get that a prosecutor is going to reach for the stars - but the vast chasm between a homemade bomb that can destroy an armored vehicle and a bomb that splits the atom demands more precise terminology.

A roadside bomb is not a weapon of mass destruction - it can be an instrument in an act of treason without being hyped to the level of something that can kill millions.

Enough with the fear mongering, eh? We're still full up from the last administration.

Later update:
Newshoggers has a fine observation: Aren't EFPs something that requires state backing to create?

Late update:
Here's the section of US code they are citing in the indictment (PDF) defining their terms:

(2) the term “weapon of mass destruction” means—

(A) any destructive device as defined in section 921 of this title;

(B) any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors;

(C) any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector (as those terms are defined in section 178 of this title); or

(D) any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life; and

-and here's the relevant language from section 921 which turns all destructive devices into WMDs:

(4) The term “destructive device” means—

(A) any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas—

(i) bomb,

(ii) grenade,

(iii) rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces,

(iv) missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce,

(v) mine, or

(vi) device similar to any of the devices described in the preceding clauses;

Which translates into - a person who sends anything that could be defined as a 'bomb' through the US mail can be charged with using WMD.

None of which is to suggest such a actions aren't vile or deserving of severe punishment - I'm just pointing out how stupid it is to have a category of WMD in the US Code that equates a half-ounce incendiary with a sarin gas or an H bomb.

I would hope such a distinction would be captured by other statues. But mostly, I'm just sick of the alarmist tone that will suggest that militia members have WMDs - when they're really talking about homemade bombs.

V Said, Y Said

This is just too strange - YouTube's account of their dispute with Viacom.

(H/T Barry)

Checking Your Bag? Here's $25...

(Via Felix Salmon)

[Freightdawg's] Eric [Joiner] has some very smart and well-informed analysis of the economics of checking bags: essentially, if, like Southwest, you only have one kind of aircraft, then checking bags saves you money because it speeds up the rate at which passengers get on and off the plane. And he knows that the economics of reducing the bag-check fee from $25 to $0 are essentially the same as the economics of reducing it from $0 to -$25. And so:

What if an air carrier said…rather than charge you a fee to check a bag, They would PAY you to do so?

I believe I'd say Check my bag...please. Particularly if they also followed Felix's suggestion of adding an RFID tag to each bag for tracking.

The Court is Not Amused

Knowing my affinity for judicial snark - E sent me a link to the U of Washington's Law School's legal humor page.

They summarize a long list of opinions where judges have departed from staid legal prose in favor of bringing the funny.

I'm primarily interested in the snark, so here's US District Judge Kent laying the smack down in Bradshaw v. Unity Marine Corporation, Inc., 147 F. Supp. 2d 668.

Briefly, the case involved a sailor suing a dockowner for injuries on the job. Two attorneys who have offered legal arguments that were wanting in both substance and format.

Let's join the opinion already in progress:

Before proceeding further, the Court notes that this case involves two extremely likable lawyers, who have together delivered some of the most amateurish pleadings ever to cross the hallowed causeway into Galveston, an effort which leads the Court to surmise but one plausible explanation. Both attorneys have obviously entered into a secret pact--complete with hats, handshakes and cryptic words--to draft their pleadings entirely in crayon on the back sides of gravy-stained paper place mats, in the hope that the Court would be so charmed by their child-like efforts that their utter dearth of legal authorities in their briefing would go unnoticed. Whatever actually occurred, the Court is now faced with the daunting task of deciphering their submissions. With Big Chief tablet readied, thick black pencil in hand, and a devil-may-care laugh in the face of death, life on the razor's edge sense of exhilaration, the Court begins....

Defendant begins the descent into Alice's Wonderland by submitting a Motion that relies upon only one legal authority. The Motion cites a Fifth Circuit case which stands for the whopping proposition that a federal court sitting in Texas applies the Texas statutes of limitations to certain state and federal law claims. See Gonzales v. Wyatt, 157 F.3d 1016, 1021 n. 1 (5th Cir.1998). That is all well and good--the Court is quite fond of the Erie doctrine; indeed there is talk of little else around both the Canal and this Court's water cooler. Defendant, however, does not even cite to Erie, but to a mere successor case, and further fails to even begin to analyze why the Court should approach the shores of Erie. Finally, Defendant does not even provide a cite to its desired Texas limitation statute. [FN2] A more bumbling approach is difficult to conceive--but wait folks, There's More!

Plaintiff responds to this deft, yet minimalist analytical wizardry with an equally gossamer wisp of an argument, although Plaintiff does at least cite the federal limitations provision applicable to maritime tort claims. See 46 U.S.C. § 763a. Naturally, Plaintiff also neglects to provide any analysis whatsoever of why his claim versus Defendant Phillips is a maritime action. Instead, Plaintiff "cites" to a single case from the Fourth Circuit. Plaintiff's citation, however, points to a nonexistent Volume "1886" of the Federal Reporter *671 Third Edition and neglects to provide a pinpoint citation for what, after being located, turned out to be a forty-page decision. Ultimately, to the Court's dismay after reviewing the opinion, it stands simply for the bombshell proposition that torts committed on navigable waters (in this case an alleged defamation committed by the controversial G. Gordon Liddy aboard a cruise ship at sea) require the application of general maritime rather than state tort law. See Wells v. Liddy, 186 F.3d 505, 524 (4th Cir.1999) (What the ...)?! The Court cannot even begin to comprehend why this case was selected for reference. It is almost as if Plaintiff's counsel chose the opinion by throwing long range darts at the Federal Reporter (remarkably enough hitting a nonexistent volume!). And though the Court often gives great heed to dicta from courts as far flung as those of Manitoba, it finds this case unpersuasive. There is nothing in Plaintiff's cited case about ingress or egress between a vessel and a dock, although counsel must have been thinking that Mr. Liddy must have had both ingress and egress from the cruise ship at some docking facility, before uttering his fateful words.

(and so on...)

Ahh, what fun...

Random Sip From the Firehose

1. Who will pay more income tax this year: You - or Bank of America? The answer won't surprise you.
    
2. Rep. Eric Cantor makes a complete fool of himself - (TPM)
    
3. Gmail compared to Fitts Law, found wanting - (Coding Horror)
    
4. I wish all user agreements were written this way - (H/t Good blog)
    
5. More than a dozen Wall Street firms colluded to underpay interest owed to state governments on municipal bonds. Estimated time until we see a defense of this tactic voiced on CNBC...?

Man With The Golden Arm

(via The Daily Mail)

File under 'Awesome'

An Australian man who has been donating his extremely rare kind of blood for 56 years has saved the lives of more than two million babies.

James Harrison, 74, has an antibody in his plasma that stops babies dying from Rhesus disease, a form of severe anemia.

He has enabled countless mothers to give birth to healthy babies, including his own daughter, Tracey, who had a healthy son thanks to her father's blood.

Mr Harrison has been giving blood every few weeks since he was 18 years old and has now racked up a total of 984 donations.

That seriously kicks @ss.

Barry on Health Care

Barry Ritholz posts some off the cuff observations about health care in the US - (which are nice) but the winning 'graphs are his personal experience he posts in the comments section:

I used to be a pitcher, and somewhere between college and last year I tore my rotator cuff. Never knew about it, never bothered me. One night, I wake up in pain, Can’t lie on the shoulder. Gets worse, and worse, and after a month I finally go to the orthopedist. X-rays in his office, “yep, it looks like a problem, you need an MRI.”

Here’s where we go down the rabbit whole.

I say, let’s do it, and the doc tells me he needs permission from the Insurer. So a 24 year old girl with a High School diploma sitting in a cubicle in Syracuse has to give approval to my doc, (Yale undergrad, Columbia Med school). That makes no sense.

Even worse, it takes a week to get permission, and then another week to schedule the MRI. This means I am in pain for 2 unnecessary weeks. Very annoying.

MRI comes back positive, and I say (right from Rocky) Doc, cut me. He warns me its a six month long rehab — grueling physical therapy (PX), very uncomfortable. Better alternative is to try Physical Therapy before hand. 3X week for 4 months — massage (not the good kind — painful and no fun), strengthening, stretching.

Further down the rabbit hole: It seems that every 4th visit, the insurer wants an evaluation done. This is a ridiculous waste of time — it seems as if they are trying to discourage the treatments. I speak to the insurer, get a colossal runaround. I speak to 5 different people, there is no way to waive this.

I have a simple solution — cancel the PX, and get the Doc to schedule the surgery. My insurer SUDDENLY becomes way more responsive. Senior VPs are calling me, trying to get me to try PX first. My terms are simple Evals after every 10 weeks, not 4th visit. I keep getting bumped up to higher VPs.
When we reserve the operating room for the actual surgery, they finally cave. I make them fax the pre-approval of the entire PX in writing. Surgery canceled, PX effective.

That is the sign of a very broken system . . .

Once again: rationing? Check. Bureaucratic delays? Check. Pointless suffering and run around? Check.

And that is our current system.

Here's to Whitey

My great uncle B passed away this morning. He was a man I didn't know enough about - but somebody I greatly admired.

I knew him as man who delighted in life and family. As a combat veteran of WWII, he was practically a legend in our family.

He'd enlisted as a skinny 19 year old, had more than his share of close shaves in the war, then came home to build a life.

In all my memories of him, he is laughing or making others laugh. Surrounded by family hanging on his every word - or gamely laughing along at whatever prank he'd stumbled into.

His family is legion. And wherever they gather to mourn the man - there is sure to be more laughter than tears. Like him, they have an infectious sense of fun. I remember B's boys at my dad's funeral - they insisted on making time for what fun could be had. It helped everyone to have them around.

My great uncle B.

By any measure - a giant of a man.

Forty Cents an Hour

You have to read this to believe it:

In 1979, Des Moines Register reporters Mike McGraw and Margaret Engel discovered sixty mentally disabled men eviscerating turkeys at an Iowa meat plant for less than $70 a month. The workers were Texas natives who had aged out of state care and been sent to the meat plant to work for subminimum wages by a Texas labor broker called Henry’s Turkey Service. They were housed in an old schoolhouse that was owned by the town of Atalissa and operated by Henry’s, which deducted room and board from the men’s meager paychecks.

The low wages were legal under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which allows disabled workers to be paid based on their productivity. But it wasn’t clear that anyone had ever assessed the men’s productivity at Atalissa, and there was a clear conflict of interest in Henry’s acting as the men’s employer, landlord, caretaker, and designated recipient of disability benefits. The whole situation raised “thorny questions about how handicapped persons should be paid for their work,” according to the article that McGraw and Engel wrote (PDF). It ran on the front page of the Sunday Register and spurred an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Shortly after their story was published, McGraw returned to his old paper, The Kansas City Star, where he still works today, and Engel moved to a job at the Register’s Washington, D.C., bureau.... “We had reason to believe something would happen,” McGraw says now.

But nothing did. The investigation stalled and eventually was dropped, and with both McGraw and Engel gone, no one at the paper followed up.

Thirty years later the Atalissa bunkhouse story resurfaced at the Register. In February 2009, reporter Clark Kauffman received a call from the sister of a Henry’s Turkey Service employee who had started working at the Atalissa plant in 1979. She was concerned that her brother was being exploited; after three decades working for Henry’s, he had amassed a life savings of just $80. As Kauffman began digging, he unearthed the Register’s original story from the clip file. It turned out that twenty-one of the original sixty men were still living in the same bunkhouse, still plucking turkey feathers and pulling guts at the same slaughterhouse. Their 40-cents-an-hour wage had not changed.

Thankfully, this time around - the government has actually done something.

But a classic example of how merely bringing bad things to light is not enough - disinterested government officials are perfectly willing to forget about something if we let them.

Read the whole thing.

Financial Access at Birth

(Via Felix Salmon)

Here's a clever, yet depressing idea:

We propose that starting November 11, 2011 (11/11/11), every child born in this world will start life with a Financial Access at Birth (FAB) bank account. The opening of these “FAB” bank accounts would be integrated with the official birth registration process and perhaps with electronic banking. Governments, with the help of institutional/individual donors will make a deposit of US$100 in each FAB account.

The barriers in the way of this idea are legion, the scope of the problem they are trying to solve is depressing -

-but it's still a damn good idea.

File Under "Well, duh..."

(Via The Consumerist)

Science Says High-Fructose Corn Syrup Is Pretty Much The Worst Thing Ever

"Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn't true, at least under the conditions of our tests," said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. "When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese -- every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight."

Stimulus Tracking

ProPublica has been tracking the progress of federal stimulus spending and while the $800 billion dollar figure has stuck in the national psyche, here's what they've been pointing out for months:

Stimulus spending by the Obama administration has reached roughly $321 billion, according to the latest numbers from Recovery.gov. That number includes $202 billion in spending and an estimated $119 billion in tax cuts. Overall, slightly more than 40 percent of the nearly $800 billion stimulus package has entered the economy.

In other words, whatever good has been done, has been done with considerably less than $800 billion - and a third of the actual money spent came in the form of tax cuts.

Taibbi's List of Cons

I'd missed this effort from Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, Wall Street's Bailout Hustle - printed back in February.

It's vintage Taibbi - a frothing screed that uses language every bit as profane as the conduct it describes. Here's a nice bit detailing Goldman's tactics right before AIG went under:

...when the housing bubble went crazy, Goldman made money coming and going. They made money selling the crap mortgages, and they made money by collecting on the bogus insurance from AIG when the crap mortgages flopped.

Still, the trick for Goldman was: how to collect the insurance money. As AIG headed into a tailspin that fateful summer of 2008, it looked like the beleaguered firm wasn't going to have the money to pay off the bogus insurance. So Goldman and other banks began demanding that AIG provide them with cash collateral. In the 15 months leading up to the collapse of AIG, Goldman received $5.9 billion in collateral...

It was a brilliant move. When a company like AIG is about to die, it isn't supposed to hand over big hunks of assets to a single creditor like Goldman; it's supposed to equitably distribute whatever assets it has left among all its creditors. Had AIG gone bankrupt, Goldman would have likely lost much of the $5.9 billion that it pocketed as collateral. "Any bankruptcy court that saw those collateral payments would have declined that transaction as a fraudulent conveyance," says Barry Ritholtz, the author of Bailout Nation. Instead, Goldman and the other counterparties got their money out in advance — putting a torch to what was left of AIG....

And why not? After all, according to the terms of the bailout deal struck when AIG was taken over by the state in September 2008, Goldman was paid 100 cents on the dollar on an additional $12.9 billion it was owed by AIG — again, money it almost certainly would not have seen a fraction of had AIG proceeded to a normal bankruptcy. Along with the collateral it pocketed, that's $19 billion in pure cash that Goldman would not have "earned" without massive state intervention. How's that $13.4 billion in 2009 profits looking now? And that doesn't even include the direct bailouts of Goldman Sachs and other big banks, which began in earnest after the collapse of AIG.

I like that last bit. How's that $13.4 billion in 2009 profits looking now?

Goldman receives just under $19 billion from husking AIG and then fleecing the taxpayer - and makes $13.4 billion for the year.

Meaning - the rest of their year's activities (that they tell us about) talled up to negative $5 billion dollars plus. Absent those $19 billion in ill gotten money, Goldman was in a world of hurt.

Taibbi's narrative is colorful - but it's very illuminating to see all the Wall Street giveaways piled up one after another.

Good stuff.

In The Interest of Saving Time

Here are two really short encapsulations of two very big issues.

1. Why bipartisanship is an impossibility in the current US congress (Via James Fallows):

[the following is an exchange between two Congressmen discussing the stimulus bill]:

"GOP member: 'I'd like this in the bill.'

"Dem member response: 'If we put it in, will you vote for the bill?'

"GOP member: 'You know I can't vote for the bill.'

"Dem member: 'Then why should we put it in the bill?'

2. "The clearest description of the financial mess" (as satire) (Via Mark Hurst)

Go to The Daily Show episode for March 16, 2010
Start watching at 7:09 and watch until 11:30.

As Mr. Hurst said, "The best 4 minutes and 21 seconds of video you'll likely watch all month."

Things That Make Me Laugh: Tea Partiers

Bruce Bartlett takes the p!ss out of the average Tea Partier's grasp of taxes in the US. Apparently David Frum and some folks polled about 57 of them about the current state of taxes in America - and let's just say they were found wanting:

The first question that was asked concerned the size of government. Tea Partyers were asked how much the federal government gets in taxes as a percentage of the gross domestic product. According to Congressional Budget Office data, acceptable answers would be 6.4%, which is the percentage for federal income taxes; 12.7%, which would be for both income taxes and Social Security payroll taxes; or 14.8%, which would represent all federal taxes as a share of GDP in 2009.

...

Tuesday's Tea Party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times as high as they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944.

As useful as it is for some of these folks to vent their anger in public - I have to say the Tea Party is a bit of a joke. I mean, sure - be angry with government - but let's have a point, shall we? The fault lines present on some of their signs shows a group of people whose only uniting factor is they are mad at government.

Well, get in line, folks - and stop acting like you came up with the idea. I'd pay good money to see some of these Ron Paulites stand up and spout in front of a throng of Tea Partiers. I'd lay good odds that the crowd (or any card carrying GOP members) would storm the stage to shut them up.

Sheesh.

Oh, and this made me laugh, too but for different reasons.

I Know It When I See It

The headslapper: An idea so good, so obviously better that any analysis is reserved for how you can put it to use, rather than IF you should put it to use.

Here's one - the infinite USB, by Gonglue Jiang, a Chinese design student:

Don'cha wish your machine's USB's all ended like this?


(H/t Endgadget)

Frum on Health Care's Waterloo

I have no love for David Frum, and while I think much of his Waterloo article is aspirational - it nicely encapsulates what is wrong with current political strategy.

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

...

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

...

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

I think Frum's pandering a bit - but here's a bit that I especially appreciate:

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Exactly the observation that was lacking in the all the commentary and posturing of conservatives.

This legislation was not a left wing showcase of ideas. It was a stumbling attempt to make something that would pass with broad support. The GOP chose to go scorched earth against ideas they used to support. Which made them look craven and stupid. To whip up the faithful, they made demonstrably false statements, invented any number of inane straw men - and finally trotted out the tired old canards of immigration and abortion - (as if this bill was an attempt to wander into either of those minefields).

A lot of people got mad - but in the end, the Democrats finally were forced to use the majority they had been given.

In the health care summit, the visual that keeps springing to mind is the President saying over and over again that there were large sections of the bill that they could agree on - and that a viable course would be to pass those measures and then put the more contentious items into a separate bill. This was resoundingly rejected with calls to "start over" - which is Washington-speak for "do nothing."

It's disappointing on lots of levels, because there are good conservative ideas (no matter how well hidden they are behind the idiocy of GOP party leadership) and because a president wasted a year attempting to pass this with the GOP and ended up without a single conservative vote.

You wonder if the GOP will change tactics, or if they will double down yet again. I don't believe bipartisian legislation is inherently more virtuous or effective, but I think that unavoidable problems require legislation, and scorched earth politics just prolongs our national agony.

If this was a Waterloo - I'm hoping the GOP's old guard gets left on the battlefield. They'd be a better party without them.

(H/t TPM)

Bolsheviks and Baby-Killers, Unite!

Well, I'll be damned - the Dems actually grew a pair and passed a bill.

Golf clap, anyone?

Now how's about passing the reconciliation bill, add a robust public option, and get off my tv for a while, eh?

I'm sick of you people.

The [Investment] Firm

(Via The Awl with a H/t to Felix Salmon)

This was just too creepy not to pass on. Next time your boss asks you how your family is doing - be glad your boss isn't Dick Fuld [of Lehman Brothers infamy]:

This Foucauldian regime of total marital surveillance went into overdrive at the firm’s annual retreats in Sun Valley, Idaho. After being flown in on firm-owned jets, each couple was met by one in a vast armada of black S.U.V.’s. In the morning, the wives would be marshaled for punishing, competitive hikes up nearby Bald Mountain—Karin Jack recalls that Fuld himself would pantomime pushing her forward for the final upward stretch. (She once tried to shun hiking duty by faking a leg injury, replete with a phony cast—only to be one-upped by another go-getting Lehman wife who arrived in an actual leg cast and nevertheless professed her intention to march grimly up the mountain regardless.) When she awoke one morning to find that the hiking-wives’ corps had left without her, she instantly put Brad on alert that his star was in decline. (And she was right—he was demoted a few months later, and left the firm in 2005; the Jacks divorced in 2008, both informing Ward that the intrusive reach of the Fuld regime had irreparably harmed their marriage.)

One wonders if they had a security officer who looked like Wilford Brimley...

Yikes.

A New Twist on the Srebrenica Massacre

Why did 8,000 Bosnian muslim men die at the hands of the Serbs?

It was because the Dutch army contains homosexuals.

At least, that's the reason if you're as stupid as Retired Gen. John Sheehan.

It All Depends On How You Look At It

(Via Felix Salmon)

One man's $50 billion dollar fraud is another man's "like, whatever"

Max Abelson has talked to three former Lehman executives about the Valukas report, [which details how Lehman concealed $50 billion dollars worth of liabilities from their shareholders] and you can see why they requested anonymity. Here are some of the gems from Senior Executive #2:

“It’s just not that big of an event… They just want to be mad and don’t know what they’re talking about and want to be outraged.”

“These firms clearly shop jurisdictions all the time for the most favorable rule set, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

The only people who would worry about using an old trick to reduce leverage from 13.9 to 12.1, the second executive said, are “yappers who don’t know anything."

Nice perspective, guys. Always wanted to know how things look inside your gilded bubble.

Now shut the hell up.

John Carney: Wow, What an Idiot

Ryan Chittum takes the p!ss out of John Carney's pathetic attempt to rationalize giving Lehman execs a pass on cooking the books.

It needs to be read in its entirety, but here's a teaser (emphasis mine):

(Carney) It’s far from clear that a criminal prosecution would be the best response to alleged fraud at Lehman Brothers. In the first place, the alleged fraud is not what brought down Lehman Brothers and did not cause the broader financial crisis. The questionable Repo 105 transactions may have actually forestalled a collapse for several months because they may have concealed Lehman’s failure to improve its financial condition in 2007 and 2008.

That's John Carney telling you that hiding $50 billion worth of liabilities from your shareholders is good, because it delayed the company's collapse.

*Throws hands in the air*

Beyond stupid. I mean, we've seen corporate shills before (see the Santelli clip here) - but Jeezus...

If You Order Now, We'll Throw In....

After a discussion of the economics of print media and advertising, CJR's Ryan Chittum launches this meme:

Now if, say, The New York Times abandoned its presses and gave everybody a $500 iPad (minus a bulk discount from Apple, of course) with a commitment to a two-year subscription (which averages $604 a year in print), then you might be talking.

Hell, that's not a bad idea.

Not that a print company can turn on a time - but the idea that a content provider would subsidize the distribution of a device they can use to distribute for-pay content is hardly new (Kindle, the Nook etc) is hardly new.

But make that idea your sales pitch and see how many people will take the plunge. I'm lukewarm on the iPad, but if buying it can be bundled with content purchases that I would make anyway (and allow me to access that content from other devices as well) and I'm asking: "where do I sign?"

Think of it:
Buy a year of the NYT and LA times and get an iPad for $200!
Or
Buy an iPad now and get a year's subscription to two newspapers of your choice!

If the content is rich enough - that could get me off the fence. And content providers who are losing money on free content could loss lead their way into paid content with a shiny new user toy.

It'd get me off the fence.

Michael Lewis: A No Interest Loan is a Bailout

I'm sure there are a slew of sites talking about the Michael Lewis book, The Big Short - but I just wanted to highlight this marvelous quote of his.

Did they ever explain how they made all this money? If you look at their businesses right now, they’re heavily government dependent. If you were Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, or JPMorgan, you have access to a 0 percent loan in virtually unlimited quantities from the Federal Reserve. You can take that money and re-invest it in Treasury bonds or in government agency securities and you will get a spread. And you can do it over and over. You’re essentially borrowing from the government, lending to the government, and taking a cut.

(Emphasis added by CJR's Ryan Chittum)

When you hear - over and over that the banks have paid us back - there are any number of items that are not included in that remark - and the one Mr. Lewis is talking about is still going on.

Who can't find a way to make money with free funding?

We have bailed out Wall Street and we are still bailing them out.

Read Chittum's whole post - there are other winners in there.

Breaking: Lehman Execs Full of Crap

Okay, not breaking - but newly minted as established fact.

Here's Ryan Chittum:

The Lehman Scandal Breaks Wide Open

Yesterday’s blockbuster 2,200 page report on Lehman Brothers by a court-appointed examiner shows Lehman Brothers executives moving $50 billion in toxic assets off-balance-sheet to deceive investors about its financial health. Finally it seems it’s taken Anton Valukas and $38 million to put the scandal in the scandal.
...
Essentially what Lehman did was make its balance sheet look much better than it actually was by taking those $50 billion in assets and arranging short-term transactions just before the end of each quarter—all so it wouldn’t have to report that it held these assets.

Viva Valukas. Give this guy some room, Wall Street is a fairly target rich environment.

Some Things You Just Can't Spin

(Via TPM)

The Majority Leader of the Utah House took a nude hot-tub with a 15-year old employee, then paid her $150,000 and had her pledge to keep quiet, he admitted yesterday...

...[Utah State House Majority Leader] Garn yesterday told reporters about the incident. "I can unequivocally tell you there was no physical contact, there was no touching, there was no intercourse, there was none of those things. It simply did not occur. I'm not trying to downplay what did occur but I want to make it very plain."

Owch, it hurts.

Dude, wave off the Damage Control team, this ship's goin' down.

Money Well Spent

Planet Money profiled a Hatian woman named Yvrose - whose modest business was wiped out by the earthquake. The short version is that she bought inventory with credit and then placed the goods up for sale on consignment. The earthquake destroyed her inventory before it could be sold - so she was left owing her creditors almost a thousand dollars.

Which in Haiti - is a staggering sum of money.

The portrait of a hardworking soul being completely undone by random chance clearly struck a nerve.

People wrote in asking how they could help, and NPR set up an account for her at a Haitian microfinance institution, Fokonze. So far, about $3,500 in donations have come in. That's a transformative amount of money for an impoverished Haitian. It could move Yvrose from miserable and insecure poverty to what could become a stable life with a cushion for bad times

Sure, there are still hundreds of thousands dead - and it's not likely that Haiti's lot will improve.

But this lady and her family were saved.

Inadequate to the larger picture - but not insignificant.

The Sun is White - and There are No Green Stars

(Via Bad Astronomy)

Take a blowtorch (figuratively!) and heat up an iron bar. After a moment it will glow red, then orange, then bluish-white. Then it’ll melt. ...

Why does it glow? Any matter above the temperature of absolute zero (about -273 Celsius) will emit light. The amount of light it gives off, and more importantly the wavelength of that light, depends on the temperature. The warmer the object, the shorter the wavelength.

...

An object that is at 4500 Kelvins (about 4200 Celsius or 7600 F) peaks in the orange part of the spectrum. Warm it up to 6000 Kelvin (about the temperature of the Sun, 5700 C or 10,000 F) and it peaks in the blue-green. Heat it up more, and the peaks moves into the blue, or even toward shorter wavelengths. In fact, the hottest stars put out most of their light in the ultraviolet, at shorter wavelengths than we can see with our eyes.

Now wait a sec (again)… if the Sun peaks in the blue-green, why doesn’t it look blue-green?

Yes... why indeed?

Phil tells us why.

Free Marketeers, Afraid of an Auction

(Via CJR and the almighty Bloomberg)

Here's Bloomberg:

A Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. plan to auction more than $1 billion in assets seized from failed banks next month, including a loan to build a W Hotel in Atlanta, may trigger writedowns that weaken lenders nationwide.

And here's the money quote from the attorney of the affected banks:

These banks can’t believe that the regulator they pay to protect them is going to sell these loans to someone who can flip them and cause them serious losses,” said Robert Reynolds...“Our banks just cannot believe they’re being treated in a way that ultimately hurts the FDIC’s insurance fund, because some of them are right on the edge.”

Love how he got the talking point "...in a way that ultimately hurts the FDIC's insurance fund" in there.

Bloomberg's article is saying that this is an symptom of the coming (or ongoing) implosion in commercial real estate loans. They're saying this was largely a regional bank issue (something I didn't know), which casts an entirely new light on all those condos popping up all over town. Wonder how many of my local lenders are on the FDIC's balooning watch list.

Worth a read.

Team Mayhem vs. The Hurt Locker

Awhile ago, Danger Room offered a day in the life of an army EOD team called Team Mayhem.

Totally worth the read.

A sample:

At about 7 pm, 28 hours into Team Mayhem's shift, the guys are on the roof of a well-groomed apartment building in one of Iraq's nicest remaining neighborhoods. They're looking at a fist-sized projectile that landed about an hour ago. Palmer identifies it as a Chinese-made 60-millimeter mortar, but there's no way to tell from here if it's about to explode. Palmer looks at Ferraro.

Ferraro squares his gear on his chest and crouches next to the shell, his face inches from the mortar. He takes a whiff. And just then, white smoke starts to curl from the thing. "Water! Get some water right now!" Palmer shouts. He knows that the smoke is from white phosphorus, an incendiary agent that burns on contact with oxygen, and that it will ignite the mortar's highly explosive core. The rooftop? About 15 feet wide.

The only way to stop the shell from detonating is to smother it. Very, very soon. Ferraro runs downstairs to get water from the apartment's owner - "and some sand, too!" Palmer yells to his back. Things get worse; the air crackles with the popcorn sound of automatic weapons fire. Mayhem's security escorts, two sergeants carrying M4 rifles, duck behind the waist-high wall surrounding the roof and point their guns out into the setting sun, looking for targets.

Sounds an awful lot like a movie that just sucked up all the Oscars, right?

Now, I get that the pushback on Hurt Locker has already started - but conveying the intensity of this thing next to me could blow at any second is something that the Hurt Locker does very well.

I've read criticisms about the films accuracy and they seem to focus on EOD boys don't use sniper rifles, or go off base alone, or chase bad guys - which are perfectly valid points - but they miss the fact that the guts of the film hold up rather nicely. EOD is dangerous work, moreso when you don't dominate the lanscape.

Story wise, I had a similar reaction to Saving Private Ryan - as spectacle, there are few comparisons you can make. Both films show you new things, new scenes. They get you by the throat.

But as storytelling...there's not a lot of new ground - and the more you think about the story, the less satisfying it becomes.

(Minor Spoiler alert)





















In the Hurt Locker, you have the classic action hero guy - a risk taking, mavrick, who is at first resented, then admired. If they'd left it at that, the film would be just another clichéd war movie. They do one better, by showing you the main character's personality has drawbacks - things go wrong because of their inability to switch it off. But, at least to me - those elements were switched off just as they were becoming interesting. Here's the other side of this guy - now, roll credits.

Credit to the film for bringing across something more than "hail, the conquering bad-@ss" - but I wonder if the raves on this film were more due to the fact that it was a well-done movie about an ongoing war that didn't take sides.

Anyway - read the Team Mayhem stuff.

Yet Another Gay Basher Comes Out of the Closet

CA state Senator Roy Ashburn admits the obvious.

Memo to closeted, outwardly conservative types... there is such a thing as protesting too much. If you can't publicly be yourself - at least be mellow. You go all vitriolic against the gay community you're going to get a reputation.

Then when you do get caught DUI coming from a gay bar, you'll be embarrassed - but at least you won't be exposed as a total hypocrite.

Yeesh.

Winning Line

(via Danger Room)

Aviation Week's Bill Sweetman scores palpable hit - discussing the delays in the much delayed, fantastically expensive F-35 wunderplane program:

“For every month’s litany of problems in the program, you’ll find a Lockheed Martin or government program boss assuring the customers, Congress and the taxpayers that everything is going fine,” he wrote. “‘On track,’ as they like to put it.

“Remember this distinction:  The Donner Party was on track. They were not on schedule.”

Owch.

The Market Mindset at Work

(Via Gizmodo)

You just have to love this kind of evil thinking....

Ok, Damn - This Too Shall Pass

Awhile ago - Honda threw down the Rube Goldberg gauntlet with their commercial, The Cog.

The band OK Go has picked it up with a vengeance. Their video, This Too Shall Pass is sure to be (if it isn't already) full on viral.

Rube Goldberg, eat your heart out:



They've helpfully added a four part video diary showing how the video was made, but unfortunately the band members talk too much so you don't get to see all the geekish glory.

Still.

Damn.

Not Makin' 'em Like We Used To

My grandpa always used to wail on people who reflexively waxed nostalgic about the good old days thusly:

Yeah, we sure don't make cars like we used to....and thank God!

Then he'd launch into a tirade about using a salt bag to keep the windshield from fogging up, or packing a full set of tires along for every trip to make sure they reached their destination.

FiveThirtyEight does a similar number on the tired old saw that the US doesn't make things anymore:

Unfortunately, the US still makes plenty of goods. In addition, free trade is not the boogie-man job killer many purport it to be...


There is a common theme across the internet: US manufacturing is dead and it's never coming back. Well, there's a big problem with that analysis: it's not true.

In fact, as the chart above indicates, it's actually false. Note that since 1960, the index of industrial production has risen from a little below 30 to its current level of about 100. And note the increase is continual -- meaning the number didn't just hover around 30 for most of that time only to spike up in one big move. The index has continually risen over that entire period.

...

Instead, what people are commenting on is the drop in manufacturing employment. Consider these two charts.



Durable Goods Employment remained fairly steady at 10 million to 11.5 million employees between the mid-1960s to the early 2000s. Then total employment dropped like a stone, losing three million people over the last 10 years. These are levels last seen in 1950.


Non-durable goods manufacturing is even worse. From the mid-1960s to the early 200s, total employment in this area hovered around a 6.8 million. However, starting in 2000, the number fell off a cliff, losing almost 2 million people. This is the lowest the number has been in over 60 years.

People notice the empty factories, but think their being empty means we're making less than we should. If you believe this guy's argument, we're making more stuff today - we're just doing it using less people than ever before.

Depressing, but interesting.