To add insult to injury. AIG cut bonuses to other divisions that didn't do anything wrong. Irony volcano erupting here: http://firedoglake.com/2009/03/15/aig-is-teh-funny/
Danner notes that senior Bush officials were well aware of the techniques being used. Some accounts from detainees:
– "I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room."
– "Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing."
– "A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall.
The report's conclusion reads: "The allegations of ill treatment of detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination constituted torture." Previously, the Bush administration had attempted to conceal harsh treatment from the Red Cross.
The $30 billion in aid promised to Israel over the next decade will not be harmed by the world financial crisis, the official told Israel Radio. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1070318.html
Former Vice President Cheney charged Sunday morning on CNN that President Obama is using the recession "to try to justify" what is probably the largest expansion of federal authority "in the history of the Republic.""I worry a lot that they're using the current set of economic difficulties to try to justify a massive expansion in the government, and much more authority for the government over the private sector," Cheney - who used the 9/11 terrorist attacks to justify a massive expansion of federal authority, including illegal wiretapping and torture - said. "I don't think that's good."
Screw you, Dick. And screw John King at CNN.
h/t Dick - Remember these scum...from Barbarians at the Gate?
Henry Kravis's KKR Financial Holdings LLC, a publicly traded finance company whose shares have fallen 97 percent in the past year, reported a $1.2 billion loss on March 2. That included charges for loans held in its CLOs to bankrupt Chicago-based newspaper owner Tribune Co.
Kravis, his cousin George Roberts and Jerome Kohlberg started Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 1976 and were pioneers in leveraged buyouts, where investors acquire companies mostly with borrowed money. KKR participated in the largest deals, ranging from the $31.4 billion acquisition of RJR Nabisco Inc. in 1989 to the $43 billion purchase of Dallas-based electricity producer TXU Corp. in 2007.
In 2004, Kravis and Roberts started KKR Financial to buy mortgage securities and high-yield debt, giving them the opportunity to invest in financings for new deals as the buyout boom crested in 2006 and 2007 when LBO firms made $1.4 trillion of acquisitions, according to Bloomberg data.
Archaeologists say a new discovery shows how vampire
PSSSST — Wanna invest in a broken down third world country? Great potential. Get in on the ground floor Now.
Believe it or not, this destitute country once dominated the world. They still have the world's largest army; but it's been stretched so thin over the last six years, it's almost at the breaking point. And their numbers are shrinking: morale is so low, they can barely find anybody who still wants to enlist.
This country's infrastructure has completely collapsed. Imploded. Their education system, once the envy of the world, has deteriorated into a sick joke. Because of their gutted, ruined education system, there are tens of millions of supposedly "educated" people who have the critical thinking skills of a 4-year-old. If you're an unscrupulous politician or businessman, this is the greatest gift imaginable — millions of gullible people who'll believe everything you tell them.
A lot of these people have very archaic religious beliefs, which they cling to like a pitbull. Learn about these beliefs, and communicate with these people in their own religious terms — and they'll be eating out of your hand. Two very important buzzwords to remember are "Abortion!" and "the Homosexual Agenda!"
Why are so many of these people willing to work two or three jobs just to survive? Why do they allow their own wages to diminish while prices are skyrocketing all around them? Why do they allow their hard-earned tax dollars to be handed over to the same robber barons who created their economic misery? And why do they keep voting for the same politicians who keep reinforcing this feudal system they're slaving under?
All of these questions can be answered by referring to those two buzzwords mentioned above. Use them frequently when talking to these people, and they'll be putty in your hands.
So, what do you think? Interested? A bankrupt country with lots of natural resources and millions of industrious hardworking people who will take ANYTHING you can dish out — what's not to like?
This is your golden opportunity. Act Now.
And guess what? The foundation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was still standing, still meaningful, and still sacred.
In fact, despite all the flack the network, this newspaper and I got after the reporting of a scene in the episode in which a character is seen going through an endowment ceremony in an LDS temple, it turns out that scene goes to the heart of why "Big Love" is perhaps the best drama running on television today. That's because it's about people, not just piety.
Not only that, the scene actually conveyed the sanctity of the church's practices and the importance of its faith better than any self-righteous and angry Mormon who has yelled at me or the newspaper since this story exploded Monday afternoon.
This may seem like a bit of an contradiction to some, but Texas legislators are sponsoring a bill to facilitate the creation of a master's degree in Creation Science. While these degrees are traditionally called Divinity degrees, Texas politicians fighting against evolution theory want to help the Institute for Creation Research: http://jonathanturley.org/2009/03/15/texas-legislation-to-facilitate-the-creation-of-an-advanced-creation-science-degree/
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Vermont hunter jailed for shooting doe and bolting antlers to her head. Story here.
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Test tube meat?
Test-tube meat is also known as in vitro meat, cultured meat, victimless meat, vat-grown meat, hydroponic meat and, finally, shmeat. Shmeat is grown from a cell culture (hence the in vitro or cultured prefixes), not from a live animal. These harvested cells are taken from an animal, such as a pig, and placed in a "nutrient-rich medium" that mimics blood. Once the cells multiply they are attached to a spongy scaffold or "sheet" (sheet + meat = shmeat) that has been soaked with nutrients and stretched to increase cell size and protein content.
This shmeat could, in theory, be harvested in vast quantities and used in minced meat products: burgers, nuggety things, or potted meat-food products, etc. While scientists (they call themselves "tissue engineers") admit that growing a pork chop with a bone without a real pig attached is not likely, they also say that affordable, palatable minced shmeat might be available at a grocery store near you within a decade.
http://wholelifetimes.com/2009/03/healthyliving0903.html
Gross.
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Doesn't he know that Clinton is the only ex-president you're allowed to blame?
Today's Washington Post raps Brack Obama's knuckles:
Obama's New Tack: Blaming Bush
In his inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed "an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics."
It hasn't taken long for the recriminations to return -- or for the Obama administration to begin talking about the unwelcome "inheritance" of its predecessor.
Over the past month, Obama has reminded the public at every turn that he is facing problems "inherited" from the Bush administration....
How dare he! Doesn't he know that wars and economic situations don't continue to evolve during changes of administrations -- that everything returns to an Edenic state on Inauguration Day?
... Oh, except that what Democratic presidents do lingers on forever, or at least the bad stuff they do, or the allegedly bad stuff. So while it's terribly unfair and spiteful and petty for President Obama to blame a man who was president way, way, way back in early and mid-January, it's perfectly OK to blame Bill Clinton, as this guy did last month:
RNC Chairman Michael Steele on ABC's "This Week" rejected the notion that Republicans are solely responsible for the current economic mess -- by placing part of the blame on William Jefferson Clinton....
"Bush inherited a recession," Steele said when Stephanopoulos pressed him on Bush-era economic failures....
Or this guy last fall:
I kid you not. Just now Howard Fineman said that Bill Clinton was to blame "because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were securitizing mortgages."
Or, implicitly, this guy last fall:
Former President Bill Clinton ... on Thursday responded to a remark President Bush made in his address to the nation Wednesday night. Bush argued that the financial system's problems began more than a decade ago, during the Clinton administration.
"Most economists agree that the problems we're witnessing today developed over a long period of time," Bush said. "For more than a decade, a massive amount of money flowed into the United States from investors abroad because our country is an attractive and secure place to do business."
Clinton took Bush's remark as criticism of a 1999 bill he signed that allowed commercial banking firms to offer investment services....
When will Barack Obama learn the ironclad rules of blame -- that everything bad is Democrats' fault?
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The growing (and well-deserved) backlash against the banking industry and Wall Street could hinder progress on other issue fronts - that's a concern of Team Obama according to Adam Nagourney at the NY Times. AIG's bonuses sure don't help.
It's like an evil plot cooked up by the mad policy-makers in the Bush White House: Let's destroy the economy and ruin the banking system. We'll start to "fix" it in a way that won't work. Then, Obama will inherit the mess and when he tries to solve it, there will be a populist backlash and he'll never pass his agenda. The scariest thing is that it could work.
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Latest victim of the credit crunch: North Atlantic right whales.
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Little Timmy - PWN'd
Reuters
So, let's recap shall we?
AIG maintains that it must pay bonuses to certain executives who admittedly are the ones that drove the company into the ground. CEO Edward Liddy says that it is a contractual obligation and that his hands are tied.
Poor baby intends now to spend more than a billion of our taxpayer dollars handing out bonuses, or "he will lose the executive talent."
I say let it rip.
Lose the talent.
Where else will these crooks find jobs? It is an empty threat, at best.
What I would like to know is what Little Timmy is doing about this, well, blackmail? It seems to me that any contract, anywhere, is subject to litigation, and given the extraordinary circumstances here, with massive fraud, a world-wide economic meltdown, and now colossal sums of taxpayer money going to bail out this allegedly capitalist market, litigation is truly called for. I dare AIG to let this go to a jury of US citizens…
But all that aside, why isn't someone, somewhere looking into criminal prosecutions against these executives? I mean, this whole debacle seems clearly like fraud on a massive scale. Instead of bonuses, there should be handcuffs.
My guess is that Geithner is not so much up for confrontation, and the real tragedy here is that like Payout Paulson before him, Geithner is part of the problem. If the Federal Government is too afraid to take on these crooks, then who will?
In my mind, this situation with AIG (and others) is to Obama as the Iranian hostage crisis was to Carter. Obama needs to act, decisively, immediately, or this whole thing is a PR nightmare and he becomes a one-term president.
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You have to love the credit card industry. They remind me of that old story about the man who killed both his parents - and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.
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"We'll see the recession coming to an end probably this year," Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said on CBS's 60 Minutes last night. "We'll see recovery beginning next year." "We won't be back to full employment. But we will, I hope, see the end of these declines that have been so strong in a last couple of quarters," he said.
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Yesterday on CNN, former Crossfire co-host Tucker Carlson ripped The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, calling him a "partisan hack" and an operative for the Democratic party who only took on Jim Cramer and CNBC only because they criticized Obama's budget. "I would like to see somebody have the stones to come out and say, Jon Stewart is kind of a pompous jerk, actually," Carlson added.
Carlson was the first person Stewart ever ripped to shreds. Remember this?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE
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h/t Dick - Natural Gas Rigs Shutting Means Prices May Double: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aRtPkrODxxn0&refer=home
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Remember how when the stock market was falling, it was all Obama's fault? Remember how it rallied last week? We didn't hear a damned peep about how awesome Obama is for turning the market around, which is the logical extrapoplation from right-wing theories that it's all the president's doing. Dana Perino explains why:
"You were just speaking earlier about the possibility that since we had a little bit of a better week on Wall Street does that spell a turnaround?" Perino said. "Can all the credit go specifically to President Obama? Well, I would say no. We are just going to have to take a while to let all of this settle down and let the policies that our administration and the new administration are trying to put in place have a chance to work."
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