Italian bus driver caught on video using two cell phones, and elbows to drive

NYT has the story and video, and this Italian page has the video too, but it's auto-on, so I'm not embedding it. Read the rest of this post...

Does Chris Matthews have it in for Newt Gingrich or what?

Decide for yourself. Here is Matthew's ending segment, "Let Me Finish" from Thursday, dealing with the announcement of a Gingrich run at (yes, I said "at") the White House. It's the most focused and well-crafted segment I've seen from him.

Did he hire a writer? Or was he one in a past life? Either way, a delightful piece of work.



Freddie Kruger? And "What kind of a dream for America would a person have, that would see this weird political element somehow seep under the door of our political process into America`s highest office?"

"Seep under the door?" Wow.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Big Oil CEO: It's "un-American" to end Big Oil tax breaks

Welcome to modern American capitalism. Anyone really wonder why the US isn't as competitive as it used to be? Executives say this garbage because they own Washington and know they can get away with sticking their thumb in the eye of the American public and get away with it. The GOP is much too gutless to ever stand up to punks like this guy. More from ThinkProgress:

On Wednesday, ConocoPhillips CEO Jim Mulva outraged many on Capitol Hill when he released a statement calling it “un-American” to end subsidies to the Big 5 oil companies — ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips. A press release referencing the subsidies posted on the company’s website was headlined: “ConocoPhillips Highlights Solid Results and Raises Concerns Over Un-American Tax Proposals at Annual Meeting of Shareholders.”

This position is a stark reversal from what Mulva said just a few years ago. In 2005, he testified that he agreed with President Bush’s assessment that with “$55 oil, we do not need incentives to oil and gas companies to explore.” Mulva testified, “With respect to oil and gas exploration and production, we do not need incentives.” But with oil prices now hovering around $100 per barrel, Mulva has inexplicably changed his tune.

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Earth to Senator Ensign: "Put your pants on and go home"

Senate ethics complaints almost never come down to a resignation; it's a ruler to the wrist and they move on.

It seems that John Ensign is the exception. If what Rachel Maddow says in the following report is true, this is a genuinely horrible human being, a sorry specimen — and not in a good way, since he's apparently not sorry at all. Be prepared to be appalled.



A terrible human being. How did you fail thee? Let me count the ways. The horrid story starts at 5:05 in the clip. First it's lurid, then turns cruel, then criminal.

The timeline is a little munged in the Maddow report, since she narrates the financial destruction of the Hamptons after the affair is revealed, and then jumps back to narrate the affair itself.

In simple, the story is:

■ The Hamptons and Ensigns are best friends from way back. Cynthia Hampton is Darlene Ensign's bridesmaid, for example. (Lurid starts here.)

■ Ensign was the sole source of financial support for the Hampton family, including subsidizing the education of their children. In Maddow's words, the Hamptons are "totally financially dependent" on Ensign.

■ In this context, the affair starts, with Ensign very much the pursuer.

■ When Doug Hampton finds out about the affair (Christmas 2007), things start coming apart, but after promising Doug Hampton to leave his wife alone, he pursues her even harder, driven by what he calls "love."

■ In early 2008, C Street is involved — first, trying to get Ensign to stop the affair, then negotiating for Ensign with the Hamptons. Both Tom Coburn and Doug Coe (C Street head) are involved.

■ Once the affair ends, Ensign retaliates, immediately ending all financial support. Both Hamptons are fired, all payments for their home are stopped, along with school tuition for the Hamptons children. The Hamptons lose their house. They are now ruined financially. (This is the cruel part.)

■ To tamp down the brewing storm (and silence Doug Hampton), Ensign arranged an illegal lobbying job for him, using blackmail and the power of his office to "make it so" (in Picard's grand-gesture phrase). If you're guessing "This is criminal," you wouldn't be wrong.

■ Ensign even got his parents to lie about a Hampton payoff in a way that may put them at risk of prosecution themselves.

Maddow inventories the wreckage starting at 11:45. It's considerable. The Ralston interview is good as always (13:45).

Conscienceless. Doug Hampton is under indictment by the Justice Dept. An indictment for Ensign could follow. (Or not, depending on whether you think these things are traded away during, ahem, an election year. See Jon Ralston at 17:15.)

Watch what happens to Coburn. Then watch how this is spun — lurid or criminal? And stay tuned.

GP Read the rest of this post...

House GOP demands Dems stop being mean to them

Would you like some cheese with that whine?

On Tuesday, Kinzinger and 41 of his colleagues sent a letter to President Obama, asking him to rein in Democratic attacks on GOP members who voted for the House budget, which includes a plan to privatize Medicare and cap spending on the program.

They know the President has a soft spot for bipartisanship and playing nice.  And they also seem to have finally grasped that their own party's extremism is quickly bringing their careers to an end.  Hopefully the President will understand that if he truly wants another four years to do good, and if he wants a chance to actually succeed, he needs to win re-election and win back the House (and hold the Senate).  Letting the GOP off the hook for their abominable vote on Medicare is not the way to accomplish either. Read the rest of this post...

Dems negotiated with Republicans for a year on HCR, Rs simply take you hostage

A very telling story about GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.  You'll note how McConnell is trying to pass his version of health care reform - dismantling Medicare and Medicaid - via extortion.  This is the same McConnell whose party accused President Obama of ramming through his version of health care reform, when in fact Obama negotiated with the Republicans the entire year, and then put HCR up for a vote, no hostages.  The Republicans, on the other hand, demand you accept their version of "reform" or they'll send the world into an economic depression.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told President Obama on Thursday that he must agree to cut spending on federal agencies over the next two years and make significant changes to Medicare and Medicaid as part of a deal for raising the legal limit on government borrowing.

It's unclear why the Democrats aren't making a bigger deal out of the Republican threat to send the country, and the world, into a depression. It's irresponsible. And as usually-mild-mannered Bush Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill said, it's what Al Qaeda would do. From the Hill:

"The people who are threatening not to pass the debt ceiling are our version of al Qaeda terrorists. Really," O’Neill, Treasury secretary in the Republican administration of George W. Bush, said Wednesday in an interview with Bloomberg Television's InBusiness with Margaret Brennan.

"They're really putting our whole society at risk by threatening to round up 50 percent of the members of the Congress, who are loony, who would put our credit at risk," O’Neill said.

Remember, it was the Republicans who demanded Obama accept a smaller stimulus than was needed, thus guaranteeing higher unemployment and lower GDP growth. And it is the Republicans who are demanding that we cut spending now, just in time to send growth even lower before the 2012 elections.

It's no longer just about politics. These loons, as O'Neill referred to them, need to be challenged, need to be stopped, for all of our sakes.   The White House, and Democrats in Congress, should be reiterating, day after day, how the GOP has been hurting our recovery from their first day back in power. Read the rest of this post...

Nothing says "family values" like helping your buddy hide his adulterous affair, Rick Santorum

Politico:

Rick Santorum alerted Sen. John Ensign in 2009 that the husband of Ensign's mistress wanted to go public with the affair that ultimately ended the Nevada Republican's Senate career, according to a Senate ethics committee report released Thursday.

Even more damning, Rick "Holier than thou" Santorum lied about it to the press. Santorum "refused to dignify" the question as to whether he tipped off the adulterer Senator, clearly implying it wasn't true. It was true. Santorum lied about helping to cover up a violation of one of the Ten Commandments, which would be a violation of another Commandment.

And the guy has the nerve to run as the candidate of God.  Santorum has always been a fraud, and a hateful bigot, trying to slide buy on his boyish looks.  Now he's caught red-handed. Read the rest of this post...

Report: Gaddafi wounded in NATO air strike

Capture him, send him to The Hague and try him for crimes against humanity, but this is ridiculous. He may be a revolting human being who ordered the killing of innocent civilians, but we need to return to the old days when we tried criminals in court rather than the battlefield. Why do some hate our system so much?

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has likely been wounded in western airstrikes and has probably left Tripoli, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Friday.

A Libyan government spokesman immediately denied that Gaddafi had been harmed.

Frattini told reporters that he believed what he had been told by Giovanni Innocenzo Martinelli, the Catholic bishop in Tripoli, that Gaddafi had probably left Tripoli and had probably even been wounded by NATO airstrikes.

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Porn stash found at bin Laden complex

This may be true, or it may be disinformation.  Either way, it's funny. Read the rest of this post...

White House gives Romney bear/death hug on health care reform

How downright political of them. From HuffPost:

The Obama administration, on Friday, continued to apply a veritable death hug to likely Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, praising the health care law he passed as Massachusetts’ governor despite Romney’s insistence that there were major distinctions between his and the president’s approach.

“We have said before that health care reform that then Governor Romney signed into law in Massachusetts is in many ways similar to the legislation that resulted in the Affordable Care Act,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in an off-camera briefing at the White House. “And as to the issue of flexibility, as you know, earlier this year we made quite a big deal out of the fact that the president wanted to move up to 2014 … the starting point at which states can ask for waivers to opt out of the Affordable Care Act as long as they, of course, demonstrate their capacity with their own ideas to achieve the same objectives.”

“We wholly endorse flexibility and we obviously feel that Massachusetts took a smart approach towards health care reform,” the press secretary added. “Its provenance was so mainstream, there are great similarities between Massachusetts' law, the Affordable Care Act and legislation proposed by then Rhode Island Republican [Senator] John Chaffee in 1993.”

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Facebook reportedly paid PR firm to smear Google

More than a bit ironic that Facebook is accusing Google of being a risk to your privacy.

Facebook has been caught secretly paying a top public relations firm to plant negative stories about Google in the US media.

Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest PR firms, attempted to get USA Today, the Washington Post and other high profile US news outlets to write scaremongering stories about Google's privacy policies.

The explosive revelation – which will seriously damage relations between the two technology giants, already bitter rivals – came to light in leaked emails late on Wednesday. Facebook later confirmed to the Daily Beast that it had hired Burson-Marsteller.

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Guilty charges in Wall Street insider trading deal

It's a success but as I've said before, this is a drop in the bucket compared to the big money lost by the Wall Street old boy network. The fact that Rajaratnam is not white and not part of one of the big firms should not be overlooked. He cheated and deserves to pay the price but how is it possible that the trillions lost by Goldman, Citi, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley get a pass? Wall Street continues to evade real justice.

Hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam was found guilty on all 14 counts in a sweeping insider trading verdict Wednesday that vindicated the government's aggressive use of phone taps to prosecute Wall Street figures.

Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group and the central figure in the broadest Wall Street insider trading probe in decades, will appeal the use of the secret recordings, tactics historically deployed in organized crime and drug trafficking cases, not white-collar probes.

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Symantec claims Facebook may have leaked personal data

It would be a surprise if Symantec made such remarks if they weren't accurate. Facebook hasn't exactly shown much interest in their customers before (other than to squeeze them) and leaking personal data is rarely even noticed by the law or politicians. It's almost a standard business practice thanks to blissful ignorance by Congress. Reuters:

Third-parties would have had access to personal information such as profiles, photographs and chat, and could have had the ability to post messages, the security software maker said.

"We estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage," the blog post said.

" ... Over the years, hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties," posing a security threat, the blog post said.

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Will Greece leave the euro?

Chris in Paris has been doing a great job covering the Greek financial crisis, by far the worst in Europe. His latest pieces are here, here, and here.

Now we are starting to find speculation that the Greece may be forced by circumstances to abandon the euro, and the euro has responded with a sharp drop, from a high-flying $1.48 and change (fueled by talk of higher interest rates) to a chastened $1.43, thanks to speculation about Greece. That five-cent drop took just two days. (Oops, now $1.42 as we speak.)

One of the voices recommending a euro exit is Mark Weisbrot (h/t Paul Krugman), who writes in the New York Times:

Sometimes there is turmoil in the markets because a government threatens to do what is best for its citizens. This seemed to be the case in Europe last week, when the German magazine Der Spiegel reported that the Greek government was threatening to stop using the euro. The euro suffered its worst two-day plunge since December 2008.

Greek and European Union officials denied the report, but a threat by Greece to jettison the euro is long overdue, and it should be prepared to carry it out. As much as the move might cost Greece in the short term, it is very unlikely that such costs would be greater than the many years of recession, stagnation and high unemployment that the European authorities are offering.

Weisbrot then talks about Argentina, which was in a similar situation — a long and deep recession with very high international debt. Yes, they had their own currency, but the peso was hard-pegged to the dollar. With that peg in place, Argentina had as little control of its currency as Greece does today. Weisbrot notes that:

Argentina defaulted on its foreign debt and cut loose from the dollar. Most economists and the business press predicted that years of disaster would ensue. But the economy shrank for just one more quarter after the devaluation and default; it then grew 63 percent over the next six years. More than 11 million people, in a nation of 39 million, were pulled out of poverty.

So the first piece of information I want to point you to is this — it's likely in Greece's interest to cut loose from the euro; even the credible threat to do so would get Greece a better deal from the austerity-loving Germans and others like them in the core eurozone.

The second piece is this: Argentina indeed defaulted on its debt. That's the national equivalent of declaring bankruptcy, and sometimes, that's what you have to do. (As my amoral business friends like to say, "It's not immoral, it's business. It's only immoral when humans do it.") The same with Greece. As Weisbrot states, "Greece would not pay this debt," so even the inevitable devaluation (and attendant increase in the debt burden) would not matter to them. Your debt can be anything if you're not going to pay it.

Weisbrot recommends that Greece leave the euro, or at least make a credible threat to do so. Krugman goes less far:

I agree with a lot of what he says, but am still not ready to counsel that step, for a couple of reasons. First, while I agree that Argentina is the right parallel, it’s an imperfect parallel: although Argentina had a supposedly irreversible peg, it still had peso notes in circulation, so the mechanics of exit from the peg were much easier than exiting the euro would be. ... Second, Greece, as a relatively poor country with a history of shaky governance, has a lot to gain from being a citizen in good standing of the European project[.]

The mechanics of a euro-exit matter a lot. (By the way, that link on the phrase "Argentina is the right parallel" is a very good read.)

My third piece of info is about those mechanics — they may be self-triggering. Krugman agrees that Greece will inevitably default, in any scenario. But, he writes in a separate article:

the main argument against the possibility of a euro breakup has been precisely that any hint of exit would unleash the mother of all bank runs.

He adds that while no one would deliberately want to trigger that, if a banking crisis were to occur anyway:

I can easily see how events could lead to a situation in which euro exit becomes the least bad option.

So if you're watching the euro, for whatever reason, watch the banks in Greece. While no one may want the crisis that a euro-exit would cause, that crisis may show up first, making the exit eminently thinkable.

GP Read the rest of this post...

We're baaaaaack

Blogger was down the last 24 hours, and they've apparently still lost a day's worth of posts, that are hopefully coming back soon. We'll get writing right away. Read the rest of this post...