Mitt Romney: Job Creator?

Job creation for Bain Capital and investors was pretty nice, but not so much for everyone else. Read the rest of this post...

Keyboard Cat’s creepy evangelical cousin

This is from the late 1950s or so. Dear God. And that poor mouse!



(H/t Oh Have You Seen This?) Read the rest of this post...

After creating a dysfunctional Wall Street, Clinton now supports OWS

Here's the classic Bill Clinton that we've seen for years.

Let's not kid ourselves and think that he had nothing to do with the abuses on Wall Street that brought down the economy. Maybe the GOP was leading the charge for scrapping the protections that kept America safe from Wall Street for decades, but Bill Clinton embraced the "reforms" and his team - Wall Streeters themselves - implemented the plans.

It was Clinton who signed the Gramm Leach Bliley Act back in 1999. The Clinton team at the center of the changes - Larry Summers and Robert Rubin - later went on to cash in themselves (Rubin was already a Wall Street giant) on the reforms and made millions more on Wall Street. Bill Clinton himself was no stranger to Wall Street gigs. Sorry if I'm not buying into the new and improved Bill Clinton who supposedly supports OWS, but I'd much rather hear him explain how bad his decisions were and how those terrible decisions left Americans with the worst economy since the Great Depression. It wasn't that long ago that Bill Clinton was defending Wall Street ("time to lower the rhetoric and talk about the facts") and telling Americans to shut up since Wall Street did nothing illegal. It wasn't illegal because people like Bill Clinton helped legalize the abuse of the system, which left Americans holding the bag while Wall Street continued the celebration with fat checks.

As long as people like Bill Clinton remain involved in the political process, there's really no hope for reform. He cashed in on his public service and takes money from the highest bidder. He's clever enough to tell which way the wind is blowing, but it doesn't make him any less cynical and opportunistic. It may not be polite to say in Democratic circles, but that's the way it is with our party elder. Forbes:

“I think what they’re doing is great,” he said. “Occupy Wall Street has done more in the short time they’ve been out there than I’ve been able to do in more than the last eleven years trying to draw attention to some of the same problems we have to address,” he said. Without once looking around, but completely engaging me, the statesman continued. “There are a lot of young people out there, I see a lot of unemployed students and they are upset, he said. They don’t know where the jobs and opportunities are for them, and they are worried about how they’re going to pay off their student loans without going broke.”

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Will the SEC ever stop abusing 'admit nor deny' with settlements?

There are no doubt times when agreeing that the defendant neither admits nor denies something, but the SEC abuses this practice. Nearly every settlement with the Wall Street gang that trashed the economy has been settled this way. There is at least one judge who has had enough of it and the SEC is now claiming the practice is changing, but that's just more deception. The changes are only in limited cases though the SEC is promoting this update as a major change. It's not. It's easy to understand why the SEC settles like this with Wall Street, because most at the SEC are only there to set themselves up for a promotion and big money working on Wall Street. It's the infamous Washington revolving door at work. The days of a different rule of law for Wall Street has to end. CNBC:

The SEC has come under pressure — mostly from one federal judge and some lawmakers — to rethink the ease with which it lets companies settle without admitting wrongdoing. Judge Jed Rakoff, a federal district court judge for the Southern District of Manhattan, has called the practice into question in a number of cases. He’s actually rejected a couple of settlements — or at least refused to immediately approve them — on the grounds the SEC should “see that the truth emerges.” This latest ruling doesn’t touch on the types of cases with which Rakoff has been dealing. They involve no criminal accusations, much less convictions. And the SEC is not, so far as anyone can tell, thinking about revisiting this for the vast majority of purely civil cases.

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Scientists confirm Ohio and Oklahoma earthquakes linked to fracking

No surprise here. Voters are going to have to decide if they are willing to live with these consequences. It won't be easy to break the links between the gas drilling companies and politicians due to the money involved, so it would be a fight to stop the fracking.

A boom in gas production using hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" of natural gas has played a role in decreasing U.S. dependence on foreign oil and coal and helped cut energy prices, but evidence is mounting that the process may come at a price. "To the extent that our nation wants to become independent of meeting its energy needs in the coming years, the increased earthquakes are going to go along with that," said Art McGarr, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif. "The problems are only going to grow in the future." State officials shut down all drilling around a brine-injection well after a magnitude-4.0 quake rumbled through the Youngstown, Ohio, on New Year's Eve day. That was the 11th earthquake in 2011 in the region, which is not considered seismically active. Experts are also investigating a magnitude-5.6 earthquake east of Oklahoma City that has been linked to gas drilling there, McGarr said.

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Pro-Gingrich Super PAC to release 30 minute documentary blasting Romney

This is when things get fun.  Interestingly, the documentary depicts Romney as "more ruthless than Wall Street."  I just find it interesting that Gingrich, of all people (well, a Super PAC "associated" with Gingrich), it smearing Wall Street.  That's about the best tribute to Occupy Wall Street you could make, that even Newt Gingrich is trying to climb on board the message machine.  The video even includes the hecklers going after Romney for claiming corporations are people.  Those hecklers certainly weren't Republicans.  This is seriously fun.

From the Daily Beast:

The effort to derail Mitt Romney’s presidential quest heightened dramatically on Friday when a super PAC associated with Newt Gingrich outbid all comers for the rights to a scathing 30-minute attack video depicting Romney as a greedy, job-killing corporate raider “more ruthless than Wall Street.”

In a season filled with negative ads and rhetorical crossfire, the striking feature of the film, aside from its mini-documentary length, is its authorship. The film was made by Jason Killian Meath, a former associate of Romney’s top strategists, Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer. Meath had worked for the Romney campaign in 2008, creating much of the ad content for that failed effort. He left Stevens and Schriefer’s firm, SSG, in 2010. Meath declined to comment on his project, referring inquiries to the pro-Gingrich PAC Winning Our Future.

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The Beat - Mirror in the Bathroom

It's my first weekend in a few years without my bike, which is heading back to the factory to be either repaired or replaced. I found some fissures in the frame (most likely, just in the paint layer) and the bike shop gave me the option of either putting tape over it (ummmm, no) or being without the bike for 3-4 weeks. As this is my least favorite time of the year to ride, I opted for being without for a few weeks and just do other exercise during the gap. It's been one of those customer service moments that I've come to expect in France but still drives me insane. The shop asked me to send photos, which I did, and then it still took eight weeks to get a response. The response was to bring it to the store and they would disassemble and return the frame to Italy. Eight weeks. During that waiting time, I phoned the manufacturer in Italy (Kuota) who kept telling me that "Maurizio" wasn't in today, but he'd be in tomorrow and respond. That went on and on and on as well and in fact, Maurizio never so much as emailed or made contact. Since I don't have a car, my bike is like my car, so I did drop enough hard earned money on it. I put a lot of miles on the bike over the year, probably more than many put on their car. The service from Kuota has been horrid to date, but maybe I'll find a pleasant surprise when I finally get my bike back later this month. Then again, if the recent history is an indicator, I'm likely to be underwhelmed. Read the rest of this post...

Eurozone unemployment up

Germany continues to weather the storm but in most of Europe, the numbers are bad. In this environment, it's highly likely that things will get a lot worse in 2012. The Guardian:

Official figures compiled by Eurostat, the EU's statistics agency, show the heavy toll taken on the workforce by austerity measures and the slowdown in the eurozone economy during 2011. Unemployment across the 17-member single currency area hit 16.4 million by November. The unemployment rate – the proportion of the workforce without a job – has risen only slightly over the past 12 months, to 10.3%; but many workers have given up on finding a job. In bailed-out Greece, the unemployment rate stands at 18.8%, up from 13.3%; while Spain now has the highest unemployment rate in Europe, at 22.9%. In Germany, however, still the motor of the European economy, and as yet relatively unscathed by the downturn, the rate declined, from 9.1% to 8.1%.

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