Open thread

Slow day. Not unexpected for a Sunday. But with DC heading to a balmy 66 on Wednesday, it's nice to know that winter is finally over. Read the rest of this post...

This is how Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan spends your money

Throwing $75 BILLION into another trash dump to prop up their previously failed ventures. When did throwing good money after bad become a successful strategy? While it may provide some immediate easing of the pain (and that's a big *may*) this is only delaying the inevitable.

Anyone who has their money with these banks ought to be wondering if their interests are being served with this new program. Between the cushy exits plans for disgraced executives plus the typically high fees the banks charge (including ATM charges that make no sense at all) there is very little that these banks offer for average customers. At least the Bush administration has not given Wall Street a wad of cash from taxpayers but it's still early. Read the rest of this post...

George Bush and poetry

Our friend John Lundberg wrote a piece today over at Huffington Post about George Bush and poetry (John's a poet). John referenced something at the beginning of his post that I figured had to be an urban myth. Apparently it's not - it happened two years ago. This goes down in the annals of history, alongside Ronald Reagan's Bible and key-cake that he sent to Iran, as some of the stupidest foreign policy initiatives ever tried by an American government.

From John:

Is America's newest weapon in the war on terror the... acrostic poem? In December 2005, a Pakistani youth discovered that the first letter of each line of a poem in his English primer spelled out the name of "P-R-E-S-I-D-E-N-T G-E-O-R-G-E B-U-S-H." The anonymous poem -- called "The Leader" -- listed the qualities of a great statesman in a series of painfully stiff rhyming couplets. Here's the beginning (I'll spare you the rest):

Patient and steady with all he must bear,

Ready to meet every challenge with care,

Easy in manner, yet solid as steel,

Strong in his faith, refreshingly real...

Read the rest of this post...

Study Debunks Theory On Teen Sex, Delinquency

Facts are such inconvenient things:

Researchers at Ohio State University garnered little attention in February when they found that youngsters who lose their virginity earlier than their peers are more likely to become juvenile delinquents. So obvious and well established was the contribution of early sex to later delinquency that the idea was already part of the required curriculum for federal "abstinence only" programs.

There was just one problem: It is probably not true. Other things being equal, a more probing study has found, youngsters who have consensual sex in their early-teen or even preteen years are, if anything, less likely to engage in delinquent behavior later on.

Read the rest of this post...

Intel official: Say goodbye to privacy

Gee, had the Democrats been harping on this issue for the past several years, as I'd been suggesting, the climate would be ripe to respond to these incredibly dangerous comments from this senior Bush official:

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.

Get that? The Republicans think that privacy means the government and private industry have the right to know everything about you, so long as they don't share that information with anyone other than the government and private industry. So privacy now means your secrets are safer from your neighbor, but not Big Brother or every corporation in America.

Sick, just sick. And there isn't a damn thing the Democrats plan to do about it, other than give Verizon and AT&T; immunity for conspiring with the government to illegally violate your privacy. Read the rest of this post...

Schumer gets pummeled by NYT over Mukasey

And Schumer deserves it. I'm sick of Democrats issuing pseudo-lofty statements about saving the nation in order to rationalize why they continually cave to Bush. If the Democrats want to save the nation, stop caving to Bush.

Today's editorial:

On Thursday, the Senate voted by 53 to 40 to confirm Mr. Mukasey even though he would not answer a simple question: does he think waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning used to extract information from a prisoner, is torture and therefore illegal?

Democrats offer excuses for their sorry record, starting with their razor-thin majority. But it is often said that any vote in the Senate requires more than 60 votes — enough to overcome a filibuster. So why did Mr. Mukasey get by with only 53 votes? Given the success the Republicans have had in blocking action when the Democrats cannot muster 60 votes, the main culprit appears to be the Democratic leadership, which seems uninterested in or incapable of standing up to Mr. Bush.

Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who turned the tide for this nomination, said that if the Senate did not approve Mr. Mukasey, the president would get by with an interim appointment who would be under the sway of “the extreme ideology of Vice President Dick Cheney.” He argued that Mr. Mukasey could be counted on to reverse the politicization of the Justice Department that occurred under Alberto Gonzales, and that Mr. Mukasey’s reticence about calling waterboarding illegal might well become moot, because the Senate was considering a law making clear that it is illegal.

That is precisely the sort of cozy rationalization that Mr. Schumer and his colleagues have used so many times to back down from a confrontation with Mr. Bush. The truth is, Mr. Mukasey is already in the grip of that “extreme ideology.” If he were not, he could have answered the question about waterboarding.

Frank Rich:

What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far even exemplary sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy’s bar. When they argued that Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed because he’s not as horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general who might get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of Bush-Cheney torture, they’ll say things they know are false just to move on.

In a Times OpEd article justifying his reluctant vote to confirm a man Dick Cheney promised would make “an outstanding attorney general,” Mr. Schumer observed that waterboarding is already “illegal under current laws and conventions.” But then he vowed to support a new bill “explicitly” making waterboarding illegal because Mr. Mukasey pledged to enforce it. Whatever. Even if Congress were to pass such legislation, Mr. Bush would veto it, and even if the veto were by some miracle overturned, Mr. Bush would void the law with a “signing statement.” That’s what he effectively did in 2005 when he signed a bill that its authors thought outlawed the torture of detainees.

That Mr. Schumer is willing to employ blatant Catch-22 illogic to pretend that Mr. Mukasey’s pledge on waterboarding has any force shows what pathetic crumbs the Democrats will settle for after all these years of being beaten down. The judges and lawyers challenging General Musharraf have more fight left in them than this.

I sure don't expect Schumer to be swayed by the anger over Mukasey in the netroots and the activist base. Maybe, just maybe, he'll listen to his hometown paper. Read the rest of this post...

Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

Iowa is getting closer, that's for sure. Six presidential candidates on the talk shows today -- evenly divided. Barack does Russert or vice versa. Also, Condi's on "This Week." She and her boss, George Bush, have made a mess of U.S. foreign policy -- a dangerous deadly mess. And, Condi's mismanagement has made a mess of the State Department.

Here's the lineup:

ABC's "This Week" — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn.; architect Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

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CBS' "Face the Nation" — Former Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark., and Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas.

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NBC's "Meet the Press" — Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

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CNN's "Late Edition" — Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of State; John Bolton and Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations; Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.; Army Command Sgt. Maj. Marvin Hill and Command Sgt. Maj. Neil Ciotola.

"Fox News Sunday" _ Gov. Bill Richardson, D-N.M., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

I do want to give a shout out to Maya Lin who designed the Vietnam War Memorial. It really is an amazing place that she created. Twenty five years ago, there was enormous controversy when the memorial was unveiled and built. She captured a moment. I doubt we'll ever see anything that intense, moving and innovative allowed in D.C. again. It truly is a worthy memorial for the men and women who died in Vietnam. Read the rest of this post...

The subprime storm hitting Britain

The Northern Rock run on the bank announced to the world that credit within the banking industry was collapsing. The easy money, high flying days of wrapping up lousy subprime with other equities and selling them amongst themselves came crashing down leaving the banks with billions of the so-called SIVs that saw their market dry up practically overnight. It was all fun and games until someone actually realized that SIVs had about as much value as dotcom stock in 2002, probably even less. The bad news in banking continues.

The embattled UK banking sector is likely to be dealt another blow this week when HSBC reveals more writedowns from its American sub-prime business.

Shares in financial stocks plummeted last week with Barclays shedding around 11 per cent of its value amid frenzied rumours of an imminent £10bn writedown, strongly denied by the group. The other big loser was Royal Bank of Scotland, which lost 16 per cent of its worth in the past five days as fear of greater losses intensified.

Any sensible Congress would step back and take a look at whether or not such massive, intertwined banks are really serving the interest of consumers. I can see how these beasts benefit deal-makers and executive boards who want bigger bonuses though it's never been clear to me why a Bank of America (for example) would even care about an individual bank account for someone in the middle class. It's almost a hassle to the bank to bother with such small amounts and they seem to punish small account owners with high charges. Then again, how else are they going to afford CEO exit packages worth tens of millions of dollars?

So here it is, unraveling right in front of us and no matter how many rate cuts the banks make, Humpty-Dumpty won't be put back together again. The "experts" made a mess and nobody in power anywhere - the US or Europe - did a damned thing to stop it. Will the Democrats bother to revisit the structure of banks and provide oversight? Considering their recent string of inactions, we should expect it but let's not count on it. It might help out the middle class too much and we know appealing to the middle class is such dangerous territory. They only vote and can win or lose an election. Read the rest of this post...

Great news! USA beat Latvia!

Too bad we only tied Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia.

The rate at which infants die in the United States has dropped substantially over the past half-century, but broad disparities remain among racial groups, and the country stacks up poorly next to other industrialized nations.

In 2004, the most recent year for which statistics are available, roughly seven babies died for every 1,000 live births before reaching their first birthday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. That was down from about 26 in 1960.

Babies born to black mothers died at two and a half times the rate of those born to white mothers, according to the CDC figures.

The United States ranks near the bottom for infant survival rates among modernized nations.

The worst part of this story is that the US is not lacking in doctors or hospital rooms. Oh I forgot though, that the USA has the greatest health care system in the world. Just ask any Republican or Fox News and they will tell you so. No need for change at all. Read the rest of this post...