Upset with red lights on Empire State Building?

I've seen some right wingers going on about this and as much as I find Beijing to be a repressive regime and this was a bad idea, I don't get the sudden anger by the right. Corporate America hitched its wagon to China years ago and Americans (or Europeans) don't complain much about the cheap prices as a result. Billions upon billions (trillions in total) in trade has been promoted by US governments for years. George Bush even went to Beijing for the Olympics and nobody on the right cared. (They do, of course, care that Obama is traveling to Copenhagen to win the Olympics for the US. Go figure.) Again, I get the point by the human rights protesters, but why now is the right upset?

Red and yellow lights shone from the top of the Empire State Building at dusk Wednesday, a tribute to communist China's 60th anniversary that protesters labeled "blatant approval" of totalitarianism and criticized as inappropriate for an icon in the land of the free.

The building is routinely lit with different colors to mark holidays and big events, but opponents questioned whether it's right to commemorate a sensitive political issue, particularly when China has such a poor human rights record.

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Ban on texting and driving?

There is enough evidence out there that suggests texting while driving is dangerous. It always surprises me when I see pedestrians crossing busy streets while talking on the phone - often against the light - but while that is dumb, chances are they will be the ones paying the price. For drivers, the repercussions tend to be much more serious as they are behind the wheel of a few tons of metal. Is this the return of the nanny state of just common sense safety?

Determined to stop people from texting while driving, the Obama administration plans a campaign similar to past government efforts to discourage drunken driving and encourage the use of seat belts.

The administration planned to offer recommendations Thursday to address the growing safety risk of distracted drivers, especially the use of mobile devices to send messages from behind the wheel.

Read the rest of this post...

Help wanted: marijuana tester/reviewer

Somehow I think they're going to find a few applicants. Funniest responses to be listed after the winner is chosen. Read the rest of this post...

Huff Post: The Beginning Of The End For The Public Option

From yesterday, still important.

Jason Linkins makes some excellent points. I have to admit, I wasn't very inspired by Chuck Shcumer's appearance on Hardball last night.

Schumer began with the good news: sure, the public option failed in the Senate Finance Committee, but once the bill is out in the Senate, it will fare better. Why? Because, according to Schumer, the "most difficult terrain for the public option" is the finance committee because it's "more conservative than the Senate Democrats as a whole, and the Senate Democrats as a whole are more conservative than the House and the conference." "This was really good news for us!" Schumer enthused, apparently unaware that Max Baucus and Blanche Lincoln and Kent Conrad do not suddenly become entirely different people just because they've entered a different room.

But that's Schumer's outlook! Everything's going to get REALLY AWESOME now, and hopefully your concept of "really awesome" is a public option "trigger!" "There may be some adjustments and tweaks we have to make," Schumer said. HINT HINT.
Watch

If Schumer were serious about trying to get the public option passed, you'd think his office might deign to talk to the blogs, since we are the Democrats' noise machine, and obviously are pretty in favor of the public option. Instead, you don't see that. You don't see any Democrat who claims to support the public option talking to the blogs about how we can all work together to get it passed. And that should tell you volumes about their sincerity. Read the rest of this post...

Is Sean Hannity just a wee bit jealous of Glenn Beck?

Greg Sargent seems to think so. Read the rest of this post...

CNN debunks anti-Jennings campaign

So much for that story. And as CNN notes, the group leading the charge, the religious right activists at the Family Research Council, have wanted Obama official Kevin Jennings to resign from the git-go. Why? Because he's gay.

Read the rest of this post...

"Credit default swaps" for dummies

(NOTE FROM JOHN: Read this post. I remember my friend Ari trying to explain these things to me last winter. I gave him a blank stare. Now I get it. Fascinating stuff, and you'll actually understand it by the end of the post.)

Here is a post to demystify one of the least understood areas which contributed to our financial meltdown, and which needs reform NOW. I am talking about those “credit default swaps” -- CDS’s – which financial reporters never seem to be able to explain in terms anyone can understand. Maybe that is because they don’t understand them either, but the fact is that if people cant figure out what they are, then they will never get why to do anything about them. In reality, the basic idea isn’t all that complicated, and the need for reform is so glaringly obvious that there is no excuse whatever for delaying.

It helps to tell the story of why they were invented. Suppose you were the Chief Financial Officer of a corporation and you wanted to try to convince your management that it was OK to invest the company’s spare cash in some of those high yielding mortgage backed securities that everyone was selling just a couple of years ago. The corporate bosses would have been reluctant. Those mortgage backed securities were strange animals, with payouts based on the mortgage payments of thousands of bundled mortgages that underlie them. So in order for the company to get the very high interest rates that could be earned on these bonds, they had to believe that John and Jane Public would keep on sending the mortgage company their monthly payment for their McMansion.

“Too dangerous” they might say to the Chief Financial Officer. “What if these mortgage backed securities go bad? We can never go after thousands of individual homeowners to get the money. What insurance is there against such a loss?”

“Aha” says the CFO. “There is no insurance policy for these mortgage backed securities, but there IS a credit default swap market. We can pay a company (and not just insurance companies, any company could do it) to write a contract with us saying that if these bonds default they will pay us enough money to cover the loss.”

And that is what a credit default swap is. These “swaps” can be written to cover almost any kind of bond or eventuality – including the bankruptcy or buyout of an entire company. As long as few bonds are defaulting and companies aren’t going bankrupt (i.e., all the years until 2008) then it is a virtual money machine for companies writing the contracts. Since these aren’t even traded assets there was no capital requirement for companies to make sure they actually had the money to pay in the event of default. Since it was a private contract between two parties, and not an insurance policy marketed to everyone, there was no insurance regulation either.

Unfortunately, and as we all know now, LOTS of mortgage backed securities went into default at the same time when the housing market melted down. In fact, credit default swaps were at the heart of much of the financial market mayhem that taxpayers had to pay to fix over the past year. Regulators! You need to pay attention! Require some credit default loss reserves for companies writing these contracts! Then they will charge more for them and/or not write so many!

But the story is far worse than that. While not exactly corrupt in the strict sense of the word, some things are so corrupting or capable of creating such huge temptation to corruption that they simply shouldn’t be allowed. What if companies could buy credit default swaps to insure mortgage backed bonds or companies that they didn’t even own themselves? In other words, it was possible to get a credit default swap that would pay out if somebody else’s bond holdings defaulted or their company went bankrupt! So if somebody else’s company which you had no ownership in went bankrupt or got bought out then you could be paid a large sum of money.

Think about that. You could buy a contract which said that if some other company had trouble then YOU would be paid lots of money. The temptation for corporate raiders to buy the “insurance” and then try to force the default or bankruptcy would be too great for some of them to resist.

Here is an analogy which most people can easily understand. I have fire insurance on my house. The insurance company will pay me a huge amount of money if my house burns down. They are OK with this because they think I don’t really want the house to burn because I have my family and everything I own inside it.

But what if I could insure YOUR house? And what if I were a cold-blooded capitalist jerk who didn’t really care about YOUR family or YOUR belongings – my goal in life, my job in fact, was to simply make money? Why shouldn’t I run around outside your house playing with matches? Playing with matches may not be a good idea but it’s not actually illegal. What? You say your house burned down? Gee, let me check my insurance policies….

We need financial reform. The guys who were doing these kinds of things can’t be trusted. It is like giving children a box of blue tipped matches that will light on any surface. It is time for the grownups to step in and take away the toys. Read the rest of this post...

GOP brand in the kaka

From Pollster.com:

In short, there's no question that the GOP party brand is in worse shape than any opposition party in recent memory.

A bit more analysis:

The overall finding is simple -- the GOP's standing relative to the Democrats on both measures is worse than any opposition party in the sample. For instance, the Pew data show that the Republicans are currently viewed more negatively than any minority party in the previous four midterms in terms of both net favorables and the difference in net favorables between parties...

Read the rest of this post...

Lindsay Graham slams Glenn Beck

Oh my.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-S.C.) offered unusually blunt assessments of the fringe elements of his party and conservative media on Thursday, calling the popular and bombastic Fox News host Glenn Beck a "cynic" whose show was antithetical to American values.

"Only in America can you make that much money crying," Graham said of Beck. "Glenn Beck is not aligned with any party. He is aligned with cynicism and there has always been a market for cynics. But we became a great nation not because we are a nation of cynics. We became a great nation because we are a nation of believers."

All jokes aside, it seems the GOP is starting to wake up, at least some in the GOP, to the fact that their brand is going south while the crazies take over the party. Read the rest of this post...

Nike resigns from board of Chamber of Commerce over chamber's extremism on climate change

It's about time someone held corporate America responsible for its relationships with political extremists. And the Chamber of Commerce is one such extremist group. Anything that helps people is bad. Anything that helps business is good. Well, if all the people are dead under water, it's gonna be hell for business. Read the rest of this post...

I'm smelling more than a little homophobia surrounding Mike Allen and the Politico

It seems the Politico's Mike Allen falsely accused an Obama administration official of a crime this morning on national TV.

Oops.

But hey, the official is gay, and well, you know how those gays are. So it's totally understandable that a top reporter thought the gay was enabling sexual abuse. I mean, don't we all?

I have a much longer discussion of this over on the gay section of our blog. Read the rest of this post...

Financial reform, now

Professor Steven Kyle actually wrote this post, not me. I was editing it, and then posted it for him - forgetting that, duh, it would post under my name! Sorry about that. I'm really not this smart. (Clearly)
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Yet another of many reasons to do financial reform now.

There has been a lot of vague angst lately about the lack of progress in reforming the financial sector. The most visible symptom of the need for reform has been the return to obscenely large pay packages for those lucky enough to find themselves at the top of investment banks like Goldman Sachs. Huge pay packages can also be found elsewhere in the US corporate world, with the pay of CEO’s often exceeding that of the lowest paid workers by factors of two or three hundred, or even more. Compare that with European companies (or US companies a few decades ago), where multiples from top to bottom rarely exceed 50.

There is an obvious public policy reason not to want to allow this to go on. These guys almost ran our economy into the abyss and should suffer personally so that they have a good reason never ever to take such risks again. Back in the Great Depression, the management of failed banks could be found selling apples on corners, or committing suicide, because they couldn’t face the reality of total failure and destitution.

While nobody is suggesting suicide for today’s CEOs, if they don’t feel personal pain as a result of their insanely dangerous risk taking, what’s to stop them from doing the same thing again? Worse, it is actually a great idea, from the perspective of the CEOs, to do it again because if their insane risk taking pays off, they win big and can cart off millions of dollars to their personal accounts. And if the risks don’t pan out, they STILL get to cart off millions to their personal accounts, this time at taxpayer expense -- but hey, what the hell, once it is in their personal account who cares where it came from?

This sort of thing isn’t just bad from a risk/incentive point of view. It is also bad for our “social compact” – a shared belief in the way our system works. How many workers can look at what happens in corporate boardrooms and conclude that it is anything but rigged? If this sort of feeling becomes widespread – if people start believing that the system can’t be trusted – they will start to refuse to play by the rules, something which will affect all of us as the engine of growth and wealth starts winding down.

Apologists and pundits will claim that these CEO’s are just getting paid in proportion to the “added value” they brought to their corporation, which always seems to be measured in terms of the price of the company’s stock. What rot. Apart from the obvious objection that they kept right on getting paid huge amounts even when stock prices went down, why on earth should anyone assume that it is only management that gets to cart off added value (if such “value” were actually more than a transitory illusion)? If the chairman of Goldman Sachs got hit by a bus tomorrow, does anyone think that their earnings would go down by $300 million this year (or whatever his obscene pay package turns out to be)?

Seriously, that logic should be applied to this problem all the time. It is what we economists call “marginal analysis”. Corporate apologists like to pretend that we should focus on the added value that the accountants recorded after a CEO got installed. But it is equally defensible from an economic point of view to ask the question in reverse – What percent of stock value would be lost if we fired that top guy? I would say, “Not much.”
And while we’re at it, lets also fire the accountants since all that “added value” they recorded seems to have been a figment of their imaginations. Not only that, but some of those guys were actually corrupt – they purposely inflated the value of companies they were evaluating (see Enron for a great example). In fact, why anyone in their right mind would want to pay Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s a single dime to rate companies on financial viability is a mystery. They were rating companies as investment grade last year just days before those same companies collapsed.

My answer to all of this? Let’s go ahead and fire some CEO’s. Or at a minimum, let’s go ahead and cut their pay. If that makes them decide to quit, then good riddance. Hey, I am personally available to run General Motors! I would be happy to run it into bankruptcy for a mere $1 million! That is far cheaper than what their actual CEO’s charged to run it into bankruptcy. Think of the added value for their creditors that would result from Steve Kyle accepting a mere million for the job! Read the rest of this post...

Public option "Just one small part" of reform, but it's "the best way to offer choice and hold down costs"

Greg Sargent was provided the talking points from the Obama operation on the status of health insurance reform. With Greg's post, we see the current dissonance coming from the Obama messaging. First, from the talking points:

The public option is just one small part of health insurance reform.

Okay. But, then Greg got a quote from an Obama for America spokesperson:

Asked for comment, an OFA spokesperson said: “The President still believes that a public option is the best way to offer choice and hold down costs, as he’s said throughout the process.”

Yes, he said that throughout the process. So here's the question? If the public option is "the best way to offer choice and hold down costs," how can it be just one small part of reform? Isn't offering choice and holding down costs central to health insurance reform? I'm confused. And, I don't want to confused.

The Senate Finance Committee bill should have included a public option. That Baucus didn't include it sent a powerful signal -- a bad signal. If Obama really wants a public option, he needs to work for it -- and stop sending mixed messages. But, that's apparently a big "if." Read the rest of this post...

Broken wrist as a pre-existing condition

Um, what? Having watched people both in France and the US deal with health care issues, I can certainly say no system is perfect. That said, it's unthinkable to imagine treatment like this in France. When people get sick, they are able to focus on the illness and not fighting with the insurance company who appear to be trying to trick patients (and doctors) at every step of the way. When my own father was dying following cancer treatments (or at least the side-effects of cancer treatments) it was sickening to see how much stress they added to an already stressful situation. For some reason, too many in Washington want to continue supporting that industry. Read the rest of this post...

EPA to regulate environment again

Sounds like the EPA of the past is coming back. During the Bush years, it was all about supporting whatever industry wanted. It's nuts to think that the pollution and health care are not linked, but of course, they were Republicans after all. Polluting factories are being put on notice. Good move and glad to see Obama is serious about restoring the EPA to its core mission.

These large sources are responsible for 70 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions — mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels — that are released in the U.S., the EPA said.

"By using the power and authority of the Clean Air Act, we can begin reducing emissions from the nation's largest greenhouse gas-emitting facilities without placing an undue burden on the businesses that make up the vast majority of our economy," EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said. "We know the corner coffee shop is no place to look for meaningful carbon reductions."

Read the rest of this post...

Jon Stewart on the "Democratic Super Majority"

Just watch it:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Democratic Super Majority
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

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Thursday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Your president is heading to Copenhagen tonight to pitch the 2016 Olympics for Chicago. That has the right-wingers in a frenzy. Actually, everything Obama does has the right-wingers in a frenzy. I'm still not sure the professional Democrats and the pundits in DC grasp the depth of their hatred. It's deep and it's real. The DC pundits are still too flummoxed by Rep. Grayson's blunt (and brilliant) talk about the GOPers. We need more Grayson.

The Senate Finance Committee continues its work on health insurance reform. That panel approved abstinence-only funding in their bill on Tuesday night. Yep, two Democrats, Lincoln (AR) and Conrad (ND), helped secure that. Yep. It's obvious that if the Senate Democrats want a good bill, Harry Reid is going to have to craft it from the Senate HELP Committee's bill, not the Baucus bill. Actually, if the White House wants a really good bill, we'll know it by what the Senate leader does.

Okay, let's get rolling... Read the rest of this post...

Another Pacific earthquake leaves hundreds dead

The Hawaiian earthquake that triggered the deadly tsunami in Samoa has been deadly enough. Another earthquake struck Sumatra, Indonesia which was weaker, though the results even deadlier.

There are 467 confirmed deaths, according to disaster relief officials, but they warned that the figure was now likely to rise. The head of the country's crisis centre said at least 1,000 may have been killed.

Indonesia's government dispatched teams of rescue workers to the stricken region. International aid agencies were preparing to launch a major relief effort as tens of thousands of people spent a night in the open in pouring rain after their homes were damaged.

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UK to pursue bribery charges against largest defense contractor

This is a gutsy move. One can only imagine how dirty defense contractors are though their counterparts in other industries certainly are not slouches either. Meanwhile in the US, Washington is tripping over themselves to shut down ACORN but somehow defense contractors can deliver bad food and water and even electrocute soldiers due to shoddy work and the contracts continue. The Independent:

The Serious Fraud Office is to pursue bribery charges against BAE Systems, Europe's largest defence contractor, in relation to defence contracts in several countries overseas, the BBC reported today.

BAE and the SFO have been in talks to reach an agreement over the allegation for several months, but those talks broke down yesterday and the fraud office is now pursuing the track of drawing up bribery charges against the vast company.

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From the actors at Glee to the stars at PS22

I can't sing. Just can't. And, shouldn't. Even my dog gets annoyed when I sing to him. That's probably one reason why I love watching Glee. I know it's just a t.v. show and those kids are really trained actors, but they're great. But, even better are the kids from PS22:

More about the students here. I met the kids at The Slog. Read the rest of this post...

Pentagon journal article calling for repeal of DADT won "2009 Secretary of Defense National Security Essay competition"

Earlier today, at AMERICAblog.com Gay, I wrote about on the new report in a Pentagon journal calling for an end to Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It was a "breakthrough development" in the effort to repeal that law, according to SLDN.

There's even more from the New York Times:

Although the article, by an Air Force colonel, Om Prakash, carries no weight as a matter of policy, it may well signal a shift in the official winds. It won the 2009 Secretary of Defense National Security Essay competition.

Colonel Prakash, who researched the issue while a student at the National Defense University, in Washington, and who now works in the Pentagon, concludes that “it is not time for the administration to re-examine the issue.” Instead, he writes, “it is time for the administration to examine how to implement the repeal of the ban.”

It will be hard for the White House to ignore this report. Read the rest of this post...