‘Bush’ and ‘Cheney’ reunite on SNL to talk about their legacy (Video)
Will Ferrell returned to SNL to reprise his classic George W. Bush impression and scold Dick Cheney, played by Darryl Hammond, for his frequent media appearances defending Bush administration policies since Barack Obama’s inauguration. “Here’s my regret: That I didn’t have me a vice president like Joe Biden…. I need that kind of VP, who did dumb stuff to make me look smarter,” Ferrell’s Bush says to Cheney.....
‘Daily Show’ on the one line America will not cross
Barack Obama’s announcement that he will oppose the release of a fresh set of photos of detainee abuse has prompted complaints that his administration is already going back on its promises of greater transparency.
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, however, sees a deeper level of hypocrisy in the decision. After playing a series of clips of former Vice President Dick Cheney and other conservatives defending torture, he noted, “America’s war on terror has indeed tested our resolve. We’ve pushed the limits of our own principles. … Is there any line we still will not cross?”.....
FBI Probing SEC Attorneys for Insider Trading
Two enforcement lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission are being investigated by federal prosecutors and the FBI for possible insider-trading violations, according to a report from the SEC's inspector general. The criminal investigation, which was disclosed to SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro in a March 3 memo, came about after SEC Inspector General H. David Kotz conducted his own investigation into the matter and referred it to criminal authorities after discovering suspicious trading activity...
Our man at Bilderberg: They're watching and following me, I tell you
Now I've got too much to report.
I'll talk later about the strange secret circus of limousines, blacked-out windows, sirens, helicopters. No time to relate being detained for a SECOND time, for the crime of being half a mile from the Bilderberg hotel gates trying to take "arty" photographs of limousine wheels as they whisked past. Doing so little wrong that I was doing it while standing next to three policemen who were fine about it. Until the call came through on the radio and the motorbikes and squad cars squealed around me like a bad dream. I'll tell that story later. I have to talk now about what just happened.....
America's growing surveillance state
The US department of homeland security has once again run afoul of cultural and political conservatives. Last month, a leaked report on rightwing extremism sparked an outcry for suggesting that returning veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could become domestic terrorists – the next Timothy McVeigh. Now, another document has come to light, and conservatives are having another aneurism......
Nokia to build radio ID chips into phones for "inventory control"
Nokia, the world's biggest maker of mobile phones, plans to incorporate radio frequency identification chips in its handsets to track them from assembly through recycling. The company sees "numerous benefits" from using the chip tags "early in the process, and early in the process for Nokia means in the device itself," Jarkko Jaervilehto, a Nokia development manager, said Tuesday at an industry seminar in Vantaa, Finland.
Credit card companies piling on fees, raising rates ahead of new federal rules
It appears that credit card issuers are insisting upon exercising their right to abuse their customers in the name of higher profits. A survey of recent activities by the top eight credit card issuers reveals that since the Federal Reserve announced rule changes designed to curb unfair credit card industry practices last December, the companies have implemented even more onerous practices, raised interest rates more aggressively and increased the number of fees that they can impose on their customers....
Senators and Office of Inspector General Seek Criminal Investigation of Bush Official who lost $11 Billion of Government Pension Guaranty Fund
Remember Charles Millard? He's the former Bush-appointed director of the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation, and we expect to be seeing a lot more of him as congressional investigations into his brief but significant tenure at the agency gathers steam, starting with a scheduled appearance next Wednesday.
Some background: the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation insures a portion of the retirement funds of 44 million Americans to protect their savings accounts from the capriciousness of market conditions. Somehow, by the perverse illogic that defined the financial services industry of the past few years it came to pass that this fund would be run by a former Lehman Brothers executive who would plow the majority of its investment portfolio into the volatile stock market and the massively overheated real estate market under the pricey guidance of financial advisers at Wall Street's most prestigious investment banks, such that some such that billions of dollars would vanish in the course of months. An honest mistake, or was unethical behavior involved?
The Office of the Inspector General conducted an audit of Millard, who spearheaded this effort, and found no evidence he'd committed any actual crimes -- but enough "clear violations" of agency ethics rules to alarm Congress, which released the OIG's draft report yesterday and announced an investigation of Millard and said it had requested a criminal probe of him as well....
House committee investigating former Bush PBGC (Who lost $11 Billion) director's contacts with Wall Street
The former director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. had inappropriate contacts with Wall Street firms chosen to give investment advice to the agency, which insures the retirement benefits of 44 million Americans, according to a government watchdog report released Thursday...."Phone records and e-mails show that the former director was communicating directly with some bidders at the same time that he was actively evaluating their ... proposals — a clear violation of the prohibition of contact with potential offerors," the draft report said....
Historically, the PBGC has had a conservative investment strategy. However, in February 2008, during Millard's tenure, the PBGC's three-member board approved a new approach to invest a portion of a $48.4 billion investment portfolio more aggressively in stocks and alternative investments, the report said. The new strategy involves transferring up billions of dollars from fixed-income treasury securities to marketable equities, real estate and private equity.
At the end of its last fiscal year, the PBGC had about $11 billion less than it needed to meet $74 billion in obligations to pensioners down the road. The board — comprising the secretaries of treasury, commerce and labor — was convinced that more aggressive investments would help close the gap and prevent the need for a future taxpayer bailout. To help implement the new policy, the PBGC solicited the services of investment firms on Wall Street....
Bush Treasury Secretary Paulson Memo Warned Banks to Take Aid or Be ‘Exposed’
Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, describing nine U.S. banks as “central to any solution” of the credit crisis, told their leaders to take government aid or be forced to by regulators, according to a memo his staff prepared for a private meeting in October. “If a capital infusion is not appealing, you should be aware that your regulator will require it in any circumstance,” Paulson’s one-page list of talking points for the session with the banks’ chief executive officers said. “We don’t believe it is tenable to opt out because doing so would leave you vulnerable and exposed,” the memo said.....
Bush Admin's Real Torture Objective: Finding The Elusive Iraq-Qaeda Link?
Writing on The Daily Beast, former NBC producer Robert Windrem reports that in April 2003, Dick Cheney's office suggested that interrogators waterboard an Iraqi detainee who was suspected of having knowledge of a link between Saddam and al Qaeda....
Our man at Bilderberg: in pursuit of the world's most powerful cabal
Once a year, it is rumoured, the global elite gather at a luxury hotel to chew the fat and fine-tune their secret plans for world domination. We sent Charlie Skelton in pursuit....
Our man at Bilderberg: Close, but still no cabal
It's B minus one, the day before Bilderberg. And it is definitely happening: I've seen the guns. I thought it might be a good idea to go to the Astir Palace resort for lunch. See just what kind of a cheese omelette the president of the Federal Reserve is going to be enjoying. I didn't get far. At the gates, there were machine guns and men in loose jackets and guards checking under cars for bombs with those mirrors on sticks that morbidly obese people use to check whether they've taken their knickers off...
Bilderberg: One mention of Sylvester McCoy and it all kicks off
You know your day's gone badly when it ends with you being shouted at in a Greek police station. It wasn't meant to end this way. I'd gone for a gentle sunset walk, up by the Bilderberg hotel, to relax before the big opening day of the elite globalist shindig, watch Phoebus plunge headlong into the western sea, and (yes) maybe sneak a couple of short-lens pictures of the mounting security....
Letterman Top 10 Surprises in
Sarah Palin's new book "Lipstick on a Pig" (Video)
The news that Sarah Palin signed a book deal with HarperCollins to pen her memoir was met with shouts of glee from the comedy world and suicide threats from the literary world. Fortunately, on HuffPost Comedy we get to focus on the former. Last night, David Letterman devoted his top ten list to the former VP candidate, giving away the secrets of he impending tell-all....
Fed Dread (Who Runs the Federal Reserve)
By Elliot Spitzer
The kerfuffle about current New York Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Stephen Friedman's purchase of some Goldman stock while the Fed was involved in reviewing major decisions about Goldman's future—well-covered by the Wall Street Journal here and here—raises a fundamental question about Wall Street's corruption. Just as the millions in AIG bonuses obscured the much more significant issue of the $70 billion-plus in conduit payments authorized by the N.Y. Fed to AIG's counterparties, the small issue of Friedman's stock purchase raises very serious issues about the competence and composition of the Federal Reserve of New York, which is the most powerful financial institution most Americans know nothing about.....
Obama Administration Plans New Regulations for Derivatives
The Obama administration will detail this afternoon its plan to regulate the exotic financial contracts that helped fuel the global crisis and crippled some of the biggest names on Wall Street, such as American International Group, sources familiar with the matter said. The proposal, which will require congressional action, imposes a number of restrictions on the so-called dark markets that trade a broad range of these instruments, known as derivatives, without government oversight....
Brain scanning may be used in security checks
Distinctive brain patterns could become the latest subject of biometric scanning after EU researchers successfully tested technology to verify identities for security checks. The experiments, which also examined the potential of heart rhythms to authenticate individuals, were conducted under an EU-funded inquiry into biometric systems that could be deployed at airports, borders and in sensitive locations to screen out terrorist suspects.....
Beware, exorbitant cell phone use may cause brain tumor
hough the cell phone phobia is taking over the youth and over 91.4 million Pakistanis use cell phones today, experts are of the opinion that the cell phones emit Radiofrequency (RF) energy which may increase the risk of cancer for cell phone users. To date, many of the studies have focused on whether RF energy can cause malignant or benign brain tumors. The experts opine that the cell phone users are exposed to the radiofrequency (RF) energy, a non-ionizing form of radiation, emitted by the cell phones and due to the widespread use of this technology, there is understandable concern about the health implications of cell phone use....
FBI Investigating Sleazy Sore Loser Ex-Senator Coleman In Minnesota for Taking a Bribe
The FBI is investigating allegations that former Senator Norm Coleman had clothing and other items purchased on his behalf by a longtime friend and businessman Nasser Kazeminy, according to a source in Minnesota who was interviewed recently by federal agents.
E.K. Watkins, a spokesman for the Minnesota FBI, would neither confirm nor deny the report. The source provided details of the interview to the Huffington Post, in addition to copies of business cards left by the agents...
Did the swine flu evolve in a lab?
he World Health Organization and leading influenza research groups are investigating unpublished claims that the new H1N1 swine flu virus may have evolved in a laboratory, not in nature.
The Geneva-based agency was informed of the pending publication over the weekend by the author, a retired Australian virologist named Adrian Gibbs.It scrambled to draw in researchers from leading human and animal influenza laboratories around the world in a bid to determine if the claim has merit and if it does, whether that changes the advice WHO gives member countries on the threat posed by the new H1N1 swine flu virus...
In Attics and Closets, 'Biohackers' Discover Their Inner Frankenstein
In Massachusetts, a young woman makes genetically modified E. coli in a closet she converted into a home lab. A part-time DJ in Berkeley, Calif., works in his attic to cultivate viruses extracted from sewage. In Seattle, a grad-school dropout wants to breed algae in a personal biology lab.
These hobbyists represent a growing strain of geekdom known as biohacking, in which do-it-yourselfers tinker with the building blocks of life in the comfort of their own homes. Some of them buy DNA online, then fiddle with it in hopes of curing diseases or finding new biofuels.....But are biohackers a threat to national security?
Ponzi Scum Update: Records Show Billions Withdrawn
Before Madoff Arrest
About $12 billion was pulled out of accounts at Bernard L. Madoff’s firm in 2008, according to several people briefed on an analysis of Mr. Madoff’s business records. About $6 billion, or half, was taken out in just the three months before the financier was arrested in December and charged with operating an extensive Ponzi scheme, these people said.Those figures offer a bit of hope for Mr. Madoff’s thousands of defrauded customers. Under federal law, the trustee overseeing the Madoff bankruptcy can sue to retrieve that money from the investors who withdrew it....
When The DEA Came Calling, Allen Stanford Re-Routed His Plane
An anecdote in a new GQ Allen Stanford story sheds some light on yesterday's weird reports that the suspected Ponzi schemer secured himself ten years of SEC amnesty by being an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration -- and also the continuing puzzle of why the Stanford's "statuesque" CIO Laura Pendergest-Holt, who was formally indicted today, isn't cooperating with the government. Stanford wasn't just any DEA informant, he turned his plane around at the chance to rat out a Mexican drug lord! Also, Stanford was a bit cultlike.....
Ponzi Scum Stanford DEA Drug Informer
Evidence has emerged that the Texan who bankrolled English cricket may have been a US government informer. Sir Allen Stanford, who is accused of bank fraud, is the subject of an investigation by the BBC's Panorama. Sources told Panorama that if he was a paid anti-drug agency informer, that could explain why a 2006 probe into his financial dealings was quietly dropped.....
Why Would Laura Pendergest-Holt Take The Fall
For Allen Stanford's Ponzi?
Suspected Ponzi schemer Sir Allen Stanford's chief investment officer Laura Pendergest-Holt was indicted in Houston this morning for obstructing and conspiring to obstruct the federal investigation into Stanford's sham money manager. Aside from a new allegation that Pendergest transferred $4.3 million of bank funds into the bank's operating account after speaking to the SEC, the charges don't appear much different from those laid out in a criminal complaint filed against the photogenic 35-year-old overseer of Stanford's "Tier 2" investments in February. (That's not for lack of rifling through her underwear drawer, according to a motion filed by her lawyer.)
Why Are Oil Prices Rising?
Many are asking the question about oil prices: Is this deja vu all over again? Didn’t we just go through a several-year run-up in prices based largely not on fundamentals, but on traders bidding them up, ultimately to $147 a barrel? Only then to see them plunge to $32 a barrel?
If one puts stock in the plunge, then there appears to be air in the run-up today to a six-month-high of $60 a barrel. How much is anyone’s guess. The other day, one exceedingly smart oil analyst privately put it in the range of $5 to $10 a barrel....
Has Microsoft gone mental?
Here’s the thing: say you have invested a lot of time and money in shoving out yet another new Windows OS hot on the heels of, let’s face it, a not very well received new Windows OS in the shape of Vista. Then, obviously, you want people to try it, so some clever sort in marketing strategy says “why don’t we let users play with the release code of Windows 7 on as many different computers as they like, without restriction, for a whole year?”
You know what, it is actually a good idea. Until, that is, you get to the bit about what happens when that year is up. Or rather what happens before that year is up. Look, the smart money says that when you arrive at June 1st 2010, the day that the freebie expires, it stops working and offers an upgrade at a cost option or similar. Fair enough? Hey, even a little nagging during the month or so before to let people know that expiry is about to hit them in the face like a wet fish would be acceptable, and even sensible.
What is totally mental, and I mean running around the supermarket without your pants on shouting “where is the mustard” mad, would be to start shutting down the user PC every two hours until they upgrade to a paid for OS and to start this nutball feature THREE MONTHS before the thing actually expires.
Yet that is exactly what some loon at Microsoft thought would be a good idea, and that’s what is going to happen. Starting March 1st 2010 your PC will shut down every two hours...
Ventura: Powell's a 'war hero,' while Cheney 'ran and hid' (Video)
Former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura laid into Dick Cheney on CNN Monday night for, among other things, supporting waterboarding and maligning a "war hero" during an interview on Sunday.
"I was water boarded, so I know -- at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion," the former wrestler who gained his first mainstream fame playing a role in the sci-fi actioner Predator told CNN's Larry King. "It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence -- every one of us was water boarded. It is torture."
King asked, "What was it like?"
"It's drowning," Ventura responded. "It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you -- I'll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders."....
Daily Show: President had plausible deniability for offensive 9/11 joke (Video)
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart and John Oliver compared President Obama’s potential foreknowledge of a joke about Rush Limbaugh at the White House Correspondents Association dinner to the Bush administration’s authorization of harsh interrogation techniques. As Huffington Post’s Alex Leo observes, “Two days after Wanda Sykes appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and joked that Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker on 9/11 but missed the plane because he was so strung out on Oxycontin, all hell has broken loose with commentators and politicians alike chiming in on why they hated what Wanda said.”...
The masterpiece that killed George Orwell
In 1946 Observer editor David Astor lent George Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to write his new book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It became one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. Here, Robert McCrum tells the compelling story of Orwell's torturous stay on the island where the author, close to death and beset by creative demons, was engaged in a feverish race to finish the book...
Florida police use motorised paragliders
Officers in the town of Palm Bay are being sent aloft on motorised paragliders to act as spies in the sky, in a first-of-its-kind mission codenamed Operation Soar. Suspended beneath parachutes wearing lawnmower-style motors on their backs, they will patrol the skies looking for burglars, car thieves and missing children, equipped with radios, cameras and GPS navigation systems....
If the guy who invented DNA fingerprinting is worried,
we should all be
How much information does the State need to have about me that I have not freely volunteered? I’d say it already knows a lot more than it needs to. But then so does Tesco. I have been photographed, fingerprinted and asked all sorts of odd questions without ever having been arrested – though it’s come close...
Great Britan has vowed to scrap a ‘big brother’ database, but a bid to spy on us all continues
SPY chiefs are pressing ahead with secret plans to monitor all internet use and telephone calls in Britain despite an announcement by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, of a ministerial climbdown over public surveillance. GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, is developing classified technology to intercept and monitor all e-mails, website visits and social networking sessions in Britain. The agency will also be able to track telephone calls made over the internet, as well as all phone calls to land lines and mobiles....
Cartoon predicts the future 50 years ago (Video)
Weekend Late Night Round-Up: The Pope, Joe Biden, And The Edwards Family On Oprah (VIDEO)
David Letterman kept after Joe Biden this weekend, showing a PSA featuring the VP telling people not to leave their homes because of the sun. This, of course, comes on the heels of Biden telling Americans to avoid public transportation because of swine flu.
Bill Maher also used the swine flu to mock politicians saying:
"The CDC is having to warn people not to have swine flu parties. I swear to god, people were having swine flu parties where they would infect each other on purpose to build up the immunity. Even sadder, the idea of a swine flu party is now more popular that the Republican Party."
Three Worst Reasons to Delay Putting Cheney in Prison
#1: Cheney says that he and Bush ordered torture but did nothing wrong.
On Sunday, Cheney said: "The fact of the matter is that these [torture] techniques that we're talking about are used on our own people. In the SERE program that in effect trains our people with respect to capture and evasion and so forth, and escape, a lot of them go through these same exact procedures."
If this were true, participants in the SERE program would be kidnapped and tortured by people willing to kill them. They would be waterboarded believing they might be drowned. This would be done upwards of 100 times. They would be hung by their wrists, beaten, electroshocked, deprived of sleep, stripped naked and exposed to cold, attacked by dogs, slammed against walls, kept in isolation, and in many cases killed, in many other cases driven insane.
"Once we [waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times] he produced vast quantities of invaluable information about al Qaeda," Cheney said, while failing in multiple interviews to cite a single example of such information that has not already been debunked. The same people fall for this sort of claim as fell for this one: "Iraq continues to conceal quantities, vast quantities, of highly lethal material and weapons to deliver it." (Colin Powell, January, 2003). In both cases, the supposed evidence is classified. In both cases, the existence of that evidence and truth of the claim would do absolutely nothing to legalize the action being defended, be it aggressive war or torture....
Hersh: Cheney ‘Left A Stay Behind’ In Obama’s Government, Can ‘Still Control Policy Up To A Point’
...“Are you saying that you think Vice President Cheney is still having a chilling effect on people who might otherwise be coming forward,” asked Gross. “I’ll make it worse,” answered Hersh, adding that he believes Cheney “put people back” in government to “stay behind” in order to “tell him what’s going on” and perhaps even “do sabotage”:
HERSH: I’ll make it worse. I think he’s put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay behind that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence...
A Cheney Cover-Up
Who in the George W. Bush White House tried to shred a memo challenging the use of torture?
On April 21, Philip Zelikow, who was counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the Bush administration, revealed on Foreign Policy's "Shadow Government" blog that he wrote a memo in 2005 disputing the conclusions of Bush Justice Department lawyers that torture was legal. The existence of such a memo was a surprise. But Zelikow also disclosed that the "White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo."
This story is not over....
Media Censoring Lethal Side Effects Of Flu Remedies (Tamiflu)
.....Rumsfeld’s Tamiflu is worse than worthless. It kills people. Japan has banned it. Even the FDA—after review of nearly 600 cases of neuropsychiatric events reported by patients on Tamiflu and 115 cases of neuropsychiatric events by patients taking Relenza—has warned that Tamiflu’s label be strengthened to note: “In some cases, these behaviors resulted in serious injuries, including death, in adult and pediatric patients.” .......Donald Rumsfeld’s Tamiflu pushers (just as they were in 2006) are set to be the big winners in the GSFS (great swine flu scare of 2009) lottery. Shares of Swiss drug-maker Roche Holding had fallen sharply after their latest cancer drug failure—but the GSFS came just in time to give their falling stocks a boost—just as the great bird flu scare of 2006 did.
In November 2005, George W. Bush goaded Congress to pass $7.1 billion in “emergency funding” to prepare for the possible bird flu pandemic, of which $1 billion was solely dedicated to the purchase and distribution of Tamiflu.
Bush said a minimum of 200,000 Americans were going to die from the avian flu pandemic. Hyping up the hysteria, he claimed if Congress didn’t finance his convoluted pandemic influenza plan, stockpiling 80 million doses of Tamiflu at $100 per dose ($8 billion)— two million Americans would die from the bird flu..
The danger of drugs … and data
A fascinating court case in Australia has been playing out around some people who had heart attacks after taking the Merck drug Vioxx. This medication turned out to increase the risk of heart attacks in people taking it, although that finding was arguably buried in their research, and Merck has paid out more than £2bn to 44,000 people in America – however, they deny any fault.
British users of the drug have had their application for legal aid rejected, incidentally: the health minister, Ivan Lewis, promised to help them, but documents obtained by the Guardian last week showed that within hours Merck launched an expensive lobbying effort that convinced the minister to back off.....
Harry, Louise and Barack
By Paul Krugman
Is this the end for Harry and Louise? Harry and Louise were the fictional couple who appeared in advertisements run by the insurance industry in 1993, fretting about what would happen if “government bureaucrats” started making health care decisions. The ads helped kill the Clinton health care plan, and have stood, ever since, as a symbol of the ability of powerful special interests to block health care reform....
Full Video: Obama's White House Correspondents Dinner Speech
President Barack Obama mocked his own administration and gave playful digs at his critics and Republicans at a black-tie dinner Saturday night attended by a mix of politicians, celebrities and journalists....
Wanda Sykes: Video Of White House Correspondents Dinner Speech
Full video of comedian Wanda Sykes at the 2009 White House Correspondents Association dinner...
White House Correspondents' Dinner: Obama Pokes Fun At
Michael Steele (VIDEO)
President Obama had some fun with RNC chairman Michael Steele at tonight's White House Correspondents Association dinner, noting Steele's penchant for using street slang and telling him for the last time, the GOP cannot have a bailout and they cannot cite Rush...
Watch Bill Maher's 'Overtime' from Friday
HBO's political comedian Bill Maher hosted writer Reza Aslan, author Naomi Klein, animator Seth MacFarlane and journalist Matt Taibbi on his show Friday night....
On Wall Street: Beware of the sucker’s rally
The market is a cruel mistress indeed. Compounding the pain of big swoons, it kicks investors when they are down by luring them into sucker’s rallies – typically sharp but fleeting bounces in the middle of a bear market.
The current recovery has propelled the S&P 500 a third above its March low in just 60 days, convincing many sceptics that a new bull market has begun. Noted bear Doug Kass of Seabreeze Partners said the recent nadir may be a “generational low” and strategist Tobias Levkovich of Citigroup claimed many large investors who had feared another bear market rally may soon capitulate, pushing markets higher.....
Actual U.S. Unemployment: 15.8%
This morning's news that U.S. unemployment has hit 13.7 million, pushing the rate to 8.9 percent, tells only half the story of this recession. The total number of Americans who are not working full-time but ought to be is actually about 22 million, or 15.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics...
Colbert mocks Sean Hannity’s ‘liberty tree’ (Video)
Earlier this week, Fox’s Sean Hannity tried to use a graphic to illustrate that President Obama is shifting the tenets of America’s Democratic freedom towards socialism. In Hannity’s description, the fruits on the “Tree of Liberty” were being harvested by Obama into a bushel of “socialism.”
Stephen Colbert offered a hilarious dissection of Hannity’s ludicrous metaphor. “I have to admit Sean scooped me here. I was all ready to unveil my own visual allegory for America: The Freedom Fungus, which of course is constantly under attack by the Tinactin of Tyranny,” joked Colbert....
Soaring Credit Card Transaction Fees Squeeze Independent Businesses
As Congress and the Obama administration consider legislation to rein in abusive practices by credit card issuers, the focus so far has been on the interest and other fees that consumers pay directly. Little attention has been given to the $48 billion in fees that credit card companies extracted from merchants last year. Largely invisible to the public, these fees, which amount to $427 per household, are ultimately passed on as higher prices to all consumers, whether they use plastic or not.
Most people are unaware that every time they use a credit card, the business making the sale is charged a transaction fee. These fees, known as interchange, are set by the credit card processors: Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, which together control 93% of all card transactions in the United States...
New York Fed Chairman Friedman abruptly resigns
Stephen Friedman, chairman of the board at the Federal Reserve bank of New York, abruptly resigned Thursday, days after The Wall Street Journal pointed out his approval of a request by Golaman Sachs was in violation of policy because of his considerable holdings in Goldman shares.
“Mr. Friedman was chairman of the New York Fed at the same time he was a member of Goldman’s board. He also had a substantial stake in the firm as the Fed was crafting a solution to keep Wall Street banks afloat,”....
Stop Whining About Populist Anger!
Is there any business in the United States more vilified than credit card lending? The card companies stand accused by Congress and the Federal Reserve of gouging customers with impenetrable fees, enticing innocents to borrow themselves into bankruptcy, and blowing off cardholders who try to correct errors in their accounts. Attacking these firms is a crowd-pleasing sport for lawmakers, in part because every constituent has a story about being mulcted by a card issuer.....
Board Ties at Apple and Google Are Scrutinized
The Federal Trade Commission has begun an inquiry into whether the close ties between the boards of two of technology’s most prominent companies, Apple and Google, amount to a violation of antitrust laws, according to several people briefed on the inquiry....
Justice Dept. Finds Flaws in F.B.I. Terror List
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has incorrectly kept nearly 24,000 people on a terrorist watch list on the basis of outdated or sometimes irrelevant information, while missing people with genuine ties to terrorism who should have been on the list, according to a Justice Department report released Wednesday....
If China loses faith, the dollar will collapse
....China is aware it must become independent from the dollar at some point. Its recent decision to turn Shanghai into a financial centre by 2020 reflects its anxiety over relying on the dollar system. The US will not pay attention to something so distant. However, if global stagflation takes hold, as I expect it to, it will force China to accelerate reforms to float its currency and create a single, independent and market-based financial system. When that happens, the dollar will collapse.
Short Selling of Banks Accelerates as New Financial Stress Test
Short sellers, the bane of Wall Street executives last year, are back.
The number of Citigroup Inc. shares borrowed and sold short increased sixfold since Feb. 27, the day the U.S. Treasury announced it would convert some of its preferred shares in the New York-based bank into common stock.
Short interest in Bank of America Corp., MetLife Inc. and American Express Co. climbed more than 40 percent in the same period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In total, short sales of the 18 publicly traded financial companies undergoing government stress tests were twice as high on April 15 as they were at their peak last year in July, two months before Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed....
Almost a Quarter of U.S. Homeowners Are Underwater
A growing number of U.S. homeowners owe more than their properties are worth after prices extended their two-year decline in the first quarter, Zillow.com said.
About 21.8 percent of all owners were underwater as of March 31, the Seattle-based real estate data service said in a report today. At the end of the fourth quarter, 17.6 percent of homeowners owed more than their original mortgage, while 14.3 percent had negative equity three months earlier...
The Dead - "Sugar Magnolia" on Letterman 4/23/09 (Video)
Jerry Garcia & Bob Weir - Letterman 1987 Part One
(When I Paint My Masterpiece Video)
Jerry Garcia & Bob Weir - Letterman 1987 Part Two (Interview)
Colbert: Let kids conduct torture trials (Video)
Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert suggested on Monday that torture prosecutions may be the only way to clear the names of “patriots” like Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, John Yoo and Stephen Bradbury.
However, Colbert has an original idea for how to handle those prosecutions. “Our torture trials should be conducted by children,” he announced.
“Kids have no political agenda,” Colbert explained. “They ask great questions like ‘Do dogs go to heaven?’ and ‘When is it appropriate to abandon the values of our country in order to save our country?’ Plus, kids will accept ‘Because I told you so’ as a legitimate answer.”.....
Letterman turns tables on Darth Cheney: ‘How’d he do?' (Video)
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has attacked repeatedly attacked President Obama and suggested that his national security policies are making the U.S. less safe — calling the new president’s economic decision-making “devastating,” and he saying Obama’s foreign trips were “disturbing.”
In response, CBS’ David Letterman responded Tuesday night with a segment on Cheney’s time in office with a segment titled “How’d he do?"
Former unit of Darth Cheney’s firm makes up ‘vast majority’ of criminal audit cases in wake of Iraq war
In shocking testimony made by the Pentagon’s top auditor on Monday, the Defense Department revealed that a former unit of the company where Vice President Cheney was CEO is under investigation for allegedly billing for unallowable costs, accepting bribes, falsifying time cards and overbilling.....
Canadian Dollar Touches Highest in Six Months on Risk Appetite
(CAD up 10% against USD in about 1 Month)
Canada’s dollar touched the highest since November as investors sought riskier assets including commodity-linked currencies. “The market is now willing to embrace risk and move clean of the safety associated with the U.S. dollar,” said Stewart Hall, an economist in Toronto at HSBC Securities. “The Canadian dollar has the potential to be a high-yielding currency if the commodity story once again gains traction and moves forward.”
"Canada is America's largest trading partner. America gets 50% of it's impoted oil from Canada. This does not bode well for oil prices. Currencies that fall 10% in one month, reflect more of a country that is a "Banana Republic", than the worlds last "Superpower". The Fed needs to something to stabilize the dollar's rapid decline ASAP, or we will see $3.00 per Gallon gas by June 1st, and $4 per Gallon gas by Labor day...." Willy Bova
Law Class Collects Personal Info About Scalia;
Supreme Ct. Justice Is Steamed
Last year, when law professor Joel Reidenberg wanted to show his Fordham University class how readily private information is available on the Internet, he assigned a group project. It was collecting personal information from the Web about himself.
This year, after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made public comments that seemingly may have questioned the need for more protection of private information, Reidenberg assigned the same project. Except this time Scalia was the subject, the prof explains to the ABA Journal in a telephone interview. His class turned in a 15-page dossier that included not only Scalia's home address, home phone number and home value, but his food and movie preferences, his wife's personal e-mail address and photos of his grandchildren....
Web tool 'as important as Google'
A web tool that "could be as important as Google", according to some experts, has been shown off to the public. Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram. The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.
The "computational knowledge engine", as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year.....
With Their "Magic Bullet", Dems Have No More Excuses
As counsel for the Warren Commission, Arlen Specter described a “magic bullet” that changed America. Four decades later as a U.S. senator, Specter is providing another history-altering magic bullet—one Democrats will either fire off in a starting gun, or use in their suicide.
By leaving the Republican Party this week, the five-term Pennsylvania lawmaker eliminated the last Democratic rationale for inaction: the Senate filibuster. With Minnesota Democrat Al Franken expected to be seated soon, and now with Specter, Democrats will have the 60 Senate votes needed to overcome all parliamentary obstructions......