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I almost forgot… 22 February 2009

Posted by marisacat in California / Pacific Coast, Divertissements, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter.
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how could I? Los Angeles is UP tonight… (Academy Awards)

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1. Intermittent Bystander - 22 February 2009

Ever so pretty and shiny . . . especially at night.

Phospherescent sea foam.

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2. marisacat - 22 February 2009

That is so true… I had never thought of it.. like phosphoresence..

***

Obviously other than a few parts he has played i know nothing of Hugh Jackman… but there he is a song and dance man.. what a hoot!

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3. diane - 22 February 2009

Nice to see that Stu responded this morning re the Lockheed and the SSA Database

”Dumb American (2.00 / 1)
Unreal….

Do I have to spell it out for you?

First of all your a Republican in essence…

Secondly…

What does the Social Security Administration do?

They don’t build F16′s….they DO PAPER WORK….Lockheed Martin builds F16 or 21′s or whatever.

Your mindless.

Thirdly:

How did it come about that the worlds largest ARMS MFG. besotten with scandal in bribing government officials….got to handle the “SECURITY of the SOCIETY?

Lockheed Martin CUTS THE CHECKS for Social Security. Lockheed Martin’s database is what’s used for who is eligible, how much and when.

When the government goes to find out if social security is viable…THEY ASK LOCKHEED MARTIN FOR A REPORT.

Lockheed Martin is part of the Military Industrial Complex that would prefer that Social Security become an “investment”….they would prefer these dollars go to PRIVATE INDUSTRY….

Your a person who indulges in being dumb.

Stu Piddy…a Free Range Human ”

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4. marisacat - 22 February 2009

hey hey good one from Stu Piddy… I noticed in that thread that O Otvos called cometman (and others like him) “anit-government”. Hardly… I am just sick of government that is a CHEAT and exists to exercise State Power.

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5. diane - 22 February 2009

glad you brought Otvos up, apparently this morning there’s been a swift, miraculous conversion to Socialist Ideals on his (her? though I doubt it) part.

Been pondering whether to say this..guess I’ll spit it out…I remember a dkos poster with a real similiar tag, if not the same, who posted a diary which hit my gut as an argument for eugenics…as I recollect, it was one of a few times I actually troll rated someone.

Well, just like the really creepy phone bots as of late who appear to be rather complex in “their” responses, I often wonder whether there aren’t net bots that respond after robitically mulling what might be a desireable and credible response…..

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6. Intermittent Bystander - 22 February 2009

Otvos is a complex character. Check his posts at FSZ (curse you peeder) and DK before jumping to conclusions. (Not that he isn’t cog-sci gonzo and pedantic.)

Stu Piddy has always given me sneaky feelings, as Elvis might say. Talk about sock aromas!

FYI – Donkeytale once cited SP as his moral guiding light!

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7. Intermittent Bystander - 22 February 2009

Fishnet victim in the mod pod! Help help I am oppressed!

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8. Intermittent Bystander - 22 February 2009

Tanks!

Quite a few other complex characters at FSZ, too, diane. You oughta get a handle and jump in. Revisionist, Susan Something, and sabrina have made recent re-appearances there (HCfM remains aloof), Miss Devore and melvin (now blogging semi-irregularly at http://sisdevore.wordpress.com/ ) and cometman, pinche doberman, Laura (formerly sejemojo), and others are also worth a look. . . .

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9. diane - 22 February 2009

Intermittent

Otvos, gives me a chill, and if I’m right about it having been Otvos championing eugenics on DKos, it’s a permanent chill.

While I don’t agree with everything Stu has written, I really agree with much of what I’ve read (which is admittedly little)…Loved his pft diary re the APA with the pitbull pic.

By the way, I hope all is well with you on the job and health coverage end!

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10. Intermittent Bystander - 22 February 2009

Getting by, thanks, diane. Still feeding grey squirrels, not eating them!

All the best to you as well.

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11. diane - 22 February 2009

8

I should have added, that I have read a number of his FSZ posts in passing, before coming to what’s likely an end thought.

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12. catnip - 22 February 2009

Ever since I heard that you middle-class yanks are going to be getting a whopping $65/month in tax breaks this spring, I’ve been asking myself: if Obamalama had announced that during the campaign, don’t you think he would have been laughed right off the stage? $65?? Are you kidding me? After what the rich have milked from the gov’t for decades on end? And will continue to do so through endless tax loopholes only available to them? Seriously… alms for the poor.

I’m no economist but I do know that if the tax code and financial system aren’t massively overhauled, nothing will change. What are a few more regulations going to do when there already were regulations in place that just weren’t used? What’s needed is a cultural shift on all levels. The only way that happens is if the empire falls.

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13. Intermittent Bystander - 22 February 2009

PS – At sisdevore, melvin has the handle of artemis54.

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14. Intermittent Bystander - 22 February 2009

What’s needed is a cultural shift on all levels. The only way that happens is if the empire falls.

What was the sequence again? Or is this a chicken and egg menu?

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15. diane - 22 February 2009

8

Thanks for the invite sweety…but much like pft..I’d be too uncomfortable there, an overdose of testerone, and I really despise snark…and the c word, to me there’s a huge difference between satire and snark.

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16. Madman in the Marketplace - 22 February 2009

13 – if the tax code and financial system aren’t massively overhauled, nothing will change.

Nothing will.

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17. catnip - 22 February 2009

13. All I have is my humble opinion. America is being held together by bandaids right now. I know so-called progressives thought Obamalama would really be that change he promised (fools) but they seemed to forget that DC has its own rules (which he is more than willing to play by). So, where does it start? On the ground. It seems to me though that there is more than enough fear out there about what it really means to challenge the system. Just look at all of these spineless fucks who are giving Obama a pass on the most important human rights issues of these times. If they can’t even muster an iota of outrage over that, the US will just keep on chugging along as it always does – needing a serious oil change judging by the horrendous amount of choke-inducing fumes Obama’s changeyhopeyness train is emitting into the current atmosphere.

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18. diane - 22 February 2009

catnip (12)

yeah chump change….enough for two tanks of gas.

One of the best things he could have been would have been income averaging for those not at some huge salary level, and certainly could have premised it on the fact, that if jobs got better, the amount Govt. paid out would decrease, versus a flat tax cut, and further it wouldn’t be a tax credit when looking at it over a three year span. Most importantly, it would have benefited those already out of work, those who just lost jobs, and those who will in the near future.

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19. diane - 22 February 2009

Intermittent (re 15)

I was referring to FSZ not Miss Devore’s new site, I have been reading it. Melvin’s squirrel post reminded me of when my brother’s and I had a pet squirrel who had fallen, or been kicked out of the nest. “Whiskers” was absolutely charming, my dad made us put him him in the woods at a point when he feared the squirrel might chew some wires and electrocute himself.

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20. catnip - 22 February 2009

Well, I have to say that Sean Penn got a chuckle out of my sourpuss face tonite.

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21. catnip - 22 February 2009

18. Most importantly, it would have benefited those already out of work, those who just lost jobs, and those who will in the near future.

What do they get out of his plan? Anything?

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22. Madman in the Marketplace - 22 February 2009

Sean Penn was so good in that movie.

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23. marisacat - 22 February 2009

I used income averaging in the 70s.. I thought it was great. That WOULD have been an excellent idea…

He needs, and says he will …to reorganise the bankruptcy laws. As it is since the new bill passed congress in 2005..(as I understand it) credit card debt comes before child support under the current set up.

The biggest thing to help the nation would be a single payer health care… and they will never never never never do it.

Everything i hear out here about the housing bill is that for banks and lenders there are more detailed guidelines.. but it is still VOLUNTARY… which it has been since Bush and congress instituted the Dial 800-***-HOPE shit

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24. marisacat - 22 February 2009

God help us.. I let Barbara walters drift onto the tv after the AA… the Jonas Bros wear purity rings.

Let me out of here!

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25. diane - 22 February 2009

catnip (21)

Well, I stopped keeping track, and have been meaning to go over the results but haven’t. My guess is, a pittance. At one point there was an absurd exemption of 2,400 of unemployment income (which was previously not taxable, which some states have maintained thankfully) which means next to nothing at the lower income levels, where at the really high income level (of course) it would(‘ve) save those persons a max (single person would have to have earned about $350K) $840

Marisa (22)

Yeah the state of healthcare in the US is absolutely BARBARIC.

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26. wu ming - 22 February 2009

re. NYCO’s remark last thread -

i’m not surprised the beijing RE is standing empty right now, the office towers were clearly bubbled out back IMO when i was there in 2003. construction quality varies a lot by location, as is true in taiwan: the closer you are to a capital, or provincial seat, or county seat, the more enforced the building regs are; the further away you get, the more shoddy the construction. the worst damage in both the 1999 taiwan earthquake and the 2008 sichuan quake were in rural areas far from the regulatory reach of the gummint, where organized crime or kickback contractors were cutting corners on the building code. now beijing might be at that degree of corruption now, but i would assume that it’s probably better there than elsewhere. the chinese call it “tofu construction.”

for all the talk of china as an authoritarian state, people often miss the fact that it has a very decentralized government in most areas, with a very, very weak regulatory apparatus and a tiny court system still very much in its infancy (and a point of contention in both gov’t and business circles for the past decade or two). when deng xiaoping ended the maoist phase of things in the 80s, central state control devolved to local officials, who deal more with local power brokers than any beijing diktat. the reason why the govt executes higher-ups every once in a while is that they literally don’t have the tools to actually root out the networks that create corruption; it’s basically a “let’s scare them and people will behave” mindset, applied to white collar types, but they couldn’t do it differently if they wanted to.

the tricky thing with sorting out the RE boom is that from the 50s-90s china had several decades of essentially little to no new urban housing construction at the same time as a huge population boom, with strict state barriers on internal urban-rural migration. when the 90s and zeroes saw a private housing market, the RE market opened to foreign and domestic investment, and a partial lifting of the barriers to physical mobility, there was a gigantic pent-up demand for housing. as the reform-era economy exploded (with effects good and wretchedly bad, depending on where you were), the demand for office space boomed alongside.

those demands in turn created a mindset not dissimilar from thailand in the 90s, or california in the zeroes, in that people assumed that any building investment would be guaranteed to a) be profitable, and b) be occupied as soon as it was built. they’re all but assured of a bust in places like beijing IMO, that never seemed to have the commercial energy and scale necessary to fill all those glass towers. in other coastal cities, they’ll take a hit from the global depression, but they’re probably going to get cushioned by the sheer demand for all that housing, unless people stop moving to cities permanently, or families see their savings/investments wiped out enough that they can’t buy it. the chinese countryside has a higher population density than most american cities, so there’sstill a pretty large reservoir of people wanting to move if there’s a job or money to be made somewhere else.

i wouldn’t be surprised to see beijingers ultimately start to forcibly occupy empty apartment buildings, especially if china takes a huge hit in the depression. they’re a pretty feisty bunch, and made up the majority of the people at the barricades in 1989, media reports of students notwithstanding. i’ve heard rumors that china is currently close to zero growth in the last quarter, but noone (including the govt) has good numbers,because there isn’t a huge state apparatus to keep such numbers, much less one shielded and independent from political tampering. i suppose we’ll see the social effects of that sort of a slowdown in not too long. i may be there this summer, knock on wood for grant applications.

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27. lucid - 22 February 2009

Well the love of my life won best actress… :) And congrats to Sean too – his post win Q&A was pretty good as well. I really appreciated that when asked what he thought of the anti-gay protest sign ‘Heath is in hell’, he told the reporter that such sentiments shouldn’t even be dignified an answer.

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28. marisacat - 22 February 2009

LAT has a look at some parts of Stumble Bill… fwiw. I thnk part of the problem is one shown in teh graf below. O Admin has said a LOT of things.

[T]he intent is to put people to work and pump money into the economy quickly.

“So we concentrated on projects that were ready to go . . . projects that were just waiting for the money so they could be built,” said Jim Berard, spokesman for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “Most of those are not sexy things, but are badly needed nonetheless.”

Still, Robert Poole — director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based free market think tank — said: “Obama’s early statements on the stimulus, comparing its impact to that of [ President] Eisenhower’s interstate highway program, created a false expectation that it would be comparable to the New Deal in building great new public works. The sad reality is that the bill Congress wrote and Obama signed is mostly make-work stuff.”

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29. marisacat - 23 February 2009
30. marisacat - 23 February 2009

Blooooooooooo Dogs Rule! (It’s all so high school)…

[T]he president’s interest in reinstating tough pay-go rules appears, in part, to reflect the changing makeup of the Democrats’ congressional majorities. Over two election cycles, the party’s growing strength has come largely from the election of moderate Blue Dog Democrats in traditionally Republican states in the South and Midwest.

Although Mr. Obama spoke on the campaign trail about pay-go rules, he didn’t pledge to implement a statutory change or mandatory cuts. But the fiscally conservative Blue Dogs have pressed him hard on the issue. They raised the need for statutory budget rules at a White House meeting ahead of passage of Mr. Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan. “They helped persuade him,” the senior administration official said….

And Judd Gregg chimes in… LOL

“The Democratic Senate and House made a farce of [pay-as-you-go rules] over the last two years,” said Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. “For them to revive it would be the most hypocritical act they could pursue.” …

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31. marisacat - 23 February 2009

Right right right… right, they mean us no harm. Great line-up.

President Obama’s Fiscal Responsibility Summit at the White House today brings together lawmakers of both chambers and parties and representatives of an unprecedented spectrum of groups never before seen in the same room:

Peter G. Peterson Foundation, American Hospital Association, Families USA, Campaign for America’s Future, the DLC, AEI, Heritage Foundation, Children’s Defense Fund, Change to Win, AFSCME, SEIU, Concord Coalition, Business Roundtable, the National Federation of Independent Business and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

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32. marisacat - 23 February 2009

hmm new annuncemtn out today that SF will lay off up to (still working on the numbers) 1200 teachers from SF Unified School District. Despite Stim bill. Notices to go out end of March.

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33. BooHooHooMan - 23 February 2009

This President Obama of whom you speak… Who’s he?
The Stimulus Package guy, right? Isn’t he that guy who picked up some souvenirs in Canada?

Seriously. The Mofo and his attendents seem in shell shock.
So flat-footed, that soon, 90 year olds will be heckling at the gate wantin to hustle up a game of hoops:
“For Money, motherfucker.”

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34. marisacat - 23 February 2009

I feel rather winded by the whole thing… there is some help for people in the bills.. but then again, there HAD to be.

Interestingly i Iheard that the housing perameters (sp?) will likely leave many out in CA… that 417,000 break point in lending that hd existed will persist as a barrier to recovery… and the rules of how much underwater on the mortgage and a few other points. hmm Hard to know what is coming.

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35. marisacat - 23 February 2009

hmm Bloomberg:

U.S. Stocks Fall, Sending Market to Its Lowest Close Since 1997

By Lynn Thomasson

Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) — U.S. stocks fell, sending the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to a 12-year low, as concern that the deepening recession will erode earnings offset the government’s pledge to give more capital to banks.

Hewlett-Packard Co. and Intel Corp. slid at least 5.4 percent as Morgan Stanley said technology shares are the most vulnerable among economically sensitive industries. U.S. Steel Corp. helped lead a tumble in steelmakers after UBS AG said the group has raised output too quickly. Bank of America Corp. rose 3.2 percent and Citigroup Inc. climbed 9.7 percent as concern eased that the U.S. government will seize control of the lenders.

The S&P 500 lost 3.5 percent to 743.33, its lowest close since April 1997. The six-day losing streak in the U.S. stock benchmark ranks as its longest since October. The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 250.89 points, or 3.4 percent, to 7,114.78, its lowest since May 1997. The Russell 2000 Index lost 4 percent.

“Many investors simply can’t contemplate any more stock market risk in their portfolios,” said Fritz Meyer, the Denver- based senior market strategist for Invesco Aim, which oversees $357 billion. “Sentiment in the market is very weak and negative.”

Bank of America and Citigroup, each with slides exceeding 68 percent this year, have dragged the S&P 500 to an 18 percent decline in 2009, the worst start to a year on record. The losses came as President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner failed to assuage investor concerns with an $787 billion economic stimulus plan comprised of tax breaks and government spending.

….

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36. Madman in the Marketplace - 23 February 2009

Some background on the odious Peter Peterson:

Peter Peterson is coming to get your Social Security and Medicare. Peterson was the commerce secretary in the Nixon administration. He then went on to make billions of dollars as one of the top executives at the Blackstone Group, a private equity fund. Mr. Peterson is known as one of the top beneficiaries of the fund managers’ tax break, through which he personally pocketed tens of millions of dollars.

Mr. Peterson has been using his Wall Street wealth to attack these social insurance programs for decades, but he recently stepped up his efforts. Last year, he spent $1 billion to endow the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to further his efforts.

In politics, it’s not easy to counter the impact of $1 billion. In addition to its money, the Peterson crew enjoys the support of many important news outlets, most importantly The Washington Post, which pushes his line on both its editorial and news pages.

In fact, The Post even went so far as to identify Peterson’s foundation by its boilerplate, an organization that “advocates for federal fiscal responsibility,” instead of telling readers of its political leanings, the normal mode of identification for such organizations. (The Center for Economic and Policy Research was established “to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people’s lives.”)

Such strange people at the upper levels of this society … why would you use a vast fortune to make sure people DON’T receive help?

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37. Madman in the Marketplace - 23 February 2009

John Cole has a pretty good response to Andrew Sullivan’s pushing of the Social Security hysteria:

A few thoughts. First, I don’t think there is any disagreement anywhere that there is a problem with medicare and medicaid. Second, I simply can not take seriously anyone who worries about Social Security going insolvent in thirty years when there is a solid chance our currency will not make it to 2010. Third, the reason social security is such a hot-button issue is because we have been looting it for decades.

There. I have addressed this. Only a fool can not see the writing on the wall- we are going to have to move to single-payer at some point, because businesses can not compete and the largest problem for Detroit is… their health care obligations and other retiree benefits. Likewise, we spend an enormous amount of our GDP on health care yet have rankings that look third world on issues like infant mortality. Something has to give.

And before the morons start saying I have switched positions on this, I haven’t done anything of the sort. My consistent position the last few years has been that this is sort of inevitable, and whether I want this to happen or not is irrelevant. It will happen. I had sort of felt things were moving this way, and as we all know, our Captains of Industry at Wal-Mart are pretty ok with pushing off the cost of the health care of their employees onto the public. When United Airlines managed to just say to hell with a couple hundred thousand employees and say to hell with their pensions and healthcare in 2005, it sort of became glaringly obvious to me what big business thought the future held for us. Just today a story out of Detroit that Ford is, under an agreement, allowed to substitute their stock for payments to a retiree health care trust. Showing no sense of irony, the other headline at the NY Times is Stocks Slump on Corporate Woes; Indexes Fall by 3.4%. Any of you junior Nostradamus’ want to take a stab at what is going to happen to the retirees covered under that plan? I know what my guess is.

The only thing that is not settled, as far as I can tell, is how much damage we will do moving to the system. It will be a joy to behold, especially listening to folks with lifetime sinecures at prestigious organizations with lucrative health benefits or politicians with government provided health care yelling socialism until their last gasp, but it will happen. Again, the only real question is will we be able to summon up our American ingenuity and in our Solomonic wisdom make a single-payer system that tries to adopt the best of both worlds, does neither, yet still manages to make the members of the gilded class even richer and leaves us with the worst health care system in the industrial and post-industrial world.

Seems about right to me.

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38. Madman in the Marketplace - 23 February 2009

My Mother and I Don’t Leave

In Baltimore, ACORN member Donna Hanks re-took her home. Foreclosed on last Fall, the house has stood empty since then, a stark reminder of the failure of the system. But Donna joined with 30 ACORN Home Defenders to liberate her home from the bank. Her act of civil disobedience was covered by 2 radio stations, 2 TV stations, the Baltimore Sun, and the Huffington Post.

Donna used bolt cutters to break the lock to the door and re-enter the home. Unfortunately, in the six short months since the home was seized, it has been extensively damaged, essentially partially gutted. The toilets are missing, and the upstairs ceiling is badly damaged. The greatest tragedy here is that Donna worked for months with ACORN sister organization ACORN Housing Corporation to try to get the bank to modify the loan so it could be affordable, but they refused, taking the home and now allowing it to be a haven for squatters and a target of looters.

In Houston, where one in three homes sold in January was a foreclosure and foreclosure sales accounted for 34 percent of all homes sold – a 9-percent jump from the same time last year, Sara Chavez announced her refusal to leave here home. “My mother and I don’t leave,” she said. A mother of three who cares for her sick mother, she has owned her house since 2004, but has seen her mortgage payment double from $1,000 to $2,000. She joined with ACORN Home Defenders to declare her neighborhoods a “Foreclosure Free Zone”.

We even had a little star power come out to help the campaign to keep hard working families in their homes. In Los Angeles, comedienne Roseanne Barr traveled to Watts to join with Tommy and Debora Beard. The Beards are a teacher assistant and hospital cook who have lived in their home for over 20 years and have lost it to foreclosure in part due to a predatory loan. There is a possibility that allies in the legal community may be able to extend the Beards’ eviction process for quite awhile to buy time get Chase to reverse the foreclosure, person after person (including Roseanne) pledged to “go to jail” with the Beards if necessary.

There are other reports from Oakland, New York, and Orlando

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39. Madman in the Marketplace - 23 February 2009
40. marisacat - 23 February 2009

Please god let it be so:

Only a fool can not see the writing on the wall- we are going to have to move to single-payer at some point, because businesses can not compete and the largest problem for Detroit is… their health care obligations and other retiree benefits.

It’s the only answer. Tho I’d add that the ONLY reason the government is even willing to the hatchet job they want to do to health care is that lots of businesses just don’t want to offer it as part of employment package, in a long term plan.

Read a dicey headline at Times Online… As part of along plan to privatise the Royal Mail, they are threatening future AND current retirees benefits, if reforms are opposed.

Talk about Shock Doctrine.

***

I am looking forward to some big shifts to legalising MJ out htere… the biggest operation here, Oaksterdam over in Oaklnd has made public via NBC evening news a couple weeks ago that they pay 900,000 USD in various taxes. Annually…

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41. NYCO - 23 February 2009

35. Today was the “purest” untrammeled one-day slide in the Dow I’ve seen for a long while. Not much hesitation, just a straight march on down.

There’s still a lot of whistling past the graveyard out there. I’m concerned that there are going to be a lot of nasty shocks for higher ed (private schools, not just the struggling public systems) at the end of this semester, and higher ed is one of the more “stable” bulwarks of the status quo out there in the private sector, probably second only to health care.

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42. Madman in the Marketplace - 23 February 2009

I don’t think the half-assed “universal heathcare” aka forced insurance is going to go down well. If there is one thing people HATE more than politicians, hippies and the poor, its their insurance companies.

I don’t know how it plays out, but if the donks go down the MA/TN road, I think things will turn very, very ugly for them when they go home.

Or maybe I’m just reading my own anger and disgust and projecting it. I frankly can’t tell anymore.

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43. marisacat - 23 February 2009

please let it be so:

I don’t know how it plays out, but if the donks go down the MA/TN road, I think things will turn very, very ugly for them when they go home.

***

Well SF USD is laying off over 500, notices to go out this week, a mix of teachers and admin… the School board is asking that San Francisco’s “Rainy Day” fund step in, which it did do last year and saved lay offs…

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44. marisacat - 23 February 2009

From the Guardian… I snagged it from Lenin…

Police are preparing for a “summer of rage” as victims of the economic downturn take to the streets to demonstrate against financial institutions, the Guardian has learned.

Britain’s most senior police officer with responsibility for public order raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming “footsoldiers” in a wave of potentially violent mass protests.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police’s public order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.

He said that banks, particularly those that still pay large bonuses despite receiving billions in taxpayer money, had become “viable targets”. So too had the headquarters of multinational companies and other financial institutions in the City which are being blamed for the financial crisis.

…

Hartshorn said he also expected large-scale demonstrations this year on environmental issues, with hardcore green activists “joining forces” with middle-class campaigners over issues such as airport expansion at Heathrow and Stansted. With the prospect of angry demonstrations against the economy, that could open the door to powerful coalitions.

“All you’ve got to do then is link in with the environmentalists, and look at the oil companies. They’re seen to be turning over billions of pounds profit in issues that are seen to be against the environment.”

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45. Madman in the Marketplace - 23 February 2009

Merrill Lynch CEO:

NY AG Andrew Cuomo is seeking to force John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, to release the names of the Merrill executives who shared over $3.6 billion in bonuses before the merger with Bank of America. Thain is refusing, and said this about the bonuses:

“Bonuses were determined based upon the performance and the retention of people, and there is nothing that happened in the world or the economy that would make you say that those were not the right thing to do for the retention and the reward of the people who were performing,” Thain said, according to the transcript.

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46. Madman in the Marketplace - 23 February 2009

Welcome to Great Depression Cooking with Clara – The YouTube series

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47. Madman in the Marketplace - 23 February 2009

make sure to watch Ep. 6, the breakfast.

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48. Madman in the Marketplace - 23 February 2009
49. marisacat - 23 February 2009

hmm when Master-in-Chief crumpled to the Republican screams… over BC for poor women (a way to avoid the waiver game for states to fund BC thru Medicaid) a month ago, one of his first big shitty knee bends..

I wondered if Waxman, who is not stupid, knew soemthing about what was down the line. He put it in the stumble bill… and voila:

[B]ut a more important question might be what’s not in the 2009 spending bill. The Medicaid family-planning aid that was removed from the stimulus amid Republican attacks, for one, is nowhere to be found in the Health and Human Services title of the 2009 spending measure.

One wonders if that absence will draw fire from women’s health advocates, some of whom believed the family-planning provision could make a quick comeback after it got dumped earlier this month. When GOP governors such as Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty are using Medicaid family-planning money as an excuse to cut their budgets, how can congressional conservatives get away with slamming the program as taxpayer-funded abortions?

Oh who knows what advocates will do. The email today from NOW was a naked beg for the Obster fella to please do something about Solis.

gah.

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50. marisacat - 23 February 2009

The thread at TPMDC is very interesting, esp in contrast to the lousy thread to the Jan TPMDC posting from Elana Schor on the crumble to R in Jan.

Ob is standing about 4 feet tall about now.

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51. Madman in the Marketplace - 23 February 2009

This country is overrun by teh stupid: Massachusetts Moves Toward Segregated Math Classes

The most recent proposal appears the brainchild of Bellamy Principal Matthew T. Francis, who reportedly attended an all-boys school as a child. He believes that other genders is a distraction and part of the reason that his school has underperformed: “I want to take away one of the variables.” Strangely, other schools not under Mr. Francis’ supervision have excelled on tests and math without adopted segregation by gender.

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52. Madman in the Marketplace - 23 February 2009

classy:

Sen. Jim Bunning (R., Ky) used the annual Hardin County Republican Lincoln Day Dinner to announce his diagnosis that Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 75, will be dead from pancreatic cancer within nine months. While Bunning only holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Xavier University and had a baseball career with the Detroit Tigers, he felt comfortable with the medical prediction and even more comfortable discussing Ginsburg’s imminent demise at a political dinner.

With only 150,000 in the bank and rumors that his colleagues believe he is a loser, Bunning appears desperate. At the dinner, he virtually went through the coats in the cloakroom for cash: “I’m not only asking for your support, but if you have a $25 check somewhere, or whatever, you can send it, I’ll cash it.”

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53. wu ming - 23 February 2009

ammiano put a bill up today regulating and taxing pot like alcohol, as a way to fix the CA budget. will be interesting to see how the vote breaks down.

we are, after all, an ag state, and pot’s our best cash crop. no reason to p[ass up a billion or two in revenues/savings.

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54. marisacat - 23 February 2009

I heard that this evening on the news… at least he took a flyer on the idea.

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55. diane - 23 February 2009

Dealers and dreamers see gold in California housing bust

”….
Investors and real estate speculators, meanwhile, can snap up foreclosed properties on the cheap [thought they were all broke?????needed BAILOUTS??????] to sell during the next boom in California’s boom-and-bust real estate cycle, a boom they believe is inevitable and possibly not far off.

“This is the buying opportunity of our lifetime,” said Bruce Norris, who heads an investment group that expects to purchase some 100 homes this year in Southern California’s Inland Empire region.

snip snappety indeed….

I wonder what Blum’s company is “snapping up”

…..fucking predators……………

just stopping by, have a good evening all.

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56. marisacat - 24 February 2009

nu post

LINK

…….. 8) …………

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