No, I don't want to talk about the Cowboys. (Hello, Jerry? You're one-for-three on the "reforming" outlaws list, and Pacman Jones can't hold onto the ball any better than the big-mouthed whiniest butterfingered "wide receiver" in the NFL. You've got a coaching staff, a quarterback, a pretty good OL, a not-too-shabby -- remember the stands they made against the 'Skins and the Steelers, on the tail-end of this graceless season? -- defense, and a kicker. You're ok for next year on running backs, but you need some special teams help -- and Roy Williams will need somebody to take the heat off him in the far downfield next year. No. 81 ain't it.)

I want to talk about aircraft maintenance and how outsourcing it is putting lives at risk on major carriers, how Southwest chose not to follow this trend because it was already having static with its BFF the FAA, and the shameful way controllers are being treated in this country. I'll never be able to afford live tickets to a Cowboys game, but sometimes you have to ride airplanes to get from point A to point B on time.

Make no mistake about it. The anti-union frenzy Reagan started is alive and well and unless Read more…

Developers, and real estate promoters, are the shiznit when it comes to making money for themselves. But when it comes to running companies they bought via outright confidence games, guys like Sam Zell pretty much suck. So now Tribune Media's in the tank, hundreds of jobs are gone, several news outlets are shutting down ... and Sam Zell's gonna get MONEY!! Hat tip Jim Hightower.

Make of this what you will:

The Bush team has also invited Obama transition officials to attend a “national level exercise” set for Jan. 12 and 13 that may play out what would happen if the top leadership of the nation were wiped out in a single stroke, officials said.

Because "continuity of government" has always been Shooter's baby.... Read more…

Online Search Analytics Provide a Window Into Customer Behavior

Online searching is a proxy for consumer behavior. By examining how people search and what they're searching for, insurance companies can figure out better ways to connect with potential customers. Understanding how and when consumers are using the Web to look for information will help drive growth and help insurance companies navigate the next year.

Don't worry, they would never use this information to deny you coverage.

The Transition today launched "Open for Questions," a Digg-style feature allowing citizens to submit questions, and to vote on one another's questions, bringing some to the top of the list.

Sounds good, let's ask some questions!

Oh, but wait, the ability to flag "inappropriate" questions seems to be very popular with those who wish to shield Obama from ever having to answer actual, substantive questions. When you flag a question as being inappropriate, it gets removed from the front page. Read more…

Change you can believe in!

The Washington Post appears to have changed an already published article without noting the change. The original article started out:

President-elect Barack Obama's transition team has agreed to accompany Treasury Department officials to meet with Capitol Hill leaders to help the Bush administration gain access to the second half of the $700 billion financial rescue package, government sources familiar with the matter said. Read more…

As Jim Hightower points out in his blog entry, while the prices don't increase for some commodities at your grocery store and the packages look the same, the amount of product is dropping -- sometimes dramatically.
Then there's the excellent "Mouse Print" web site, which reveals the fine print (in readable fonts) behind many retail, coupon and online offers. You could do worse than read both sites regularly, folks, if you -- like me and many others -- want to avoid waste and scammage.

The whole thing is very good.

This goes to the other side of how this nation is changing radically - with a series of programs conceived largely by executive fiat that weakens civil liberties protections and subverts the plain letter of the law. This includes illegal wiretapping of American citizens, indefinite detention of prisoners without charges, and the dehumanizing practice of torture, which is ineffective and deeply dangerous to the lives of our troops, as this senior interrogator in Iraq explains.
... Read more…

It has gotten to the point where Mr. A takes away the sharp objects at the table when someone brings up "the terrible times facing newspapers these days" or "isn't it just awful how no one reads anymore." Newspapers make plenty of money. PLENTY of money. They are wildly successful businesses. If you or I owned them we'd be jumping for joy.

They just don't make enough money to satisfy the greedy, rapacious assholes who own and run them. This isn't a death, you know. It's a homicide. Newspapers aren't dying. They're being murdered. And until somebody convenes an academic conference on how to overthrow these fuckers and raise funds for employee buyouts of every last one of these newspapers you cannot pay me in solid gold ingots to listen to one more stupid lecture about the Internet. Read more…

The NT Times asks: Was the federal goverment out to get Eliot Spitzer?

No evidence has surfaced to support such an assertion, and the prosecutor in the case has said that politics played no role in the pursuit of Mr. Spitzer, a Democrat. But that has not put to rest suspicions, expressed on left wing blogs, that Mr. Spitzer, a zealous pursuer of Wall Street wrongdoing who some thought could one day be president, had been singled out.

Now, a congressional committee is pursuing what would be the first public examination of the events that prompted the initial inquiry into his bank transactions, which showed he was sending money to a front company for Emperor’s Club V.I.P. Read more…

So I included "impeachment" in the tags because I've got a dollar right here that says, before his first term is over, one or another Congresscritter is going to ride the wave of the guaranteed to happen future Obama-hating by introducing a bill of impeachment against him, esp as the Bailout fallout speeds the rate at which the economy tanks and nothing gets better for Little People, and brighter Republicans take advantage of the natural opportunity Obama and his bailout buddies have provided them. But I had the thought, even as I realize this blog is already sort of a running one, that we should create "The List" of Obama's various betrayals and failures to live up to his label of "Democrat" and otherwise chooses to shit upon the progressive and liberal element to his party. I'm betting it's going to be a long list, over the next four years. And Oborg members: please don't whine at me that "he's not yet in office." If you think he's not already directing the actions and statements of the Dem party as its leader, you don't know much about how the Village works. I said I'd wait until after the election and I lived up to that. Now, I want my promised results. Or does "compromise" and "unity" only mean such between center-rightists and far-right theocrats and neocons? Sorry, but lefties like me aren't going away, and we're not going to shut up.

I'll go first.

1. Ordering Senate Dems to "make nice" with Lieberman, and allow him to keep his chair and other Senate privs, in the name of "working together." Hint from the Wise, Mr. President-Elect: you can't do business with traitors who stab you in the back (and front). They'll fuck you over every time.

Your turn, Gentle Readers. Read more…

Saxby Chambliss, in a runoff with Jim Martin to hold the seat he cheated Max Cleland out of via an ad that morphed a US Veteran into a terrorist on TV, is refusing to respond (what? A Republican, flouting the law? Read more…

That's where we seem to be headed. Masters of capitalism, my ass. These folks are parasites. But you knew that already.

Via Calculated Risk, four insurance companies are seeking to buy thrifts so they will qualify for bailout money, Yes, that's right, they have money to buy thrifts, but we still need to bail them out.

American Express is now a bank. At least for bailout purposes. Not for regulatory purposes, I'm sure.

The Government is insuring debt issued by GE to the tune of $139 billion. Read more…

So, MSM has been caught with its hand in the cookie jar. Quelle Surprise!

David Shuster, an anchor for the cable news network, said on air Monday that Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, had come forth and identified himself as the source of a Fox News Channel story saying Palin had mistakenly believed Africa was a country instead of a continent.

Eisenstadt identifies himself on a blog as a senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. Yet neither he nor the institute exist; each is part of a hoax dreamed up by a filmmaker named Eitan Gorlin and his partner, Dan Mirvish, the New York Times reported Wednesday. Read more…

How much money has Sun Myung Moon poured into the right-wing media's rise? Avedon, writing at Atrios' place, seems to think it's a lot, and that it's been pretty effective.

Obama wants 'em:

A seven-page questionnaire being sent by the office of President-elect Barack Obama to those seeking cabinet and other high-ranking posts may be the most extensive — some say invasive — application ever.

The application asks applicants to “please list all aliases or ‘handles’ you have used to communicate on the Internet.”

No more Mark Foleys, I suppose (even if Leader Nance did deep six investigating him).

But really, how serious is this? How on earth could they check? Read more…

Fox News and Politico carried the now-discredited story of a politically-motivated attack on a white 20-year-old woman who was in Pittsburgh to volunteer for the GOP. She has since come forward and admitted her story was false.She has a history of mental illness; may she find the help she needs.But what of the media -- some of it "mainstream," much of it Web-based -- where the story broke, grew, and spawned outrage?

Shades of Jessica Lynch ... only worse.

and walk away. After all, it's not your problem if the contractor's work is flawed, right? Read more…

He says his name is Mr. Margin.

Lambert asked why they no share the monies. The NY Times article linked above is instructive.

Banks are holding on to the cash to prop up the stock price for investors (sure, sure) and especially to keep the stock prices propped so the top execs (whose lifestyles are dependent on borrowing money against the stocks they own in the companies they run) aren't busted out. Read more…

[I'm stickying this because, dammit, it seems unfoily to me, and everybody's assuming LIBOR is some sort of neutral measure. Takedown, anyone? -- lambert]

Bloomberg has an interesting article whose headline, if taken literally, puts shock doctrine right out into the open:

Libor Holds Central Banks Hostage as Credit Freezes?

(Note the usual lack of agency. LIBOR's just a number. How can a number hold anyone hostage? Only sentient beings can hold each other hostage.)

Anyhow -- with the usual caveat that I'm trying to learn all this stuff as I go along, and anybody who steps in with clarification or a takedown will be doing a public service -- LIBOR is the London Interbank Offered Rate, a "daily reference rate based on the interest rates at which banks offer to lend unsecured funds to other banks in the London wholesale money market (or interbank market). " It's one component of the TED spread, a number Krugman warned us to watch back in February:

The TED spread is the difference between the interest rate banks charge each other on 3-month loans (3-month LIBOR) and the interest rate on 3-month U.S. Treasury bills. It’s a measure of financial jitters. If banks believe that their peers are solid, they should be willing to lend each other money on almost the same terms as money lent to Uncle Sam. When they start demanding a big interest rate premium, that’s a sign of fear.

Hold that idea, "measure of fear," in mind. Because LIBOR has an interesting backstory. Let's read on in the article we originally started with: Read more…

How bad? 'I thought I was going to throw up,' Jennifer Brunner recalls

This year, denizens of the Buckeye State who mistrust touch-screen systems will be allowed to vote on a paper ballot if they prefer. The directive to allow "paper or plastic" came in the wake of Brunner's landmark 2007 "Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing" analysis, otherwise known as EVEREST, in which "critical security failures" were found in every system tested by several teams of both corporate and academic computer scientists and security experts.

After reading this on LIBOR by Bloomberg:

The cost of borrowing in dollars overnight in London jumped ..

The London interbank offered rate, or Libor, that banks charge each other for such loans rose 157 basis points to 3.94 percent today, the British Bankers' Association said. The corresponding rate for euros climbed 22 basis points to 4.27 percent, the highest in four days. The Tokyo interbank rate stayed at the highest level this year and the Libor-OIS spread, a gauge of cash scarcity among banks, widened to a record.

``There's still a massive lack of confidence in this market and the more we talk about it, the more it becomes a self- fulfilling prophecy,'' said Jan Misch, a money-market trader in Stuttgart, Germany, at Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg. ``Sentiment hasn't improved much and rates remain at elevated levels.''

`Government-Led Injection'

``It's shocking [indeed!] to see that the money market is still in the condition that it's in, despite measures by central banks to unfreeze it,'' said Vincent Chaigneau, head of foreign exchange and interest rate strategy Societe Generale SA in London. ``A global government-led capital injection into banks may be needed.''

Libor, set every morning in London, determines prices for financial contracts valued at $393 trillion as of Dec. 31, 2007, or $60,000 for every person in the world, and helps set consumer interest rates on everything from home loans to credit cards.

The constant references to "confidence" and "sentiment" in all the coverage of the crisis seems awfully vacuous, and LIBOR (along with the TED spread, one factor of which is LIBOR) seem to be treated as if they were objective realities, like a thermometer reading. The idea seems to be that sentiment drives LIBOR, but what LIBOR was being used to drive sentiment instead?

So I googled "LIBOR manipulated and came up with a lot of hits.

Anybody with any actual knowledge of finance tell me whether this is possible? Because at this point, anything seems possible. Read more…

Shelly Mandell, pres. of the L.A. Now chapter, introduces Palin at a rally in SoCal:

In rarity for a Republican event, Mandell bragged about her efforts campaigning for the failed Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and her support for Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1984.

"I know Sarah Palin cares about women's rights," Mandell said. "As vice president, she will fight for you. She cares about our children and she cares about women's lives."

Local news station has the rest. Read more…

The Sideshow

TChris asks, "Did you know this?" and then reports on something I certainly did not know - that the bailout bill creates permanent authority for the IRS to work as undercover agents running sting operations to try to tempt citizens into breaking the law, as well as involving themselves in investigations of drug case in order to bust dealers for not reporting their income, which, as TChris says, is really stupid, because dealers don't usually save any money to collect on.

It is not hard to see how that is going to come back to bite Busheviki.

I'm out in the garden today and so I don't really have time to get into this. But if true I'd be unsurprised. It reminds me of bad Clancy novels, or something. Anyway, via Avedon, haxxorwarz:

Last week, VR interviewed GOP Cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore about the upcoming election and his testimony in the new Ohio litigation to take depositions of Karl Rove and others.

The video is posted in full below with ten short clips for You Tube viewing. This interview is so important and explosive that we urge everyone to watch it.

Spoonamore says that the GOP wanted e-voting to steal elections but now foreign governments will be hacking and the winner will be determined by the best hackers. He says that if the GOP wins the hacking competition, McCain will win 51.2 percent with three electoral votes over Obama, and it will be a stolen election.

Spoon also makes a crucial point about the people who have been implicated in much of the election theft: "They are religious extremists." He names those who know about stolen elections, and he insists that the only way to protect this election is with paper ballots, hand-counted. Read more…