The early bird catches the cat
4 hours ago
A blog by a "sucker" and a "loser" who served her country in the Navy.
If you're one of the Covidiots who believe that COVID-19 is "just the flu",
that the 2020 election was stolen, or
especially if you supported the 1/6/21 insurrection,
leave now.
Slava Ukraini!
At some banks last year, revenue fell to levels not seen in more than five years, but pay did not.Let's be clear about this: Without our money to prop them up, they could not have afforded to pay those bonuses. And it should come as no surprise that the leading vampire is Goldman Sachs.
In a letter to be delivered to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House health care leaders, Congressional progressives will reject a compromise Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) forged with Blue Dog Democrats to advance legislation. "We regard the agreement reached by Chairman Waxman and several Blue Dog members of the [Energy and Commerce] Committee as fundamentally unacceptable," it reads.It's about frakking time. What the Blue Dogs want (an appropriate color for them, since they serve the interests of Blue Cross and the rest of the health insurance industry) is a bill that has as its central purpose, the enrichment of the health insurance companies. I'm cheered to see that the Progressives may (emphasis on may) be stopping their doormat routine.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
Home Crisis Investigation | ||||
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On July 20, the agency permanently revoked the contracts with BlackRock, Goldman and JPMorgan Chase, the third winner, nullifying the process. The decision was based on questions surrounding Mr. Millard’s actions during the formal bidding process. His actions have also drawn the scrutiny of Congressional investigators and the agency’s inspector general.And more!
Mr. Millard’s e-mail messages show that, while the bidding was under way last fall, he also spoke with Rick Lazio, a former House Republican who is now a senior executive at JPMorgan Chase, to discuss career options.[1]We are seriously into the "ZOMG, a Bush Administration official ran his agency with an eye towards feathering his own nest, so what's so shocking about that" territory. Between the incompetence and the corruption of the Bush Administration, you'd be excused for thinking that they did their recruiting, in part, from among those who scored 400 on their SATs and those who were from New Jersey.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
Spinal Tap - (Funky) Sex Farm | ||||
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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
Spinal Tap | ||||
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Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something. And that’s what they’re doing.No matter which party is in power, it seems that if any legislation passes that benefits the majority of Americans, that is purely a happy by-product of Congress and the President appeasing the special interests.
"The Director of the MTA is a fascist pig who has sex with goats."The MTA was moving forward with plans to listen in on the conversations of riders of its trains and buses.
[Senator Jeff Sessions] said Monday he'll vote against Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, siding with his party's leaders against the judge who's on a fast track to becoming the first Hispanic justice.Sessions is a real piece of work:
Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he 'used to think they [the KKK] were OK' until he found out some of them were 'pot smokers.'For a judicial candidate, having Sessions oppose your nomination is a badge of honor. If Sessions thinks any particular candidate would be a good and fair judge, there is probably something really wrong with that candidate.
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There has been much controversy about the lawfulness of the program. Here I must point out that agency lawyers — career attorneys with deep expertise in the law, privacy and intelligence — assisted their professional Justice Department counterparts in their review of the program but remained comfortable throughout with the lawfulness of all aspects of the surveillance effort.Yeah, the same career lawyers who opined that torture was legal? Those guys?
Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.And:
The Secretary of Defense shall prescribe such regulations as may be necessary to ensure that any activity (including the provision of any equipment or facility or the assignment or detail of any personnel) under this chapter does not include or permit direct participation by a member of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps in a search, seizure, arrest, or other similar activity unless participation in such activity by such member is otherwise authorized by law.(You may have noted that one of the lawyers who said it was legal to send in the Army to arrest people within the US was John Yoo, who is a tenured professor in the Department of Fascism at Boalt Hall Law School.)
Abstinence-Supporting GOP State Lawmaker Admits To Sex With 22-Year-Old InternYou'd think that a politician who promotes abstinence would know to keep his schlong safely zipped up inside his trousers, but sadly, no.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
White House M.D. | ||||
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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
Moment of Zen - Liz Cheney Sounds Like Her Father | ||||
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The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
Sniper Trifle | ||||
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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
The Born Identity | ||||
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I love the Birthers. They are nothing but walking bags of Trail Mix (nuts and flakes) and, as such, they are taking the GOP further and further into the Wilderness of Irrelevancy. Every time they yammer on about "show me the birth certificate", they drive home the point with wavering Democrats, all Independents and even a lot of Republicans that these people cannot be trusted with political power.
As long as seven years ago, the federal National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration recommended that drivers not use cell phones, even with hands-free equipment, while on the road except in emergencies.An unenforceable law, in my opinion, is worse than having no law at all.
For anyone who believes crime doesn't pay, tell that to the New York state legislator who introduced a "Madoff" bill on Monday. Rich New Yorkers convicted of crimes would be forced -- if his bill becomes law -- to pay the state and federal governments for how much it costs to keep them in jail.The Chinese make condemned prisoners pay for the ammunition used to kill them. This isn't any different, except in degree.
"From the Wright Brothers in Kittyhawk to Tranquillity Base was 66 years. From Tranquillity Base, 66 years in the future takes us to 2035. I believe we deserve to do a little bit more than footprints on the moon." -- Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot, second man on the Moon.We can do better than that.
I came to motherhood in woeful denial. My image of the job dated from my own childhood, which (and here I date myself) looked much like an episode of "Madmen": mothers complaining about housework over coffee, cake and the odd cigarette while their children played unattended in the yard.The rest of it is pretty good.
As far as I knew, my duties for the first stage of motherhood -- giving birth -- consisted of:
1) showing up
2) wearing a little makeup afterward when my husband came to visit.
NSA officials, who have a long-standing relationship with Utah based on the state Guard's unique linguist units, approached state officials about finding land in the state on which to build an additional data center.As I have said before, put nothing into an e-mail (or, for that matter, say on the telephone or put into a fax) that you would not mind seeing printed on a billboard alongside a highway in your home town. Those bastards are trolling through the telecom and internet traffic of everyone.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
Pyramid Economy | ||||
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Sears Tower is history. As of Thursday, the iconic Chicago, Illinois, skyscraper is now named Willis Tower.Oh, sorry, it's named for some Brit insurance company.
The nation’s largest public pension fund has filed suit in California state court in connection with $1 billion in losses that it says were caused by “wildly inaccurate” credit ratings from the three leading ratings agencies.And it just gets better and better:
The suit from the California Public Employees Retirement System, or Calpers, a public fund known for its shareholder activism, is the latest sign of renewed scrutiny over the role that credit ratings agencies played in providing positive reports about risky securities issued during the subprime boom that have lost nearly all of their value.
The lawsuit, filed late last week in California Superior Court in San Francisco, is focused on a form of debt called structured investment vehicles, highly complex packages of securities made up of a variety of assets, including subprime mortgages. Calpers bought $1.3 billion of them in 2006; they collapsed in 2007 and 2008.
Calpers maintains that in giving these packages of securities the agencies’ highest credit rating, the three top ratings agencies — Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch — “made negligent misrepresentation” to the pension fund, which provides retirement benefits to 1.6 million public employees in California.
Now, here comes the fun part: Calpers doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the money. Sure, the financial instruments at hand (Cheyne Finance, Stanfield Victoria Funding and Sigma Finance) have defaulted on their payment obligations. The losses to Calpers are ~!$1 billion.Oh, motherfuckin' yeah! I am going to have to lay in a large supply of popcorn in order to watch this one.
But that’s not what’s going on here: These Left Coasters want their pound of flesh. They don’t care for the Ratings Agency folks, and consider them a blight on the investment landscape.
The goal of the litigation (as I see it) isn’t to make the rating agencies pay a financial penalty; rather, it is to publicly try them just as the regulatory rules are being rewritten. I also predict that CALPERS is going to attempt to not just win, but humiliate these agencies, call them out in the most embarrassing way possible, trash the senior executives, and make things very uncomfortable in general for these firms.
They don’t want them to merely suffer — they want to destroy their unique position as an Oligopoly, to remove them from having a special status under the SEC rules.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
White Men Can't Judge | ||||
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The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
Paul Krugman | ||||
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Congressional demands for an investigation grew on Monday over new disclosures that a secret CIA program to capture or kill al-Qaida leaders was concealed from Congress for eight years, perhaps at the behest of former Vice President Dick Cheney.I'll bet this: There is no "perhaps" about it. If the program was concealed from Congress, that was done on Cheney's orders. That is illegal. There is an old axiom in politics that time and time again is proven to be true: They don't hang you for what you did. They hang you for attempting to cover it up.
Republicans announced Thursday that they plan to call a white firefighter to testify against Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor during her Senate confirmation hearings that open Monday.I have seen nothing to indicate that the 2nd Circuits decision in the Ricci case was not correct in accordance with the then-existing Supreme Court precedent. Lower courts are bound to decide cases based on the guidance of the Supreme Court. If the Supremes later reverse themselves, they are entitled to do that, but no lower court is entitled to decide a case if their decision would contradict what the Supreme Court has previously held.
In a related development, President Obama threatened to veto the pending Intelligence Authorization Bill if it included a provision that would allow information about covert actions to be given to the entire House and Senate Intelligence Committees, rather than the so-called Gang of Eight — the Democratic and Republican leaders of both houses of Congress and the two Intelligence Committees.The Gang of Eight has not been effective at doing anything, so far as I can see. When they are "read into" a program that is highly questionable if not outright illegal, they don't do anything to stop it. They might as well expand it to the "Gang of Nine" with the ninth member being the statute of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial.
I went out to plant corn for a bit to finish a field before tomorrow morning and witnessed the Great Battle.
A golden eagle - big bastard, about six foot wingspan - flew right in front of the tractor. It was being chased by three crows that were continually dive bombing it and pecking at it. The crows do this because the eagles rob their nests when they find them.
At any rate, the eagle banked hard right in one evasive maneuver, then landed in the field about 100 feet from the tractor. This eagle stood about 3 feet tall. The crows all landed too and took up positions around the eagle at 120 degrees apart, but kept their distance at about 20 feet from the big bird. The eagle would take a couple steps towards one of the crows and they'd hop backwards and forward to keep their distance. Then the reinforcements showed up!
I happened to spot the eagle's mate hurtling down out of the sky at what appeared to be approximately Mach 1.5. Just before impact the eagle on the ground took flight, and the three crows which were watching the grounded eagle, also took flight thinking they were going to get in some more pecking on the big bird. The first crow being targeted by the diving eagle never stood a snowball's chance in hell. There was a mid-air explosion of black feathers and that crow was done! The diving eagle then banked hard left in what had to be a 9G climbing turn, using the energy it had accumulated in the dive, and hit crow #2 less than two seconds later. Another crow dead!
The grounded eagle, which was now airborne and had an altitude advantage on the remaining crow, which was streaking eastward in full burner, made a short dive then banked hard right when the escaping crow tried to evade the hit. It didn't work - crow #3 bit the dust at about 20 feet altitude.
This aerial battle was better than any airshow I've been to, including the warbirds show at Oshkosh! The two eagles ripped the crows apart and ate them on the ground, and as I got closer and closer working my way across the field, I passed within 20 feet of one of them as it ate its catch. It stopped and looked at me as I went by and you could see in the look of that bird that it knew who's Boss Of The Sky. What a beautiful bird! Not only did they kill their enemies, they ate them.
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