Running with a story you read on Drudge means that you will probably eat it later.
Consider this a public service announcement.
Why Intelligent People Ignore The <em>Drudge Report</em>Post + Comments (92)
by Tim F| 92 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
Running with a story you read on Drudge means that you will probably eat it later.
Consider this a public service announcement.
Why Intelligent People Ignore The <em>Drudge Report</em>Post + Comments (92)
by Tim F| 32 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
Weirder and weirder.
We’re talking about the tangled matter of one Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who is being prosecuted in connection with what the authorities say was a pricey prostitution ring in the Washington, D.C., area that serviced as many as 15,000 clients between 1993 and 2006. A federal indictment was handed up in the district on March 1.
[…] Ms. Palfrey, evidently short of money for legal defense since prosecutors froze her $400,000 in cash and stocks last fall, attracted a good deal of attention over the last few weeks, some of it perhaps of a panicky nature, by threatening to sell her business’s phone records, showing the telephone numbers of thousands of customers, to the highest bidder.
[…] On Tuesday, Ms. Palfrey changed course. Her lawyer told WTOP radio in Washington that she had decided not to sell the records. Instead they will be handed over to a news organization, free of charge. Which one? Nobody is saying yet.
What, if not money, does Ms. Palfrey get out of that? The news organization’s help in combing the records and identifying customers, who can then become witnesses for the defense, the lawyer, Montgomery B. Silbey, told WTOP. And what does the news organization get? The opportunity to break the news if it finds anyone prominent in the list. About everybody else, we are told, the news organization has promised to be discreet.
One assumes that Ms. Palfrey wouldn’t be so cruel as to go on teasing us with her client list without ever delivering the goods. It wouldn’t be professional.
by Tim F| 46 Comments
This post is in: Politics
Save a little pity for the hardworking folks trying to land Rudy Guiliani a top spot on the Republican ticket. The problem goes well beyond the ridiculously dispositive things that we already know about – Rudy’s intense loyalty to Bernie Kerik and Kerik’s numerous ties to organized crime, his liberal slant on nearly every hotbutton issue, disputes about his behavior on and after 9/11, two ugly divorces, personal character straight out of a Dickens novel. One could argue that most voters still don’t know much more than the “America’s Mayor” title that the major newsweeklies gave him, so in a sense his candidacy can already be counted in the days or weeks it will take his rivals to change that.
Still, even that understates the gravity of Rudy’s problems. The real thing keeping his supporters up at night is the wealth of delicious revelations still percolating just under the surface. Just two examples from the past few days –
* In 1989 Guiliani told a gathering of supporters that the government should fund abortions for poor women who can’t afford to pay. Don’t get me wrong about this, his logic seems perfectly reasonable to me. Somehow I doubt he can count on GOP primary voters to see it the same way.
* Then there’s this:
March 14 (Bloomberg) — Rudolph Giuliani’s law firm lobbies for Citgo Petroleum Corp., a unit of the state-owned oil company controlled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the U.S.’s chief antagonist in the Western Hemisphere.
Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up. The potential self-destructiveness of the Giuliani campaign is almost impossible to put into words.
***
Maybe it will help to analogize. Imagine if a candidate for Vice President headed a firm which sold petroleum infrastructure to Saddam Hussein and nuclear supplies to Iran, defying international sanctions and propping up some of America and Israel’s most intractable enemies. The ticket would be sunk for sure. Right?
As near as I can tell the mystery veep would still be ok if he showed a satisfactory level of ideology purity. The Movement can apparently forgive a lot. Does anybody think that Rudy has that same benefit of the doubt?
***Update***
Speaking of Bernie Kerik.
Kerik was Giuliani’s man. At one time Giuliani’s limo driver, Bernie Kerik (inexplicably) became NYPD commissioner under Giuliani. It was Giuilani’s word that sent Kerik on his ill-fated mission to train the Iraqi police. When Bush tried to nominate Bernie Kerik for Michael Chertoff’s job it was widely understood to be Giuliani calling in his chips.
If you think that George Bush tends to nominate people long on loyalty and short on talent, wait until you see Rudolph Giuilani.
Reason #953 Why The Giuliani Campaign Is DoomedPost + Comments (46)
by John Cole| 58 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Republican Stupidity
The Gonzales resignation watch continues, and we move one step closer to his departure with the admission that ‘mistakes’ were made:
Under criticism from lawmakers of both parties for the dismissals of federal prosecutors, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted Tuesday that he would not resign but said, “I acknowledge that mistakes were made here.”
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales acknowledged during a news conference at the Justice Department today that “mistakes were made.”
The mea culpa came as Congressional Democrats, who are investigating whether the White House was meddling in Justice Department affairs for political reasons, demanded that President Bush and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, explain their roles in the dismissals.With Mr. Bush traveling in Mexico, the White House insisted that the president’s role had been minimal and laid the blame primarily on Harriet E. Miers, who was White House counsel when the prosecutors lost their jobs and who stepped down in January.
Harriet Meiers? But Hugh Hewitt says she is the best attorney since Abe Lincoln and should be a Supreme Court Justice!
At any rate, the inevitable bleed has started. Pretty soon Gonzales will have to resign so ‘the administration can put this behind them and get to work making Americans secure’ or some such nonsense.
*** Update ***
I am linking this solely for the awesomeness of the title. How many WaPo readers will get a reference to a 30 year old LP? Or is this a reference to something else, and I am showing my cultural ignorance by attributing it to Styx?
This post is in: Politics
This:
World equity markets continued to tumble on Wednesday as fears over the growing crisis in the US subprime mortgage market triggered fresh selling.
After Wall Street tumbled overnight, Asian and European bourses were hit hard as investors headed for the safer investment havens such as government bonds. Credit markets also continued to weaken.
In Asia, the sell-off was broad and deep on investors’ worries that the subprime mortgage problems could hit the US housing market and the broader US economy – a big export market for many of the region’s companies. The Tokyo stock market plunged 2.9 per cent, Singapore by 3.3 per cent, Mumbai dropped 3.3 per cent, Hong Kong by 2.5 per cent and Shanghai by 1.9 per cent.
That was the headline splashed at Drudge, and there is also this story:
Late mortgage payments shot up to a 3 1/2-year high in the final quarter of last year and new foreclosures surged to record levels as borrowers with tarnished credit histories had trouble keeping up with monthly payments.
The Mortgage Bankers Association, in its quarterly snapshot of the mortgage market released Tuesday, reported the percentage of payments that were 30 or more days past due for all loans tracked jumped to 4.95 percent in the October-to-December quarter.
That marked a sharp rise from the third-quarter’s delinquency rate of 4.67 percent and was the worst showing since the spring of 2003, when the late-payment rate climbed to 4.97 percent.
I am not going to even pretend that I remotely understand the complexities of the mortgage game, but I do know that Kevin Drum has been warning about a crash of this sort for several years (this is on of his pet issues, along with peak oil). This could be a very serious problem with major implications to the entire economy.
*** Update ***
Some interesting comments:
simple look at a complex subject:
A lot of people obtained financing to buy homes they couldn’t pay off, mostly so they could then resell them and make a quick buck. A lot of lenders borrowed the money to make these loans then turned around and sold the loans to make a quick buck. A lot of institutions bought these loans for both a quick buck and a steady payoff. A lot of individual investors saw all this money flowing and wanted a share of it, so they put their money in as well. All this extra money flowing around made everyone feel good and they bought lots of goodies.
But now…
A lot of the people who couldn’t afford it aren’t paying the bills. The lenders, therefore, can’t repay what they borrowed. Because of this, the easy loans have dried up. Consequently a lot of people who can’t afford this but who were expecting to sell are ALSO not paying the bills, making this vicious circle worse. The institutions aren’t getting their money. Everyone involved is trying to make someone else eat the loss. The individual investors, seeing this circular firing squad, are trying to get THEIR money out as well, which makes things worse. All this disappearing money means people are NOT buying goodies, which hits companies which aren’t part of the circular firing squad.
There are a lot of additional complexities and parties involved – and parsing into subgroups of the parties already mentioned – but that’s the gist.
Some people tried to get money for nothing, and enough people joined that it turned into a game of musical chairs. And the music just stopped.
And:
Aye.
And I work in the industry. The benefit of this meltdown is the first to get hit hard are the lenders who had no standards.
I hope anybody who got suckered into subprime mortgages has a lawyer, and they’re fighting to new payoff terms.
Those who took out subprime to buy houses they thought they were going to flip. So sorry, go fuck yourself.
Have no fear, they are rushing to bail out the people who made this mess in the first place:
U.S. lawmakers will have to consider providing aid to about 2.2 million subprime mortgage borrowers who are at risk of defaulting and losing their homes, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said today.
“The impact of losing 2.2 million homes I suspect will be in a lot of areas of our cities and towns that are already pretty hard hit, so we clearly want to look at that and legislate,” Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, told reporters in Washington after a speech to the National League of Cities.
Foreclosures involving homeowners who took out subprime loans from 1998 until 2006 could cost $164 billion, Dodd said, citing a December study by the Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, North Carolina. The government needs to provide at-risk homeowners “forbearance or something like that to give them a chance to work through and get a new financial instrument here that they can manage financially better,” Dodd said.
while it sounds like they are bailing out homeowners, this would be a direct stream of cash to the lenders who caused this problem in the first place. Think Airline Industry Bailout multiplied by a factor of 100. As one person noted, this is more of the “privatization of profit, socialization of risk.” Much more here, and here is a great website dedicated to the topic.
by John Cole| 20 Comments
Alan Simpson with a sensible piece on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”:
Since 1993, I have had the rich satisfaction of knowing and working with many openly gay and lesbian Americans, and I have come to realize that “gay” is an artificial category when it comes to measuring a man or woman’s on-the-job performance or commitment to shared goals. It says little about the person. Our differences and prejudices pale next to our historic challenge. Gen. Pace is entitled, like anyone, to his personal opinion, even if it is completely out of the mainstream of American thinking. But he should know better than to assert this opinion as the basis for policy of a military that represents and serves an entire nation. Let us end “don’t ask, don’t tell.” This policy has become a serious detriment to the readiness of America’s forces as they attempt to accomplish what is arguably the most challenging mission in our long and cherished history.
It is time to change the policy. Hell, it is long past time.
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
Tim has several thought out, well-reasoned, and interesting posts in a row, so I feel it is my duty to shit all over the website and try to start a flamewar.
Attempt #1:Here goes:
How long before Gonzalez is fired decides to spend more time with his family? And is this the most hopelessly corrupt fucking administration, ever?
Attempt #2: The Republican Part is Divided
No shit. The moderates left, the decent religious folks had enough after Foley, and all you are left with are the Bush dead-enders, Dan Riehl, and Dobson.
Attempt #3: Nancy Pelosi should STFU.
Like, who does she think she is? Speaker of the House?
I hope you appreciate the quality effort I have put forth here. Consider this an open thread.