This blog is dedicated to logical Reasoning, political consciousness, religious dialogue, intelligent thoughts, uncommon wisdom, current events, and humor.
Chances are, you know what a Captcha is. If you don’t, check it out here on Wikipedia. In a nutshell, a Captcha is a type of challenge-response test used on many webforms. It is to ensure that a human is filling out those forms rather than a computer program.
Go to Recovery.gov, click on Contact Us link on the top toolbar. Click on “Feedback” on the left toolbar. You are presented with a webform. Skip filling out the form. Scroll to the bottom and see the Captcha. Pretend you are visually impaired, and click on “Get an audio challenge” link indicated by a microphone icon. You’re presented with random – I think – movie bits, most of which are undecipherable.
Why is it that this administration’s cabinet members cannot go a few weeks before admitting to some tax problem?
The latest is Kathleen Sebelius who’s the Health and Human Services secretary nominee. She has now admitted that she made “unintentional errors” on her taxes and has corrected her returns from three different years. In total, she and her husband paid just over $7,000 in back taxes, along with $878 in interest.
Before Sebelius, it was Tom Daschle who was the first Health and Human Services secretary nominee. He withdrew his nomination over tax issues.
Before Daschle, it was Nancy Killefer, the Chief Performance Officer nominee, who admitted to tax problems.
Before Killefer, it was Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary.
Before Geithner, it was Ron Kirk, US Trade Representative.
Every once in a while, even Glenn Beck conducts a brilliant interview. This video is kind of long – 10 minutes. But it’s absolutely brilliant.
Glenn is interviewing Connecticut State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.The premise of the interview is very simple. Glenn is asking Blumenthal what law AIG executives broke when they dished out those bonuses. Irrespective of your outrage over bonuses, the right answer is none. And Blumenthal is not prepared for that.
Clearly Glenn Beck is capable of conducting a great interview, just not every day . . . or week . . . or month . . .
Pop quiz everyone. In this day and age, any bank that is not in financial trouble should be congratulated? Right? Well, not according to the FDIC.
East Bridgewater Savings Bank is a small community bank in Boston. It has zero bad or delinquent loans. It has no foreclosures. It ended 2008 with $135 million in assets. It squeezed a profit of $87,000 last year.
That’s pretty good, don’t you think? FDIC disagrees. It slapped the bank with a “needs to improve” negative review, citing that Bridgewater Savings is too careful and stingy with its money. For instance, Bridgewater’s net loans and leases equaled 21 percent of assets. Compare that with 72 percent among 385 savings banks across the country with assets between $100 million and $300 million. → source
I would put a link to Bridgewater’s website but, believe it or not, it doesn’t have one. That’s another sore point with FDIC which is faulting Bridgewater for insufficient advertising and marketing.
Seems like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
It all began on Monday when Sen. Grassley was steamed about AIG bonuses. He suggested that AIG executives should resign or “commit suicide.” Not surprisingly, he apologized the next day by claiming that he didn’t mean suicide literally. → source
So, how can Grassley redeem himself? Easy! He throws himself a press event and utters the following sentence: “From my standpoint, it’s irresponsible for corporations to give bonuses at this time when they’re sucking the tit of the taxpayer.”
One thing is not quite clear to me. Does the sucking tit part come before committing suicide or as a result of it?
If you haven’t already heard or seen Rick Santelli’s rant on CNBC, check out the video below. If you have, then you probably have already made up your mind about whether he’s right or not. I hope to challenge you if you’re on his side.
Background: Santelli is a CNBC reporter (and a former derivatives trader). Last week, he went on an unintelligible rant on Chicago’s trading-floor about the $75 billion stimulus package. Among other things, he said that “the government is promoting bad behavior” by bailing out “the losers” who took out irresponsible mortgages. He went on to ask “how many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bill, raise their hands.” Cheers were shouted by floor traders.
I will not address here whether or not the stimulus package is good for our long term prosperity. That topic is irrelevant. Instead, I want to address Santelli’s idea that bailing out “the losers” who took out irresponsible mortgages promotes bad behavior.
We live in America. It’s the land that has most famously coined the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people” by a famous Republican at Gettysburg. In other words, the government is instituted to protect the people of this country – not the corporations, not the banks. The operative word here is the people.
Yes, many “losers” bought houses they could not afford. Many “losers” lied about their income on their mortgage applications. Many “losers” did not consider the inevitable consequences of signing up for unaffordable and incomprehensible mortgages. Those “losers” deserve to lose their homes. Those “losers” are partially to blame.
But then you should also consider that those “losers” would not have qualified for mortgages if the banks and mortgage companies had not made it possible. In fact, by many accounts, they down-right encouraged the practice of lending money to those who had no hope of repayment. Mr. Santelli didn’t mention anything about promoting bad behavior by bailing out those banks and mortgage companies, did he? Not once did Mr. Santelli condemn the banks for fraudulent practices, did he? Where’s your outrage, Mr. Santelli, about keeping zombie banks such as Bank of America alive? Aren’t failed banks “losers” too? Oh, I see! The banks are too big to fail, but the people are dispensable.
I strongly believe in a free market economy. But the concept of free market does not imply screwing thepeople for the benefit of corporations. The government’s focus should be to protect the people (rather than corporations) with reasonable regulations.
Please don’t tell me, my conservative friends, that you are for less government. I consider myself more conservative than liberal. But what does less government mean? It does not (and should not) mean lack of protection for the people. Do you truly believe that less regulation is always necessarily better? Do you? Do you believe that toy companies, in absence of meaningful and reasonable regulation, would have alerted you that your child is licking Chinese toys painted with lead? Free market competition would not have helped in this case if there was no mandated testing of toys. No one, including the competition, would have known about the lead paint.
I can cite many other examples, but this is not the post for it. Most conservatives I know seem to think free market implies less government regulation, but no one I speak with seems to be able to quantify what that means or how that would affect their families and daily lives.
So, Mr. Santelli, how about some respect for the people. If you rant about ”losers” who purchased houses they cannot afford, then you should go on an even bigger rant about corporations that made it all possible and encouraged the practice. If it’s OK to bail out the banks, then we should bail out the people. In my opinion, neither the people nor the banks should have been bailed out.
Rant of the year? I’m calling BS on this one. Your rant was down right irresponsible. You wouldn’t have a day job, Mr. Santelli, would you?
So, the mortgage meltdown was caused by the Republicans and on their watch, right? No so fast!
As early as April of 2001, the Bush administration, while working on its 2002 budget, called the size of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a “potential problem” that could “cause strong repercussions in the financial markets.” In 2003, John Snow, the then Treasury Secretary, lobbied Congress to create a new federal agency to effectively regulate the two mortgage giants. At that time, Barney Frank, a ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, was adamantly arguing that “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not in a crisis.”
Barney Frank: “The more people, in my judgement, exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the treasury, which I do not see. I think we see entities that are fundamentally sound financially, and withstand some of the disaster scenarios, and even if there were problems, the federal government doesn’t bail them out.”
Even Alan Greenspan, during a House Financial Services Committee Hearing in 2005, argued for regulating Fannie and Freddie.
John McCain added his concerned voice in 2006 during a speech on the Senate Floor: ” . . . and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market . . . the GSEs need to be reformed without delay.”
This entire situation is laced with irony. Here we have Republicans arguing for more regulation while key Democrats arguing that the system is working just fine – mostly in the name of providing affordable housing to all.
I am fully aware that current financial and mortgage disasters were caused by a series of fairly complicated events. Clearly what’s presented here does not fully explain everything, but it is certainly something to think about.
I know it’s still early in the investigation of this case, and that he will likely serve some prison term. But does anyone else see the irony in all this. Madoff created a $50B ponzi scheme. Countless people lost their savings and investments. His actions negatively affected the lives of others. In contrast, Martha Stewart served a 4-month jail sentence in 2004 for improperly selling (through insider trading, as it’s claimed) 4000 shares of ImClone. That action, in contrast, did not directly harm others’ well being.
Perhaps the Mayans were right all along in their belief that 2012 marks the end of the world as we know it. Numerous recent signs point to troubling, unexplained and unprecedented events.
Obama’s victory was unprecedented. The global financial meltdown is troubling. President Bush coming to the aid of the auto industry, UAW praising Bush, and a Democratically led Congress defeating a bailout package for the big three are all unexplained.
I am not an economist by any mean, but I do exhibit (most of the time) common sense and do employ (ditto) logic in my views. In the case of auto industry bailout, I’m not afraid to admit that I don’t know what the right answer is. I said so in a previous post ”Auto Industry Bail Out – What To Do, What To Do“.
First, what bothers me more than anything else about this bailout is that President Bush and VP Cheney are fierce supporters of it. That makes me skeptical beyond explanation. It is the same healthy skepticism I have of Al Gore’s intentions. Whether global warming is real or not is irrelevant to me as compared to the unbelievable profit he has made from preaching it. Gore owns a carbon trading company. He makes about $10M per year and has an estimated worth of about $100M. Google it if you don’t believe me.
Second, I reject Congress’ grilling of auto CEOs with respect to their private jets. That was just silly. It was time ill-spent. GM claims that it requires $4B to survive the next few weeks. Even if the total monthly cost of ownership and operational maintenance of GM’s private jets is $4M (and that is an uncharacteristically high number, I’ve researched it), that represents a mere one tenth of one percent of GM’s $4B deficit. In other words, who cares? I promise you, the auto industry’s problems are not because of owning and operating corporate jets.
Perhaps it was the symbolism of riding in private jets while asking for a bailout (or loan depending on your point of view). Should the CEOs have demonstrated sound judgement and left their corporate jets back in Detroit? Of Course. But let’s be realistic and not waste time on irrelevant issues.
Finally, the entire idea of CEOs working for $1 a year is also merely more symbolic than useful. Again, I promise you, that solves nothing. Their salaries are mere pocket change compared to their debts. Why $1? Who’s idea was that? Why not $0? Why not ask the CEOs to work for nothing AND give back 5% of their company stocks to be reinvested in their own company? That would make much more sense.
Here’s a fun one.
Posted by jmjorat 
Seems like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
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