FROM MEGAN MCARDLE, savings advice for the New Year.
Some related advice here. Of course, it helps to have a job, which is not to be taken for granted in the Obama Economy.
Archive for December, 2011
December 28, 2011
CHUTZPAH: Eric Holder on cops killed with illegal guns. Hey, only some of those cops were killed with illegal guns sold to Mexican drug cartels by the Justice Department.
UPDATE: Chuck Simmins emails:
Holder may not have actually read the report. http://www.nleomf.org/assets/pdfs/reports/2011-EOY-Report.pdf
The report seems to say nothing about the use of illegal weapons. It does note that the record low for firearms fatalities was in 2008, and that since Obama came in to office the number of firearms fatalities for law enforcement has increased 70 percent. 25 of the line of duty deaths reported were due to illness or heart attack. 61 percent of all line of duty deaths were not gun related.
Six individual cases are profiled in the report. All six were clearly preventable. Only one involved a firearm and that officer was killed with his own gun.
Hmm.
YEAR-END DEALS in Toys & Books.
KEVIN WILLIAMSON ON Wall Street and Crony Capitalism.
For a few measly millions, Wall Street not only bought itself a president, but got the start-up firm of B. H. Obama & Co. LLC to throw a cabinet into the deal, too — on remarkably generous terms. President Obama, for a guy prone to delivering prim and smug little homilies denouncing greed, greed, greed — the only of the seven deadly sins that truly offends Democrats (though Mrs. Obama has done some desultory work on gluttony) — is strangely comfortable among the Gordon Gekkos of this world. Shall we have a partial roll call? Beat the drum slowly and call out the names: With unemployment still topping 9 percent, the catastatic world economy teetering on the brink of another, even larger financial catastrophe, and trillion-dollar U.S. deficits as far as the green-shaded eye can see, let’s hear it for Obama’s first National Economic Council director, Lawrence Summers (of hedge-fund giant D. E. Shaw and venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz), who has had some nice paydays courtesy of Lehman Bros., JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup. Let’s hear it for Citigroup’s Michael Froman, deputy assistant to the president and deputy national-security adviser for international economic affairs, for Hartford Financial’s Neal Wolin, deputy Treasury secretary, for JPMorgan’s William Daley, Obama’s chief of staff, and for his predecessor, Rahm Emanuel of Wasserstein Perella. Let’s hear it for Fannie Mae’s Tom Donilon, national-security adviser. (No, seriously: One of the luminous interstellar geniuses who brought Fannie Mae to its current aphotic state of affairs, upside down to the tune of trillions of dollars, is running national security, and the former director of the White House Military Office, Louis Caldera, was on the board of IndyMac when it finally went toes up — sleep tight, America!) And, lest we forget, let’s have three big, sloppy cheers for economic-transition team leaders Robert Rubin (Goldman Sachs, Citigroup) and folksy tax enthusiast/ghoulish billionaire vulture Warren Buffett.
That’s a pretty fantastic lineup, from Wall Street’s point of view, but the real bonus turned out to be Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who came up through the ranks as part of the bipartisan Robert Rubin–Hank Paulson–Citigroup–Goldman Sachs cabal. Geithner, a government-and-academe man from way back, never really worked on Wall Street, though he once was offered a gig as CEO of Citigroup, which apparently thought he did an outstanding job as chairman of the New York Fed, where one of his main tasks was regulating Citigroup — until it collapsed into the yawning suckhole of its own cavernous ineptitude, at which point Geithner’s main job became shoveling tens of billions of federal dollars into Citigroup, in an ingeniously structured investment that allowed the government to buy a 27 percent share in the bank, for which it paid more than the entire market value of the bank. If you can’t figure out why you’d pay 100-plus percent of a bank’s value for 27 percent of it, then you just don’t understand high finance or high politics.
Read the whole thing.
PETER WALLISON AND EDWARD PINTO: Why the Left is Losing the Argument over the Financial Crisis.
Summarized below are the original numbers we relied on, taken from Fannie and Freddie’s own data and from the views of bank regulators—and now supplemented with additional data from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent complaints against certain officers of Fannie and Freddie. Of particular interest are Fannie and Freddie’s non-prosecution agreements with the SEC, in which they agree with facts that confirm—and in many cases go beyond—our original research concerning the scope of the GSEs’ subprime and Alt-A exposure. These are facts, and Nocera and others who might wish it otherwise should become familiar with them.
For example, in its non-prosecution agreement Freddie agreed that as of June 30, 2008, it had $244 billion in subprime loans, comprising 14 percent of its credit guaranty portfolio, rather than the $6 billion it had previously disclosed. Freddie also agreed that it had $541 billion in reduced documentation loans alone, vastly more than the $190 billion in previously disclosed Alt-A loans which Freddie had said included loans with reduced documentation.
While the SEC documents about $1.03 trillion in previously undisclosed subprime and Alt-A loans in Fannie and Freddie’s credit guaranty portfolios, an estimated $812.8 billion, or about 80 percent, were already accounted for in the totals of Fannie and Freddie subprime and Alt-A exposures included in Pinto’s Forensic Study and Wallison’s Dissent from the majority report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
The SEC findings add $219 billion and 1.43 million loans to our original Fannie and Freddie subprime and Alt-A totals, bringing the combined subprime and Alt-A total to $2.041 trillion and 13.37 million loans.
If the left were winning the argument, Barney Frank wouldn’t have resigned.
WELL, SHOOTING A GUN IS “ZEN-LIKE,” when you do it well.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Your Brownie Husband Looks Delicious. “I mean, he could get messy in bed, but Duncan Hines’ Brownie Husband makes dating the Gingerbread Man look like a joke.”
TAM: You Are The Weapon. Don’t forget this.
JENNIFER RUBIN: Obama’s annus horribilis. “President Obama has had the worst year of his presidency. Or, to be more precise, his performance this year has been the worst of his presidency. Pundits and pollsters will say that his ‘numbers are up,’ but let’s look at what he’s done or not done.”
#GREENFAIL: Prospects Darken For Solar Energy Companies.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN . . . OH, HELL, YOU KNOW THE REST: Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing.
NORTH KOREA’S SUCCESSION, and Two More Holiday Hotspots to Watch.
THE HILL: Perry blasts Obama for not hosting parade for returning US troops. “It really disturbs me that nearly after nine years of war in Iraq that this president wouldn’t welcome home our many heroes with a simple parade in their honor.”
UPDATE: A reader emails:
You know, I just wish that my friends on the Right—whom all say that they detest the policies of Barack Obama and his supporters—would just soldier their way through this next election. I’m afraid they will sit it out, in a electoral fit of pique because the nominee isn’t conservative enough or is too conservative or whatever.
After we get this gang (and I use that word intentionally) out of the Oval Office, then, my friends on the Right can form their Third Party, or push a candidate that they feel is “conservative enough” and so forth.
2012 is too important. And sitting out the election, or carping about a particular candidate…well, it just makes Axelrod smile. And it smooths the path not toward “Four More Years,” but “Four Worse Years.”
Yeah. If, as I expect, Obama is trailing in Tennessee by double digits, I’ll vote for Gary Johnson. But if it even looks like it might be close, I’ll vote for whoever the GOP nominee is, and feel good about it. Obama has been a presidential disaster without parallel in my lifetime, and that must be brought to an end before anything constructive can begin.
Meanwhile, Operation Counterweight has started. “Meet the guy who can take down Sheldon Whitehouse.”
GEN. MCCAFFREY on Mexico.
IS THE ANSWER PERVASIVE DISINFORMATION? Government Total Recall On Past Communications. “UCLA electrical engineering prof John Villaseno thinks the growing capacity of computers to collect, store, and analyze data will enable governments to assess, track, and draw connections between dissidents on a scale previously not seen. . . . As the cost of computer disk storage and other storage media continue to plummet the amount that governments can record goes up. Storage costs have fallen so far that the amount that can be captured about each person and kept long term has gotten pretty detailed. In the future the amount that can be recorded and stored per person will undergo more doublings. Every phone conversation that takes place will be able to be captured and stored for decades. . . . When a government decides someone is of interest as a potential trouble maker that government will be able to quickly analyze every phone conversation (and a large fraction of all online text conversations) that person ever participated in . Then threat assessment software will assess the threat posed by the citizen who is critical of the regime. A retrospective approach is not the only possibility of course. A political threat profile could be maintained that gets continually updated with the latest movements, utterances, and purchasing decisions.”
HOPE AND CHANGE: More and more women embracing gun ownership.
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is Japan’s Prius Cup the world’s most boring form of motorsports?
SCOURING THE MOON for alien footprints.
BOB OWENS: More on the NY Times gun lie… and media lies in general. “It’s easy for people to look at areas in which they specialize and find the lies that editors and journalists pass off as ‘news,’ but what people are afraid to do is consider is that the rest of the news is just as blinkered. What we have here is just one story of hundreds published in the Times this week that has been conclusively debunked. What would happen if all of the stories in the Times – or the Washington Post, or your local newspaper or television news – were subject to the sort of expert scrutiny as this Luo article, in a given day or week? What percentage of reporting would we discover is marginally biased, seriously slanted, or even fabricated?”
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Europe Is Still Hip Deep In The Bad Stuff.
Combined intervention by the world’s central banks and an open door policy by the ECB to European banks wanting to borrow lots of money fast calmed the world’s markets this month. We are no longer having to think about whether the international financial system might melt down over a long weekend, and the relief plus continuing good if not spectacular news from the US economy made December a much better month than the world feared.
But if Europe dodged the charge of an angry bear last month, it is still hopelessly lost in the woods. The proposal for a new, souped up fiscal union treaty has bogged down in the usual horsetrading, favor swapping and generally ineffective European legislative process. More profoundly, the core cultural problem at the heart of the economic problem remains: northern and southern Europe are different places that need different rules, and the euro requires them to live and play as one.
Good luck with that.
SOME BEN NELSON HISTORY:
Nebraska’s Ben Nelson announced today that he will not seek re-election next November, despite the please of Harry Reid and other Democrats. Presumably Nelson chose to retire in response to polls that convinced him he faced an uphill battle.
One of the sources of Nelson’s unpopularity in Nebraska was his vote for Obamacare. So this is an opportune moment to recall the Cornhusker Kickback, one of a number of acts of outright corruption on which Obamacare was based. The Kickback provided that the federal government would pick up Nebraska’s tab–but only Nebraska’s–for the new Medicaid recipients that would be created by the statute, apparently in perpetuity. That was the bribe that Obama needed to get Nelson’s vote, and Nelson evidently thought his sweetheart deal would insulate him against criticism for voting for the unpopular bill. One wonders: how can such a special arrangement for a single state possibly be constitutional? But constitutionality was never a big concern where Obamacare was concerned.
To Nelson’s surprise, perhaps, the kickback didn’t entirely placate his Cornhusker constituents. What is wrong with those people? Don’t they know a good payoff when they see one? Maybe Thomas Frank needs to write a new book called What’s the Matter With Nebraska?
The moral, I suppose, is that there are still a considerable number of voters–in the red states, anyway–who are not interested in being bought.
Indeed. This may have been his first hint:
Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson and his wife were leaving dinner at a new pizza joint near their home in Omaha one night last week when a patron began complaining about Nelson’s decisive vote in favor of the Senate’s health care bill.
Other customers started booing. A woman yelled, “Get him the hell out of here!” And the Nelsons and their dining companions beat a hasty retreat.
“It was definitely a scene in there,” said Tom Lewis, a 41-year-old dentist and registered Republican who witnessed the incident. A second witness confirmed the incident to POLITICO.
It’s a new experience for Nelson.
He used to be a popular figure back home, a Democrat who served eight years in the governor’s office and was elected twice to the Senate by a state that’s as red as the “N” on the University of Nebraska’s football helmets.
But Nelson has seen his approval ratings tumble in the wake of his wavering over the historic health care bill, his deal-cutting with other Senate Democrats and, ultimately, his support to break a GOP filibuster and send the bill to a House-Senate conference committee.
Good riddance.
HOWIE CARR TO THE SCOTT BROWN HATERS: Consider The Alternative. “My question is, if Scott Brown is so damn liberal, how come the Democrats already are spending millions upon millions of dollars to knock him out of the Senate next year?”