AN ELIZABETH WARREN caption contest winner.
Archive for 2011
October 14, 2011
THE WORLD’S THINNEST HANDGUN? “Thinner than the ATF’s ethics handbook.”
MORE ON MONEYBALL APPROACHES to law practice and legal education.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, we’d have more troops fighting in more countries than I could keep track of. And they were right! Obama Deploys Troops to Uganda to fight Lord’s Resistance Army.
FIGHTING TO KEEP ROTC at Knoxville’s West High School. A glitch in the scheduling system caused enrollment to drop below the minimum — now it’s back up, but the decision on whether to reinstate the program is in the hands of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The students sure seem to want it.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA (CONT’D): Reverse Brain Drain: U.S. Workers Head to Canada. “There are a lot of disgruntled people who say ‘America is letting me down.’”
JOSEPH STIGLITZ’S SWITCH IN TIME:
Speaking before a group of protesters in Zuccotti Park, Nobel economics prize winner Joseph Stiglitz urged on the crowd, telling them they are “right to be indignant.” Professor Stiglitz goes on to explain, correctly in my view, that we have a financial system of socialized losses and privatized gains.
What the good professor fails to mention is only a few years ago, for what I understand was a nice paycheck, he was denying this very fact. In 2004, along with Jonathan and Peter Orszag, Professor Stiglitz wrote a paper for Fannie Mae in which he “estimated” that the “risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero.” The paper goes on to argue “that the expected cost to the government of providing an explicit government guarantee on $1 trillion in GSE debt is just $2 million.” Now I understand his Nobel is in economics, not math, but $2 million sounds no where near the actual cost so far of $160 billion.
Certainly there was a time where some could be forgiven for not really understanding the nature of Fannie and Freddie, but this was published after Freddie’s accounting scandals came to light and while Fannie itself was being investigated.
So yes, you do have a right to be indignant. Especially at those “academics” who sold their work to the highest bidder defending the system and now pretend to be shocked at how everything turned out.
Ouch.
IT’S NOT JUST “GUNWALKER:” CBS: Don’t forget Grenadewalker, too. “ATF let thousands of grenades cross the border into Mexico at roughly the same time the Mexican drug cartels were using grenades to blow up a casino and kill dozens of people.”
DOES THIS MEAN THE CHEVY VOLT ISN’T SELLING AS HOPED? GM Ditches the Gas Tank in Its New Electric Car: It seems few consumers want range-extending gas engines in their electric vehicles.
WHITE HOUSE AIDE ERIC SCHULTZ subpoenaed in Fast and Furious probe.
Related: Obama Spoke About “Fast & Furious” Before Holder Claimed He Knew.
ANOTHER WHITE HOUSE STAFF SCREWUP: Obama Honors South Korean President With Japanese Food. “What’s next? German beer for when Netanyahu visits? Does the President of the U.S. not know the history of Japanese atrocities in WWII? Koreans in all 57 states would like an explanation.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Sens. Boxer, Coburn Demand Dep’t of Education Investigation of Law Schools.
FASTER, PLEASE: Scientists Correct Sickle-Cell Disease In Mice. “U.S. scientists have found a way to get mice with a form of sickle cell disease to make normal red blood cells, offering a potential new way to treat the blood disorder in people, they reported on Thursday.”
MICHAEL YON: Thin Air. And if you missed it, check out his piece on medevac problems in Afghanistan.
WASHINGTON POST HEADLINE: Raj Rajaratnam, hedge fund billionaire, gets 11-year sentence for insider trading.
What the story doesn’t mention: Raj Rajaratnam Big Democratic Booster.
UPDATE: Other Wall Street fraudsters who donate to Dems. Bernie Madoff, for example, gave a lot.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Mike Lupica goes after President Goldman Sachs. “When do they head to Washington and start yelling about a President who often looks like the Fundraiser-in-Chief, trying to keep his job backed by what might become the richest campaign in history, in a jobless country going broke. It’s why you wonder if there will come a day when the house that Occupy Wall Street is standing in front of isn’t Jamie Dimon’s on Park Ave., it is the White House.”
MICHAEL WALSH: COMPARE AND CONTRAST: “About the only thing the Tea Party and the unwashed rabble occupying Zuccotti Park have in common is their deep loathing for the financial and political nomenklatura who precipitated the economic collapse of 2008 and — thanks to their generous campaign donations to politicians — have emerged unscathed while the rest of us suffer. Any other resemblance is purely coincidental.”
President Goldman Sachs was unavailable for comment.
Related: WaPo: Occupy Wall Street protests reveal liberal tensions. “How good can Obama be when he needs so much Wall Street money?”
MICKEY KAUS: Ford/UAW Deal In Trouble:
The deal between the UAW and Ford is in trouble. UAW members appear to be on the brink of rejecting it. That means a strike is possible. Will the UAW win a strike? I don’t think so, and the UAW leadership apparently doesn’t think so either. Remember that hundreds of thousands of competent American workers would happily perform UAW members jobs for half of UAW pay. A UAW Facebook post warning members that Ford could hire “replacement workers” has been withdrawn, but that doesn’t mean Ford won’t and it doesn’t mean the union hierachy isn’t worried.
We’d be better off without the UAW.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Obama wants a government bank to fund more Solyndras. “Now that Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., Jon Tester, D-Mont., Jim Webb, D-Va., Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., have either voted against President Obama’s American Jobs Act, or said they would if it came up for final passage, it is safe to say that the chief executive’s second stimulus program is dead. Unfortunately, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is trying to revive one of its worst big-spending provisions, creation of a national infrastructure bank to throw more billions of tax dollars at special interests favored by Democrats. It’s a terrible idea that should be rejected, along with the rest of Obama’s failed stimulus policies.” Don’t mince words, guys. Say what you really mean.