Wishing you and yours a healthy, pleasant holiday season.

One has to appreciate Mr. Elliott’s finely-honed sense of the absurd.

Mired in a scandal that could strip him of his pride, his job and the misperception that anyone shares his enthusiasm for his hair, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has now also been stripped of his clothes.

A nude portrait of the governor, by artist Bruce Elliott, is nearly complete and will hang on the wall of Elliott’s wife’s bar, the Old Town Ale House, next to his infamous depiction of a naked Sarah Palin. It is the next installment in what Elliott loosely calls his “nude governor series.” Source

See: Reap what ye sow.

Credit Suisse Group AG’s investment bank has found a new way to reduce the risk of losses from about $5 billion of its most illiquid loans and bonds: using them to pay employees’ year-end bonuses.

The bank will use leveraged loans and commercial mortgage-backed debt, some of the securities blamed for generating the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, to fund executive compensation packages, people familiar with the matter said. The new policy applies only to managing directors and directors, the two most senior ranks at the Zurich-based company, according to a memo sent to employees today.

[snip]

The securities will be placed into a so-called Partner Asset Facility, and affected employees at the bank, Switzerland’s second biggest, will be given stakes in the facility as part of their pay. Bonuses will take the first hit should the securities decline further in value.

“It’s monstrously clever,” said Dirk Hoffman-Becking, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd. in London who has a “market perform” rating on Credit Suisse stock. “From a shareholders’ perspective it’s great because you’ve got rid of some of the assets and regulators will be pleased because you’ve organized a risk transfer.”

[snip]

Assets in the facility will remain on Credit Suisse’s balance sheet and will be held in the company’s fund management division, the people familiar with the plan said. The new structure will mean that any mark-to-market losses or gains on the assets will be offset by identical gains, or losses, on the bank’s liability to employees.

Employees will receive semi-annual coupon payments on their investment in the Partner Asset Facility at the London Interbank Offered Rate plus 2.50 percentage points. The ultimate value of the facility will be determined over the next eight years as the loans and securities mature or default, the people said.

“Cash payments representing distributions of a portion of the award may be made to participants in the future contingent on the performance of the underlying assets,” Dougan and Calello said in the memo. “Cash distributions will not be made for several years.”

The bank said it expects to begin annual payments after five years. Source

Q: What does mixing Rube Goldberg, Ian Fleming and Darth Vader produce?

A: Pakistan.

Ye old scribe’s jaw dropped further and further with each more incredulous paragraph.

BUSH: …One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take …

Raddatz: But not until after the U.S. invaded.

Bush: Yeah, that’s right. So what?… Source

Enough to make the blood boil, isn’t it? Here is the woebegone G. Walker representationally carving the phrase “President of the U.S.: “So what?” into the grave marker of every person dead as a result of his administration’s invasion and occupation.

That despicable two-word casual dismissal surpasses disaffection and denial and treads firmly into the realm of sociopathy and psychosis.

No sex please, we’re in a recession.

…While the world’s oldest profession may also be one of its most recession-proof businesses, brothel owners in Europe and the United States say the global financial crisis is hurting a once lucrative industry. Source

Have mentioned the infusion of members filled with demented hate over the years here and in previous oncarnations of this blog.

The situation remains unaddressed, if not entirely sweept under the carpet. Small in gross numbers, perhaps, but it doesn’t take more than one or a very few professionally lethally trained, mentally irrational, venom-infused human time bombs to wreak great havoc.

…Military and Defense Department officials seem to have made no sustained effort to prevent active white supremacists from joining the armed forces or to weed out those already in uniform.

Furthermore, new evidence is emerging that not only supports the Intelligence Report’s original findings, but also indicates the problem may have worsened since the summer of 2006, as enlistment rates have continued to plummet, and the military has struggled to meet recruitment goals in a time of unpopular war. Asked about the latest developments, military officials this fall declined to comment.

A new FBI report confirms that white supremacists are infiltrating the military for several reasons. According to the unclassified FBI Intelligence Assessment, “White Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel Since 9/11,” which was released to law enforcement agencies nationwide: “Sensitive and reliable source reporting indicates supremacist leaders are encouraging followers who lack documented histories of neo-Nazi activity and overt racist insignia such as tattoos to infiltrate the military as ‘ghost skins,’ in order to recruit and receive training for the benefit of the extremist movement.”

[snip]

Currently, 46 members of the white supremacist social networking website Newsaxon.com identify themselves as active-duty military personnel. Six of these individuals are members of “White Military Men,” a New Saxon sub-group.

Earlier this year, the founder of White Military Men identified himself in his New Saxon account as “Lance Corporal Burton” of the 2nd Battalion Fox Company Pit 2097, from Florida, according to a master’s thesis by graduate student Matthew Kennard. Under his “About Me” section, Burton writes: “Love to shoot my M16A2 service rifle effectively at the Hachies (Iraqis),” and, “Love to watch things blow up (Hachies House).”

[snip]

As part of the research for his thesis, “The New Nazi Army: How the U.S. military is allowing the far right to join its ranks,” Kennard used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain from the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division investigative reports concerning white supremacist activity in 2006 and 2007. They show that Army commanders repeatedly terminated investigations of suspected extremist activity in the military despite strong evidence it was occurring. This evidence was often provided by regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which are made up of FBI and state and local law enforcement officials. Source

It’s been a while since the term has been used here (see glossary at bottom of blog).

A new draft report mapping the tip of this dreadful and deadly iceberg cries out for it to be used again now.

An unpublished, 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

[snip]

An unpublished, 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures. Source

Much more here.

“None of your beeswax. Shut up and trust us.” doesn’t cut it.

Star Chamber economic largess and the resultant vast, unlit chasms of uncertainty due to the deliberate withholding of data are inimical to confidence, to support and to attempted recovery to normalcy and fiercely serve to undermine them .

$2 trillion comes to nearly $7,000 apiece when spread over a 300 million population. And that’s just the amount so far stealthily slipped into the coffers over the past three months.

The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

[snip]

The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information. The institution confirmed that a records search found 231 pages of documents pertaining to some of the requests.

“If they told us what they held, we would know the potential losses that the government may take and that’s what they don’t want us to know,” said Carlos Mendez, a senior managing director at New York-based ICP Capital LLC, which oversees $22 billion in assets.

[snip]

Total Fed lending exceeded $2 trillion for the first time Nov. 6. It rose by 138 percent, or $1.23 trillion, in the 12 weeks since Sept. 14, when central bank governors relaxed collateral standards to accept securities that weren’t rated AAA.

[snip]

The Fed lent cash and government bonds to banks that handed over collateral including stocks and subprime and structured securities such as collateralized debt obligations, according to the Fed Web site.

[snip]

“Americans don’t want to get blindsided anymore,” Mendez said in an interview. “They don’t want it sugarcoated or whitewashed. They want the complete truth. The truth is we can’t take all the pain right now.”

The Bloomberg lawsuit said the collateral lists “are central to understanding and assessing the government’s response to the most cataclysmic financial crisis in America since the Great Depression.” Source

These books and ledger are our books and ledgers.

The upshot: 2,000 wiped completely from the face of the Earth.

Those of you who have been here over the years already are well aware of ye old scribe’s views on the illiterate, vicious, tyrannical thug and despot Abdul Rashid Dostum, whom the woebegone G. Walker administration repeatedly, even into Year Eight of hostilities, counts a ‘friend and ally.’

Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who’d surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime.

When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum’s headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum’s militiamen had fired into the metal containers.

Dostum’s men hauled the bodies into the nearby desert and buried them in mass graves, according to Afghan human rights officials. By some estimates, 2,000 men were buried there.

Earlier this year, bulldozers returned to the scene, reportedly exhumed the bones of many of the dead men and removed evidence of the atrocity to sites unknown. In the area where the mass graves once were, there now are gaping pits in the sands of the Dasht-e-Leili desert.

A U.N.-sponsored team of experts first spotted two large excavations on a visit in June, one of them about 100 feet long and more than 9 feet deep in places. A McClatchy reporter visited the site last month and found three additional smaller pits, which apparently had been dug since June. Source

The bodies aren’t the only evidence buried and dispersed. Ditto for complicity and truth.

NATO — which has command authority over a team of troops less than three miles from the grave site — the United Nations and the United States have been silent about the destruction of evidence of Dostum’s alleged war crimes.

Hopeful grounds for further testing.

Researchers in Nevada are reporting that waste coffee grounds can provide a cheap, abundant, and environmentally friendly source of biodiesel fuel for powering cars and trucks. Their study has been published online in the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication.

…Spent coffee grounds contain between 11 and 20 percent oil by weight. That’s about as much as traditional biodiesel feedstocks such as rapeseed, palm, and soybean oil.

Growers produce more than 16 billion pounds of coffee around the world each year. The used or “spent” grounds remaining from production of espresso, cappuccino, and plain old-fashioned cups of java, often wind up in the trash or find use as soil conditioner. The scientists estimated, however, that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world’s fuel supply. Source

Over the past eight years:

Amount of vacation time for typical American worker: 16 weeks.

Amount of vacation time for G. Walker: 16 months.

Bush data culled from here.

This time the Edsel isn’t being pushed onto the public, rather an Edsel of a plan is being funded by the public.

Short take is that, going in, looking askance at an ownership entity of Chrysler named after the canine guard of the underworld (Coincidence? One suspects not. Heck, viewed one way, it’s a proud advertisement of being three-faced.) and which also handsomely pays Dan Quayle as a lobbyist (’nuff said) should be the least of cautions to take before providing unencumbered (or even encumbered) massive federal funding.

But no-o-o-o…

No, there’s nothing inherently wrong with supporting strengthening the structural backbone of modern society, but color ye old scribe just a wee bit skeptical as to motivation.

Big business is lining up to support President-elect Obama’s plan to stimulate the economy with the biggest spending spree on roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects since the Eisenhower administration.

Business groups believe injecting funds into rebuilding America’s roads and highways could put thousands back to work at a time of rising unemployment. As a result, lobbyists from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) are asking lawmakers and Obama’s transition team to funnel federal funds to “shovel-ready” projects as the best way to stimulate the flagging economy. Source

Why?

1) The handwriting is clear and unassailable that there will be a Democratic administration and a Democratic lock on Congress. Not getting a foot in the door at the start is just plain self-destructive. Opposing en masse what is a keystone policy initiative right off the bat is a guarantor of limiting later access.

2) Deep down (maybe not even all that deep), this is looked at as (primarily) ‘free money.’ That is, it, unlike the ‘bailout’ funding for the banking and finance industries which is being shuffled around in-house or in-sector, will shower down directly or indirectly to the benefit of those with goods (and with related or ancillary services) to sell, whether through a multiple-branching tree chart of sub-contractors or by way of an increased consumer pool of relatively well-paid workers (along with their chunk of disposable income) whose costs are not nearly as much being borne by their employers as would normally be the case. In short, the cost-benefit ratio is amenable to the business sector as the output for labor is greatly minimized while the potential for income via sales is de facto increased by what is perceived as ’someone else’s money.’

Now, just because the stance may be seen as self-serving does not necessarily equate with the stance as being ill-conceived. But let’s all go into this with eyes wide open, shall we?

A trio of stories which ye old scribe found of particular interest today and which are recommended with little beyond introductory comment.

Drip, drip, drip.

A military contractor has provided federal investigators with a first-person account of a shooting in Baghdad last year that resulted in the death of 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians, according to a court filing just unsealed. […] According to the proffer, one Iraqi “was shot in his chest, while standing in the street with his hands up.” Additionally, none of the victims “was an insurgent, and many were shot while inside of civilian vehicles that were attempting to flee…. Source

Mucking out the stalls of the woebegone G. Walker administration: Having someone head an agency tasked with protecting the environment who does not possess (or, worse, who has rejected) even the most rudimentary concepts (for example: rejection, refutation, revision or alteration resultant from reproducible experiment and test, inclusive of any foundational core) of the differences between a science and an ideology — an unmitigated retrograde disaster for the agency, for the public, for the planet.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson willingly endorsed the Bush administration’s push to put business interests ahead of his agency’s mission to “to protect human health and the environment” An extended profile of Johnson published Sunday by the Philadelphia Inquirer reveals that the evangelical Johnson is unwilling – or unable – to separate religion from science.

[snip]

Johnson will leave office having tarnished the reputation of the agency, decimated staff morale, and degraded the health and safety of the American public. Condemnation of his tenure is near-universal. Four former Republican administrators — Russell Train (Nixon and Ford), William K. Reilly (George H.W. Bush), Christine Todd Whitman (George W. Bush), and William Ruckelshaus (Nixon and Reagan) all criticized Johnson to the Inquirer for deferring to the president and polluters instead of obeying his sworn oath to enforce the law. Source

Knowledge is power, and power is not exclusive: Empowering the general public via access.

President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team is giving another hint of how its approach to open government would be different from the Bush administration’s: It is posting the suggestions it is receiving from interest groups on its Web site.

[snip]

The new disclosure policy is certainly a way of making good on Obama’s campaign promises of open government, but it’s also a way of putting the greatest possible distance between the new administration and Vice President Dick Cheney, who famously refused to release the names of the people and groups who had advised his energy task force. Obama specifically cited the Cheney example in his campaign proposal to increase transparency in government.

“It signals to the public that this is going to be an open administration, not just in the White House, but throughout the executive branch” said Ellen Miller, co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation, a group that advocates greater openness in government. Source

Little mentioned, but yet another demonstration of how the Hawaiian tradition of pono is seemingly a bedrock principle being dutifully and deliberately thrust into practice under President-elect Obama.

The woebegone G. Walker administration. determined on going out on a carpet of lies, still brazenly attempting simplistic methodologies of dissembling, misdirection, and cherry-picking. In short,

1) The blind leading the bland.

2) Blather, rinse, repeat.

We long ago gave up hope that President Bush would acknowledge his many mistakes, or show he had learned anything from them. Even then we were unprepared for the epic denial that Bush displayed in his interview with ABC News’ Charles Gibson the other day, which he presumably considered an important valedictory chat with the American public as well.

[snip]

After everything the American public and the world have learned about how Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney manipulated Congress, public opinion and anyone else they could bully or lie to, Bush is still acting as though he decided to invade Iraq after suddenly being handed life and death information on Saddam Hussein’s arsenal.

The truth is that Bush, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been chafing to attack Iraq before Sept. 11, 2001. They justified that unnecessary war using intelligence reports that they knew or should have known to be faulty. And it was pressure from the White House and a highly politicized Pentagon that compelled people like Secretary of State Colin Powell and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to ignore the counter-evidence and squander their good names on hyped claims of weapons of mass destruction.

Despite it all, Bush said he will “leave the presidency with my head held high.” And, presumably, with his eyes closed to all the disasters he is dumping on the American people and his successor. Source

Accountability, thankfully, is not a dead concept. But it sure as shootin' has atrophied over the past eight years.

Irresponsible use, inadequate or non-existent regulation and rampant dumping into the ecosphere heralds a long-term toll to a not so brave new world.

The male gender is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals.

The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people.

[snip]

Backed by some of the world’s leading scientists, who say that it “waves a red flag” for humanity and shows that evolution itself is being disrupted….

It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals.

“This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat,” says Gwynne Lyons, a former government adviser on the health effects of chemicals, who wrote the report.

[snip]

The report – published by the charity CHEMTrust and drawing on more than 250 scientific studies from around the world – concentrates mainly on wildlife, identifying effects in species ranging from the polar bears of the Arctic to the eland of the South African plains, and from whales in the depths of the oceans to high-flying falcons and eagles.

It concludes: “Males of species from each of the main classes of vertebrate animals (including bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) have been affected by chemicals in the environment.

“Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a widespread occurrence. All vertebrates have similar sex hormone receptors, which have been conserved in evolution. Therefore, observations in one species may serve to highlight pollution issues of concern for other vertebrates, including humans.” Source

Idle musing on December 7:

FDR took us from Depression to Pearl Harbor to war to incipient prosperity.

GWB took us from prosperity to a Pearl Harbor-type incident to war to incipient Depression.

1) “This is such a surprise. It’s hard on the family.”

Oh, please. As compared to the weight imposed on families of the dead and maimed as a result of what has been found, investigation after investigation, to be an unprovoked massacre? Spare us the treacle and schmaltz.

Attorneys for five Blackwater Worldwide security guards charged in a 2007 shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead accused the government yesterday of engaging in unfair second-guessing of the contractors’ actions in a combat zone.

[snip]

The guards were working as Blackwater security contractors for the State Department when their convoy pulled into Nisoor Square and they opened fire.

An Iraqi government investigation concluded that the guards fired without provocation, and the U.S. military and the FBI found that the guards were the only ones who opened fire that day. Blackwater, which is not a target in the investigation, has consistently said the men were fired upon. Source

2) “I think ideas are often underrated in Washington,” said Federalist Society President Eugene B. Meyer. “People think it’s all about power, but at the end of the day, ideas are very important.”

Recalibrating the scales of justice is not in any context a detriment.

The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy was founded seven years ago to counter a growing right-leaning legal philosophy that has reshaped the American legal landscape on issues from the reach of federal regulation to the separation of church and state. Now, as President-elect Barack Obama assembles his administration, the little-known legal organization stands on the brink of influence it once could only imagine. Source

3) Restoration 101.

One of the most outward symbols of that power shift in the Bush years has been Vice President Dick Cheney’s attendance at weekly Senate Republican strategy luncheons. Cheney’s access to lawmakers enabled the White House to extend its reach into the legislative branch in ways unmatched in modern presidential history.

Congressional observers say Cheney’s presence helped create an atmosphere in which many Republicans favored party unity above congressional independence from the executive branch — perhaps most forcefully in debates over national security and the Iraq war.

“Cheney would come in there and try to force discipline on the Republican senators,” said Rutgers University Professor Ross Baker, who studies Congress.

“He was the Bigfoot that came into those meetings,” Baker continued. “If someone got out of line, he would put a thumb in their eyes.

“It’s something I think people will puzzle over for a long time — how passive the Republicans were, and how easily led they were by the Republican White House,” he said. “I don’t think that Reid wants a repetition of that at all.” Source

Tales of the woebegone G. Walker administration, chapter 87, 119:

1) He got away with it for 4 years without FEMA noticing?

A former FEMA worker who stole the identities of disaster victims to go on shopping sprees — which a federal judge called “low down” — was sentenced Friday to more than five years in federal prison.

[snip]

Davis stole the identities of over 200 people while working at several mortgage companies and with natural disaster victims while at the Federal Emergency Management Agency from December 2003 to November 2007. About 30 of those people had given their information to FEMA as part of their applications for disaster relief.

He used the accounts to go on shopping sprees and ordered gold and diamond jewelry, designer watches, gourmet food including steaks, lobster, and seafood, and lingerie and clothing. Things that Davis did not keep he pawned. Source

2) The beat of the ‘couldn’t organize a one-person parade down Main Street of a ghost town’ administration goes on:

A seaports security program spurred by the 9/11 attacks has hit yet another snag, causing concern that commerce could be slowed during the busy holiday season.

House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson said ID card applications for about 3,000 seaport workers were inadvertently deleted by the program’s contractor, Lockheed Martin. The Mississippi Democrat’s panel oversees the program that aims to make sure potential terrorists cannot access sensitive security areas of US seaports.

“The department’s implementation of the program has been an abysmal failure,” Thompson wrote in a letter dated yesterday to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Additionally, at least 150 workers have been told by their port operators that they cannot work until they have the secure card, Thompson said.

[snip]

The seaports program has faced several problems and delays since it was prescribed six years ago. Most of the machines that print the ID cards were malfunctioning earlier this year. In May, officials decided to extend the compliance deadline by six months. While more than 466,000 cards were activated as of this week, not all ports have machine readers to read them. The $70 million-plus program also has been criticized because of potentially intrusive background checks on the workers, who have to foot the bill for the $132.50 cost of the card. Source

3) Say what? Ronald Reagan was too strict on guns?

The Interior Department revised a Reagan-era regulation Friday that now allows persons to carry concealed firearms in some national parks and wildlife refuges.

[snip]

The park rule will be published in the Federal Register next week and take effect 30 days later, well before President-elect Barack Obama takes office Jan. 20. Overturning the rule could take months or even years, since it would require the new administration to restart the lengthy rule-making process. Source

That last is yet another in a long string of ‘midnight rulings’ which are the policy equivalent of salting the earth before the next administration begins to till it. Not to mention spitting in the face of rule- and law-making procedure while also granting the broad an very often self-serving wish lists of some of the most extreme loyalists to a failed tenure.