#1
At the weekend Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, said that he expected running the bailout to cost $141 billionâ $200 billion less than originally thought â as banks repaid their bailouts more quickly than expected.
So far the Tarp has received $71 billion in repayments, with a further $45 billion due to be paid soon by Bank of America.
President Obama is considering using some of the $200 billion freed up from the Tarp on job stimulus programmes.
"Freed up"??
Hey - put it back where you got it. Pay off the IOUs written to our kids.
Besides, TARP is not some slush fund. It's illegal to use those funds for anything but emergency support of the financial system.
#2
The reason the financial system is in trouble is the collapse of the housing bubble. I can't say it better than Karl Denninger: the only solution to the housing mess is for house prices to contract to, on average, three times average incomes or less.
Every program from the government - literally every one - has been aimed at preventing this.
The reason is simple: Those who funded the bubble machine would be rendered insolvent - in some cases many times over - if the truth about home values was to be recognized.
Therefore, every program has been one sort of "extend, pretend and lie" or another. All of them.
Now we are finally getting people in the so-called "expert business" opining on what I have said since this crisis began: loan-to-value ratios are too high, and until they fall foreclosures will continue.
What regulators and lawmakers need to understand is this: Prices will fall - one way or the other. We are only able to determine who bears the loss of making these unsound loans, not whether the losses are ultimately recognized. All the bailouts have done is kick the problem down the road a few months at a time.
#3
Another article on Kashkari said they got dry heaves worrying about it. He has now bought a cabin on the Truckee River and chops his own wood--apparently he doesn't have much confidence it will turn around and is becoming self-sufficient.
Before Max Baucus there was Paul Wolfowitz. Will the ethical uproar be the same?
Here's a poser: Suppose a public official is accused of recommending his girlfriend for a promotion, though he was the one who first flagged the potential conflict of interest and officials had refused to let him recuse himself from decisions about the woman. Should he lose his job?
That's precisely what happened in 2007 to Paul Wolfowitz, who was run out of the World Bank on the pretext that he had given his girlfriend a raise. In fact, Mr. Wolfowitz had made bank officials aware that his girlfriend already worked at the bank before he accepted the job as president, and bank officials had raised no objection to the job change that removed his girlfriend from any direct reporting to Mr. Wolfowitz. The ethical uproar was a politically convenient excuse, fanned by the media, to oust Mr. Wolfowitz when his real offense was that he was too hard on corruption.
So it's going to be fascinating to see how the press corps and political class react to the news that Montana Senator Max Baucus recommended a staff member who was his girlfriend for the plum job of U.S. Attorney. Mr. Baucus disclosed the attempted sweetheart deal early Saturday after media inquiries made clear the story was breaking. The 67-year-old Senator disclosed that he had recommended Melodee Hanes and two others earlier this year for the U.S. Attorney post in Montana. While Presidents appoint U.S. attorneys, by tradition home-state Senators have significant influence in the selection, especially Senators from the same party as the President.
A spokesman said the Senator and Ms. Hanes began their relationship in mid-2008 after Mr. Baucus separated from his wife. Ms. Hanes left his payroll earlier this year, but only later did the couple come to their senses and decide to withdraw her application for the U.S. Attorney post. She nonetheless landed on her feet in another job at the Justice Department, and "was awarded the position based solely on her merit," the Baucus spokesman said. Of course she was.
As Senate Finance Chairman, Mr. Baucus is a crucial player in health-care reform, and our guess is that neither Democrats nor their media allies will want to explore this nepotistic near-miss lest it interfere with that greater political goal. But if they don't, we will learn a good deal about workplace ethics and political double standards.
#1
a basic rule in life is : If they CAN they will.
You can trust this rule. If they can get away with it they are going to take your wallet and if you WONT fight, they will take you in the other room and bend you over.
That's what the Left is all about and PC will get them there.
Now...what have YOU got? Or are you worth just about as much as a Lebanese flag or the word of an Arab?
#3
As I said before, Baucus is in the spotlight because a) he's relatively moderate and b) those that want the 'public option' aren't happy with the bill he's been pushing through. You can also add c) his political star was rising and there's a particular part of the political spectrum that doesn't like it.
Or, you can do a search on 'Bob Packwood'.
Again, if this was a senior Democrat like Dodd, a Frank/Franken or any other 'progressive' politician, it'd never see the light of the MSM-day.
#4
To paraphrase a line from an AL PACINO scene in "THE GODFATHER" > IN SICILY, MICHAEL CORLEONE, WOMEN ARE MORE DANGEROUS THAN GUNS ... THE WOMEN HERE ARE ALL VIRTUOUS BUT ARE NOT TO BE FRIVOLOUSLY PLAYED WITH!
#1
Darwin zero is the thermometer at Darwin Airport.
It appears the climatologists "adjusted" the temperature readings starting in the 1930s to change a long term downward trend (since 1880) in temperatures into a rapid increase. The difference between actual and adjusted is several degrees C.
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
12/08/2009 19:47 Comments ||
Top||
#2
if the hadn't added "value" to the "data" how do you think they'd have gotten their grants?
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/08/2009 20:21 Comments ||
Top||
It's the science scandal of the year. A thousand e-mails and 2,000 other documents were swiped from the server of Britain's Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University and posted on the Web. Many were truly embarrassing to the writers, while others have been quoted out of context and falsely used as "proof" global warming is "a hoax."
But in one e-mail a top "warmist" researcher does admit it's a "travesty" that "we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment." Further, "any consideration of geoengineering [is] quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not!"
"Geoengineering" - as in the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that passed the House and that the conservative Heritage Foundation estimates will lop $9.4 trillion off the economy? Geoengineering such as that to which President Obama hopes to commit us to at this week's U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen? Yes, that kind of "geoengineering."
And as it happens, the writer of that October 2009 e-mail - Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the warmist bible, the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - report told Congress two years ago evidence for man-made warming is "unequivocal." He claimed "the planet is running a 'fever' and the prognosis is that it is apt to get much worse."
But Mr. Trenberth's "lack of warming at the moment" has been going on at least a decade. "There has been no [surface-measured] warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995," observes Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Richard Lindzen. "According to satellite data, global warming stopped about 10 years ago and there's no way to know whether it's happening now," says former NASA Senior Scientist for Climate Studies Roy Spencer.
Don't tell that to Al Gore. "Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb," he warned a few years back. In a typically understated claim, he warned "we have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced." He forgot the frogs, the locusts and the boils, but point made.
And yet during the past decade we've belched so-called "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere at ever greater rates, from 6.51 billion metric tons in 1996 to 8.23 billion tons in 2006 - a 26 percent increase. Atmospheric concentrations have also reached the highest levels ever observed.
Still, no increase in warming. In fact, according to a study in Nature magazine last year, Mr. Trenberth's "moment" may last another decade and we might even see some cooling.
Now add in tremendous historical fluctuations such as the little ice age (about 1,250 to 1,850) and the medieval warming period (about 800 to 1,250) that let slip the Vikings of war, when fossil-fuel usage was virtually nil. Suddenly the simple equation of more greenhouse gases equals more warming doesn't seem so simple.
"In the IPCC view, climate change is mostly under the control of humans," says Mr. Spencer. "I believe [temperature trends] are essentially natural. Trenberth saying we don't understand why there hasn't been warming lately indeed shows mankind's role has been overstated."
Mr. Spencer is no hermit in this belief. Recently a major study in the American Geophysical Union's official publication, the Journal of Geophysical Research, supported earlier research in concluding that least 80 percent and perhaps far more of the observed warming over the past half-century is natural. Factors well beyond our control, such as cloud cover, Mr. Spencer says, matter far more than we do.
An interesting sentence, given that at the tail end of the past century they were fussing that airplane comtrails were seeding cloud formation which would lead to global climate change (I can't now remember whether the New York Times, et al were upset about warming or cooling at the time).
None of which means mankind plays no role in climate. "We know there is a greenhouse effect and adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere like carbon dioxide should cause more warming," Mr. Spencer adds. "We just don't have a clue how much." But, he adds, "2 or 3 times an extremely small number is still an extremely small number."
Bottom line: While Waxman-Markey and Mr. Obama's Copenhagen initiative would address global warming through costly carbon dioxide emissions reductions, we get no return on such an investment. Waxman-Markey would have so little effect on global climate that it's nothing more than a down payment as even the most zealous global warming crusaders concede.
Just maybe, before we take out that mortgage with our struggling economy as collateral, we ought to see how the science develops. For those who say we can't afford to wait, the answer is we can't afford not to.
#1
Somehow I've never been comfortable with the concept of "stealing" computer files. Granted that the COPYING may be unauthorized but I always picture stealing as removing something such that the original owner is left without it.
Maybe that's what comes of spending too much time as a Systems Auditor. In any case UEA would definitely get a full handshake for this one (i.e. rating of 5 where the best is 1 on a scale from 1 - 5)
#2
You can't steal something that already belongs to you. This data was all publicly owned. The criminals and fraudsters at CRU were unlawfully withholding it from its rightful owners.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
It's the science scandal of the year. A thousand e-mails and 2,000 other documents were swiped from the server of Britain's Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University and posted on the Web. Many were truly embarrassing to the writers, while others have been quoted out of context and falsely used as "proof" global warming is "a hoax." 
