Wednesday’s Mini-Report

November 7, 2007

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* This really isn’t good: “Wall Street suffered its second big drop in a week Wednesday, with investors worried about spreading fallout from the credit crisis at banks and about a dollar that just keeps getting weaker. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 360 points — just about matching its plunge of last Thursday. A passel of worries tormented investors, including the dollar, which swooned amid speculation that China will seek to diversify some of its foreign currency stockpiles beyond the greenback. Meanwhile, a record loss from General Motors Corp. owing to an accounting adjustment further dragged on sentiment.”

* The president has been eerily quiet about the crisis in Pakistan, but today he picked up the phone: “President Bush told Pakistan’s president on Wednesday that he must hold parliamentary elections and step down as army leader. ‘You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time,’ Bush said, describing a telephone call with Gen. Pervez Musharraf. ‘I had a very frank discussion with him.'”

* In related news: “Following four days of relatively tepid statements, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto on Wednesday issued a rousing call to action against President Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of emergency rule, setting up a possible direct confrontation between two titans of Pakistani power. Bhutto, whose legions of rank-and-file supporters have been conspicuously absent from anti-Musharraf demonstrations this week, called her backers to join in a major rally on Friday in Rawalpindi, headquarters for the army, which Musharraf heads. After that, she said, opponents of emergency rule would begin ‘a long march’ from the eastern city of Lahore to the capital, Islamabad.”

* Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.): “Two weeks ago, I learned of the indictment of David H. Brooks, the founder and former CEO of Point Blank Solutions, Inc., and its COO Sandra Hatfield for insider trading, fraud, obstruction of justice, and tax evasion to the tune of nearly $200 million dollars. Point Blank Solutions, Inc., formerly DHB Industries, is a leading U.S. manufacturer of body armor for our troops and law enforcement, manufacturing more than a million Interceptor body armor units that have been standard issue to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last several years.”

* TPMM: “Malcolm Nance, good-spirited though he is, is a pugnacious guy. Nearly 20 years’ service in the Navy, including time instructing would-be Navy SEALs how to resist and survive torture if captured. Intelligence and counterterrorism expert. Several years in Iraq as a security contractor. So don’t expect him to suffer in silence if his credibility is attacked during testimony to a House panel tomorrow about his personal experiences with waterboarding.”

* It took five vetoes, but it looks like we’ll see our first override: “The House voted to override a veto by President Bush for the first time yesterday, acting to save a $23 billion water resources bill stuffed with pet projects sought by lawmakers from both political parties. The Senate is likely to follow suit as early as today, in what would be the biggest Republican defection of Bush’s tenure — even given the legislation’s obscurity.”

* Karen Hughes apparently won’t be missed by some of her international observers. G. Khouri, a widely respected columnist in Lebanon’s Daily Star, wrote that Hughes “should apologize for subjecting her own country, and we who were the objects of her mission, to what can only be described as a monumental and insulting hoax.” Ouch.

* Spencer Ackerman: “Just in time for Michael Mukasey’s impending Senate vote to become attorney general, the ACLU has discovered that one of his would-be underlings, Steven Bradbury of the Office of Legal Counsel, penned three memoranda in 2005 on the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the CIA. The discovery raises the possibility that the Justice Department has penned other as-yet-unknown torture memos since 2005.”

* The House has debated the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) for much of the afternoon. The Gavel has some informative coverage.

* The man-crush continues: “On the November 6 edition of Hardball, Chris Matthews asserted, ‘I’m not going to sell Rudy [Giuliani]. It’s not my job to sell anybody.’ But Matthews declared Giuliani ‘the person with the best shot to win the Republican nomination,’ and he and his panelists called Giuilani a ‘a gunslinger,’ ‘a straight-talker,’ ‘a quick draw,’ ‘a tough, kick-butt policeman,’ and ‘this tough, kick-butt cop from New York.”

* It’s been quite a while since Halliburton was in the news for getting into trouble. I guess the company was due. (thanks to reader B.H.)

* Asked today about his Iraq policy, the president offered the following: “If you lived in Iraq and had lived under a tyranny, you’d be saying: ‘God, I love freedom,’ because that’s what’s happened.” You know, I have a hunch that’s not what Iraqis are saying right now. Call it a hunch.

Anything to add? Consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.

You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time. -President Bush

Instead, just hire a sycophant crony. When they stop believing in your divine right to lead, just fire them and find another sycophant crony.

  • ‘You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time,’ Bush said, describing a telephone call with Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

    Can Bush also not be President and head of the military? I think that would solve a bunch of our problems. But alas, then he might just turn the military over to Cheney.

  • If Musharraf were to actually allow “real” elections, he’d likley loose to the hard-core Islamic groups.

  • Chris Matthews said:

    ‘a tough, kick-butt policeman,’ and ‘this tough, kick-butt cop from New York.”

    So now they’re going to pretend Giuliani’s a cop?

    Hm- trying to fight a cross-dresser image, maybe?

    Remember- a prosecutor is not a cop! A prosecutor is a lawyer, and Giuliani was never a cop, never want to police academy, and never received any cop training!

  • Under our constitution, our president IS the head of the military. He’s called the Commander-in-Chief, remember? It doesn’t make any sense for Bush to tell Musharraf can’t be both president and head of Pakistan’s army.

    Pakistan’s Supreme Court was trying to tell Musharraf that he couldn’t be president any longer. If Bush wants the “rule of law” in Pakistan, he should be telling Musharraf to step down as president.

    Bush is clueless. Totally clueless. And so is whoever is advising him. I’m talking about you, Condi.

  • ‘You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time,’ Bush said, describing a telephone call with Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

    Whenever they report such conversations that Bush has with other world leaders, it always sounds like he’s lecturing them and laying down the law. It always makes me wonder just how they take such a conversation from someone with Bush’s obvious cluelessness. It must REALLY rankle! I wonder if any of them have ever just told him to piss off.

  • This Really Isn’t Good: And that understates the problem by several orders of magnitude. All of the major investment banks are skating the edges of bankruptcy. The commenters on the major econ sites are in a major wad about the possible fallout. Personally I think our genius government is steering us to a financial meltdown to save us from global warming and peak oil, but then I’ve been off my meds for about a week now!!

  • “You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time.”

    Only Cheney can do that. And even he wouldn’t be able to do it if Pelosi and Reid had the balls required of them by their Constitutional oath of office.

  • The thing about the stock market is, much as people are getting jittery and would like to get out and find a safer harbor, there just aren’t a many other places for the money to go right now. Bonds suck because the federal government is so far in hock. Real estate isn’t looking like a real high-growth-potential sector at the moment. Gold is already sky high and a pain in the ass to own anyway. Foreign equities markets are as vulnerable as our own and commodities trading really isn’t for the casual investor.

    There are those internet savings accounts paying around 4-5% now, but if you’re a small investor then most of your investments are in 401k or IRA accounts so that might not even be an option. It isn’t for me (I checked). Large investors wanting to go that route would of course have to deal with splitting up large sums into multiple accounts at multiple banks to keep balances under the $100k FDIC insurance limit. I also think higher savings rates tend to have a positive effect on equities markets in general (but don’t quote me on that).

    Anyway, I’m certainly no expert but it seems very possible to me that the equities markets could conceivably stay pretty healthy right through a recession as things stand right now. I also read somewhere that the market tends to do better under Democratic presidential administrations than Republican, so making one of those happen would be a positive move all around.

  • From Bloomberg: Banks Face $100 Billion of Writedowns on Level 3 Rule

    The opening graf:
    Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) — U.S. banks and brokers face as much as $100 billion of writedowns because of Level 3 accounting rules, in addition to the losses caused by the subprime credit slump, according to Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc.

    For those of us who don’t know Level 3 accounting rules from a hole in the ground, the article explains:
    Under FASB terminology, Level 1 means mark-to-market, where an asset’s worth is based on a real price. Level 2 is mark-to- model, an estimate based on observable inputs which is used when no quoted prices are available. Level 3 values are based on “unobservable” inputs reflecting companies’ “own assumptions” about the way assets would be priced.

    Oil’s going to be at $100/bbl before long, we’re no longer able to use home equity as an ATM, our savings rate is negative, and the dollar is slipping against all of the commonly traded currencies.

    We may be in for a rough patch. I’d be a bit more confident if Bush’s economic team was 1000% more competent than his diplomatic team.

  • “This really isn’t good.” I’m afraid this might be double-plus ungood. A double bubble. We’ve all known that the housing boom/loosey-goosey credit constituted the dot.com bubble of the this decade, that it had to end, that there’d be serious financial consequences when it did.

    And that happened.

    But I’ve been concerned about a kind of stealth bubble – the mighty United States economy itself. It’s struck me for years that for a country that doesn’t produce anything anymore, we live awfully well. And now we see the dollar nose-diving. Is that a sign that the rest of the world has caught on that there’s a lot of hot air in this economy of ours?

    Economists out there – tell me it’s not happening.

  • Lookee here, hark, just because we don’t make or grow or know anything that the rest of the world wants enough to pay us for it doesn’t mean that we’re in trouble.

    I mean, a snake can eat its own tail forever – right?

  • “President Bush told Pakistan’s president on Wednesday that he must hold parliamentary elections and step down as army leader.”

    Makes me wonder how they handle Bush’s phone calls. For his speeches, they have ghost writers/thinkers. But how do they handle phone calls? We all know what happens when Bush goes into unscripted Q&A mode – absolute incoherence.

    The tip-off, of course, is the phrase, “parliamentary elections.” There’s no way this imbecile knows how to use it in a sentence, if he can even pronounce it.

  • In Washington Tuesday, members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee savaged Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callahan for the company’s involvement in the 2005 jailing of a Chinese dissident. But if their bipartisan criticism of Yahoo’s behavior – cooperating with a Chinese government “subpoena-like document” to supply information about journalist accused of the “illegal provision of state secrets” – sounds disingenuous, it should. After all, those are trademark tactics of the Bush administration and its Republican amen corner in the aftermath of 9/11.

    For the details, see:
    “Yahoo, China and Bush’s America.”

  • Makes me wonder how they handle Bush’s phone calls. For his speeches, they have ghost writers/thinkers. But how do they handle phone calls? We all know what happens when Bush goes into unscripted Q&A mode – absolute incoherence.

    They just coach him. It’s like if you’re a young teenaged girl and you haven’t really talked to boys yet in a boy-girl type way, and you’re shy about it, so your girlfriends coach you and tell you exactly what to say on the phone and how to handle everything before you do.

    They just come up with a game-plan for Bush, and then they tell him exactly what to tell Musharraf. And they probably have ideas like, ‘open up the conversation by saying [whatever],’ or ‘end the conversation by saying [whatever]’ or ‘make sure he’s gotten the point that [whatever] by the time you end the conversation’ and maybe they even listen in while he talks– kind of ‘holding his hand’ to make him feel watched, and make him feel like he needs to stick to the script. Bush could follow instructions like that. He’s not a fool at playing the game and patronizing people, so he’s smart enough to follow a plan like this.

  • The world is finally realizing that America is no longer the mighty producer it once was. It’s just a matter of time before oil is traded exlcusively in euros, not dollars. It’s amazing that the oil market has let the dollar reign this long – I guess the Bilderberg group has a lot more power than perhaps some of us originally thought. Middle class warfare at its finest.

  • The subprime meltdown is nothing yet, when compared to the severe overextension caused by banks continuously trying to hedge their profit-loss ratios in muni-funds. I’ve seen and heard a few econ-sites mentioning a high potential for this to turn into a trillion-dollar fiasco.

    That’s “trillion” with a “T.”

    A write-down of that size is a sure-fire way to start a whole fleet of bank runs.

    Any of you “youngsters” ever see a bank run before? Imagine going up to the ATM and finding it turned off. Imagine trying to make a withdrawal—but the doors are locked. Try buying groceries when the frocery store refuses your check, your debit-card gets rejected, and that shiny Citigroup Visa in your pocket has a buying power equal to the recycle value of the plastic it’s made of.

    Add to that the news that $110 worth of 2002 dollars is only worth $77 today, oil rolling past the $100-mark like Panzers through papier mache, milk climbing $0.20 a gallon retail over the weekend, and a national dependence on imported goods and services manufactured by nations who are losing all confidence—in our currency’s value.

    All hail neoconservativism—the political equivalent of Herbert Hoover!

  • Update on an earlier item from CB:

    ENDA Passes House Without Trans Protections

    (Washington) The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act but with without protections for trans-workers after more than five hours of debate, wrangling, maneuvering and lobbying.

    In the end the House voted 235 – 185, mostly along party lines.

    I don’t have any comments about the “big tent” party right now, except “f—en bigots”.

  • “You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time.”
    Only Cheney can do that….

    Because Cheney is the fourth branch of government. Duh!

  • ‘You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time,’ Bush said, describing a telephone call with Gen. Pervez Musharraf. ‘I had a very frank discussion with him.’

    I wonder if Musharat started laughing after he hung up the phone or did he have to tell The Deciderator he has a cold?

    Oh and re: Wall Street – The fed might be able to keep pumping enough cash into the market to maintain the semblance of not-total-fuckedness for a while. And what is that cash backed by, you ask?

    Don’t ask.

    The wheels have fallen off because the Free Market Free For All Bush and his buddies love so much could only work for a limited amount of time and only if people weren’t complete fucking greed-crazed pigs. Now the game is try to pretend everything is OK until Bush is out of office.

    Not gonna happen. It is going to suck for quite a while and the other nations that got their arses caught in the crack we made aren’t going to forgive us. Start sharpening those guillotine blades boys, a ReThuglican head on a stick might be the only thing that will earn you the mercy of our new European overlords.

  • Former Senator Fred Thompson is the only candidate that gets it. He makes decisions based on principles. Principles don’t change. You have to stand for something and not change who you are based on the polls. That is what Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani have done and all of the Democrats do it. Give me a leader that will stand by his principles anyday versus someone that stands for everything.

    I know many Republicans and conservatives that will stay home if Rudy Giuliani is the candidate. He does not represent our values as conservatives, and never will. Millionaire Mitt Romney is a Republican-in-name-only (RINO) that simply has everything else and nothing to do. “I guess I’ll just try to buy the presidency”. The White House isn’t for sale! He has flip-flopped on almost every issue in the last few years! Conservatives will simply stay home and the Democrats will pick up additional seats in the House and probably get the 60 seats in the Senate they need to completely destroy our country-nice picture huh?

    However, I think Fred can bring America back together, if that’s even possible. America needs a rebirth of patriotism and honor. Republicans also need a rebirth. President Reagan was our last rebirth and he can never be duplicated. Fred Thompson will bring his own down-to-earth common sense to this country.. A little of the good old days of faith, federalism and family would do well for this country. If a conservative runs as a conservative, he will win!

    Think of it this way: Eight years of another Clinton White House? Now if that is not a sufficient enough reason to pull together as a nation, and fight this socialist liberal takeover of our government, what is?

    Folks, we are in for the fight of our lives, just as our young men and women are fighting for our freedoms in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must fight for our nation right here and now! I truly believe Fred Thompson is the one man who can pull this nation back together! Rudy Giuliani will just tear us apart.

  • What gets me is all of you calling President Bush an idiot, moron, fool and worse. If he is so stupid, please explain to me how he beat your three geniuses (Ann Richards, Albert Gore, Junior and John “Vietnam” Kerry) along with a strong economy, two wars that are about to turn out to be successes, and his legislative victories? What gives? Either he’s not stupid, or the Democrats are complete RETARDS!!

  • Cal—show me how FDIC covers a bank run. How it covers multiple bank runs. The Fed has been pumping tens of billions of dollars into the banking system since Spring—and they’re STILL teetering on the edge of the abyss? FDIC, as I recall, was on very thin ice when the S&L crisis hit—and that was nothing compared to the general banking industry….

    Swan—I should be thankful we weren’t discussing the “g”ag reflex most Americans experience when discussing Pat Robertson. The streets could be strewn with heavily-armed fundamentalists by now….

  • wow! new trolls!

    Yeah, but this one’s the $50 Rolex of trolls.

    Then there’s this:
    Study: 1 out of 4 homeless are veterans

    WASHINGTON – Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

    Oh, that’s right; it’s “Support the Troops” – not “Support the Veterans.”

  • Don’t get your hopes up just bill – Phred has been around auto-pasting that exact same post for a couple of months now. He’s probably just a bot that, like Frederick of Hollywood, only campaigns occasionally.

  • Let me get this straight….
    I can ask people for money to join me at a building without any mormons, filipinos, albinos, lesbians, catholics, or redheads, if we want to and call it a “club”.

    But if I offer to PAY people to come to my building and call it a “company” I gotta let everyone in?

    How does ENDA jibe with the 1st amendment right to freedom of assembly? Like free speech, there’s an ugly side to this freedom, but you can’t wish it away legally. The only rule that I think might wash is companies that get a dime of government contract work could not bar anyone. If that happens then government is not offering equal protection under the 14th.

    Secondly…
    We bought 1 million vests….
    Anyone care to check how many were actually RECEIVED? There’s 150,000 soldiers in Iraq… you’d think there might have been enough to go around.

    Army Man @25
    You’re making a few logical fallacies.
    1) You assume genius is correlated to winning elections.
    2) George Bush being stupid doesn’t preclude the Dems from being retards.

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