Obama's First 100 Days On Facebook

Barack Obama's Facebook feed for his first 100 days, via Slate. Click the link below.

Love the last update: Arlen Specter joined the group Democrats.



Source: Slate

Condi Rice Is Her Own Worst Enemy

Condi gets roughed up from some Stanford college students regarding use of torture and pretty much admits to a Nixonian conspiracy. John Dean chimes in on Keith Olbermann:

“She tried to say she didn’t authorize anything, then proceeded to say she did pass orders along to the CIA to engage in torture if it was legal by the standard of the Department of Justice,” Dean said. “This really puts her right in the middle of a common plan, as it’s known in international law, or a conspiracy, as it’s known in American law, and this indeed is a crime. If it indeed happened the way we think it did happen.”

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Source: MSNBC

Cincinnati's Crime Fighter Shadow Hare

Cincinnati's masked crime fighter, Shadow Hare. A local 21 year-old fighting crime. You have to admire his sense of service.

"I'm Doing This For Justice, Justice Long Since Forgotten"

Follow up:

Republicans: A Regional, Monochromatic Party

Republicans relevance in the Northeast? None.

"Specter's switch shows that Republicans haven't yet paid the final bills for Bush and Rove's insular strategy. That price has been especially steep in the Northeast. In 1988, George H.W. Bush won eight of the 11 states from Maryland to Maine. Even as recently as 2000, Republicans won 40 percent of the House seats and held eight of the 22 Senate seats from those states. But amid the younger Bush's polarizing, Southern-inflected conservatism, Northeastern Republicans fell through the floorboards: They now hold only 18 percent of the region's House seats and, since Specter's switch, just three of its 22 Senate seats. In 2008, Barack Obama won all 11 Northeastern states and a combined 60 percent of their votes. Some weakened individual Democrats may provide isolated electoral opportunities for the GOP in 2009 and 2010, but across much of the Northeast, Republicans are now about as relevant as Whigs."

Not so much a regional thing, just and expectation of competency unclouded by self-righteous faux religion. The "Southern Strategy" by the GOP worked for Newt in 1994, but is now an all too obvious failure.

Source: National Journal

The Other Shoe: Commercial Real Estate

The other shoe, but it may not be the same. At what point do you just call it a bad investment?

Two years after fissures in the residential housing market gave way to a national collapse of home prices and sales, experts warn that the commercial real-estate market is the next shoe to drop, bringing more woes to the battered economy.

Thousands of commercial mortgages valued at hundreds of billions of dollars are approaching their renewal dates, and by some estimates, two out of three no longer will meet the original loan conditions and won't be able to refinance. With prices for commercial properties expected to plunge, a vicious cycle could unfold, much as it has in the nation's housing market.

"It's the next wave to hit. It's the next round of bad news," said Scott Talbott, the senior vice president of government affairs for the Financial Services Roundtable, a trade group for big banks and other financial institutions who are collectively concerned about the coming problems.

Trying to prosper by simply rolling over debt continually is no longer viable.

The Bad: Forecaster Moody's Economy.com expects $375 billion in losses on the $3.5 trillion in commercial mortgage loans and securities outstanding. That's a loss rate of about 11 percent, nearly twice the rate of home mortgage foreclosures, and the forecaster thinks that about $200 billion of those commercial losses are still ahead.

The Not So Bad: No doubt there is some cause for concern. But commercial real estate has a different dynamic. Commercial real estate generates cash flow which residential properties do not. That cash flow has always been influenced by changes in the business cycle. Even in foreclosure a commercial property could still be earning rent. Sure, business closings could leave building owners with vacancies (no cash flow then). But that's always been a risk in commercial buildings. Commercial properties, with their shorter terms and their underlying funded foundations, are expected to adjust according to supply and demand.

This could be a problem for the smaller banks in the coming years.

Source: McClatchy

Chrysler's Game Of Chicken

The greedy, unregulated hedge fund industry, the one that shorts the market and makes massive gains on the down side, and shadowy investment bankers are at it again:

President Obama blamed “a small group of speculators” for forcing Chrysler into bankruptcy. “A group of investment firms and hedge funds decided to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout,” Obama said yesterday.

Obama’s team had first offered secured lenders $2 billion for their $6.9 billion in loans, and then raised the offer to $2.25 billion. In a game of chicken, the holdouts asked for $2.5 billion, and Obama’s patience ran out. Now the bankruptcy courts will handle it.

This, after the unions made massive concessions and lenders representing 70 percent of the Chrysler loans agreed to Obama's offered plan. Yet another public relations disaster for Wall Street.

Source: NYT

Supreme Court Justice Souter To Retire

The first Justice to be filled by a Democrat in 15 years. Thanks for waiting! Sitting with Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, and Kennedy would make me want to retire, too.

Justice David H. Souter has indicated that he plans to retire at the end of the term in June, giving President Obama his first appointment to the Supreme Court, three people informed about the decision said Thursday night.

Justice Souter, who was appointed by a Republican president, George H. W. Bush, but became one of the most reliable members of the court's liberal wing, has grown increasingly sour on Washington and intends to return to his home state, New Hampshire, according to the people briefed on his plans. His decision was first reported by National Public Radio.

Will there be a woman nominee?

Source: NYT

Biggest Month in Nine Years For Market

News from the tea leaf readers from the land of smoke and mirrors:

April was Wall Street's best month in nine years, offering some of the most powerful evidence yet that maybe, just maybe, the economy is about to begin a turnaround.

In downturns over the past 60 years, the S&P hit bottom an average of four months before a recession ended and about nine months before unemployment hit its peak.

Looking for a summer trough, they say. Considering Wall St's track record for predicting anything, I'm not holding my breath.

Will the Right concede any congratulations for averting the Bush economic death spiral?

Source: HuffPo

Impeach Jay Bybee

MoveOn.org joins the Impeach Jay Bybee chorus.



Source: http://pol.moveon.org/bybee/

"You Just Can't Say No"

A lucid moment from a Republican from all places, Utah! Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (R) warns the GOP, "You just can't say No".

"You can't just say no. You can't just obstruct or obfuscate. Instead of just kind of grousing and complaining, it would do us all a whole lot of good if we actually started engaging directly in finding compromises and common ground and shared solutions... When you are devoid of the ideas, or the content that would allow you to articulate or paint a better future, you have no choice other than to fall back on 'no, we are not going support it, it cannot be done."

Can a guy from the Mormon belt fend off the eventual attacks from his own socially conservative party?

Source: ABC News

What Came First: The Torture Or The Bush

Andrew Sullivan on The Rule Of Law and Bush:

"The lawyers we are talking about, after all, are lawyers for the president, whose oath of office demands that he faithfully execute the laws. These lawyers are not there to help him circumvent or break the law, but to ensure that it's followed. They violated that core responsibility and the sheer shoddiness of their work reveals that they knew it."

There was a legal and Constitutional way:

"If the president believed that following the law at that point would lead to the imminent deaths of thousands of people, then his constitutional responsibility was either to urge the Congress to repeal the Geneva Conventions and UN Convention, or to break the law because this once moment necessitated it and then present himself for trial. That's the Lincoln model. What Bush did instead was secretly break the law, invoke a constitutional theory that the executive can always break such laws in the furtherance of national security and order his lawyers to provide specious reasons why he had not done so. Then he lied about it repeatedly in public. Then when photographs from Abu Ghraib showed in graphic detail the horrifying reality of much milder techniques than the ones he had explicitly authorized, he blamed low-level soldiers and allowed them to take the fall. Then, over a year after Abu Ghraib and four years after 9/11, he set up an elaborate, ongoing program to torture prisoners, replete with lawyers, doctors, professional torturers, and psychologists. Then, when the International Committee of the Red Cross gave him a report detailing what it described as unequivocal torture, he shelved it, further violating his core responsibility to enforce the law."

The premeditated nature of Bush's torture is the core issue:

"I guess you could find all sorts of ways to say that this illegal behavior should be ignored because the chief executive has used every sophistry in the book to parse legal statutes against their plain meaning and intent. But why would that be your argument, rather than the simple one that the law be enforced as plainly written, and that a failure to enforce the law when the chief law-breaker is supposed to be the chief law-enforcer is a serious threat to our entire system of government?"

Source: Andrew Sullivan

H1N1 Swine Flu Perspective

Not to belittle this new H1N1 Swine Flu, but the regular ol' flu kills about 36,000 Americans a year and accounts for between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths every year around the world.

Source: CNN

Rebrand Equals Retread

The GOP is trying to click its heels three times and return to a time when they actually could still strike fear into their dim constituents and loot for the ultra-rich.

Looking to rebrand a struggling Republican Party, a group of party heavyweights including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) are launching a new group that will hold town halls around the country and look to produce GOP ideas on issues like education and health care.

Republicans will announce today the creation of the "National Council for a New America," a group led by congressional party leaders that includes Bush, McCain, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal as its "national panel of experts."

Or, as Josh Marshall put it, "You know things are really humming along when your 'rebranding' effort is led by your recently crushed presidential nominee and your discredited party leader's brother."

Interestingly, the NCNA, or Diet PNAC, invites did not include Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Michael Steele, Mark Sanford, Tim Pawlenty or Joe The Plumber.

Source: Washington Monthly

Condi Rice Channels Nixon

The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur, who obtained the video, said Condi Rice "absolutely pulls a Nixon" in her answer. The ol' "if the President did it, it must be legal" twisted logic. Watch it (Rice's answers come at 0:57):

RICE: "I just said, the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture."

Condi weakly tries to give herself cover, refusing to take responsibility, saying only that she "conveyed the authorization of the administration." What's next, "I was just following orders"?

If King George asked for a ruling from his own neo-con legal team of cronies, amassed by Cheney over the past 30 years, that is not justification or legal. That is getting your buddy to back you up.



Source: ThinkProgress

Quote Of The Day: Arlen Specter

"I'm a loyal Democrat. I support your agenda."

-- Sen. Arlen Specter, quoted by ABC News, in a phone conversation with President Obama about switching parties.

Arlen Specter To Be Democrat

The continued demise of the out of the mainstream regionalized Republican Party. The party of misguided ideological rigidity, AKA, Southern racist hicks.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) is becoming a Democrat.

"I have decided to run for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary," said Specter in a statement. "I am ready, willing and anxious to take on all comers and have my candidacy for re-election determined in a general election."

"Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans."

We're glad to have you, Arlen. Now let's seat Al Franken. Who else may flip to the Democratic Party? BTW, that sound you hear is Joe Lieberman becoming even more irrelevant.



Source: HuffPo

Bush's Promise On Torture

George Bush in his own words on Al Arabiya:

"It's important for people to understand that in a democracy, there will be a full investigation. In other words, we want to know the truth. In our country, when there's an allegation of abuse ... there will be a full investigation, and justice will be delivered. ... It's very important for people and your listeners to understand that in our country, when an issue is brought to our attention on this magnitude, we act. And we act in a way in which leaders are willing to discuss it with the media. ... In other words, people want to know the truth. That stands in contrast to dictatorships. A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this. A dictator wouldn't be saying that the system will be investigated and the world will see the results of the investigation."

Seeing that Bush personally authorized every technique revealed at Abu Ghraib and he refused to act upon the International Committee of the Red Cross's report that found that he had personally authorized the torture of prisoners, his words seem not only hollow, but that he calmly lies with the greatest of ease. "A few bad apples"? Will will investigate?

What a tremendously false statement. The Bush Trademark.