Yep. Mukasey is a piece of shit.

Funny that Bush would have picked a "loyal Bushie" to be Attorney General. Where are the John Deans when you need them?

How is The Barnicle's interview with a federal prosecutor considered priviledged communication ?
so confused ...

These days Nixon would have been given the Medal of Honor ...

FYI, A detailed work in progress by one of the Great Unwashed Non-Lawyers, updated.

For Mukasey to claim "executive privilege" blows my mind. He is appointed by the president and confirmed by our lame congress.

katy @ 6:

OurFuture: Everything about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has been nationalized ...

what is it randi says? i think, something like:

Privatize the Profits; Socialize the Bailout

Exactly. Study the Federal Reserve System. It's fucked.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=530806696524042736

The entire meme regarding the prisoner exchange between Israel and Hezbollah that Arabs celebrate cold blooded killers while Israelis are one close-knit happy family of great moral authority is such outdated blatant propaganda. That stuff works in Israel, but it doesn't work in the U.S. and Europe. Don't the Israelis know that already?

There are two points worth mentioning:

1. Regardless of what you think of him, Samir Kuntar maintained that he did not kill the young child in 1979 until his last day in prison. It's hard to know if Israel is telling the truth and whether the Israeli military/police did not cover up their own culpability and incompetence by accusing him of killing her. The man has served thirty (30) years in prison anyway, so it's not like he got away with a murder scott free.

2. Many of Israel's leaders, including Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres are criminally responsible for ordering Israeli troops to massacre and deport Palestinians in 1947 and 1948, Kill Egyptian POWs in 1967 and the list goes on and on.

At the end of the day, Israel should take its two soldiers and keep quiet instead of starting its circle jerk of a propaganda campaign.

Fact: When the month long war came to an end in 2006 Israel had killed more than 1,200 Lebanese civilians after two Israeli soldiers were captured. Hezbollah killed 120 Israeli soldiers and about 100 Israeli civilians.

Fact: In 1996 and in 2006 Israeli Prime Ministers gave the order to bomb a UN base in southern Lebanon that was used at the time as a makeshift refugee camp. In total, about 300 Lebanese women and children were killed.

Somehow Israel would have the world believe that one Israeli life is worth a 1000 Arab lives.

P.S.: Israeli prisons still hold 11,000 Palestinian prisoners while the media is constantly bombarded with cries of sympathy for ONE Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas. Many of those 11,000 did nothing more than throw stones at Israeli troops. Some are as young as 12 years old.

Peter G @ 12:

You know when you read that story from the The Washington Note you'd almost get the impression that Israel and Hezbollah are exchanging live prisoners. Actually Israel is getting the dead bodies of it's soldiers. This swap is a very bad idea. Hezbollah now knows that dead Israelis are just as negotiable as live ones.

Great point.

Our Future:

The housing market will NEVER return. First, the whole secondary mortgage market is fractured beyond repair. No one wants to purchase grouped mortgages as securities under an economy that is shrinking jobs and whose currency is debt ridden, with massive trade deficits. Second is the reforms the Federal Reserve Bank is making to ensure most Americans will never be able to qualify for a mortgage again. This action is by design and a form of tightening the monetary policy to further cause our currency and economy to fall straight into a depression. Just think of the additional jobs the housing market will shed in the next year or more. Builders will go bankrupt, construction workers will be laid off, Realtors will be out of jobs, loan processors, home inspectors, contractors, you name it. Poof!

Good luck. You're going to need it.

Peter G @ 12:

You know when you read that story from the The Washington Note you'd almost get the impression that Israel and Hezbollah are exchanging live prisoners. Actually Israel is getting the dead bodies of it's soldiers. This swap is a very bad idea. Hezbollah now knows that dead Israelis are just as negotiable as live ones.

The soldiers were probably dead before captured. Maybe its bad precedent, but its really the only thing Israel could ask for. Its not like Hezbollah has much else that Israel wants.

Regardless of your point of view, all the facts cited in canary in a coal mine @ 11: are accurate.

Everything about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has been nationalized - except the profits and the pay scales of their executives.

Here Kevin Phillips, in 'Lies, Damn Lies and Government Inflation Statistics' gives another of his compelling essays on just how deep the doo-doo is that we are wading in.

Peter G @ 12:

You know when you read that story from the The Washington Note you'd almost get the impression that Israel and Hezbollah are exchanging live prisoners. Actually Israel is getting the dead bodies of it's soldiers. This swap is a very bad idea. Hezbollah now knows that dead Israelis are just as negotiable as live ones.

This deal is a gold mine for the Israeli propaganda machine and AIPAC and people like yourself who clearly know very little about Israel's history. The deal further supports the often touted claim that "we're the real victims here". Besides, I don't think Israel feels any differently about Lebanese/Palestinian lives. It treats them as dispersible.

Alice X (Chomsky Nader) status quObama - change you can pretend in - @ 19:

Everything about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has been nationalized - except the profits and the pay scales of their executives.

Here Kevin Phillips, in 'Lies, Damn Lies and Government Inflation Statistics' gives another of his compelling essays on just how deep the doo-doo is that we are wading in.

I don't know how much I buy an overall trend in the economy regarding inflation. There is some devaluation of the dollar (as one can easily tell from the Euro exchange,) but a lot of the inflation reflects our dependence on oil (e.g. 50% of the price of wheat pays for diesel fuel.) I'm not much of an economist, so maybe there's no difference, but it seems to me that if we could reduce demand for oil (and of course, shut down low-margin speculation), we would immediately drive down the price and fix a lot of problems - without getting into wider market issues like the Paulette's take on the Fed for example. A great place to start would be the single largest consumer of oil, the US military. If we bring home the tanks, trucks, planes, and boats and fill them with mothballs, it would give us quite the window in which to develop some alternative fuels.

Of course it would help if the Fed and the FDIC do their jobs and keep the banking sector solvent, but it seems like we are in way better shape than everybody is crying about. Yes, $4.50 a gallon sucks, but you can cut it in half by carpooling. We shouldn't be using so much damn fossil fuel anyway. Food prices are up, but prepared food is bad for you anyway. Eat some vegetables and rice, save some money and save some health care costs down the road too.

There are a whole lot of sensible solutions, and the only thing standing in the way is mindless consumerism and jingoism. Maybe that was the lesson of the 1980's.

Old Billy Hussein @ 20:

ysbaddaden @ 14:

earthfamilyalpha: The Stupid Economy

http://www.uclick.com/client/nyt/bs/

Ha-Ha! I like that one. One answer fits all, right?

Well I just liked it for the boy boobs.

Old Billy Hussein @ 18:

Charles @ 15:

Our Future:

The housing market will NEVER return. First, the whole secondary mortgage market is fractured beyond repair. No one wants to purchase grouped mortgages as securities under an economy that is shrinking jobs and whose currency is debt ridden, with massive trade deficits. Second is the reforms the Federal Reserve Bank is making to ensure most Americans will never be able to qualify for a mortgage again. This action is by design and a form of tightening the monetary policy to further cause our currency and economy to fall straight into a depression. Just think of the additional jobs the housing market will shed in the next year or more. Builders will go bankrupt, construction workers will be laid off, Realtors will be out of jobs, loan processors, home inspectors, contractors, you name it. Poof!

Good luck. You're going to need it.

I just got a mortgage. The sky is not falling. Quit with the hyperbole.

First Billy, I would like to congratulate you on your new mortgage. I, in no way, implied that it was impossible to obtain a loan or even that it would be. Having worked in residential real estate for years I know what I'm talking about. I've had my real estate license in 3 different states. First, the Fed hasn't yet set rules for all of it's oversight on the residential mortgage market. Second, all the investment banks including Wachovia Securities, JP Morgan, Citigroup, and others who warehouse (group) mortgages and sell them as securities to the secondary mortgage market can no longer sell anything other than A paper to their customers. We haven't even seen close to the bottom of the fall out in losses from the investment banking companies. Every day the damage becomes more evident. The CEO of JP Morgan (Jamie Dimon) was on CNBC today saying that he expected the losses from these mortgage securities to triple before the bleeding is stopped. AIG has posted $11 billion in losses alone in the last two calendar quarters. "I'm with AIG, so I'm just thinking about butterflies." Yeah, because you're bankrupt and homeless.

So don't tell me I'm speaking hyperbole. I hope you can stay in your home for a long time. I hope you can keep your job. I don't want this to happen, I just see it happening. If you don't want to see it, it's not my problem. And just because you received a mortgage doesn't mean your neighbors could sell their homes or many purchasers can obtain financing. Deals are falling through in every state before close of escrow because of loan qualification issues. And in my neighborhood 3 homeowners just took their houses off the market because there is no interest. And I'm in a place that is doing much better than most.

In the future if you want to tell someone they are speaking hyperbole, please back up your statement.

Here's a raid Israel conducted just a few days after the truce in 2006 was signed. I guess it takes a truce violation to get media coverage.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5268870.stm

These kind of "raids" are by no means uncommon. And Israel constantly violates Lebanese airspace with jets buzzing over southern Lebanon and the Bekka valley, a daily occurrence. The prisoner exchange yesterday included an agreement where Israel promised, for the fifth time, that it's not going to do any more overflights of Southern Lebanon.

Last week it was the "whining." This week it's the "psychology."

Talking point of the week brought to you by the marketing team of the Republican National Committee to fuck us in the ass.