With a name like Schmuckers, it's got to be evil.

Glad Obama talked about the efforts of those who created his opportunity, something I tell about at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/2009/01/celeb...

They are just amazing together. When they danced to "At Last" there were tears in my eyes.

It is the same Military Industrial et al Complex.

It is the same CIA.

It is the same bunch of Wall Street Gangsters.

I have a reservoir of hope and a thimble of expectation.

Praise with caveats from Glen Greenwald on day one vis á vis Gitmo:

Here

Dunp the federal resrive, give the control of the money back to the US goverment. bring back the gold standard.Banks have been controling every thing for the past 40 years. The American drean is not a dream,its a nightmare. They tell you, you are getting a good ratebullshit. What you get is a bullshit loan where you pay them up to 3 times what you bought your house for and you pay them first for the first 15 yrars of your loan. They fix the systen. we have one of these bullshit money crashes every 10 to 15 years and take back there money and there houses they loaned on. You do not have to look very harde to see when the last one was. Rember the Savings & Loan crash. The name Fereral Reserve, they did not come up with this for a good reason. There are still people put there who think the federal reserve is part of the Goverment, and that just they want people to think. If the banks control the money of a goverment they control the goverment.This new screwing of the American tax payer is just another way of them causing the issue and not paying for their shit. think about it.700 billion dollars, just how mant dipshits can they buy in washingtion.

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulacity uesdnatnrd what I was rdgnieg
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy,it deosn't mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a wrod are,the olny iprmoatnt tihng is that the first and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. Therset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. this is bcuseae the huamm mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe Amzanig huh?And you awlyas tohguth sipeling was ipmorantt.

During September 14-15, both Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were on the ropes.

Here Andrew Leonard writes of the Senate confimation hearings for Tim Geithner.

Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, was the first to get the ball rolling with questions about Geithner's role in attempting to rein in credit derivatives, and why Lehman Bros. was allowed to fall.

clip

But he was only halfway through his answer on Lehman before Max Baucus, D-Mont., the committee chairman, cut him off, telling him that time was limited.

It appears to me very likely that in September Treasury promised BoA something for buying Merrill that they did not promise for Lehman.

That was a change in the tax code, section 382 which previously limited the amount an acquiring business could realize from losses on the books of a company being acquired.

Treasury does not have the authority to rewrite the law. They can try. Here is a previous comment. Here is WaPo on the IRS and section 382 change.

Promising this created a stealth (and not legal) $140 billion windfall for the acquiring Bank, in this cash BoA.

In September Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Lehman had a bit of a spat, echoing Argentina's Cristina Fernandez here.

More important was the spat between the US itself and Venezuela, Here on DN is a report from 9/16/08.

It was known that Venezuela had money with Lehman. Here is the WSJ on $300 million. There turned out to be much more, I have misplaced the link, I will find it.

Did Boy George W and Paulson the Plunderer offer to rig the tax code for a sale of Merrill but not Lehman. This to encourage the sale of Merrill but not Lehman so as stick a thumb in Hugo Chavez's eye?

Someone tell me.

And why not find out in the Senate confirmation hearings, what are they for, anyway?

http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20090121/c...

But hey, they will protect the environment after he raises his right hand.

Guess what, to lower carbon emissions to Kyoto levels in the US will further devastate the US economy. As if it isn't bad enough already.

Thanks for a good post-inauguration roundup, Mike, and as a sanity check during the Reign of Darkness under the Worst American President of All Time.

Now that the bombing has stopped and people are able to go back to whatever is left of their homes, more and more evidence is coming out.

In testimony after testimony Palestinians tell how Israeli soldiers shot at them intentionally even while carrying a white flag.

The BBC today, for example, aired a report about a little girl who was shot by an Israeli soldier in the back. She is now paralyzed from the waist down. The reporter took her picture and set out to find the girl's father. He found him trying to salvage whatever personal belongings he could find under the rubble of his demolished home. The father didn't know his daughter was still alive. After watching other memebrs of his family shot and killed, he thought they were all dead. When the reporter showed up with the picture, the father asked "How is she?".

Other members of the family, despite being in different locations, in different hospitals all gave the same account, that of Israeli soldiers getting out of their tanks with M-16s and deliberately shooting at civilians, children in particular.

Another ccount of the horror committed by Israel's army:

From the Guardian:

But most disturbing of all was the graffiti they daubed on the walls of the ground floor. Some was in Hebrew, but much was naively written in English: "Arabs need 2 die", "Die you all", "Make war not peace", "1 is down, 999,999 to go", and scrawled on an image of a gravestone the words: "Arabs 1948-2009".