Archive for February, 2009
When Immigration Law Trumps Cruel And Unusual Punishment
On October 8, US District Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled that 17 ethnic Uighurs detainees at the Guantanamo Bay camp should be released immediately since they were not regarded as enemy combatants by the administration, and there was no evidence against them. We were not just holding them indefinitely without having brought any charges yet; it [...]
Lessons From TARP For The Financial Stability Plan
Two Harvard professors — John C. Coates from the Law School and David S. Scharfstein from the Business School — had an op-ed in the NYT yesterday in which they identified a basic design flaw in TARP. Their criticism is simple and cogent, and doesn’t require any background in economics to understand, yet it has [...]
Much Ado About What Exactly?
Murray Waas has a very long post in TPM (2610 words) titled “The Big Stone Wall: Nine Bush-Era Officials Refused To Cooperate With DOJ Probes“. TPM is promoting this at the top of their home page as an “exclusive”. I waded doggedly through the first ten paragraphs or so, without finding anything that struck me [...]
How Not To Catch A Thief
Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford, accused of a $8 billion fraud, has apparently done a bunk: U.S. regulators don’t know the whereabouts of R. Allen Stanford, the billionaire accused of running a “massive, ongoing fraud” through his Houston-based Stanford Group Co., a Securities and Exchange Commission official said. “We don’t know where he is, quite [...]
2009 Amgen Tour of California
Well the Tour has been difficult for riders and photogs alike. Cold and rainy conditions ruled the first couple of days, but clearer skies should be around for a bit. I’ve uploaded some pictures from the early stages on Flickr. Enjoy. Bookmark on DeliciousDigg this postShare on Facebookshare via RedditShare with StumblersTweet about itBookmark in [...]
Behind The Allen Stanford Scam: The Real Hero
The SEC swooped down on R. Allen Stanford yesterday: The Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday charged R. Allen Stanford, a prominent Texas businessman, and three companies under his control with carrying out a “massive, ongoing fraud” involving the sale of $8 billion in certificates of deposit. The case is one of the largest alleged financial [...]
Holding Torture-enablers To Account?
Last year, the Justice Department’s ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility had launched an investigation into the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics. Newsweek‘s Michael Isikoff reported over the weekend that OPR has produced an unexpectedly hard-hitting report. An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of [...]
Wall Street Bonuses And Profitability
A story by Reuters on Friday, about the “retention awards” at Morgan Stanley and Citigroup’s Smith Barney, has a classic paragraph, which goes a long way towards explaining the bonus culture of Wall Street, and casts a very dubious light on its profitability model: According to the newspaper, not all of the joint venture’s 20,000 [...]
TPM’s Typo King
Does TPM need to increase the budget for copy-editing Josh Marshall‘s copy? On Monday afternoon, he had a typo in each of 4 consecutive posts (there are intervening posts by others). They’re trying to decide which if any alternative bust they should send with PM Gordon Brown when comes to DC in early March. (when [...]
The Grandmaster of Three Dimensional Chess
Bipartisanship Isn’t So Easy, Obama Discovers – New York Times (2/14/09): On the day before the big vote, President Obama took a freshman Republican member of Congress aboard Air Force One to visit Illinois. Before an audience in Representative Aaron Schock’s district, Mr. Obama praised him as “a very talented young man” and expressed “great [...]