Happy New Year, We're Bankrupt!

The US Gov't (i.e., us) is on the hook currently for over $53 trillion (with a 'T') in present and future liabilities (see page 6 of the Treasury/OMB Financial Report of the United States Government ).

SOTD: Elvis Costello - She

SOTD: The Cure - Just like heaven

SOTD: Mazzy Star - Flowers In December

Merry Christmas Mr. McKinnell

This joker presided over a 40% decline in Pfizer's stock price, yet will retire with an almost $200 million compensation package.

Sickening.

CSOTD: Eartha Kitt - Santa Baby

You Gotta Hand It To Rumsfeld...

Our Great Ally, Pakistan

QUETTA, PAKISTAN — At a time when the Taliban is making its strongest push in years to regain influence and territory across the border in Afghanistan, this mountain-ringed provincial capital has become an increasingly brazen hub of activity by the Islamist militia.Quetta serves as a place of rest and refuge for Taliban fighters between battles, a funneling point for cash and armaments, a fertile recruiting ground and a sometime meeting point for the group's fugitive leaders, say aid workers, local officials, diplomats and others.

"Everybody is here," said Mahmood Khan Achakzai, a Quetta-based member of Pakistan's National Assembly, describing the routine comings and goings of senior Taliban commanders in Quetta, the capital of the Pakistani province of Baluchistan...

"For the Taliban, this is considered to be a safe haven," said Syed Ali Shah, a journalist who writes for the Baluchistan Times. "They come here, they regroup and retrain."

Let's see...sponsors Al Qaeda terrorism, has WMD, is a dictatorship, shelters and supports the Taliban, has a President who goes on The Daily Show....it must be our great ally in the War on Terror!

Christmas SOTD: Chris Isaak -- Washington Square

Mohammed overtakes George in list of most popular names

Nope, it's not an Onion headline.

Mohammed, and its most common alternative spelling Muhammad, are now more popular babies' names in England and Wales than George, reflecting the diverse ethnic mix of the population.

That's not all it's reflecting.

SOTD: Amy Winehouse - Rehab

BOTD: The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror

Interesting thoughts from George Soros on America's declining lack of influence in today's world and America's need to face reality instead of fantasy...

SOTD: Jakatta - One Fine Day

He's Not Gonna Listen to Reason

Only defeatists bother with facts...From Salon, via Counterpunch...

The Iraq Study Group's report, released Wednesday, calling the situation in that country "grave and deteriorating" is hardly the first caution that President Bush has received. Two years ago, in December 2004, two frank face-to-face briefings were delivered to him from the field.

In the first, the CIA station chief in Baghdad, who had filed an urgent memo the month before titled "The Expanding Insurgency in Iraq," was invited to the White House. The CIA officer had written that the insurgency was becoming more "self-confident" and in Sunni provinces "largely unchallenged." His report concluded: "The ease with which the insurgents move and exist in Baghdad and the Sunni heartland is bolstering their self-confidence further." He predicted that the United States would suffer more than 2,000 dead. Bush's reaction was to remark about the station chief, "What is he, some kind of defeatist?" Less than a week after the briefing, the officer was informed he was being reassigned from his post in Baghdad.

A few days after that briefing, on Dec. 17, 2004, Col. Derek Harvey, the Defense Intelligence Agency's senior intelligence officer for Iraq, was ushered into the Oval Office. Harvey, who had "conversed repeatedly with insurgents, and had developed the belief that the U.S. intelligence effort there was deeply flawed," according to Thomas Ricks in "Fiasco," briefed the president about the insurgency: "It's robust, it's well led, it's diverse. Absent some sort of reconciliation it's going to go on, and that risks a civil war. They have the means to fight this for a long time, and they have a different sense of time than we do, and are willing to fight. They have better intelligence than we do." Harvey also explained that foreign fighters, jihadists and al-Qaida were marginal elements. Ricks reported that after the briefing, Bush in his speeches still "would refer to setbacks only in vague terms."

But there is more to the story. A former high-ranking intelligence officer and close associate of Harvey's told me that during Harvey's briefing the president interrupted, turning to his aides to inquire, "Is this guy a Democrat?" Harvey's warnings, of course, were as thoroughly ignored as those of the CIA station chief.

Maybe impeachment isn't a bad idea. However, at least one other person thinks things are going swell in Iraq.

"Late last year he had key Republicans up to the White House to talk about the war. And said, 'I will not withdraw even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me.' Barney is his dog," Woodward says. "My work on this leads to lots of people who spend hours, days with the president." "And in most cases they are my best sources. And there is a concern that we need to face realism. Not being the voice that says, 'Oh no, everything’s fine,' when it’s not," Woodward adds.

No word yet on if his dog Barney has changed his mind.

SOTD: Grant Lee Buffalo - Honey Don't Think

BOTD: The Assassin's Gate

When Bush and the neo-cons went into Iraq, they had no plan whatsoever for what to do once Saddam was toppled. None. The incredible incompetence of this administration, its advisors and its top generals would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. We had a brief window to get things right, but the minute the Iraqis saw the massive looting we allowed, it was shut, probably forever.

Now Bush is putting the same amount of time and effort into a "new plan" for Iraq as he did on the original one - none. From the NY Times...

The claims of calm deliberation emerging from the White House this week are maddening. The search for a new plan for Iraq seems to be taking place with as much urgency as the deliberations over a new color for the dollar bill.

In Baghdad yesterday, a suicide bomber killed at least 70 people, most of them Shiite laborers whose only sin was looking for work. In Washington, meanwhile, President Bush held a series of carefully stage-managed meetings with officials and outside experts whose common credential appeared to be their opposition to the recommendations of James Baker’s Iraq Study Group. To top it off, White House aides told reporters that — despite earlier promises of a pre-Christmas speech by Mr. Bush — the country now should not expect any announcement of a new strategy until early next year. The president’s spokesman, Tony Snow, said that “it’s a complex business, and there are a lot of things to take into account,” adding that Mr. Bush “wants to make sure it’s done right.”

We are more than eager for this White House to finally get something right on Iraq. But we find it chilling to imagine that Mr. Bush and his advisers have only now begun a full policy review, months after Iraq plunged into civil war and years after experts began warning that the administration’s strategy was not working.

We would like to believe that the reason for delay is that some of Mr. Bush’s advisers have come up with a sensible change in course and they are now trying to persuade the president to take it. Or that behind the scenes Mr. Bush is already strong-arming Iraq’s leaders to rein in the sectarian militias and begin long-delayed national reconciliation talks.

We fear that a more likely explanation is that the president’s ever-divided policy advisers are still wrangling over the most basic decisions, while his political handlers are waiting for public enthusiasm for the Baker report to flag before Mr. Bush tries to explain why he won’t follow through on some of the report’s most important and reasonable suggestions — like imposing a timetable on Iraqi leaders to make political compromises or face a withdrawal of American support. Or trying to persuade Iran and Syria to cease their meddling.

The Baker study, of course, is not the received wisdom of the ages. It should have been released far earlier, rather than being delayed to get past the midterm elections. But it was a good-faith effort by people wise enough and experienced enough to know how bad the situation really is in Iraq, and how little time left there is for the president to act.

Mr. Bush has no more time to waste on “listening tours” and photo ops. The nation is in a crisis, and Americans need to hear how he plans to unwind the chaos he has unleashed in Iraq. If the president is delaying because he is searching for a good option, he can stop. There are none. But Americans need to see that he is prepared to choose among the undesirable alternatives, and clear the way for a withdrawal of American troops that does not leave even more killing and mayhem behind.

Amen. We will be paying the price for Bush's incredible stupidity, incompetence and arrogance for decades.

SOTD: David Bowie & Moby - Cactus

They cover my favorite Pixies song...

A Loan That'll Get Ugly Fast

Great LA Times article on "pay option" loans and their role in the housing bubble...

EVERY day, Will Hertzberg owns a little less of his three-bedroom house in Corona.Like hundreds of thousands of other homeowners around the state, Hertzberg has a mortgage that lets him choose how much he pays each month. Like many of them, he always chooses to pay as little as possible.For the moment, this allows the 56-year-old Hertzberg to continue living in his tract home despite being only marginally employed. But his debt is swelling, and his mortgage company controls his fate.

"I am rather screwed," he said...

..."I'm waiting for a 100-year loan," he said. "My heirs can worry about paying it off."

Also, Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis has a related post today, an interview with economist Paul Kasriel on the potential for deflation due to the collapse of asset prices.

Here's a scary chart.

SOTD: Shannon - Let The Music Play

The War on Terror, in a Nutshell

This great post from the Angry Bear sums up how we got where we are about as well as anything I've seen (probably because it's at a "ten year old level")...

I think just about everyone has come to a conclusion that things are not going well in Iraq. Sure, there are those who still insist that in most of the country things are going well and who put the blame for the mess on everyone except those who actually have made any decisions about the war at all, but these are the cheerleaders who have just now realized that all is not hunky-dorry.I think the problems in Iraq are evident to anyone who breaks things down into the ten year old level.

1. A very bad person attacked the US
2. The President ordered an attack on that very bad person who was hiding in Afghanistan
3. Instead of finally finishing the bad guy off in Afghanistan, the President ordered an attack on another very bad guy who happened to be an enemy of the very bad guy who attacked the US
4. The President treats other bad guys as his friends.
5. The other bad guys want us dead and are funding the bad guy who attacked us.

Five Days??!!

This is great...

Forget the minimum wage. Or outsourcing jobs overseas. The labor issue most on the minds of members of Congress yesterday was their own: They will have to work five days a week starting in January.

The horror.

Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, the Maryland Democrat who will become House majority leader and is writing the schedule for the next Congress, said members should expect longer hours than the brief week they have grown accustomed to. "I have bad news for you," Hoyer told reporters. "Those trips you had planned in January, forget 'em. We will be working almost every day in January, starting with the 4th."

The reporters groaned. "I know, it's awful, isn't it?" Hoyer empathized.

For lawmakers, it is awful, compared with what they have come to expect. For much of this election year, the legislative week started late Tuesday and ended by Thursday afternoon -- and that was during the relatively few weeks the House wasn't in recess.

And you gotta love this, um, Representative?...

"Keeping us up here eats away at families," said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), who typically flies home on Thursdays and returns to Washington on Tuesdays. "Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families -- that's what this says."

63.18 to 1

A $63.18 to $1 sell vs. buy ratio...corporate executives are selling the most shares since 1987. People sell stock for a lot of reasons, but never because they think the price will go up soon.

Dec. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Stock sales by America's corporate chieftains exceeded purchases last month by the widest margin since 1987, suggesting they don't share the confidence of investors who sent the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to a six-year high...

``They're pretty savvy market guys,'' said Wayne Wilbanks, who oversees about $1.2 billion as chief investment officer at Wilbanks, Smith & Thomas Asset management LLC in Norfolk, Virginia. ``They see things are slowing down, and they're like, `Man, I'm taking some money off the table.'''

Who We're Fighting For

From the NY Times

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, a joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department has found that the American-trained police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, and that managers of the $1.1 billion training program cannot say how many officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other equipment issued to police units have gone.

...and this from the LA Times...

BURSTS of AK-47 fire hissed past them from several directions at once, showering the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers with pulverized cement and slapping spider-web fractures into their Humvees' bullet-resistant glass turret-guards.

The joint security forces, undertaking what officials described as a major counterinsurgency operation, were in pursuit of 70 "high-value targets" in Baghdad's crowded Fadhil quarter, a Sunni Arab neighborhood of multistory tenements along the east bank of the Tigris River.

Instead, the soldiers of the Iraqi army's 9th Mechanized Division and their American trainers had walked into a deadly ambush Friday. From upper-story apartments, insurgents stopped the soldiers' advance with grenades and shoulder-fired rockets. Others launched coordinated mortar strikes, hitting one of two nearby Iraqi field posts.

By the time the 11-hour battle was over, one Iraqi soldier had been killed and six others wounded, including one who shot himself in the foot. A U.S. soldier was also wounded and, according to American troops interviewed, additional casualties were averted only because U.S. Apache attack helicopters were called in and American trainers shot their way out of the ambush.

"Fear took over" among the Iraqis, Staff Sgt. Michael Baxter said. "They refused to move. We were yelling at them to move," he said. "I grabbed one guy and shoved him into a building. I was saying, 'God get me out of this, because these guys are going to get me killed.' "

And now this from the Boston Globe...

"We've been here for 12 months now and there's been no progress," said Spc. Richard Johnson, 20, of Bridgeport, Conn., as he manned a machine gun on the rooftop of an outpost ringed by a shallow moat of sewage.

Nearby buildings have been leveled by rocket or tank fire, and others are riddled with bullet holes. The neighborhood only has electricity a few hours a day and most streets are barricaded with barbed wire and blast walls.

"It's like holding a child's hand. How long can you hold onto his hand before he does something on his own?" Johnson said. "How much longer do we have to get shot at or blown up?"

Other than in operations to attack Al-Qaeda, neither of these countries is worth a single American life.

SOTD: Elysian Fields - Jack in the Box

The Worst Ever?

My personal favorite President is Honest Abe Lincoln (followed by Washington, who could have been King but refused. Also, FDR beat the Nazis and Reagan faced down the Commies, so they're up there too). As for the worst President,

At a time of national crisis, [Presidents] Pierce and Buchanan, who served in the eight years preceding the Civil War, and [President] Johnson, who followed it, were simply not up to the job. Stubborn, narrow-minded, unwilling to listen to criticism or to consider alternatives to disastrous mistakes, they surrounded themselves with sycophants and shaped their policies to appeal to retrogressive political forces (in that era, pro-slavery and racist ideologues). Even after being repudiated in the midterm elections of 1854, 1858 and 1866, respectively, they ignored major currents of public opinion and clung to flawed policies.

Remind you of anyone?

The Perfect Gift

...for a depressed Republican on your list...

SOTD: Seether - Fine Again

SOTD: Sonic Youth - Superstar