We here at Blue Crab Boulevard are excited to be able to bring you an announcement of positively biblical proportions! We have obtained an exclusive, pre-release copy of an announcement that is set to be made tomorrow morning at a gala event in Detroit, Michigan. Remember, you heard it here first!
Because I Felt Like It | Gaius March 31, 2009 | 
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No, seriously, this is getting ridiculous. Yet another of Obama’s “Best and Brightest” nominees has failed to pay their taxes.
Health and Human Services nominee Kathleen Sebelius has paid back taxes and interest of more than $7,800 stemming from “unintentional errors” revealed during her accountant’s review of recent tax returns.
The White House on Tuesday released a letter Sebelius sent to the Senate Finance Committee, detailing how she lacked proper paperwork in accounting for some charitable donations and business expenses. The Kansas governor also mistakenly claimed a mortgage interest deduction on a house she had already sold.
Trust me, if this was happening under a Republican administration, the media would be calling for the head of the President.
This is completely nuts. I am a private citizen and I spend a few hundred bucks a year to have a CPA take care of my taxes and keep all the records straight. I can guarantee you that my accountant would never, ever allow this kind of error. How do you claim a mortgage interest deduction for a property you have sold? How do you “forget” you sold it at tax time?
This is not – at all – funny anymore. This is not tolerable.
Get Sebelius out of government now. We do not need this level of incompetence running the country. This is two nominees in a row with tax issues that should never have happened.
Get her out of Washington and your wallets, folks.
British banks and other financial institution in London are planning to be shut down and boarded up during the G20 summit. The reason? Protesters have issued a map pinpointing the locations of 125 ”targets“.
The news comes after protesters circulated a map which identifies more than 125 targets across the City, including dozens of international corporations, banks, and oil companies.
More than 50 financial institutions are pinpointed, including some of those – like Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB – blamed for precipitating the current economic crisis.
The map urged potential demonstrators to vent their anger at the “carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices” of corporate capitalism, quoting the writer CS Lewis’s attack on the “managerial age”.
None of the main banks would comment. However senior banking figures told telegraph.co.uk that they were taking the security threat seriously, and admitted that they were concerned about the possibility of trouble.
Frankly, these summits have increasingly brought out more and more crazies through the years. I don’t blame them for wanting to stay clear of these protesters.
…. So let’s smear someone else. The Democrats have “moved on” from trying to use Rush Limbaugh as a handy-dandy attack target. Now they are gunning for Sarah Palin.
Multiple Democratic strategists say the party plans to increasingly elevate Palin in the same manner it has employed Rush for weeks, using her high-visibility, her social conservatism, and memories of her harsh attacks on Obama during the campaign to tar the GOP as partisan, obstructionist, and backward-looking.
James Carville, a key architect of the Limbaugh strategy, says Dems will be seeking to elevate Palin more and more, because she’s “an identifiable person who has a hook,” unlike GOP leaders like Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell.
“Her name conjures up all kinds of reactions in people’s minds,” Carville told me, adding that her association with the campaign will be used to portray the GOP as hidebound and to alienate moderates. “She’s an uncomfortable figure for a lot of Republicans,” Carville says. “They want to move beyond her. We like her.”
It sounds – more than a little – like they are getting desperate. The Democrats need something – anything to divert attention from their failures. So much so that they are going after private citizens (Limbaugh) and now a politician that lost to their “mighty” juggernaut. She already lost, kicking her when she is down does not make Democrats look strong.
This does not sound like the strategy of a party that is confident. This sounds like the strategy of a party that needs to divert public opinion as rapidly as possible. The Limbaugh gambit actually increased his audience. This one may well backfire and make Palin more popular.
Gee, and I was wondering why Sarah Palin was suddenly surfacing in news reports again.
The press is quite willing to carry water for their masters.
Politics | Gaius March 30, 2009 | Comments (2)
Apparently, in the Brave New Obama World™, if one is the recipient of some Federal largess (read taxpayer money) one is accountable to Obama, personally. Obama may demand the resignation of a CEO of a company that has received handfuls of cash (read taxpayer money) from Obama (personally, it seems).
However, if you are the CEO of a bank or insurance company that has received dumpsters full of money at the behest of Obama, you are immune from penalty.
Let’s get this straight. If you are a CEO of a bank that’s losing gobs of money, the government will bail you out repeatedly and let you keep your job.
But if you’re Rick Wagoner, the CEO of General Motors (GM, Fortune 500), you are forced to fall on your sword, or piston as the case may be. And that’s after you have had to spend months trying to prove that you have a viable business plan.
No doubt about it, there seems to be a strange double-standard going on.
On the one hand, financial companies seem to have no problem getting more bailout money.
All it takes is for the stocks of big banks like Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) and Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) to plunge to multi-year lows for the government to come running. Citi and BofA have each received $45 billion in assistance and hundreds of billions of dollars more in loan guarantees.
The difference? One would only point out that Obama took in more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from AIG alone. (Money he has not given back, incidentally.) One would love to see how much the various Wall Street firms gave in protection money campaign contributions versus what GM and Chrysler were able to come up with.
Welcome to the Brave New Obama World™.
Hows that Hope and Change, America? Is this what you voted for?
Victor Davis Hanson notices something in Obama’s address on GM and Chrysler. It is all about Obama:
I think our president needs to invest more in the use of the third-person “government,” since his speeches more and more center on the narcissistic “I” and “me.” Even the car-takeover speech was
“I-ed” to death. E.g.My Auto Task Force
And so today, I am announcing that my administration will…
In this context, my administration will offer General Motors adequate working capital over the next 60 days. During this time, my team will be working closely with GM to produce a better business plan.
I am committed to doing all I can to see if a deal can be struck…
An odd corollary of this. The increasingly narcissistic Obama now owns the economy. He cannot blame it on Bush. It is his and his alone. Will he and the Democrats continue to try to blame it on Bush? Of course.
But he owns it now with his policies and his failures.
Via Memeorandum
There is still some time left in the trading day on Wall Street, but as of this post, the Dow is down 4.23%, the NASDAQ down 3.59% and the S&P 500 down 4.29%.
I’m guessing Wall Street is less than enthralled by Obama’s promise to back GM and Chrysler warranties with our taxpayer dollars.
Asian shares slumped and were headed for their biggest daily fall in four weeks, while U.S. Treasuries gained after a U.S. task force rejected turnaround plans for automakers GM and Chrysler.
S&P stock futures dropped and European shares opened lower, with investors also spooked by news on Sunday that Spain would bail out regional savings bank Caja Castilla La Mancha, marking yet another official rescue of a firm hit by the global crisis.
Europe’s FTSEurofirst 300 fell 1.2% in early dealings on Monday and Spanish bank shares fell up to 8%.
The U.S. announcement by the White House autos panel marked a stunning reversal for GM and Chrysler and raises the prospect of bankruptcies that could further debilitate the already ailing U.S. economy.
The Obama White House is counting on investors helping with removing toxic assets from banks. But the Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration have both demonstrated that they can and will change the rules retroactively for anyone who takes any assistance from the government. Not exactly the way to gain the trust of investors.
The clearest losers appear to be the thousands of bondholders and lenders to both GM and Chrysler. In both cases, administration officials said that the companies were burdened by inordinate amounts of debt that would have to be scrubbed. Chrysler’s survival, the administration said, would require “extinguishing the vast majority” of the company’s secured debt and all of its unsecured debt and equity.
This is looting, pure and simple. The fact of the matter is that it is not rich plutocrats who will suffer for this. It is people with money in 401k funds. It is large pension funds. It is workers and retirees from GM.
This is a trainwreck.
Volunteers have crafted a replica of a device used to crack German codes during the Second World War. The Turing Bombe machines were all destroyed after the war. The replica has taken years to build.
The rows of silver dials and tangle of scarlet wires look more like a telephone exchange.
But this is the inside of the Turing Bombe, the part-electronic, part-mechanical code-breaking machine and forerunner of the modern computer, which cracked 3,000 messages a day sent on Nazi Enigma machines during the Second World War.There were 210 such bookcase-like Bombes that gave Britain advance warning of Hitler’s plans and shortened the conflict by two years……
…..The original Bombes, invented by brilliant mathematician Alan Turing, were made using reinforced brown Tufnol plastic moulded from sheets a tenth of an inch thick, a cast-iron framework and 12 miles of intricate wire circuits.
I suspect that your desktop computer can do rather more than the Bombe could. It is still a fascinating bit of history recreated.
The Obama administration has made much – very much indeed – about the supposed savings in health care costs by putting medical records online. Where no laws cover the privacy of those records, one adds. It turns out that insurance companies are already using some online information against those applying for insurance.
Trying to buy health insurance on your own and have gallstones? You’ll automatically be denied coverage. Rheumatoid arthritis? Automatic denial. Severe acne? Probably denied. Do you take metformin, a popular drug for diabetes? Denied. Use the anti-clotting drug Plavix or Seroquel, prescribed for anti-psychotic or sleep problems? Forget about it.
This confidential information on some insurers’ practices is available on the Web — if you know where to look.
What’s more, you can discover that if you lie to an insurer about your medical history and drug use, you will be rejected because data-mining companies sell information to insurers about your health, including detailed usage of prescription drugs. (Emphasis added)
These issues are moving to the forefront as the Obama administration and Congress gear up for discussions about how to reform the healthcare system so that Americans won’t be rejected for insurance.
So, how much do you think will be saved by putting all of your most intimate health details online? If this is going on in the private sector, how much worse will it be when government decides for you who gets treatment?
The quest for “free” health care will end up being very, very expensive.
To our liberty.
Anyone else troubled by this? The Obama administration is now making personnel decisions – in private companies.
The Obama administration asked Rick Wagoner, the chairman and CEO of General Motors, to step down and he agreed, a White House official said.
Wagoner’s resignation was one of the remarkable strings attached to the new aid package the administration is offering GM, based on recommendations from the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry, headed by the Treasury Department.
The White House confirmed Wagoner was leaving at the government’s behest after The Associated Press reported his immediate departure, without giving a reason.
The surprise announcement about the classically iconic American corporation is perhaps the most vivid sign yet of the tectonic change in the relationship between business and government in this era of subsidies and bailouts.
I would not know Rick Wagoner if I tripped over him. But I am very troubled by a government that offers aid, then punishes those who take the offered hand. This is now happening at the executive level, not just the legislative.
It says rather a lot about the integrity of the government right now.
None of it good.
Via Memeorandum.
Residents of Australia’s Queensland have figured out a way to eradicate (or at least slow down the spread of) cane toads. What organizers hope will be an annual event, the so-called Toad Day Out occurred this weekend. In what can only be described as an act of revenge, the captured toads will become fertilizer.
As part of north Queensland’s inaugural Toad Day Out, people in Cairns will be encouraged to collect as many toads as they can.
They’ll be euthanased in freezers, taken to an environmental waste management plant and processed with other waste to make agricultural compost.
Manager of the SITA plant, Haydn Slattery, says more than 100kg of toads may be collected.
“Each year the Cairns plant produces 25,000 tonnes of compost, and it predominantly goes to the canefields,” he said.
“I’m sure (the growers) will appreciate the fact that the toad they know so well is at last putting something back.”
The captured toads must be alive when brought in to the weigh stations and are then killed by either freezing them or putting them into a plastic bag full of carbon dioxide gas. This, apparently, gets high marks from the Australian Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
The RSPCA is dead set against cane toad golf, but is four-square athwart the idea of freezing or gassing them. They admit the toads are a “menace” that “must be eradicated” but get positively dyspeptic over some methods of eradication versus others.
How, one wonders, do the folks at the RSPCA know that freezing or gassing toads is more friendly than hitting them?
Canadian computer security experts have found more than 1,200 computers in 103 countries infected with a malicious software that allowed hackers to take over – almost completely – their victims computers. The hackers could even turn on the computer’s webcam to watch whoever was using the computer.
These were not the computers of average folks. These were computers used by high-ranking government officials and other high-profile folks. Like the Dalai Lama. The attacks were traced to China, although the researchers do not blame the Chinese government directly.
Among the affected computers were those in embassies belonging to Germany, India, Romania, and Thailand, and in the ministries of foreign affairs for Barbados, Iran and Latvia.
The researchers say the infected computers acted as a kind of illicit information-gathering network, and that they observed sensitive documents being stolen from a computer network operated by the Dalai Lama’s organization. They traced the attacks to computers located in China, but stop short of blaming the Chinese government.
A separate report by researchers at Cambridge University, also published Sunday, alleges that the Chinese government or a group working closely with it is responsible for the attack on the computer in the office of the Dalai Lama.
Media officials at China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and State Council Information Office declined requests for comment Sunday. The Chinese government has repeatedly denied past allegations that it sponsors cyber attacks.
The particularly insidious part of these attacks is that they have been spreading the malware by sending the victims what appears to be an email from someone the victim knows. The email contains a file that, when opened, infects the victim’s computer.
Looks like it’s time to begin scanning all incoming mail, even from people you think you are safe with.
… And savages a couple of patrons. Okay, I have got to work on that punchline. But that is exactly what happened in the city of Cottonwood, Arizona last week. Patrons of the Chaparral Bar had a bobcat walk in. Apparently, the bobcat didn’t like the patrons or the service and bit a couple of customers. Cottonwood police destroyed the animal in the bar’s parking lot. And yes, it was rabid.
The bobcat had been on a bit of a spree prior to entering the bar, attacking one woman and frightening another.
There is actually video of the bobcat’s bar visit posted at YouTube. Judging from what the video shows, I think we know why the bobcat really bit the patrons:
He didn’t like getting his picture taken.
So, this bobcat walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Whatever you do don’t take his picture.”
(Via freind of the Crabitat JA Jance who sent in a link the Seattle Times story about this incident.)
Animals | Gaius | Comments (1)
Baby birds are fed by the expedient method (for birds, at any rate) of the parental birds regurgitating whatever they have eaten into the mouths of their offspring.
Mammals have a few other options.
Although some mammals choose the baby bird feeding option when given the chance. In hopes of chain feeding downstream, so to speak. JournoList strikes again. (This all popped, all at once, on Memeorandum.)
Via Memeorandum
Left Wing, Media, Politics | Gaius March 28, 2009 | Comments (1)
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