Memnison Journal

..of the Bush administration, a casualty of the war on terror, troubled and victimized soul that he is.

Under Bush, OSHA backed off regulating business in a major way, because business might not like for them to support worker safety…and OSHA paid more  GOP-related consultants for doing little.
In 2006, Henshaw was replaced by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA [...]

From Dick Meyer at NPR on Blago and Made-off:
As audacious as Blagojevich’s political gluttony is, it is easy to find far worse political corruption, much of it perfectly legal: Distorting intelligence to invade Iraq, torturing prisoners, failure to regulate Wall Street, and systematic pork-barrel boondoggling come quickly to mind. If you’re feeling expansive, how about [...]

Hedge Fund founder who lost a serious bundle in the Madoff ponzi scheme commits suicide, and no, he didn’t jump out a window.
The radical Israeli settlers in the West Bank are a political nightmare that any government will have serious problems with and neither main party coalition wants to deal with.  Of course, government policies [...]

Dayton officials say that an entry they put in a pile of stuff for a possible Obama-signable economic stimulus package for local jobs wasn’t supposed to be there - an initiative to get hookers off Dayton streets.  I can’t imagine the sort of jobs something like *that* would generate locally.
Wait, maybe I could.  *shudder*

W. Mark Felt obituary in the Washington Post.
“As Deep Throat, Felt helped establish the principle that our highest government officials are subject to the Constitution and the laws of the land,” the prosecutor, John W. Nields, wrote in The Washington Post in 2005. “Yet when it came to the Weather Underground bag jobs, he seems [...]

HBO production and presently running on that network.  My take on it is that it’s a once-funny;  I have a hard time watching gangster movies because I really don’t get off on people beating and killing each other, especially if the people involved doing the beating are serious scum.   This is SOPRANOS GO BAGHDAD; [...]

Zimbabwe is a complex subject, and the complexities have gotten a whole lot rougher on the inhabitants as time passes by.   Europeans under Cecil Rhodes marched in in the ned of the 1800s and took control of the land from the local chiefs, and passed out all sorts of claims to white settlers, who set [...]

Well, if you’d never heard of our Governor before, you have now.    My reflections on this inside.

If some particular division of Citi has done well over the past few years, I can see letting the management of that division stay on. But the people who either ran Citi into the ground or were asleep at the wheel need to go. That should be the condition of a bailout: if you turn [...]

How the Office of Thrift Supervision was gamed by businesses into being a see-no-evil non-regulator of mortgage outfits, and Citigroup got seriously stupid about its operations.  Short version: it didn’t happen overnight, and nobody in management at these companies wanted to deal with anything resembling regulations or reality.   Nobody at the oversight end wanted to [...]

Burmese comic gets a 45 year sentence for criticizing the junta’s poor response to the Cyclone damage in Burma.

Ford CEO arrives for congressional grilling over the proposed bailout in a Ford hybrid; flew to DC in a private luxury jet.  Ditto the others.
Ford CEO Mulally’s corporate jet is a perk included for both he and his wife as part of his employment contract along with a $28 million salary last year. Mulally actually [...]

Excellent editorial in the NY Times on the auto bailout, along the lines of what I was talking about.
At the same time, Congressional Democrats and President-elect Barack Obama, who are pushing for many billions worth of emergency aid for the nation’s least-competent carmakers, must ensure that tough conditions are attached to any rescue package. If [...]

So here’s my ideas, half-baked:

Make the deal comprehensive, and mostly a take it or leave it scenario.  This sucker has been a political football for decades, and this ends here right now.
All three companies essentially go into a central, nationalized receivership corporation.
The equity in these businesses is pretty much gone, in any event.  [...]