Saturday, September 19, 2015

Last Call For Moosing The Point

"Treating Muslim kids like human beings" is something that professional loser Sarah Palin won't stand for in her little myopic view of America.

In a winding Friday night post, Palin aired her suspicions that the “obstinate-answering” boy was really up to no good and Irving police and school officials have been wrongly maligned in the “reactionary-slash-biased media!” The case hasgenerated outrage amid the belief that Mohamed was arrested due to anti-Muslim bias and not any genuine threat posed.

“Yep, believing that’s a clock in a school pencil box is like believing Barack Obama is ruling over the most transparent administration in history. Right. That’s a clock, and I’m the Queen of England,” Palin opined. Throughout the post, she spelled Mohamed’s name “Muhammad,” which is the spelling commonly used in the English-speaking world for the prophet of Islam.

“Friends, consider the kids disciplined and/or kicked out of school for bringing squirt guns to school or taking bites out of a pop tart until it resembled (to some politically correct yahoo) a gun,” Palin rambled. “Or the student out deer hunting with his dad early one morning who forgot he had a box of ammo in his truck when he parked in the school’s lot later that day. Kids humiliated and intimidated for innocent actions like those real examples are often marked the rest of their lives and made to feel really rotten. Whereas Ahmed Muhammad, an evidently obstinate-answering student bringing in a homemade “clock” that obviously could be seen by conscientious teachers as a dangerous wired-up bomb-looking contraption (teachers who are told “if you see something, say something!”) gets invited to the White House.”

She then criticized President Obama, who invited Mohamed to the White House in response to the outcry, for taking advantage of the situation.

“By the way, President Obama’s practice of jumping in cases prematurely to interject himself as the cool savior, wanting so badly to attach himself to the issue-of-the-day, got old years ago,” she wrote.

Palin then urged fans to compare Mohamed’s clock enclosed in a pencil box to what she thought was a much more innocent-looking pink pencil box at her own home.

First of all, Palin really is a hateful person. It's no wonder she's angry all the time, she's not even bright enough to figure out what a digital clock looks like.  Again, want to thank John McCain and 55 million American voters for almost putting this woman in our government as Vice President.

Second of all, that silly pop tart gun story is tragically stupid and Palin is far from the only wingnut screaming that it's unfair that this kid didn't get invited to the White House too.  But that's not the issue, is it?  It's a nice deflection though from the real issue: a 14-year old was interrogated by the cops without a lawyer, and people didn't exactly line up to attack John Welch for his pop tart gun, unlike Palin and loads of right wing idiots who are convinced that Mohamed Ahmed didn't really build a clock at all or in fact had to have been making an actual bomb.

In other words, people upset that Ahmed is going to the White House are even more upset that Muslims aren't being rounded up and put in camps anyway.  You kind of lose your moral high ground over that.  When the response is to make this child and his family a target that must be exterminated by the right, well...

You tell me who's the good guy here.

Breaking The Banks Again

Looks like the math geniuses in the world of finance have found yet another part of our system rigged by the megabanks to make huge profits, but this time it's the federal government being defrauded here as US treasuries markets are the target.

The same analytical technique that uncovered cheating in currency markets and the Libor rates benchmark -- resulting in about $20 billion of fines -- suggests the dealers who control the U.S. Treasury market rigged bond auctions for years, according to a lawsuit.

The analysis was part of a 115-page lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court on Aug. 26 by Quinn Emmanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP and other law firms. The plaintiffs built their case against the 22 primary dealers who serve as the backbone of Treasury trading -- including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley -- using data from Rosa Abrantes-Metz, an adjunct associate professor at New York University who has provided expert testimony in rigging cases.

Her conclusion: More than two-thirds of a certain type of Treasury auction appear to have been rigged. She found issues with other auctions, too.


Investment firms buy US treasuries from these authorized "primary dealers".  With 22 of them, they are supposed to compete against each other and keep the economy healthy during these regular treasury auctions of US debt.  Guess what?  They didn't compete.

The U.S. Treasury initially sells securities to the primary dealers who in turn sell them to clients, creating a secondary market for trading. Sometimes, after auctioning off debt, the government later issues an identical batch of securities -- known as reissued Treasuries.

When the second set of Treasuries is issued, their prices and yields can be compared with the identical securities already trading in the secondary market. If there are pricing differences, that could be evidence of a problem. According to the plaintiffs, 69 percent of the auctions of reissued Treasuries from 2009 to 2015 appear to have been rigged, artificially boosting yields by 0.91 basis points.

The plaintiffs said there’s evidence of cheating from at least 2007 through earlier this year, when press reports revealed the Justice Department investigation into the auction process.

These analyses reveal a consistent pattern: Treasury auction yields were artificially high (and prices correspondingly low),” according to the complaint. “Defendants then turned around and sold the Treasuries at higher prices (and correspondingly lower yields) in the secondary markets, reaping substantial profits.”

And yes, there's a corresponding Justice Department investigation into this as well, since the real victim here is the US taxpayer.

Perhaps we should be putting bankers in jail.  A lot of them.  Finally.

Live By Your Ignorant Political Supporters...


President Obama’s top spokesman slammed Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Friday for failing to condemn a supporter who claimed Obama is a Muslim who was born abroad.

“Is anybody really surprised this happened at a Donald Trump rally?” White House press secretary Josh Earnest asked reporters. “I don’t think anybody who has been paying attention to Republican politics are really surprised.” 
Earnest painted the incident as an indictment of the entire Republican Party, which he suggested is plagued by supporters with racist views.

He said it was a shame that Trump failed to challenge offensive views of his supporters, as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) famously did at a rally during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Earnest blasted other Republicans for declining to take on Trump, saying “they are looking for those same votes."

It's about time somebody called the GOP out on their 50-state Southern Strategy of dog-whistle racism, and even better it was somebody in the White House, doing it very, very publicly, in front of the brain-dead WH press corps so that even they had to take notice.

During a rally in New Hampshire on Thursday, Trump declined to address claims by multiple supporters who called Obama a Muslim.

“We have a problem in this country, it’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one — you know he’s not even an American. But anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question, when can we get rid of them?”

Trump responded: “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things, a lot of people are saying bad things are happening, we’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things.”

In the past, Trump has questioned whether Obama was born in the U.S.

Republicans are trying to use this as an attack on Trump, but the reality is every one of the Republicans running for Obama's job has either publicly questioned the President's faith as a Christian, his birthright as an American citizen, or in Trump's case, both.

And he's not alone in these racist attacks, either.

Good for the White House on this.

Taking Heat From All Over

Another three months of weather data, another global temperature record, and the more important global climate change issues become.

June through August of this year was the hottest summer in recorded weather history, federal scientists said Thursday. 
Surface temperatures around the globe were 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit above their average for those months throughout the 20th century, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said. 
Last summer held the previous record, and 2015 beat it by 0.2 degrees, NOAA reported. The records go back to 1880. 
August also set a temperature record, as did the period from January from August.
This year alone has seen month after month of NOAA records, which scientists are attributing to climate change. 
It’s making it more and more likely that 2015 will set a new record as the hottest year on record, NOAA said. 
“The historical data suggest it would take a remarkable and abrupt reversal in the NOAAGlobalTemp time series over the remainder of the year to upend 2015’s drive toward record-breaking status,” scientists wrote in a Thursday blog post accompanying the latest data.

But it's all a massive hoax, because it's a huge conspiracy to make people care about not burning the planet down, and Pope Francis is in on it.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) announced on Thursday that he will boycott Pope Francis' address to Congress since the pontiff may discuss climate change during the speech. 
Gosar, a Catholic, said he would prefer that the pope address the "persecution of Christians" and religious freedom, rather than focus on the environment. 
"Many believed, like I did, that this was an opportunity for the Pope to be one of the world’s great religious advocates and address the current intolerance of religious freedom," Gosar wrote in an op-ed in TownHall. "Media reports indicate His Holiness instead intends to focus the brunt of his speech on climate change -- a climate that has been changing since first created in Genesis."

The congressman suggested that the pope's speech would be too liberal for his taste.
"More troubling is the fact that this climate change talk has adopted all of the socialist talking points, wrapped false science and ideology into 'climate justice' and is being presented to guilt people into leftist policies. If the Pope stuck to standard Christian theology, I would be the first in line," Gosar said. "But when the Pope chooses to act and talk like a leftist politician, then he can expect to be treated like one." 
"If the Pope wants to devote his life to fighting climate change then he can do so in his personal time. But to promote questionable science as Catholic dogma is ridiculous," Gosar continued.

So now this Pope, being liberal on this issue, the now another in a long line of enemies to the GOP that must be destroyed.


After they get done wrecking the planet, I guess.