Greek Fire, Part 54

After burning low for most of March, April has seen the Greek Fire explode to become The Pain In Spain as Spanish bond spreads are rapidly approaching record numbers on crippling unemployment and a hollowed-out bank sector.

Spanish 10-year yields were 12 basis points higher at 5.84 percent, after rising around 30 bps on Wednesday. The yield differential over Bunds, at 411 bps, was its widest since late November, before the European Central Bank flooded the banking system with a trillion euros of three-year cash.

"There's been a lot of negative news on Spain over a sustained period of time but market sentiment was being buoyed by strong auction results until yesterday," said Rabobank rate strategist Lyn Graham-Taylor.

"It's quite a dangerous time and if the market starts to panic then the sky's the limit (for borrowing costs), although you may see some policy action come into play."

The Spanish/German yield spread was around 475 bps in November, even with the ECB buying bonds in the secondary market, a programme that has been mostly dormant this year.

ECB President Mario Draghi said on Wednesday that any talk of a withdrawal of the exceptional crisis-fighting measures would be premature.

Equivalent Italian yields, which are being dragged higher in tandem with Spain, were up 13 basis points at 5.52 percent. Shorter-dated paper in both countries underperformed.

"It looked like we were over the worst of it with the three-year (ECB funding operation) and Greece (debt restructuring) out of the way ... but now with the focus on Spain and Portugal we're looking at a different kettle of fish," a trader said.

Same kettle.  Same fish.  Only they stink worse now.  The Greek Fire just burns and burns, and while you might put it out temporarily in one EU country, it simply pops up and reignites in another one of the PIIGS countries like flaming whack-a-mole.  The hope that Europe had settled down and gotten things under control was just that: hope.

I said six weeks ago agreeing with Felix Salmon that the EU had bought itself several months.  It looks like the EU won't even get two months at this rate before having to intervene in Spain, Italy, and Portugal.  Only this time, there won't be any money to do it with.

European debt crisis?  Never went away, folks.  It's still the biggest economic story of 2012 and the economy here depends entirely on what happens in the EU over the next few weeks.

Strap in.  Gonna get ugly.

Oprah Smokes Pot?

Of course she has.  Despite what we're told, there are precious few people who never have and never will smoke pot.  Still, the TMZ video is pretty fun.


I especially like the old trick of repeating back a question while thinking furiously about what words to use. She was actually pretty graceful and in the only way she could be honest, honest.

Endorsing Execution Of Gays Is A Exciting New Low For Bachmann

Rachel Maddow took musician Bradlee Dead to task for the following quote:

"The Muslims are calling for the execution of homosexuals in America. They themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible of of Judeo-Christian God. But they seem to be more moral than even the American Christians do, because these people are livid about enforcing their laws. They know homosexuality is an abomination. If Americans won’t enforce the laws, God will raise a foreign enemy to do just that."

When pressed recently, he refused to answer with a yes or no, but said his quote was taken out of context.  I'm wondering what context could have possibly made that not sound batshit crazy.  I mean, now that women, gays, poor people and slutty girls are under the gun means the mask can come off, right?  Let's just be out with it and call to kill the people who don't live the way you think they should, is that it?  Is that really it?

According to Michele Bachmann, it is. "This ministry, 'You Can Run But You Cannot Hide,' they are not sidetracked, they're on course," Bachmann intoned. "They're way on course. Because they get it. They get what this is all about."

So do we, toots.  According to idiots like Bachmann, if you act up by exercising freedom of religion or freedom in general, you don't deserve your government's service.  In fact, you should just be shot.  Message received, oh discreet one.

A Peek Inside The Echo Chamber

The wingers are having a collective breakdown over the President's comments this week, first on the gravity of the Supreme Court's ruling on health care reform on Monday, and second his remarks on the GOP's House budget on Tuesday.  His critics are in nothing short of complete apoplexy right now, barely able to type without collapsing into inchoate rage.

"Barack Obama, Constitutional Ignoramus" declares Power Line's Steven Hayward as he accuses the President of "extreme constitutional ignorance".  Commentary Magazine's John Steele Gordon says there's "simply no lie President Obama will not tell in pursuit of his agenda."  Allahpundit at Hot Air notes that in retaliation for "moronic" speech that a Fifth Circuit Reagan appointee went after a DOJ lawyer, demanding that she explain "her boss's" comments to him in written form before the court.
 This is all over the President daring to say that the Supreme Court should practice the conservative tenet of judicial restraint.  For this, he is a liar, an ignoramus, and a moron.  Projection much, gentlemen?

Oh, and it gets worse.  Yesterday's remarks on the GOP budget were treated with similar outright hatred.  the President pointed out that the Ryan plan was cynical, and that it represented a failure on the part of the myth of trickle-down prosperity.  The words clearly hit home.  Yuval Levin at National Review sputtered that his speech "was basically just a long, dishonest way of saying the same astonishingly irresponsible thing."  Townhall's Guy Benson declared it "Obama's worst speech yet" and thundered that it was "what very well may have been the most dishonest, demagogic, and bitterly partisan speech of his presidency."  Allahpundit (again) remarked "Do we actually have to start a Godwin watch for this campaign?"

Just because these leading lights of the wingnutosphere say it, doesn't make it the truth.  But at this point any speech that President Obama makes from now on will be treated as if he took a steaming dump on the Constitution and then lit it on fire.  And it's only April.  The projection here of these guys is extraordinary, and yet any rational observer should have expected this the moment it looked like the GOP primary was in its endgame.  That's what has happened this week, and the response is clearly a harbinger of far more terrible things to come.

I keep having to believe that the goal here is to just treat everything the President does with such unremitting rancor that America simply walks away from the entire political process and leaves it to the fanatics.  It worked well enough in 2010.  We have our work cut out for us in 2012, which is one of the main reasons I'm here.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Work

It appears that Iowa Republican Steve King is strongly suggesting that if you're sexual preference is anything other than straight, you should not inform your boss or co-workers or clients at all in order to spare the job creators of the awful, intolerable hell of having to deal with laws that protect employees from being fired solely for sexual preference.

Here's his conversation on sexual orientation at the workplace with Think Progress's Scott Keyes:

KEYES: Would that encompass, for instance, the government being able to tell businesses who they can hire and fire?

KING: Yeah, they shouldn’t be able to do that [to] a private business.

KEYES: Even if those were to be regulations say on a matter of sexual orientation or gender or other stuff like that?

KING: How do you know someone’s sexual orientation? I don’t know how you discriminate against someone because of their sexual orientation. That’s their business.

KEYES: I guess if it became public knowledge that an employee were lesbian or gay.

KING: You have private sector businesses here and they need to have freedom to operate. In the first place, I would think that unless someone makes their sexuality public, it’s not anybody’s business, so neither is it our business to tell an employer who to hire. He won’t know who to discriminate against in the first place.

Video:



So yes,  apparently the solution for LGBT equality in the workplace is for everyone to go back into the closet and institute Don't Ask, Don't Tell because if employers don't know you're gay, then nobody can fired for being gay, so we don't need laws protecting gays.  Problem solved!

If gay people didn't exist, in other words, there would be no need for the government to protect them.  Awesome.  And this is a member of Congress saying this, ladies and gentlemen, who is on the House Judiciary Committee and the Judiciary's Subcommittee on the Constitution who is making this argument.

So frankly, I don't want to hear a word about how President Obama is an "ignoramus" or a "moron" when it comes to legal affairs (or anything else for that matter) when the Republican alternative includes people making laws who believe actually ignorant things like this about how the laws they craft should work.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell for your workplace?  Yes, let's put everyone back in the closet.  While we're at it, let's all go to work in giant featureless hermetically sealed sacks so that we don't have to tell anyone if we're black, Asian, Latino, female, tall, short, or whatever too.  What King really wants is for the LGBT community to simply stop existing so that he doesn't have to deal with it.

Pretty sure that's not going to happen.

StupidiNews!

• After talks have reportedly fallen apart, the Department of Justice is reportedly ready to sue Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio over violating the civil rights of Latinos.
• Minnesota becomes the latest state to put GOP-sponsored Voter ID laws on the ballot this fall with a measure that would require all voters to show a state ID.
• A new study shows that non-education public sector jobs have been slashed to their lowest number since 1986.
• German luxury firearms manufacturer Merkel is having a banner year selling rifles to Russian and especially US buyers, with hand-crafted pieces going for as much as a quarter of a million.
• Google's "Project Glass" augmented reality glasses are far from reality, but the search engine giant does admit the project is on the drawing board.

Last Call

How much do the wingers hate this President?  This much, via Kevin Drum:

This is beyond bizarre. A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court is hearing a challenge to Obamacare, but when a Justice Department lawyer began arguments this morning she was stopped short:

Appeals Court Judge Jerry Smith immediately interrupted, asking if DOJ agreed that the judiciary could strike down an unconstitutional law. The DOJ lawyer, Dana Lydia Kaersvang, answered yes — and mentioned Marbury v. Madison, the landmark case that firmly established the principle of judicial review more than 200 years ago, according to the lawyer in the courtroom. 

Smith then became "very stern," the source said, telling the lawyers arguing the case it was not clear to "many of us" whether the president believes such a right exists....Smith, a Reagan appointee, went on to say that comments from the president and others in the Executive Branch indicate they believe judges don't have the power to review laws and strike those that are unconstitutional, specifically referencing Mr. Obama's comments yesterday about judges being an "unelected group of people."

Despite the fact that Kaersvang immediately acknowledged that courts can indeed strike down laws, the panel ordered her to "submit a three-page, single-spaced letter by noon Thursday addressing whether the Executive Branch believes courts have such power."

To recap, a federal judge is handing out a book report on judicial overreach and why overturning Congress and the President happens all the damn time apparently in order to put "that one" in his place in a petty display of tyranny on the bench.  Because Jerry Smith here will be damned if that uppity sumbitch is gonna run his mouth on his watch.

And yes, at this point we have Federal Appeals Court Judges acting like GOP House backbenchers.

We are so screwed if these guys get back in power.  They will goddamn go to war with us.

Saving Ryan's Privatizing

Ezra Klein makes the convincing argument that President Obama's Tuesday speech strongly suggests he plans on running against the Paul Ryan/House GOP budget in 2012, no matter who the actual Republican nominee is.

The message of President Obama’s budget speech today was this: In 2012, the Republican nominee for president is going to be Paul Ryan. And that’s true even if Mitt Romney wins the nomination.

That’s because Ryan is doing what Romney will not: Saying what, specifically, Republicans intend to do if they take power.

Mittens of course knows better.  President Obama is absolutely right to toss the House GOP budget chain around Romney's neck and pull as tight as he can.

Throughout the Republican primary, Romney’s great weakness has been his chameleon-like nature. Conservatives never really believed Romney was one of them. But that is, arguably, a strength for Romney in the general election: Independent voters might also believe that Romney’s conservatism is an election-year show, and he would govern as the reasonable moderate from Massachusetts.

Romney’s studied vagueness is an effort to make it easier for voters to take this leap: The less specific he is about what he would actually do, the more voters can project their own preferences onto him.

There's a lot of this going around the village, that Romney will be able to magically shift to the center.  He only gets away with that if the Village, the GOP, and President Obama let him do that.  The Village will do everything they can to see that happens.  The GOP will be torn in two over this, and that help the President.  And President Obama made it clear today he's going to be throwing the Ryan plan at Romney for the rest of the campaign.

By lashing Romney to Ryan’s budget, Obama intends to lash him to the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Where Romney has purposefully refrained from filling in the details on his agenda, the Obama campaign intends to use Ryan’s blueprint to fill them in on Romney’s behalf.

This can only work because Romney can’t actually walk away from Ryan’s budget: He’s already called it “an excellent piece of work” and campaigned alongside Ryan. Worse, Romney knows full well that conservatives would shriek if he began publicly distancing himself from the policy framework that the Republican Party has coalesced around.

So fight on, Mr. President.  Let's have the battle over the GOP Austerity plan once and for all.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Is it irresponsible to speculate if President Obama threatened Chelsea Clinton’s life in order to win the 2008 primary, like FOX News anchor Heather Childers does?





It’s irresponsible not to, of course.  But the whole “Bush fee-fees were impugned” happened, so all’s fair cause politics ain’t beanbag.

Intentional Blindness, Indeed

This is appalling.  Soldiers are risking their lives to defend us and our country.  Is it asking too much that reasonable protection from rape come with the benefits package?

While it is estimated that over 19,000 sexual assaults occurred in the military in 2010, a rate far higher than among civilians, the government has failed systematically to investigate complaints, appropriately punish perpetrators, and treat trauma and other health conditions suffered by survivors. The profound personal and social consequences that arise from the government's systemic failures are powerfully profiled in the new film, The Invisible War. Turning a blind eye to these crimes has allowed them to continue, imperiling the lives of victims and degrading their service.

Well said.  Ms. Park has plenty more to say, but the paragraph above nailed it for me.  Granted, statistically most rape victims are female, but sexual assault can mean many things, and surely men have suffered their fair share as well.

The first step towards a solution is admitting you have a problem.  Or, you could take a shortcut and listen to the people telling you they were assaulted.  Either way, it's time to start looking at this and figuring out the best way to protect and treat victims and deter and punish offenders.

Quickies: Live Long And Prosper

President Obama wins all of the things.




(via Nichelle Nichols)

Bless You!

And here we have a minute of adorable, thanks to YouTube. This kid would love me. I tend to hit double digits when I sneeze.

He Yam What He Yam

It's good to see the Gates Foundation making a real difference in people's lives.  Long before there were microloans, there were microfarms.  Or, what the rest of us would call "growing your own crops to eat."  It may be the newest wave in hipster urban sustainability, but for African nations like Ghana, it's life and death.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave a $12-million (nine-million-euro) grant Monday to a project aimed at boosting yam production and doubling the income of west African farmers of the crop.

It is the foundation’s largest grant for yam production anywhere in the world, said a spokesman of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria’s southwest city of Ibadan.


The project’s initial focus is on 200,000 smallholder farm families in Ghana and Nigeria, 90 percent of whom cultivate less than two acres, the institute said in a statement.

Basic pest and disease control in situations like this can dramatically improve crop yields, and where people need to eat what they grow in order to live, it's the best $12 million spent.  Considering how much the US spends on agriculture in a year, it's refreshing to see something like this done to help tens of thousands.

Good on them.

The Big GOP Primary Thread: Farmer In The Dells

Looks like Mittens has all but ended this thing with a clean sweep of Tuesday's contests in Maryland, DC, and Wisconsin.

Mitt Romney rode a wave of high-profile endorsements to victories over Rick Santorum in Wisconsin, Maryland, and Washington, DC on Tuesday.

Only Wisconsin, where Santorum led polls just weeks ago, was considered competitive. The GOP there is currently preoccupied with Governor Scott Walker’s (R) impending recall election, making the presidential race a sideshow, but Romney’s usual spending dominance and a growing sense of inevitability helped hand him a win.

“We’ve now reached the point where it’s halftime,” Santorum declared to supporters Tuesday night. “Who’s ready to charge out of the locker room in Pennsylvania for a strong second half?’

Romney’s nowhere near the 1,144 delegates needed to clinch the nomination and Santorum’s campaign is pledging to go all the way to convention, talking up far-off states like Texas at the end of May. Santorum’s next shot at a winnable race will be his home state of Pennsylvania on April 24, a date that also includes several Northeastern states where Romney is expected to dominate.

I personally think it will take a Santorum loss in Pennsylvania to seal the deal, but frankly the next 3 weeks of pressure on him to quit is going to be brutal.  We'll see what happens, but despite Santorum vowing he can win Texas in May, it won't matter.

But by all means, continue to drain Mitt of his precious resources as you fight on, as Mitt still can't get more than 50% in a competitive primary...

StupidiNews!

• The military junta that seized control of the government of Mali says there will be a national convention to decide the country's political fate.
• Keith Olbermann tells David Letterman that the former Current TV anchor "screwed up" in trying to make the small network succeed.
• Several months after the end of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy on gays in the military, the Pentagon says the impact of ending it has been "minimal".
• The Baylor Lady Bears completed their unprecedented 40-win perfect season by blowing out Notre Dame 80-61 to win the NCAA Women's basketball title.
• Facebook is counter-suing Yahoo over alleged patent violations as the battle between the two heats up.