Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, June 26, 2012


Let's see... here's an amusing little video...

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7 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/06/26/economy-stockton-idINL2E8HQ0UF20120626

Stockton, California was poised on Tuesday to take a major step toward becoming the largest U.S. city ever to file for bankruptcy...

The City Council's main order of business will be taking up and voting on a proposed budget to guide Stockton during bankruptcy, an option city officials have been considering since February.

City Manager Bob Deis, who the council has authorized to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, last week unveiled the budget proposal, also known as a pendency plan. The plan assumed Stockton, a city of 292,000 people about 85 miles (about 135 km) east of San Francisco, would fail to win concessions from its 18 creditors to close its $26 million shortfall for the fiscal year beginning on July 1.

To help close the budget gap, Stockton's plan would suspend $10.2 million in debt payments, a move likely to trigger rating agencies to further downgrade the city, and reduce spending on employee compensation and retiree benefits by $11.2 million.

About $7 million in savings would come from cutting retiree health care benefits for one year and then phasing them out.

* AND... THEN... PHASING... THEM... OUT...

* YOU THINK YOU'RE SAFE, FOLKS? YOU'RE NOT. NO ONE IS. THEY WHOLE SYSTEM IS A HOUSE OF CARDS!

Stockton officials have said the benefits are a crushing expense due to their fast rise and projected liability of $417 million.

* THE BENEFITS THEY AND THEIR PREDECESSORS HANDED OUT LIKE CANDY, THEY MEAN!

* FOLKS... DON'T YOU GET THE SCAM? THE POLITICIANS SET THE SYSTEM UP FOR EVENTUAL COLLAPSE AND THEN WIPE THEIR HANDS OF IT. TAXPAYERS, EMPLOYEES, AND PENSIONERS ARE THEN LEFT HOLDING THE BAG. NICE SYSTEM, HUH?

Under its restructuring plan, Stockton has already defaulted on about $2 million in debt, allowing the trustee for one of its bond insurers to seize a building once slated to be its future city hall and three parking garages.

The intentional default and of bankruptcy prompted Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's Ratings Services to drop their credit ratings on Stockton, which has more than $700 million in debt across its various agencies.

Moody's has its issuer rating for Stockton at a junk level Ba2 from Baa1 while S&P has its issuer rating on the city from BB to SD, one notch above its D default rating.

A bankruptcy filing by Stockton is a "high-probability event," Gregory Lipitz, a vice president and senior analyst at Moody's, said on Monday.

June 26, 2012 at 11:03 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-06-25/detroit-firefighter-layoffs/55827788/1

* YET ANOTHER LEGACY OF LONG TIME DEMOCRATIC PARTY (MIS)GOVERNANCE:

As Detroit continues to work through its financial difficulties, the city will lay off 164 firefighters by the end of July, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing's office announced Monday.

The layoffs could be temporary, as the city hopes to secure a federal grant...

* THE BANKRUPT LENDING TO THE BANKRUPT - CUTE!

* OH... AND EVEN IF THE FEDERAL GRANT COMES THROUGH... THEY'LL ONLY BE ABLE TO REHIRE 108 OF THE 164 FIREFIGHTERS...

(*SHRUG*)

The layoffs represent nearly 19%of the fire department's 881 sworn firefighters.

(*SARCASTIC CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)

Dan McNamara, president of the Detroit Fire Fighters Association, called the layoffs disastrous and said the action will force 16 fire companies throughout the city to close. "For as long as we've been fighting fires in the city of Detroit, we have guaranteed that if you call us, we will come," McNamara said in statement. "If these cuts remain, there will be times when we won't have the necessary resources to respond. … We have a disaster waiting to happen that will likely result in not only the loss of property, but potentially the loss of lives."

(*SIGH*)

June 26, 2012 at 11:34 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/98293331?access_key=key-55vef2mjrbaxevspg43

* EXCERPTS FROM THE LETTER DARRELL ISSA SENT PRESIDENT OBAMA YESTERDAY:

Courts have consistently held that the assertion of the constitutionally-based executive privilege — the only privilege that ever can justify the withholding of documents from a congressional committee by the Executive Branch — is only applicable with respect to documents and communications that implicate the confidentiality of the President’s decision-making process, defined as those documents and communications to and from the President and his most senior advisors.

Even then, it is a qualified privilege that is overcome by a showing of the committee’s need for the documents.

Accordingly, your privilege assertion means one of two things. Either you or your most senior advisors were involved in managing Operation Fast & Furious and the fallout from it, including the false February 4, 2011 letter provided by the Attorney General to the Committee, or, you are asserting a Presidential power that you know to be unjustified solely for the purpose of further obstructing a congressional investigation.

To date, the White House has steadfastly maintained that it has not had any role in advising the Department with respect to the congressional investigation. The surprising assertion of executive privilege raised the question of whether that is still the case.

I am hopeful that, consistent with assertions of executive privilege by previous Administrations, you will define the universe of documents over which you asserted executive privilege and provide the Committee with the legal justification from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

June 26, 2012 at 11:46 AM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304782404577488363319276978.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

Egypt is lost.

Don't console yourself with the belief that the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in the country's first free presidential election is merely symbolic, since the army still has the guns: The examples of revolutionary Iran and present-day Turkey show how easily the conscripts can be bought, the noncoms wooed and the officers purged.

Don't console yourself with the idea that now the Islamists will have to prove themselves capable of governing the country. The Brotherhood is the most successful social organization in the Arab world. Its leaders are politically skillful, economically literate and strategically patient. Its beliefs resonate with poor, rich and middle class alike. And it can always use the army as a scapegoat should the economy fail to improve.

Don't console yourself with the expectation that the Brotherhood will play by the democratic rules that brought it to power. "Democracy is like a streetcar," Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's Islamist prime minister, observed long ago. "When you come to your stop you get off." Any party that rules street and square makes its own "democratic" rules.

Don't console yourself, finally, with hope that Egypt will remain a responsible, status quo player on the international scene. By degrees, Egypt under the Brotherhood will seek to arm Hamas and remilitarize the Sinai. By degrees, it will seek to extract concessions from the U.S. as the price of its good behavior. By degrees, it will make radical alliances in the Middle East and beyond.

Who lost Egypt?

The Egyptians, obviously. This was their moment, opportunity, choice. They chose — albeit by a narrow margin — a party that offers Islamic stultification as the solution to every political and personal problem. By the time they come to regret their choice, they won't be in a position to change it.

But there are other players in this debacle, too.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

June 26, 2012 at 12:29 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

First, the Obama administration.

"Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable," said Hillary Clinton as protesters began descending on Tahrir Square in January 2011.

President Obama didn't help matters by calling instantly for Mr. Mubarak's removal (thereby demonstrating how foolish it can be to be an ally of the U.S.) after doing nothing in the previous two years to pressure Mr. Mubarak to relinquish power while he still had a chance. As a result, the U.S. has no credibility with Egyptians, secular or religious, and just 19% of Egyptians approve of Mr. Obama's leadership, according to Gallup. (So much for the Cairo Speech.)

Next, the Bush administration.

"Naturally, here in Egypt as in the U.S., there is freedom of speech, so it is possible for anyone to complain about any personal or social problem. If there is a problem, there are legal ways to deal with it, whether here or in the U.S."

This bit of sycophancy was uttered in March 2006 by Frank Ricciardone, then U.S. ambassador in Cairo, just as the Mubarak government had imprisoned Ayman Nour, its only challenger in the 2005 election.

How did an administration so committed to putting its freedom agenda at the heart of its foreign policy allow its ambassador to make these remarks?

And what did it suggest to Egyptians about the sincerity of Mr. Bush's freedom agenda?

The questions are self-answering.

(*PURSED LIPS*) (*SAD NOD*)

Third, the liberal abdicators.

Egyptian women sit in Tahrir Square during prayer time in Cairo on Monday.

That's a catch-all term for anyone who believes the result of any free election is ipso facto legitimate and that the world's responsibility toward Egyptians' democracy is to preserve a studied neutrality about their political choices. But a democratic election that yields a totalitarian result isn't "legitimate," except in the most cramped sense of the word. In reality, it's a double-barreled catastrophe: a stain on democracy's good name and a recipe for turbo-charged political extremism.

Yet the deeper liberal abdication is the abdication of the idea that freedom is more than simply an end in itself.

If you believe that any use of freedom is a legitimate use of freedom — that Larry Flynt inhabits the same moral plane as, say, Vaclav Havel — then what you have mainly succeeded in doing is destroying the attractiveness of freedom to a large segment of the world.

It's the "empty concept of freedom," says Amr Bargisi of the Cairo-based Egyptian Union for Liberal Youth, that has given Islamists the philosophical and political edge over Egypt's struggling liberals. "When Islamists argue for a society that, for example, is free of pornography, you can't respond by saying that pornographers should have absolute liberty to do what they want," Mr. Bargisi says. "You will have to offer some good reason for people to have absolute freedom of expression, even when it produces bad side effects."

What is to be done?

In 1979, the U.S. lost Iran as an ally but formalized an alliance with Egypt. Perhaps we might get lucky should the Assad regime fall to Syrians better disposed to the U.S., not that we're giving the Syrian people much cause to like us. But that could change if the U.S. is seen as the instrument and guardian of their liberation.

We could also spell out to the new Egyptian government our terms for maintaining financial support and diplomatic favor. The Egyptian economy is in enough distress that the new government could be pliant. But that window won't be open for very long, and the effects of such pressure aren't likely to be long-lived.

So prepare for an Egypt that likes us about as much as Nasser's did and behaves accordingly.

It's going to be a long and ugly haul and it's just beginning.

June 26, 2012 at 12:29 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-gerson-an-attorney-generals-want-of-trust/2012/06/25/gJQA3ZPp2V_story.html

Fights between Congress and the executive branch over access to information are a staple of American politics. Every president will prefer less disclosure about the messy internal processes of his administration. Congressional investigators suspecting scandal prefer more. In the end, some accommodation short of a constitutional crisis is usually achieved.

The government’s “gun-walking” program would be considered a scandal in any administration, involving 2,000 loose firearms and a dead Border Patrol agent.

* TWO DEAD BORDER PATROL AGENTS, ACTUALLY... PERHAPS MORE... AND HUNDREDS OF DEAD MEXICANS.

But an accommodation with congressional investigators has not been reached. The balance of powers has become a showdown. And the main reason is Attorney General Eric Holder.

In a February 2011 letter to Congress, the Justice Department denied any knowledge of “Operation Fast and Furious.”

During May congressional testimony, Holder claimed that he had "only recently" learned of the matter.

Both letter and testimony turned out to be false.

* FOLKS... FOLKS.. FOLKS... THAT'S THE KEY TO ALL OF THIS! HOLDER LIED FROM THE START!

Holder’s top aides had reviewed wiretapping applications containing specific details. Holder had received memos referencing the operation. Congress had been left under a "false impression" for nine months.

The Justice Department’s response to this disclosure was to fight further disclosures — permitting investigation into the original program but not into the misstatements and corrections that followed.

“I take pride in being careful, not intemperate,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), a former state Supreme Court judge, told me. “But I’m just fed up.”

He is particularly offended by the lack of accountability.

“There were 2,000 weapons that walked. Who knows how many more agents are at risk? Yet when I asked if it happened in Texas, I got no answer. Another stonewall.”

These events, says Cornyn, “raise a question: What does it take to get fired in Eric Holder’s Justice Department?”

Cornyn has called for Holder’s resignation.

Unlike the legal determination of contempt, this is a cumulative judgment.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

June 26, 2012 at 1:38 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Holder began his tenure by supporting a special prosecutor to investigate enhanced interrogation by CIA agents, even though career prosecutors found insufficient evidence for charges — leading seven former CIA directors to denounce his assault on the institution.

The attorney general proposed a New York civilian trial that would have given Khalid Sheik Mohammed a forum to embrace martyrdom and encourage violence — leading to a revolt of New York Democratic politicians and the removal of the case from Holder’s direct authority.

Holder's handling of the Fast and Furious case was botched from the start

The problem is not primarily a matter of ideology. Holder is the critic of enhanced interrogation who defends the use of killer drones against U.S. citizens. He is the enemy of indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay prison who has institutionalized indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay prison. His views seem to conform exactly to the contours of the president’s political requirements at any given moment.

“Like a cushion,” David Lloyd George is reputed to have said of one opponent, “he always bore the impress of the last man who sat on him.”

Yet this does not stop the lecturing.

Unlike his congressional detractors, Holder was not “scared” of what Mohammed would say at trial. He prefers not to “cower.” He says his critics lack “confidence in the American system of justice.” It is Eric Holder’s distinctive contribution to the American political system: self-righteousness without the inconvenience of principle.

“The supreme arrogance, the lack of accountability,” says Cornyn, “are driving people up the wall. . . . Is he going to be the chief law enforcement officer of the United States or the political arm of the administration? Every time Eric Holder has had a choice to make, he has made the political choice, not the one grounded in a reasonable interpretation of the law.”

This presents an immediate, practical challenge.

Holder’s appointment of two prosecutors — one an Obama campaign donor — to investigate administration national security leaks is discredited before it begins.

(Which points to an immediate, practical need: an attorney general who inspires more trust than contempt.)

June 26, 2012 at 1:38 PM

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