Needlenose

Ron points out he tried to amend the Wall Street Con Artist bailout plan to cap executive bonuses, but his provision was stripped out.   He snipes at Obama a bit over the bungling of the Bailout II (which did happen on Obama’s watch), but I think the problem is still Harry Reid, the wrong man for the Senate Majority Leader position.

Ron and Senator Snowe are trying to reintroduce the provision as standalone legislation:

“… he and Snowe have a remedy: they are reintroducing their stimulus provision as a stand-alone bill, only they are getting even stricter with bailed-out institutions. Instead of capping bonuses at $100,000, they are lowering the level to $25,000. The law would cover all recipients of taxpayer TARP money, as well as those firms — like AIG — which have received money outside of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. And it would deal with bonuses issued in 2008. If a company refuses to give up the bonuses, the amount that exceeded $25,000 would be taxed at 35 percent.

“They are either going to have to pay it back or they are going to be taxed,” said the Senator. “And I think that is going to be pretty hard when they are already getting taxpayer money.”

Good luck Senator Wyden!

…due to the Repugnican Recession, forget going to a shelter – instead, try the hobo jungle of the future!

In a couple of days Ali Al-Marri will get another trip to a Federal court to see if he can go out on bail. After 3 years of Bushian limbo, the wheels of justice are beginning to start grinding again.

What was Al-Marri’s alleged crime? He was allegedly a sleeper agent for Al-Qaeda, whose mission was “to wreak havoc on the U.S. banking system.”

Huh?  I thought that was the job of Phil Gramm and the Repugs who deregulated the markets and looked the over way over the last decade while the mess was brewing?!?  Seriously, if Al-Marri was guilty as charged,  wouldn’t he be getting a big fat bonus like all financial services executives who *actually* wreaked havoc on the US banking system?

I’m confused here, why no bonus for Al-Marri?  Or court for the various actual executive ‘sleeper agents?’

Leftover US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates learned some important lessons from Shrubya’s Iraqi Quicksand:

“The lessons learned with the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction and some of the other things that happened will make any future president very, very cautious about launching that kind of conflict or relying on intelligence,” Gates told PBS television in an interview.

Any future president is “going to ask a lot of very hard questions and I think that hurdle is much higher today than it was six or seven years ago,” he said.

Oh come on, lessons learned? Maybe he was an idiot, but anybody with half a brain didn’t believe for a second the attack on Iraq had anything to do with faulty intelligence and everything to do with Wrong-Wing hubris and idiocy.

The only ‘lesson learned’ is Republicans are douchebags and shouldn’t hold higher office. Oh and it’s probably time for Obama to start vetting Gates replacements.

Muriel Kane reports for Raw Story:

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an “executive assassination ring” throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

. . . “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”

My first reaction to reading this was skeptical: “Who did they assassinate?” After all, how could the claim be true if they completely failed to accomplish anything?

Then I remembered who was in charge.  Failure would be the expected result, wouldn’t it?

Eric Black has more on Hersh’s comments, in a less snarky vein. Ditto Emptywheel, with more on the incompetence angle. Kinda like the Keystone Kops, only with more dead bodies.

More evidence that our foreign policy is behind held hostage by extreme pro-Israeli nationalists – Chas Freeman is forced to withdraw from his appointment to head the National Intelligence Council due to AIPAC pressure on influential senators.  Greenwald has some good updates to the story.  I haven’t been able to figure out why they singled this guy out, I haven’t seen any stridently anti-Israel statements in a modest amount of googling.  He did chair some outfit called Middle East Policy Council, but that doesn’t look like some pro-Palestinian front or anyting.

Previous studies have shone an increase in the acidity of the worlds oceans due to increased uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Scientists speculated that the higher levels of acid would affect the trillions of little critters at the base of the food chain that have calcium based shells or other protection, such as coral.  Sadly, a recent study confirms the adverse impact of higher acidity levels on ocean life.

Although Sarah Palin didn’t get the chance to shoot the nation’s wolves from an upgraded White House helicopter, she will still get the last laugh as Obama decides to pursue Shrubya’s rancher-friendly policy of delisting wolves from the Northern Rockies from the endangered species list.  Although I had thought Obama was shaping up as a Lyndon Johnson, he is now reminding me of Bill Clinton, who pulled the rug out from under Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s attempts to make ranchers and miners pay free market rates for their exploitation of public lands.

A year ago, polls in California showed a close race if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger chose to challenge Barbara Boxer for her U.S. Senate seat.

A new Field Poll (PDF file) today, though, shows how much damage has been done to the erstwhile Terminator’s hopes by our state’s ongoing deficit crisis — which Arnold had been dancing around for years, until the current recession caused it to blow up in his face.

Leading 44-43 in an October 2007 snapshot, Schwarzenegger now trails Boxer 54-30 percent in a head-to-head matchup (with 16 percent undecided). Similarly, Boxer wallops ex-Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina in a two-way race, 55-25 percent (with 20 percent undecided).

For reasons that are probably not unrelated, neither Fiorina nor Schwarzenegger has strong backing from California Republicans — in a prospective primary contest, Arnold leads 31-24 percent, with 36 percent undecided. (With the governor out of the race, Fiorina’s support only rises to 31 percent, with 50 percent undecided). In CA as in the rest of the country, the GOP is a party out of ideas and overloaded with personalities whose schtick no longer sells.

As a Californian who was sickened by Schwarzenegger’s ability to leverage his movie stardom into the governor’s mansion (the same way a lesser celebrity might trade on their fame to get a reality TV show), I couldn’t be happier.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

(President Obama and Sen. John McCain in Washington, D.C., today, via Reuters.)