The news that Merrill Lynch paid out $15 billion in bonuses is sure to ignite new questions about the wisdom of bailing out Wall Street. Merrill Lynch took $10 billion from the TARP, allegedly to fill holes in its balance sheet. But instead of using that to repair its financial health, it simply put the money into the pockets of its employees. There is no way to defend this disgusting payout.

...when you pay yourself a bonus with taxpayer money you are simply taking money from someone who earned it and giving it to someone who didn't. If the government hadn’t supplied the means for redistributing that money, you’d just be a mugger.

More insight in the threads.

I came from the industry... One thing I never came to terms with was how many of my colleagues actually thought they deserved their big paydays. Yes, they put in a lot of hours, but I did the same and often more in the industry I had left. What so many never seemed to understand was that their bonuses were more a factor of being able to dip their hands in the river of money that flowed through the firm, rather than any value creation greater than in other industries. Could any one of them honestly say the value he or she created was more than that of a teacher in a third-grade classroom? Their compensation was a result of a structural imbalance in our economy that rewarded oligopolistic behavior in the name of an illusory market transparency derisorily (un)enforced by the SEC and the self-regulatory organizations.

Oh, how true this is:

When I started in the business in risk management a veteran trader drew me a picture of the money river to tell me how everyone got paid.

He drew the river and then in a prime spot, a dam. That's where management was. Then you had sales and trading rank and file down the river a bit, but on the bank dipping their pans in the river. Middle office was behind the river bank dipping in the occasional spill over.

Then he drew a spot miles away from the river. "I used to be a chemical engineer and this is where I used to be."

And this:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Wall Street’s Sick Psychology of Entitlement

Nothing is original

...

YouTube - Social Distortion - Bad Luck

Tice, appearing on Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, says Americans were targeted under the pretense of profiling them for elimination from the NSA's high-tech surveillance programs but -- in fact, the agency was keeping tabs on the day-to-day lives of American citizens who have no connection with terrorism.

Tice specifically identified journalists as a target of the expanded NSA spying but said others groups were targeted as well.

The revelations begin....

NSA spied on journalists, other Americans 24/7 | Capitol Hill Blue

bucy wrote:

President Obama is expected to sign executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said.

Honestly, at this point closing Gitmo is silly.

The problem with Gitmo is not the physical prison. Its that it was designed as a legal black hole. After Boumediene that is no longer the case, and so Gitmo is no longer a problem in my view.

As a prison its not a bad place to keep terrorism suspects. Its a modern facility which is physically separate from the US mainland, so you don't have to worry about escapees. Surely building a new facility and moving all of these prisoners is more expensive than keeping the place open.

At this point its closure is almost entirely symbolic, which makes it a really easy thing for Obama to do. I'm not saying symbols aren't important. But they aren't more important than Supreme Court decisions about Habeas Corpus. There is an element of partisanship in the fact that people care more about the end of the symbol than the end of the policy. Focusing on the wrong things teaches the wrong lessons about how our system works. A preferred policy by a President can be reversed by another President. Constitutional law is more concrete.

Obama has more difficult choices ahead of him.

RE: Obama to Close Foreign Prisons and Guantánamo - NYTimes.com

Hendrik Hertzberg:

What role the Bush Administration's downgrading of terrorism as a foreign-policy priority played in the success of the 9/11 attacks cannot be known, but there is no doubting its responsibility for the launching and mismanagement of the unprovoked war in Iraq, with all its attendant suffering; for allowing the justified war in Afghanistan to slide to the edge of defeat; and for the vertiginous worldwide decline of America's influence, prestige, power, and moral standing.

I wonder if there is anyone assessing the Bush Presidency at this moment who is able to do so objectively, without Partisan bias... Who can actually give him credit for the things he did accomplish while acknowledging his failures honestly.

I've always been concerned about his attitudes about constitutional rights and international treaties. Cheney is wrong - history will not look kindly upon what they've done there. Obama stuck a fork directly into that mess during his inaugural speech, so perhaps we're off to progress, but I'm eagerly awaiting actual policies. Some of those problems are easier to talk about than to fix.

The war in Iraq was a mixed bag. We did not get into it in the right way. It blew up in our faces. Finally Bush, in the wake of a failed Congressional election, did the right thing and fired Rumsfeld. We changed course in Iraq, and the situation is better now. This wasn't entirely the result of good fortune.

A number of countries that we considered state supporters of terrorism at the turn of the century are now off the list, although I'm still a little skeptical about North Korea.

I'd argue that they significantly softenned the blow of the stock market crash - of 2002. Few people understand that. When things don't go wrong no one understands what you achieved. They should have popped the housing bubble earlier, but the result would have been depressing regardless of when they did it. The real bubble was blown in the late 1990s. The greater catastrophy was likely averted, no matter how bad things are about to get.

For all the monday night quarterbacking about DHS and its inefficiencies, the US has not been subjected to another domestic terrorist attack.

AlQueda is singificantly weakened. They simply do not have the operational capabilities that they had 8 years ago.

Bush (and his party) failed on two key domestic policy issues: social security and immigration. They were largely unable to achieve the later because of the incongruence between reality and the views of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk. Bush is right. He should have just done it. Its not like he would be any less unpopular for having gone through with it.

Transitioning

We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.

I believe that is the first respectful public reference to atheism by an American President. Reply if you know of another example.

Update:
Although the Obama team has completely upgraded Whitehouse.gov, Google still has the old version cached, which includes the only reference Google knows to this exchange with Bush 43 at an "Ask President Bush" event:

Q ... Mr. President, as a member of the local clergy of this city, I'm appalled at the different lengths of political correctness that has affected religious rights in Canada, Australia, France, and other European nations. Laws are being passed to limit offensive speech. If reelected, what will your administration do to the rights -- to help the rights of conservative Christians so that courts in America can't limit our free speech when it comes to offensive speech toward different groups?

THE PRESIDENT: Look, here's the thing. Freedom to speak is a valuable part of our country. And a President has got to protect that. People ought to be allowed to speak the way you want to speak. But there are limits. And it is very important for our society to work with those that push the limits without abridging anybody else's freedom to speak.

Let me talk about freedom of religion, as well, which is an incredibly important part of our society. My job as the President is to make sure -- this may get to your question, by the way, besides speech -- an incredibly important part about what you're asking is, can people worship freely, as well. Yes. That's the part of the job of the President, is to make sure that people can worship any way they want, any way they want. And they can choose any religion they want. Or they can choose no religion. You see, you're just as big a patriot -- as good a patriot as the next fellow if you choose not to worship. It's your choice to make. And the freedom of this country is that you can choose to do any way you want. And it's important that we keep that -- that freedom real and intact.

The move from atheism to patriotism seems to evoke this comment that Bush 41 made:

I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

There is some question as to whether or not Bush 41 actually said that, the Whitehouse never denied it, it has been widely quoted for years, and it certainly molded my impression of how the establishment in this country views atheism.

Obama's Inaugural Address: The Full Text -- TIME

"Where did you sleep last night" is one of my favorite Nirvana covers. Its an old folk song, and I've been meaning to track down this version. Apparently the associated video is creepy but I'm mostly blogging this because I want to listen to the song later.

Weirdly morphed Leadbelly photo "sings" - Boing Boing

In the aftermath of the crash, the US Airways pilot, Chesley Burnett "Sully" Sullenberger III, was praised for his efforts at landing the plane softly on the river's surface, allowing rescue crews to get to the passengers before the plane sank.

"It would appear that the pilot did a masterful job of landing the plane in the river, and then making sure everybody got out," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a news conference late today.

The mayor said Sullenberger "walked the plane twice to verify if anyone was onboard" before exiting himself.

Hats off to you, sir!

Three Cheers for Mr. Sullenberger

Privacy advocates say prosecutors are misusing child pornography laws by turning them against the very people they are meant to protect.

The accusation comes following a raft of recent child pornography cases against juveniles accused of photographing themselves in the nude.

This week, prosecutors in Greensburg, Pennsylvania charged six teens ranging in age from 14 to 17 with creating, distributing and possessing child pornography, after three girls were found to have taken photos of themselves in the nude or partially nude and e-mailed them to friends, including three boys who are among the defendants.

More evil visited upon innocent people at the hands of an overreacting state.

Child Porn Laws Used Against Kids Who Photograph Themselves | Threat Level from Wired.com