June 2009 archive

Want to know what an Ivy League education will get you?  

Apparently nobody at the Federal Reserve has any clue where the trillions of dollars that have come from the Fed’s expanded balance sheet have gone. Additionally, nobody there seems to have any idea what the losses on the Fed’s $2 trillion portfolio really are.

Here’s a question? Have you done anything or is it your job to just get in the fucking way? Have you ever just wanted to grab one of these SOB’s by the throat and just shake the truth out of them?

Sometimes a picture says more than words.

This was the FED’s balance sheet up until 2007.

This is what has happened to the FED’s balance sheet from 2008.

For all you defaltionists out there … this Bud’s for you.

Nuff said.  (:o)

So here we are, still confined in the Netroots Ward of this Nationwide Nuthouse of Centrism, owned and operated by the Wall Street Foundation for Permanent Fiscal Fuckery, staffed and supervised by the best Centralizing Centralizers of Centrism money can buy, and presided over by the Head Nurse of Centrism, your friend and mine, Nurse Ratched  . . .

Look into those eyes, you’ll see Centrism personified, Centrism epitomized, Centrism symbolized, manifested, and defined.

She knows what’s best for us.  Centrism.  She monitors the behavior of her patients very closely, especially our behavior here in the Netroots Ward.  Her patience with us is wearing thin, we just won’t get with the program, we won’t take our medication, we won’t submit to her control.  She’s not going to tolerate that, she never tolerates that.

I’ve watched her get more and more skillful over the years.  Practice has steadied and strengthened her until now she wields a sure power that extends in all directions, I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants.

Her orderlies in the corporate media are all wired to that current, her orderlies in Congress are all wired to that current, her orderly in the White House is wired to that current.  They’re doing her bidding, the Centrists have made their diagnoses, health care reform will get lobotomized, the EFCA will get lobotomized, real change itself will get lobotomized, she’ll double everyone’s daily dosage of Centrism medication, whoever won’t take it orally will get it anally.

Dick and Liz Cheney tell us that enhanced interrogation is not torture and that it made the US safer by providing actionable intelligence. They say it was unwise to make the US techniques public, because the terrorists can now train to them. Both of these claims are hogwash. More importantly, though, they expose a flaw in the Cheney mindset. The Cheneys adhere to The Rambo Myth: Subjects of torture will grant a true confession in order to avoid the pain of more torture. If we are just sadistic enough, we will get the truth out of those bastards.

Cheney et al. provided pressure to waterboard several high value prisoners to obtain information in short order. While there is some disagreement about whether or not waterboarding was used to forge a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, it is clear that we waterboarded one prisoner 83 times and another 183 times in one month. What did this likely accomplish?

Let’s have a look at the ticking bomb.

Prologue

The Middletown Hardees was packed with the usual lunchtime crowd. A day like any other early spring day in the gently rolling, farm-studded south-central Pennsylvania countryside, except that on this day the topic of conversation centered around reports of radiation released earlier that morning from the local nuclear power plant. The date was March 28, 1979, and the world was as yet still ignorant of the extent of the pre-dawn events at Three Mile Island’s unit-2 reactor. No one inside the Hardees was too worried, such things had happened before and always turned out to be minor.

Inside the control room at TMI-2 things were not so calm. The exhausted operators were desperately fighting to control a major meltdown as pumps and systems failed one right after another. Nothing seemed to be going right. Radiation levels at the plant gate were so far above limits that only operators and health physics personnel were allowed in. Site emergency had been declared shortly after 4 a.m. when thermal shock to the steam generators forced open the emergency main steam dump valves outside containment, setting off all the radiation alarms on that side of the island.

The few health physics technicians who cared to brave entry were immediately prepped and equipped to journey off-site again in order to take radiation readings at the Harrisburg airport, in Middletown and along the river on the Goldsboro side. The plan was to have the readings logged by the time the NRC arrived so important decisions about possible evacuation of the local population could be quickly made. They had been cautioned to try and remain as inconspicuous as possible.

Things were going well until the bright yellow Metropolitan-Edison work truck began sputtering and hesitating in the stop-and-go lunch hour traffic. Then it died altogether. The health physics technician [hp] who had been driving eased the one-ton truck to the side of the road just yards from a phone booth from which he could safely call the Island without alerting any locals who might be listening in on the CB channel. He clumsily exited the cab of the truck and made the short walk to the phone booth, resplendent in his full-over contamination protection coveralls and hood, full respirator face mask. He lifted the respirator atop his forehead as he entered the booth so he could talk. His partner stayed with the truck, using the opportunity to take immediate readings with his geiger-meuller. The level was significant enough that he kept his respirator firmly attached to his face. The truck and nearby phone booth were directly in front of the Middletown Hardees.

Inside the fast food emporium the lunch crowd was caught mid-hamburger. After a moment’s stunned silence, a hushed murmur spread through the crowd as they gathered behind the glass at the front of the dining room to get a better look at these creatures from out of a nightmare. Some left their barely eaten lunch and hastily made for their cars. Others just stood in dumbfounded silence and watched. Shortly another utility truck pulled next the stalled one, loaded the stranded technicians and their equipment, and took off back in the direction of the plant.

From that moment on all the air samples taken off-site were taken by helicopter. Among the locals, word spread like wildfire…