Say Anything Blog

We’re either going to lose this thing or win this thing within the next several months.

John McCain
Meet The Press, 11/12/06

The Senate yesterday approved the most far-reaching changes to the nation’s product safety system in a generation, responding to recalls of millions of lead-laced toys that rattled consumers last year.

Lawmakers still have to resolve key differences between the Senate bill and a similar measure that passed the House in December. While the Senate version is considered by consumer advocates to be tougher, both contain provisions that would require retailers and manufacturers to be more vigilant about product safety.

The biggest change is likely to be a better-staffed Consumer Product Safety Commission, with more enforcement power. Both bills would boost funding for the agency, which had a budget of $63 million in fiscal 2007 and just less than 400 employees, fewer than half the number it had in 1980. The Senate bill, which passed by a vote of 79 to 13, would increase the budget to $106 million by 2011. The House’s version would increase it to $100 million.

Both bills would provide funds to upgrade the CPSC’s antiquated testing facilities. Both bills also would raise the maximum amount of money the CPSC can fine companies that fail to report product hazards immediately. Fines are now capped at $1.8 million. The House bill would raise the cap to $10 million; the Senate to $20 million.

The Senate and House measures would also effectively ban lead in all children’s products, not just toys, and require toys to be tested by independent labs.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street banks are facing a “systemic margin call” that may deplete banks of $325 billion of capital due to deteriorating subprime U.S. mortgages, JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N: Quote, Profile, Research), said in a report late on Friday.

JPMorgan, which sent a default notice to Thornburg Mortgage Inc. (TMA.N: Quote, Profile, Research) after the lender missed a $28 million margin call, said more default notices and margin calls were likely. The Carlyle Group’s mortgage fund also failed to meet $37 million in margin calls this week.

“A systemic credit crunch is underway, driven primarily by bank writedowns for subprime mortgages,” according to the report co-authored by analyst Christopher Flanagan. “We would characterize this situation as a systemic margin call.”

The FBI has confirmed for the New York Times that it is now investigating the actions of the former Treasurer of the National Republican Congressional Committee—who was appointed to that post by Western New York Congressman Tom Reynolds.

Now those who seek to unseat Reynolds in Congress are making political hay of that fact.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (RNCC) is the chief fundraising arm for House Republicans.

Economic growth unlikely this quarter

President Bush’s top economic adviser said Friday the nation’s economic growth could dip into negative territory for the current quarter, an assessment that tracks with many outside experts but is the most pessimistic to come so far from the White House.

“We don’t really know whether it will be negative or not,” Edward Lazear, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters at the White House. “We have definitely downgraded our forecast for this quarter.”

He would not discuss whether the White House is predicting the economy will actually fall into a recession. Some economists think it already has.

“I’m still not saying that there’s a recession,” Lazear said. “We are going to have a weak growth quarter, and whether you call that a recession or not is something that we won’t know for many months.”

Why does the MSM keep saying the economy is in a slump?

A new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is scheduled to be completed this month, according to U.S. intelligence officials. But leaders of the intelligence community have not decided whether to make its key judgments public, a step that caused an uproar when key judgments in an NIE about Iran were released in November.

The classified estimate on Iraq is intended as an update of last summer’s assessment, which predicted modest security improvements but an increasingly precarious political situation there, the U.S. officials said.

Because he promised an open and transparent government, ya know.

Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), has been pushing the federal government to investigate the matter, but he “says neither the department of State nor Justice will give him answers” on the status of the investigation.

POE: Yes, exactly. There’s something you can do. We do not think this is an isolated case of sexual assault against American citizens in Baghdad by coworkers. We want the other victims to notify my office immediately.

Pentagon Refuses to Probe Halliburton- KBR Rape Case

Tim Goeglein has had a tough week, but he still has friends in the “right” places. The former White House aide in charge of religious and conservative outreach resigned late last week after admitting he plagiarized pieces he wrote for the News-Sentinel of Fort Wayne, Ind. Goeglein took passages from Pope John Paul II and Dartmouth professor Jeffery Hart, among others.

But Goeglein is still embraced by the conservative community. At the weekly meeting of center-right leaders at American for Tax Reform on Wednesday morning, he received three rounds of applause from the packed room, including one standing ovation, as he asked for their forgiveness.

Via e-mail, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told us, “We strongly appreciate Tim’s service and many contributions, and we have been saddened by the situation.”

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told senators yesterday that agents improperly used a type of administrative subpoena to obtain personal data about Americans until internal reforms were enacted last year.

Mueller said a forthcoming report from the Justice Department’s inspector general will find that abuses recurred in the agency’s use of national security letters in 2006, echoing similar problems to those identified in earlier audits.

Inspector General Glenn A. Fine reported a year ago that the FBI used such letters—which are not subject to a court’s review—to improperly obtain telephone logs, banking records and other personal records of thousands of Americans from 2003 to 2005. An internal FBI audit also found that the bureau potentially violated laws or agency rules more than 1,000 times in such cases.

Mueller testified that a follow-up report from Fine’s office, due to be released this month, will “identify issues similar to those in the report issued last March.” But Mueller emphasized that the time frame in the report “predates the reforms we now have in place” to avoid further abuses.

WASHINGTON — Hundreds of thousands of dollars are missing and presumed stolen from the chief fund-raising arm of House Republicans, according to party officials who described the findings of emergency internal audits.

The financial records of the group, the National Republican Congressional Committee, may also have been falsified for several years, Republican officials said. The campaign committees of several Republican lawmakers may also have been victims of a scam that is now under criminal investigation by the F.B.I.

The audits were ordered after the abrupt departure several weeks ago of Christopher J. Ward, who had been treasurer of the committee. Lawmakers said that Mr. Ward, who served a similar role for dozens of individual members of Congress and their political committees, is the focus of the F.B.I.’s criminal investigation.

The committee has acknowledged publicly that it was aware of “irregularities in our financial audit process” and that it had called in the F.B.I. in February because “these irregularities may include fraud.”

...The F.B.I. investigation comes at an especially awkward time for House Republicans, who are struggling to raise money for Congressional races in November.

Their job has been made even more difficult by the large number of Republican lawmakers — more than two dozen from the House — who have announced their retirements, and by a series of unrelated criminal and ethics investigations of other Congressional Republicans.

Carlyle Fund Gets Default Notice After Margin Calls (Update5)

March 6 (Bloomberg)—Carlyle Group’s publicly traded mortgage bond fund failed to meet margin calls and said it received a notice of default.

Carlyle Capital Corp. missed four of seven margin calls yesterday totaling more than $37 million, the Guernsey, U.K.- based fund said today in a statement. The fund expects to get at least one more notice of default related to the margin calls.

The collapse of the subprime mortgage market has prompted investors to flee all but the safest forms of debt, leading to the failure of hedge funds including Peloton Partners LLP. The Carlyle fund raised $300 million in July and used loans to buy about $22 billion of AAA rated so-called agency mortgage securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

``The credit crisis is spilling over to the next asset class, agency bonds,’’ said Philip Gisdakis, senior credit strategist at UniCredit SpA in Munich. ``There’s never just one cockroach. If you see one highly leveraged hedge fund going bust, then there’s another on the way.’’

More FBI Privacy Violations Confirmed

By LARA JAKES JORDAN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP)—The FBI improperly used national security letters in 2006 to obtain personal data on Americans during terror and spy investigations, Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday.

Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the privacy breach by FBI agents and lawyers occurred a year before the bureau enacted sweeping new reforms to prevent future lapses.

Details on the abuses will be outlined in the coming days in a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

The report is a follow-up to an audit by the inspector general a year ago that found the FBI demanded personal data on people from banks, telephone and Internet providers and credit bureaus without official authorization and in non-emergency circumstances between 2003 and 2005.

Mueller, noting senators’ concerns about Americans’ civil and privacy rights, said the new report “will identify issues similar to those in the report issued last March.” The similarities, he said, are because the time period of the two studies “predates the reforms we now have in place.”

U.S. Concludes Bin Laden Escaped at Tora Bora Fight

Failure to Send Troops in Pursuit Termed Major Error

By Barton Gellman and Thomas E. Ricks

Washington Post Staff Writers

Wednesday, April 17, 2002; Page A01

The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge.

Intelligence officials have assembled what they believe to be decisive evidence, from contemporary and subsequent interrogations and intercepted communications, that bin Laden began the battle of Tora Bora inside the cave complex along Afghanistan’s mountainous eastern border. Though there remains a remote chance that he died there, the intelligence community is persuaded that bin Laden slipped away in the first 10 days of December.

After-action reviews, conducted privately inside and outside the military chain of command, describe the episode as a significant defeat for the United States. A common view among those interviewed outside the U.S. Central Command is that Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the war’s operational commander, misjudged the interests of putative Afghan allies and let pass the best chance to capture or kill al Qaeda’s leader. Without professing second thoughts about Tora Bora, Franks has changed his approach fundamentally in subsequent battles, using Americans on the ground as first-line combat units.

Melanie Morgan has lost her job as morning co-host at KSFO-AM 560 as part of a cost-cutting measure by the conservative station’s new owner, Citadel Broadcasting.

Such a pleasant woman…really really a shame.