From Wonkette!

Florida’s BankUnited fails, will cost FDIC $4.9B

WASHINGTON – The federal seizure of struggling Florida thrift BankUnited FSB is expected to cost the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. $4.9 billion, representing the second-largest hit to the FDIC’s insurance fund since the financial crisis began felling banks last year.

The Office of Thrift Supervision, a Treasury Department agency, said Thursday that BankUnited FSB reported $1.2 billion in losses last year as defaults on loans piled up. The thrift “was critically undercapitalized and in an unsafe condition to conduct business,” the agency said in a statement.

Coral Gables, Fla.-based BankUnited FSB is the 34th federally insured institution to be closed this year, and the biggest. Florida’s largest banking institution with about $13 billion in assets as of May 2 was sold for $900 million to an investor group led by former North Fork Bancorp Chairman and CEO John Kanas. It will reopen as a newly chartered savings bank called BankUnited on Friday, with Kanas at the helm.

Say, wasn’t there a teabagger party in Coral Gables? You know, a bunch of cranky sore losers protesting all the damage Obama and the socialists did to the country in 3 months? Meanwhile, the stupid stems have the real enemy-capitalists right in their own backyard.

I certainly hope the community isn’t adversely affected by the republican Depression.

You can’t fix stupid!

Bush: It’s ‘liberating’ to be out of office

Bush, in one of his few public appearances since leaving office in January, told the students that leaving office lifted a heavy burden.

“I no longer feel that great sense of responsibility that I had when I was in the Oval Office. And frankly, it’s a liberating feeling,” he told seniors from Artesia High School.

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s defense Thursday of the Bush administration’s policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair , as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a “deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country.”
In a statement April 21 , however, Blair said the information “was valuable in some instances” but that “there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general’s investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any “specific imminent attacks,” according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.
FBI Director Mueller Robert Muller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn’t think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.

A triumph of conservatism. Keep those wages down, crush those unions. Pay your pilots shit wages and the passengers will all die.

Hopefully that plane was full of republicans on their way to a golf junket.

Hiring, Training of Pilots Under Fire in Crash Probe of Doomed Buffalo Jet

The lack of experience, fatigue and low pay of the Buffalo-bound prop jet pilots involved in the worst U.S. plane crash in seven years created a “recipe for an accident,” the government said Wednesday.

A huge point has been virtually if not totally ignored since the announcement on Friday that the reported federal deficit for the fiscal year that ended a week ago was $250 billion — The Bush Administration has done what it said it would do about the deficit three years ago, and has done it a full three years early, i.e., in half the time predicted.

This continues what has been a very difficult past few years for those who deride supply-side economics. If Washington, with a little help from the states, lets the supply-side engine continue to chug along for next several years, the results could be so positively stunning that it would become impossible for supply-side detractors in touch with any part of the real world to hang on to the comfort of their static-analysis fantasyland.

That was written in October of 2006. What grabbed my attention though, was this:

fiscal 2009, which ends a little less than three years from now, is the last budget over which the Bush Administration will have responsibility

Then things get real nutty like they often do with conservatives, and he throws out this scenario:

If federal tax receipts continue to increase at just 9% per year, which is only about 70% of the 13.1% average annual increase in the past two fiscal years, and if federal spending and the Social Security surpluses in future years turn out as the CBO predicts in the Budget Report noted above, the last Bush budget in fiscal 2009 will show a reported surplus.(emphasis in original)

Quaint and a little sad to read that now, isn’t it?

My point is two-fold: this blogger illustrates the pathological habit conservatives have of grabbing credit for illusions of good times they think they created and deflecting blame when they turn out to be miserable failures.

More importantly, it shows how we’re still living under the effects of BUSH economic policy.

Radio Rage

There is something dangerous afoot—an alienation that can easily morph into extremism. With the national Republican party in disarray, an argument is solidifying among grass-roots conservatives: Liberals, who are now in power in Washington, hate America and want to dismantle its foundational institutions and liberties, including capitalism and private property. Liberals are rootless internationalists who cravenly appease those who want to kill us. The primary principle of conservatives, on the other hand, is love of country, for which they are willing to sacrifice and die. America’s identity was forged by Christian faith and our Founding Fathers, to whose prudent and unerring 18th-century worldview we must return.

She sounds like she’s describing half the posts on this blog. Or more.

This is the culmination of 30 years of slavish devotion to corporatism. As the culture became less civic and more corporate, life for most has been diminished. That’s what happens when profit is given more value than community. 

This is the country created by conservatism, irrresponsible “free market” capitalism and the cultivation of greed.

AIG CEO to fight criticism of employees

“Rampant, unwarranted criticism of AIG serves only to diminish the value of our businesses around the world,” the paper quoted Liddy’s prepared testimony.

Good luck with that.

The Long Voyage Home

The party sometimes seems cut off from the concrete relationships of neighborhood life. Republicans are so much the party of individualism and freedom these days that they are no longer the party of community and order. This puts them out of touch with the young, who are exceptionally community-oriented. It gives them nothing to say to the lower middle class, who fear that capitalism has gone haywire. It gives them little to say to the upper middle class, who are interested in the environment and other common concerns.

The Republicans talk more about the market than about society, more about income than quality of life. They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to be pursued in all circumstances.

The emphasis on freedom and individual choice may work in the sparsely populated parts of the country. People there naturally want to do whatever they want on their own land. But it doesn’t work in the densely populated parts of the country: the cities and suburbs where Republicans are getting slaughtered. People in these areas understand that their lives are profoundly influenced by other people’s individual choices. People there are used to worrying about the health of the communal order.

BEIRUT (AP) — In the Arab world, where several nations have seen killings of gay men in recent months, it can be startling to see a rainbow flag unfurled in public.

But the region’s only overt gay rights organization, based in Lebanon, says it is slowly making progress in preventing discrimination and violence.

Now the group, Helem, is preparing for a campaign to overturn the law that makes homosexuality illegal.