News you didn't read

Yesterday, Rep. Dennis Kucinich read articles of impeachment against Chief Executive Bush on the House floor. I'm linking to my own liveblogging because that's the most comprehensive coverage that I can find, so please link to it; the national media has locked the story out almost entirely. I have links to the Congressional Record transcript and the C-Span video, so you can read and/or watch the original material. (At least, if you can get said video to play right, it was giving me problems this morning.)

Here are three other notes I was going to post last night but forgot:

1: Senator Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) is now working for Senator John McCain's presidential campaign, encouraging Democrats to vote for the embodiment of Mr. Bush's third term that Senator McCain has become.

2: Fabulus Maximus at RGE Economics thinks Chief Executive Mr. Bush severely damaged American credibility with the trip to Saudi Arabia for more oil last month, describing it as a trip to "beg for oil" and - much worse - being refused.

3: More destruction of evidence, in this case, of torture:

US interrogators of "war on terror" detainees were instructed to destroy handwritten notes that might have exposed harsh or even illegal questioning methods at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a lawyer for one of the prisoners said Sunday. Navy Lieutenant Commander Bill Kuebler said in a statement sent to reporters he considers the notes crucial to the defense of his client, Canadian Omar Khadr, during his upcoming murder trial by a special military tribunal at the US naval base.

Raw Story reports impeachment motion gains a cosponsour

Raw Story is reporting that Rep. Kucinich's Resolution to Impeach President Bush has gained a co-sponsour.

I strongly suggest contacting your Representatives to encourage them to add themselves as co-sponsours. I also actively request people link to my original post, here:

http://solarbird.livejournal.com/654198.html

...to try to at least in part counteract the continuing de facto media blackout of this story.

house.gov not responding reliably; here are some phone numbers

House.gov is not responding reliably; webforms accordingly aren't available, so you're going to have to phone in. I don't know why everything is broken. Here are contact numbers for various people; please provide more in comments.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): DC office: 202.225.4965; SF office 415.556.4862; constituent email sf.nancy@mail.house.gov; everyone else AmericanVoices@mail.house.gov.

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA): DC voice: 202.225.6311; DC fax: 202.226.1606; Shoreline voice: 206.361.0233; Shoreline fax: 206.361.3959.

Petition to support impeachment: http://www.democrats.com/35-articles-of-impeachment

Where did all that money go?

Big selloff in T-bills today (bonds), but a flat to lower stock market overall. Dollar was up, oil was down, gold was down. Where did all those dollars go? I dunno, but something weird is going on in bonds, regardless.

Irwin Kellner at Marketwatch says this round of stagflation will be worse than the 70s because wages will be further behind the inflation curve. Dr. Roubini at RGE Monitor is not as convinced about stagflation, seeing a severe but still more conventional recession, unless there is a military strike on Iran (as he considers fairly likely), at which point a severe stagflation effect becomes overwhelmingly more probable.

By the way, the US trade deficit continues to worsen, but now the worsening is entirely due to oil, which is now half the trade deficit.

And going back to a place we haven't been in a while; remember the ABXes? All those CDOs and the frozen derivatives market that had shown a bit of recovery for a while? that's all over now; all categories are at record lows, with AAAs hitting 50% of value. That's what happens when prime lending starts to keel over too. The lowest tranches are now at a nickel to the dollar - tasty! Junk bond defaults are also rising sharply, and a lot of banks are a lot of nervous about a lot of credit lines - US$6B worth, more specifically.

A quickie on retroactive immunity and new domestic spying powers

Glenn Greenwald takes apart a New York Times story buying the entire administration and establishment lie about how the US needs to grant retroactive immunity to the telecoms and how the Bush administration needs new sweeping warrantless spying powers on Americans. It's contemptible and you've read it before, but read it again, because there's commentary about how Democrats don't want to look "weak" before their nominating convention, and should look "not weak" by... capitulating to everything the administration wants, again.

By the way, the "compromise" bill does exactly what was mentioned before - it has the secret FISA court grant retroactive immunity rather than doing it directly. But it doesn't give the court the choice; it has the court do it if the administration says it told the telcos it was legal, even though the entire point of the FISA act has been to prevent that from happening, and have telecom companies resist illegal spying when presented as legal.

Seriously this all makes me want to throw up.

Two Tone

Two Tone